First, a quick review of the U.S. Chamber's activities this year: Multimillion-dollar ad campaigns (on top of record $144 million spent lobbying) to try to bring down both health insurance and financial reform; petitions and lawsuits against the EPA for finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public; a harassment lawsuit against the satirical Yes Men for punking them over their backwards climate change views, a position so out of whack that several major companies left the Chamber in protest ; and opposing Senator Al Franken's defense appropriations amendment that says those who serve as contractors in Iraq and get brutally drugged and raped by their co-workers, ought to be able to seek legal recourse for their injuries court. They are also starting to force movie audiences to watch commercials to convince them that the biggest problem facing the country today isn't the economy, unemployment, two wars .... (need we go on). It's lawsuits by average working families, especially the ones against corporations that hurt and poison people. Tone deaf doesn't begin to describe this.
They were also caught in a number of other embarrassing faux pas (like here and here) but as we saw with the behavior of bonus-seeking Wall St. executives, when you're that rich, you're incapable of embarrassment. And here's more proof of that.
In 1998, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, created a project called the "Institute for Legal Reform" (ILR) to pursue the Chamber's agenda of protecting dangerous corporations from liability. I've written about this group here. ILR is itself a huge spender. One of ILR's "jobs" is to publish an annual "ranking" of states, a survey that criticizes certain state business climates based on nothing more than the views of a scattering of corporate lawyers' from around the country, most of whom know absolutely nothing about the states they are "ranking." Their new one is out today.
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