Stop The Chamber
The Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of Tom Donohue, has gone from a well respected trade organization to an extremist political organization dedicated to corrupting American democracy by elevating the profits of big corporations over the well being of the citizens they serve. Recent examples of this corrupt behavior is the Chamber's spending of more than $100 million to defeat initiatives to protect the environment and provide affordable health care to everyone, and its massive attacks on democracy through the use of secret money in the 2010 election.
The Chamber is the biggest lobbying operation in the United States, spending billions of dollars on behalf of big business over the past decade to corrupt the political system. Polluters like Big Coal, Big Asbestos, and Big Oil only need call the Chamber to stop any accountability for their toxic destruction. Wall Street banks and CEOs need only make sure that they have paid their Chamber dues to ensure that they can continue to rip off the taxpayers. And killers like Big Tobacco need only form a partnership with the Chamber to ensure that they will be given immunity from lawsuits that seek accountability for the death and sickness of millions of Americans.
Tom Donohue has turned the once respected and even-handed Chamber into an extremist organization, bragging that the Chamber gutted the Clinton tobacco settlement, killed the Clinton health care plan, and scuttled previous oversight of Wall Street and the banking system. Now the Chamber is spending tens of millions on ads and lobbyists to repeal health care for all, protect polluters from accountability, and shield the financial industry from government regulation.
Sign on to Stop The Chamber
Sign On To This Campaign. Sign on to this campaign and your name will be added to the thousands who have complained about the conduct of the Chamber. We will send this letter letter to all the members of the Chamber board and others asking that they quit and condemn the Chamber.
Sign on to the campaign here
Truthout: Virgin Galactic's Space Tourism Venture for the 1% Will Warm the Globe for the Rest of Us
-By Salvatore Babones
August 14, 2012- If two words can capture the extraordinary redistribution of wealth from workers to the wealthy over the past forty years, the flagrant shamelessness of contemporary conspicuous consumption, the privatization of what used to be public privileges and the wanton destruction of our atmosphere that is rapidly leading toward the extinction of nearly all non-human life on earth, all covered in a hypocritical pretense of pious environmental virtue ... those two words are Virgin Galactic.
Virgin Galactic, billionaire Richard Branson's space tourism venture, is charging $200,000 a seat for a few minutes of weightlessness and a view from outer space. The firm has so far taken in $70 million in deposits from 536 passengers, according to an August 1 report from Reuters.
Call me old-fashioned, but I personally find it morally offensive that some people can afford to spend $200,000 on a three-minute experience when others can't afford food. Food first, luxury yachts second and $200,000 suborbital flights last. That's my motto.
Think Progress: Senate GOP Provides $1.1 Million Tax Cut To Wealthy Estates While Raising Taxes On 20 Million Working Families
-By Travis Waldron
July 24, 2012- The Senate GOP plan to preserve the Bush tax cuts on incomes above $250,000 already amounts to a budget-busting tax cut for the rich, and in addition to it, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) also added another tax cut that benefits only the super-wealthy. The Hatch-McConnell plan effectively eliminates the estate tax, costing billions in revenue and giving a huge tax cut to the very wealthiest Americans, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes:
Specifically, the new Senate Republican proposal, which Senators Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch unveiled earlier this month, would:
Cost $119 billion more in forgone revenues over the next ten years than the Obama Administration proposal to reinstate the already generous 2009 estate-tax rules. Analysis by the Urban Institute-Brookings Tax Policy Center shows that all of the $119 billion would flow to the heirs of the estates of the wealthiest three of every 1,000 people who die, since those are the only estates that would owe any estate tax under the 2009 rules.
Campaign for America's Future: Romney: Protecting the Rich Is More Important Than Deficit Reduction
-By Bill Scher
July 23, 2012- On CNBC yesterday, Mitt Romney said:
What the president should do is say look, we're going to extend for at least a year the--well, I'd like to see it permanent, but at least a year--the current tax environment. This sequestration related to defense spending, in particular, has to be put off ... whichever president is going to be elected, at least six months or a year to get those policies in place. So let's extend where we are now as opposed to looking at a cliff in January...
Let's remember what this "cliff" is. It's a two-fold bipartisan agreement.
There's the 2010 bipartisan tax cut deal, which, in exchange for additional middle-class tax cuts and jobless aid, extended the Bush tax cuts until the end of 2012.
And the 2011 bipartisan debt limit deal, which, if no deficit reduction agreement is struck, imposes automatic spending cuts, particularly on the military budget, at the end of the 2012.
PressTV: NY probes Chamber of Commerce political funding
June 27, 2012- The New York Attorney General has launched an investigation to determine if organizations are secretly channeling money to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to be used to impact political campaigns.
The tax-exempt chamber is a major player in U.S. politics, but not required to disclose the identities of its donors. AG Eric Schneiderman yesterday issued a subpoena to officials of a foundation affiliated with the chamber, seeking emails and bank records to determine if the foundation illegally funneled $18 million to the chamber for political and lobbying activities, sources tell the New York Times.
Investigators are examining grants totaling $19 million from the philanthropic Starr Foundation-which is based in New York-to the chamber's National Chamber Foundation, which loaned the Chamber of Commerce $18 million during the same period of time.
Though the money was supposed to be used for a "capital campaign," watchdog groups say the funds financed lobbying for “tort reform” legislation in Congress and to run largely anti-Democrat issue ads in the 2004 presidential and congressional campaigns.
Huffington Post: Supreme Court: U.S. Chamber Of Commerce Undefeated This Term
-By Mike Sacks
June 21, 2012- The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is undefeated at the Supreme Court this term, continuing to improve its success in securing business-friendly judgments since Chief Justice John Roberts took the bench in 2005.
The Constitutional Accountability Center, a left-leaning think tank and law firm, reported its findings on Thursday, noting that this term, which began in October and will likely conclude by the end of June, could be the chamber's "first 'perfect' term before the Supreme Court since at least 1994."
