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N A M/Nat'l Assoc of Mfgers

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see nam tag

CoC FEE pioneer

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AN 9 24

alternet-no lnx

Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting

Thom Hartmann

September 23, 2024

Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.

Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.

In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:

In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35

It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.

ALSO READ: Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push

In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”

While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.

Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.

That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.

The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.

The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.

As Mark Ames wrote:

The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36

Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.

While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.

It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise....

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohawk_Valley_formula

The Mohawk Valley formula is a plan for strikebreaking purportedly written by the president of the Remington Rand company James Rand, Jr. around the time of the Remington Rand strike at Ilion, New York in 1936/37.

The plan includes discrediting union leaders, frightening the public with the threat of violence, using local police and vigilantes to intimidate strikers, forming associations of "loyal employees" to influence public debate, fortifying workplaces, employing large numbers of replacement workers, and threatening to close the plant if work is not resumed.[1][2]

The authenticity of the written plan has never been clearly established. Although it was allegedly published in the National Association of Manufacturers Labor Relations Bulletin, no original copy has been found, nor does NAM list it among its pamphlets from that era.[3][non-primary ^source needed] Parts of the plan use language sympathetic to the views of labor organizers. The Remington Rand company did indeed ruthlessly suppress the strikes, as documented in a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, and the plan has been accepted as a guide to the methods that were used. At least one source names the strikebreaker Pearl Bergoff and his so-called "Bergoff Technique" as the origin of the formula.[4] Rand and Bergoff were both indicted by the same federal grand jury for their roles in the Remington Rand strike.

Noam Chomsky has described the formula as the result of business owners' trend away from violent strikebreaking to a "scientific" approach based on propaganda. An essential feature of this approach is the identification of the management's interests with "Americanism," while labor activism is portrayed as the work of un-American outsiders. Workers are thus persuaded to turn against the activists and toward management to demonstrate their patriotism.[5][6]

Elements of the formula[

The following is the text of the Mohawk Valley formula as quoted in the labor press:

  1. When a strike is threatened, label the union leaders as "agitators" to discredit them with the public and their own followers. Conduct balloting under the foremen to ascertain the strength of the union and to make possible misrepresentation of the strikers as a small minority. Exert economic pressure through threats to move the plant, align bankers, real estate owners and businessmen into a "Citizens' Committee".
  2. Raise high the banner of "law and order", thereby causing the community to mass legal and police weapons against imagined violence and to forget that employees have equal rights with others in the community.
  3. Call a "mass meeting" to coordinate public sentiment against the strike and strengthen the Citizens' Committee.
  4. Form a large police force to intimidate the strikers and exert a psychological effect. Utilize local police, state police, vigilantes and special deputies chosen, if possible, from other neighborhoods.
  5. Convince the strikers their cause is hopeless with a "back-to-work" movement by a puppet association of so-called "loyal employees" secretly organized by the employer.
  6. When enough applications are on hand, set a date for opening the plant by having such opening requested by the puppet "back-to-work" association.
  7. Stage the "opening" theatricallyby throwing open the gates and having the employees march in a mass protected by squads of armed police so as to dramatize and exaggerate the opening and heighten the demoralizing effect.
  8. Demoralize the strikers with a continuing show of force.If necessary turn the locality into a warlike camp and barricade it from the outside world.
  9. Close the publicity barrage on the theme that the plant is in full operation and the strikers are merely a minority attempting to interfere with the right to work.With this, the campaign is over—the employer has broken the strike.[2]

A similar, although more nuanced and longer, version was published in The Nation in 1937.[1]

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from western goals:

The Klan has never been the sole or even principle point of intersection for US fascism; formal, official Americanism has always been the lynchpin. During the 1920s, the US’s great industrial and finance moguls, from Hearst, Ford, Du Pont, and GM to the house of JP Morgan, Jr., went fascist, and big business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a leading purveyor of Americanist propaganda, joined them. In 1923, after Mussolini’s March on Rome, the counsel of NAM delivered a speech to their convention called il Duce an “extreme leader, not only converted by the lightning stroke of intelligence and falling from his error like Saul of Tarsus from his horse, but leading through the streets of a reunited country a great body of citizens,” liberating Italy from “the blighting hand of radical socialism.”

pg 145https://books.google.com/books?id=sWB9BgAAQBAJ julian barnes, prez CoC, Nam lawyer

Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America

By John Patrick Diggins

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pwl memo : Another significant shift in the law since Powell’s memo was circulated has been the gradual expansion of corporate constitutional rights(referred to by some business groups as “business civil liberties”), especially in the realms of commercial and political speech. The most infamous example is the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In the commercial sphere, companies have similarly used corporate speech doctrines to challenge various restrictions on corporate advertising (e.g. direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs for off-label uses), limits on media ownership, and product safety labeling requirements (e.g. cigarettes and genetically modified foods).

Corporate constitutional rights are regularly claimed (with the implicit threat of litigation) in opposition to new or proposed regulations. One recent example came during recent attacks on regulations created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform package, which contained a provision requiring that companies report their use of tin, gold and otherminerals that can be traced back to the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of the Congo. In its comments to the SEC, Tiffany & Co. claimed the SEC rules would “compel speech in a manner that violates the First Amendment.”

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D.C. Circuit Vacates Dodd-Frank Conflict Minerals Provision & SEC Rule as Violating First Amendment Free Speech

By Leland E. Beck on April 14th, 2014Posted in Agency Authority, Constitutional Issues in Regulations, Regulatory Process

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia today, in *National Association of Manufacturers v. SEC*, affirmed a district court judgment that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) did not violate procedural requirements or misconstrue the statute in promulgating the Conflict Minerals Rule, but vacated the specific underlying statutory provision and the rule because the requirements compelled speech in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Compelling reporting, disclosure, and publication to the extent that entails “compelled speech” pose a distinct constitutional limitation on both statutes and rulemaking under statutes.  Agencies must consider carefully this developing caselaw in formulating any reporting requirement that will be publicly disclosed – and provide a detailed justification for such requirements in the preamble of any such rule – or counsel for regulated parties will, and should, press judicial review.

Dodd-Frank Act:  In the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Congress required the SEC to issue regulations requiring companies using “conflict minerals” – gold, tantalum, tin, and tungsten mined from the Democratic Republic of the Congo or an adjoining country – to investigate and disclose the origin of those minerals.  The statutory scheme applies only to “person[s] described” in the Act – those if conflict minerals are necessary to the functionality or production of a product manufactured by the company.  A covered company must disclose annually, whether the necessary conflict minerals originated in the DRC or an adjoining country.  If so, the company must file a report with the SEC, describing the due diligence measures taken to establish the source and chain of custody of the minerals, including a private sector audit of the report.  The report must also list the products manufactured or contracted to be manufactured that are not “DRC conflict free.”  A product is “DRC conflict free” if it’s necessary conflict minerals did not “directly or indirectly finance or benefit armed groups” in the covered countries.

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NAM? CoC?

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/396365659/how-one-nation-didnt-become-under-god-until-the-50s-religious-revival

The New Deal, they argue, violates this natural order. In fact, they argue that the New Deal and the regulatory state violate the Ten Commandments. It makes a false idol of the federal government and encourages Americans to worship it rather than the Almighty. It encourages Americans to covet what the wealthy have; it encourages them to steal from the wealthy in the forms of taxation; and, most importantly, it bears false witness against the wealthy by telling lies about them. So they argue that the New Deal is not a manifestation of God's will, but rather, a form of pagan stateism and is inherently sinful.

On the Rev. James Fifield

He takes over the pastorate at the First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, an elite church, literally ministering to millionaires in his pews. It's got some of the town's most wealthy citizens — the mayor attends service there, [Hollywood filmmaker] Cecil B. DeMille. He tells these millionaires what they want to hear, which is that their worldly success is a sign of heavenly blessing. He has a very loose approach to the Bible. He says that reading the Bible should be like eating fish: We take out the bones to enjoy the meat; all parts are not of equal value. Accordingly, he disregarded Christ's many injunctions about the dangers of wealth, and instead preached a philosophy that wedded capitalism to Christianity.

On Fifield's "spiritual mobilization"

"Spiritual mobilization" is his effort to recruit other ministers to the cause. So he is serving, in many ways, as a frontman for a number of corporate leaders. His main sponsors are Sun Oil President J. Howard Pew, Alfred Sloan of General Motors, the heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, they all heavily fund this organization. But what Fifield sets out to do is recruit other ministers to his cause. Within the span of just a decade's time, he has about 17,000 so-called minister representatives who belong to the organization who are literally preaching sermons on its Christian libertarian message to their congregations, who are competing in sermon contest[s] for cash prizes and they're doing all they can in their local communities to spread this message that the New Deal is essentially evil, it's a manifestation of creeping socialism that is rotting away the country from within. Instead they need to rally around business leaders and make common cause with them to defend what they call "the American way of life."

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Significantly, similar legal issues are being considered in a federal lawsuit brought in August 2015 against the federal government by 21 young people from across the U.S. and Dr. James Hansen as guardian for all future generations, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. Just last week in that case, the world’s largest fossil fuel industry representatives filed a request to intervene to protect their commercial economic interests in fossil fuel exploitation and to thwart the youth’s request for protection of their fundamental constitutional rights. The proposed intervenors, theAmerican Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (representing members ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Koch Industries and virtually all other major refiners and petrochemical manufacturers), the American Petroleum Institute (representing 625 oil and natural gas companies) and the National Association of Manufacturers, called the youth’s case “a direct threat to [their] businesses.”

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http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/20/stem-tide-climate-change

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OMG

National Association of Manufacturers v. National Labor Relations Board (2013)—A court approved a poster from the employer informing workers they had the right not to join a union, but struck down a rule requiring that a sign be posted informing workers of their right to form and join unions and bargain collectively, because the Constitution protects the corporation's right not to speak,

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t. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers asked a federal court to modify or scrap U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules governing so-called conflict minerals.

The SEC adopted a regulation in August that requires companies using gold, tin, tungsten and tantalum in their products to make “reasonable” efforts to determine if those materials came from the Democratic Republic of Congo or an adjoining country. Business groups have complained the measure is burdensome, costly to administer and ineffective.

Trade in those minerals -- used in electronic devices -- is helping to finance conflict and contributing to a humanitarian crisis in the central African nation, according to the SEC.

“Petitioners request that this rule be modified or set aside in whole or in part,” the two Washington-based business advocacy groups said in a joint filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington on Oct. 19.

The measure was mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It applies to companies with SEC-reporting obligations for whom the minerals are “necessary to the functionality or production” of an item they manufacture, the agency said in an Aug. 22 statement announcing the rule’s adoption.

It applies to Apple Inc., Boeing Co. and thousands of other U.S-listed manufacturers whose products incorporate the metals.

The first disclosure reports are due by May 31, 2014, the agency said.

“While the petitioners did not state a basis for a challenge in their filing, we believe our legal interpretation and economic analysis are sound and we look forward to defending the rule that Congress directed us to write,” John Nester, a spokesman for the SEC, said in a statement.

‘Complex Issue’

In a joint statement, the groups that though the measure was well-intentioned, it “is not an effective approach to this complex issue.”

“The final conflict mineral rule imposes an unworkable, overly broad and burdensome system that will undermine jobs and growth and may not achieve Congress’s overall objectives.”

The case is National Association of Manufacturers v. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 12-1422, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (Washington).

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrew Harris in Chicago ataharris16@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Hytha at mhytha@bloomberg.net

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Michael Baroody fil NAM lobbyist nom b2 head consumer product safety comm but howled down) 267

NAM became big ~ to new deal, ~ union; lost members b/c of GD, but by '37 spend 1/2 on PR to bost free enterprie, but also went after unions opposed Wagner Act and publized Mowhawk Valley Formula 15.

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[Halsey also represented the National Association of Manufacturers in its successful fight against adoption of the metric system in America in 1902.]

see Spin: by Ewen

wiki

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1895. The U.S. was in the midst of a deep recession and many of the nation’s manufacturers saw a strong need to export their products in other countries. One of the NAM’s earliest efforts was to call for the creation of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

In 1903, David MacLean Parry[5]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Manufacturers#cite_note-4) delivered a speech at the annual convention of the National Association of Manufacturers that was focused on organized labor. He argued that unions' goals would result in "despotism, tyranny, and slavery." Parry advocated the establishment of a great national anti-union federation under the control of the NAM, and the NAM responded by initiating such an effort.[6]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Manufacturers#cite_note-5) The NAM encouraged the creation and propagation of a network of local anti-union organizations, many of which took the name Citizens' Alliance.[7]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Manufacturers#cite_note-6) The national Citizens' Alliance entity came to be called the Citizens' Industrial Alliance.

According to Adam Curtis's documentary "The Century of the Self", NAM used Edward Bernays in the 1930s to combat the policies of President Roosevelt.[citation needed] NAM made efforts to undermine organized labor in the United States before the New Deal.[8]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Manufacturers#cite_note-7)

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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Association_of_Manufacturers

Founded in 1895, the National Association of Manufacturers's "mission is to enhance the competitiveness of manufacturers by shaping a legislative and regulatory environment..." [1] The group has a long roster of lobbyists in Washington lobbying on dozens of issues. They also have a special lobby called National Association of Manufacturers - Asbestos Alliance, working on tort reform concerning asbestos exposure.

Although NAM has a long and unabashed history of representing the interests of industrial corporations, progressive blogger David Sirota has accused them of being a "front group," a "corrupt, partisan wing of the Republican apparatus whose leadership often uses NAM's resources against the interests of the majority of NAM's own members.[1]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Association_of_Manufacturers#cite_note-0)

Contents

Against regulating greenhouse gas emissions

In April 2009, NAM protested the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions endangered public health and could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. "Using outdated programs under the law to regulate GHG emissions would burden an ailing economy while doing little or nothing to improve the environment, NAM Pres. John Engler said. 'The clean air laws were designed to focus on local pollutants. GHG emissions, however, are global in nature and require a new framework.'" [2]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Association_of_Manufacturers#cite_note-1)

Duke Energy quits NAM over organization's refusal to address global warming

In 2009, Duke Energy, which operates scores of coal-fired power plants in the Southeast and Midwest, would not be renewing its membership due to NAM's refusal to address global warming. In an interview, Duke CEO Jim Rogers siad, "We are not renewing our membership in NAM because in tough times, we want to invest in associations that are pulling tin the same direction we are." Rogers said that NAM, as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Republican Party "ought to roll up their sleeves and get to work on a climate bill, but quite frankly, I don't see them changing."[3]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Association_of_Manufacturers#cite_note-2)

Members

After losing a legal challenge to language in the "Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 that requires groups to release the names of members that contribute $5,000 a quarter to the coalition’s lobbying efforts and actively participate in its lobbying activities," NAM listed 65 of its corporate members on its website. [4]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Association_of_Manufacturers#cite_note-3) The listing was difficult to find on the website and was posted as a graphics file, making the transfer of the information more difficult.

From their 2008 first quarter lobbying disclosure form: [5]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Association_of_Manufacturers#cite_note-4)

Personnel

Staff

Board of Directors

See **National Association of Manufacturers/Board of Directors**

Contact information

National Association of Manufacturers

1331 Pennsylvania Ave. NW

Sixth Floor Washington, DC 20004-1790

Telephone: 202-637-3000 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              202-637-3000      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Fax: 202-637-3182

Website:http://www.nam.org

Email: manufacturing AT nam.org

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

References

  1. ↑ David Sirota, "GOP Front Group Exposes It's Own Corruption & the Right's Fraying Coalition," Sirotablog (WorkingForChange), May 8, 2007.
  2. ↑ Nick Snow, "EPA issues proposed endangerment finding on GHGs," Oil & Gas Journal, April 20, 2009.
  3. ↑ Amanda Terkel, "Duke Energy Quits the Right-Wing National Association of Manufacturers Over Differences on Climate Policy," Think Progress, May 8, 2009
  4. ↑ Kevin Bogardus, "NAM discloses member list," The Hill, May 1, 2008.
  5. ↑ "NAM Lobbying Disclosure," National Association of Manufacturers, accessed May 2008.

External resources

External articles

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Additional Koch-funded groups and industry groups threatened to sue the Federal government for listing the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and National Association of Manufacturers.

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Case Study: Koch Organizations Instrumental in Dissemination of ACCF/NAM Claims

On this page

Page - March 29, 2010

The Koch web is playing a role in promoting studies that exaggerate the costs of climate policy. In 2008, the Koch-web-funded American Council on Capital Formation (ACCF) teamed up with the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) to sponsor and disseminate a study of the economic impact of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. Every step of the way, Koch-funded anti-clean energy groups played a key role in moving the NAM/ACCF study in the media and at the grassroots level.

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http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Burson-Marsteller

BM front group http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Foundation_for_Clean_Air_Progress

The Foundation was established to challenge the US Clean Air Act by 'educating' the public about the progress made in air quality over the previous twenty-five years. API, truckers, etc

Created specifically to battle the clean air proposals, the coalition operates out of the offices of the National Association of Manufacturers, a Washington-based trade group. Its leadership includes top managers of petroleum, automotive and utility companies as well as longtime Washington insiders such as C. Boyden Gray, a counsel to former president George Bush.

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pooley:

9: 1st blood

NAM (controls anti-tax group) and oil co's went after BTU tax, NAM and API hired BM p 86  BM provided local video to local tv stations 87

28 house demos got BTU'd

Byrd's nonbinding sense of senate said dev countries like china could not be exempt from cap 90

byrd-hagel (kerry backed) 91

McC Lieberman opposed by NAM, CoC, Nat Mining Assoc, but some ignored b/c feel good vote (could not pass, so no real risk, tho it did better than expected 97 (slipsliding away)

CB Gray read krupp, drove methanol car, helped get lead out of gas

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National Association of Manufacturers/Board of Directors

The Board of Directors of the National Association of Manufacturers, as at March 2008, is[1]

Contents[hide]

Executive Committee Members

Board Members

Articles and Resources

Sources

  1. ↑ "NAM Board of Directors", accessed March 2008.

Attachments