tom donohue bak

<div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">donohueTbak</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">pow, can't believe i never wrote up?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">yay 2013 donohueCoC</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bak 920</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">html birnbaum Conflict-of-Interest</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/497093-republicans-blasting-china-forget-that-the-gop-enabled-beijings</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">just free mkt BS or corps wanted?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.uschamber.com/press-release/facts-over-fear-win-china-pntr-debate&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.uschamber.com/press-release/facts-over-fear-win-china-pntr-debate</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;WASHINGTON, D.C. – United States Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue called today's bipartisan House vote granting permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) to China "a victory of fact over fear and a historic win for the American economy and our national security.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The truth about free trade won today," said Donohue. "PNTR opens China's markets for American products, businesses and farmers, and creates jobs for workers here at home. Once Congress focused on the facts, no amount of union pressure to isolate this country could defeat the fact that this trade deal with China is in America's best interest.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"American business and workers – from the new economy to the old and the small to the large – clearly recognized the significance of this vote," he said. "As co-chair of the Business Coalition for U.S. – China Trade, we worked with a broad based group of supporters, from the grassroots to the Congress, to overcome an all-out blitz of misinformation by union leaders and their allies."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This was a bipartisan victory, Donohue concluded, and he commended members of Congress from both sides of the aisle, for many of whom "this was a particularly tough vote, given the tremendous pressure from the opponents of free trade."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Chamber has actively supported the China trade deal by mobilizing a massive grassroots effort in 66 congressional districts, beginning over a year before the vote. In addition, 20 lobbyists fanned out across Capitol Hill organizing over 400 congressional meetings and more than 30 Chamber field staffers organized numerous events in targeted congressional districts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"This vote recognizes that the China trade agreement is overwhelmingly in our favor. China's concessions are its price of admission to the WTO," said Donohue. "The choice was clear: embrace and benefit from China as a trading partner, or stick our heads in the sand and hope they go away. Congress made the right choice today."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the world's largest business federation representing more than three million businesses and organizations of every size, sector and region.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://litigationfinancejournal.com/chamber-commerce-ranked-2-top-30-tort-reform-hypocrites-list</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) has ranked #2 on The New York Law School’s Center for Justice & Democracy’s 2018 ranking of the top-30 tort reform hypocrites. The report aims to reveal which tort reform advocates are the most litigious, and thereby hypocritical in their efforts to scale back the litigiousness of other entities. The ILR, which consistently advocates for numerous tort reform measures including mandatory disclosure of third party funding agreements and placing interest rate caps on Consumer Legal Funding transactions, placed second on the list behind only President Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the report, the ILR was established in 1998 to pursue the Chamber’s tort reform agenda. Since its inception, however, the ILR “has spent millions on federal lobbying to in an effort to keep victims from having their cases heard before a civil judge or jury.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. Chamber is the top lobbying spender in the country, having spent a whopping $109MM in 2017 alone ($22MM of which was spent by the ILR). Yet despite spending all of that money on efforts to scale back the ability of others to litigate, the Chamber itself is one of the nation’s top litigators. Over the last decade, “the Chamber has been involved in over 1100 lawsuits, either as a plaintiff or as an amicus curiae,” according to the report.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Chamber’s President, Tom Donohue, told the Washington Examiner in 2015: “We spend half of our time trying to reduce the number of suits by class-action lawyers and the other half of our time suing the hell out of the government. We sue the federal government and units of the federal government and some state governments, 180-90 times a year.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The report cites the Chamber for its hypocrisy, and notes that the Chamber is a longtime member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)’s Civil Justice Task Force, an entity “devoted solely to weakening or eliminating corporate liability for wrongdoing.” An investigative report by the Center for Media and Democracy found that bills proposed by ALEC “make it harder for average Americans to access the civil justice system” and “provide relief and protections for the industries who wrote them.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The #1 tort reform hypocrite according to the report is President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly scaled back access to justice – his de-fanging of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is but one example – while simultaneously suing or threatening to sue anyone and everyone whom he perceives has done him wrong.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rounding out the top-5 on the list are the National Rifle Association, the National Federation of Independent Business, and General Motors.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The entire report can be found here.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">U.S. Chamber Of Commerce Leader Warns EPA Fracking Study Could Jeopardize 'Millions Of Jobs'</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dec 3 (Reuters) - America's largest business lobby group warned the Obama administration on Tuesday against snuffing out the country's energy boom with regulations on new oil and natural gas drilling technologies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study due next year could be used to justify clamping down on drilling techniques that have sparked a surge in U.S. oil and natural gas output.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"This could short-circuit America's absolute explosion in energy opportunity that is creating millions of jobs," he told a meeting of business executives.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A major force in U.S. politics, the Chamber of Commerce is the biggest business lobbying group in the country and has been a steady critic of President Barack Obama.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his comments, Donohue railed against the Obama administration's efforts to increase regulations on businesses and appealed to the media to get his message out that the rules were hurting the economy and "undermining freedom."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"They are costing jobs and growth in our country," he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The EPA's study, first requested by Congress in 2010, may prove pivotal in the government's regulation of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves forcing large volumes of water laced with chemicals and sand deep underground to crack rock and free oil and natural gas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Currently, fracking is largely regulated by states, rather than the federal government. In its first major regulation on the energy boom, the EPA finalized a rule last year that targets smog-forming pollutants from fracking wells. It allows drillers to flare the gases until 2015.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Critics of fracking, including many environmentalists, worry that drilling operations near schools and homes could pollute water and air.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The United States overtook Russia as the top producer of natural gas last year and surged past Saudi Arabia this year as the world's biggest oil producer. Some companies, however, worry the EPA study could lead to added regulations that crimp America's energy bounty.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Many believe it will be the rationalization of new federal fracking regulations before the end of this administration," Donohue said. (Reporting by Jason Lange; Editing by Paul Simao) huffpo</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">donohueCoC</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6/12/2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1912 established as counterweight to unions and federal governement Herbert Hoover signed right to collective bargain? "It wasn't always this way. The US Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1912 as a counterweight to the increasingly powerful federal government and the labor movement. Back then it generally took a moderate, nonpartisan approach, unlike groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, which opposed efforts to expand workers' compensation and ban child labor. During World War II, the Chamber's president described collective bargaining as "an established and useful reality." Half a century later, as President Bill Clinton prepared to roll out his health care plan, the Chamber's board unanimously backed universal coverage funded by employer mandates. also NAFTA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For members of the Republican class of 1994, however, such consensus building was unacceptable. According to John Judis' The Paradox of American Democracy [7], Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) told the group's chief lobbyist that it was "the Chamber's duty to categorically oppose everything that Clinton was in favor of." Congressional Republicans threatened to ignore the Chamber and hinted that they might start a competing organization. The Chamber caved, reversing its position on the health plan and sending its new lobbyist to apologize to Boehner (now House minority leader). [does this connect to K Street? sounds like disagree with Obama even when he agrees with us tactic]"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most important in terms of industry groups taking over as buffer for big, especially fossil fuel companies (notably Exxon) which had been the major funders of climate doubt; recall even BP had it's brief "Beyond Petroluem green(wash) phase.&nbsp; Donohue took over Chamber in 1997 when it was losing members to rivals (who?).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Head of CoC in 1997 Reconfigured Chamber to money launder for big corporate donors with separate dedicated accounts. Min is a million dollars.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pushed tort reform, ideologically and strategically aligned with GOP.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Enforcer, helped take out Daschle (torpedoed for HHS because of his support of health care? 1st senate leader in 50 years to lose seat 2004.&nbsp; Limo charge especially ludicrous, as TD faous for those, private planes and lavish parties (Union Station and national air and space museum; spent lavishly at ATA and CoC.&nbsp; He was brought in to raise money, but in red; is salary tripled.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Boy Scouts to handicapped to university, then negotiator against postalworkers 1969; then to Chamber as lobbyist in 1976, eight years, then 1984 fifteen years at ATA (note, industry group) then head of CoC 1997.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The #:&nbsp; &nbsp;large amount of budget comes from a small number of very large (multi-national?) corporations. This is a conscious strategy, since all that matters it the total size of budget (so concentration of interests to those with the most to hide/lose; Matthew Effect, amplifying feedback?] Three biggest anonoymous donors gave 20% of revenue.&nbsp; Donohue innovation was setting up separate accounts for a corporation or industry so that money can be taregetted on issues they care about, so really the chanber is a lobbying firm masquerading as an industry trade group, and launders money (Shell Game). spends up to $300K/day on lobbying [6)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Opposed DISCLOSE esp on contractors (we now know because of Snowden how many pvt contractors have security clearance; 70% of NSA budget?!, forget Haliburton and Blackwater). 2010 outspent SuperPacs 3:2 CPI)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tight with Boehner and McConnell (latter big ~ to CFR)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tax breaks for big oil, all the above includes oil, coal, nuclear</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Josten: forcing disclosure is not informing; you are actually squelching free sp (// roberts?)&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">13 Jan 2012</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thursday morning, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue argued that “free enterprise” requires a future of accelerated, unending global warming. Supporting expanded fracking, shale oil, and tar-sands development, including the Keystone XL pipeline, Donohue said that the United States should burn hundreds of billions of tons of fossil fuels for hundreds of years:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">USCoC3</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OMG:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">13 Jan 201</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thursday morning, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue argued that “free enterprise” requires a future of accelerated, unending global warming. [well...] Supporting expanded fracking, shale oil, and tar-sands development, including the Keystone XL pipeline, Donohue said that the United States should burn hundreds of billions of tons of fossil fuels for hundreds of years:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We have 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to last at least 200 years. We have 2.7 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to last 120 years. We have 486 billion tons of coal, enough to last more than 450 years — and we need to use more of this strategic resource cleanly and wisely here at home while selling it around the world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">whoruns:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why He Matters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He's never actually worked in the corporate world, but he speaks for more than three million companies. In fact, Donohue's reputation as a tough negotiator may surpass the skills of the chief executives that he represents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Donohue lobbies for business interests on Capitol Hill. He's an advocate for the companies he represents, big and small, but he is also one of the most powerful political figures in Washington, D.C. When he first took the post at the chamber in 1997, the group had lost membership to rival organizations. Under Donohue's leadership, the Chamber's membership has increased 15 times over to make the trade association the largest advocacy group in the nation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since taking the Chamber's helm, Donohue has developed a powerful lobbying group within the organization, created a for-profit company, tackled tort reform and helped the trade association's PAC aggressively support pro-business candidates for Congress. The chamber has also gone to extreme lengths to oust lawmakers it deems hurtful to business interests, playing a major role in then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle's (D-S.D.) reelection defeat in 2004.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And the blunt-talking Donohue has been point man in marshaling aggressive opposition to President Obama's top priorities: health-care reform, climate-change legislation and a bid to make it easier to unionize through the Employee Free Choice Act. In Obama's first year, the chamber launched a major campaign that helped defeat the bill's key pro-union provision.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All that has led to a high-profile, bitter rivalry between Donohue and the Obama administration as White House aides attempted to court individual companies, leading to the defection from the chamber of prominent companies like Apple. Donohue's response? "Members come and go all the damn time."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In His Own Words</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I [Donohue] said they [the GOP] couldn't be sure that the chamber was going to be there on every single issue. And I told them that they could be damn sure that we're going to try to bring some Democratic votes along, even if it means making a few compromises here and there, because we don't just want to talk about these issues and feel good about where we stand on them. We want to win."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More on: Thomas J. Donohue</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.uschamber.com/press/speeches/2012/state-american-business-2012-address-thomas-j-donohue-president-ceo-us-chamber-c</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">..."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Today, I’d like to briefly outline a few of the highlights of the Chamber’s American Jobs and Growth Agenda.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Producing American Energy and Rebuilding the Infrastructure</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Let’s start with a big one—energy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Our nation is on the cusp of an energy boom that is already creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, revitalizing entire communities, and reinvigorating American manufacturing.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unconventional oil and natural gas development is on pace to create more than 300,000 jobs by 2015 in Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia alone. Take a look at what’s happening in North Dakota. The state is booming. Unemployment is at 3.4%. Oil production just surpassed that of Ecuador—one of the members of OPEC.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Energy is a game changer for the United States. It is, as the saying goes, “the next big thing.” With the right policies, the oil and natural gas industry could create more than 1 million jobs by 2018. Not only can we create jobs, but we can cut our dependence on overseas imports while adding hundreds of billions of dollars to government coffers in the coming years.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Recent discoveries have confirmed that this nation is truly blessed with energy resources. We have 1.4 trillion barrels of oil, enough to last at least 200 years. We have 2.7 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to last 120 years. We have 486 billion tons of coal, enough to last more than 450 years—and we need to use more of this strategic resource cleanly and wisely here at home while selling it around the world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To tap our energy resources, we must speed up permitting and end many of the restrictions that have put key areas off-limits. Instead of handpicking a few technologies, we must harness all our resources, traditional and alternative—while expanding nuclear power and driving greater efficiency.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Our biggest and most reliable foreign energy supplier is Canada. The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would bring Canadian oil sands down to our Gulf Coast refineries and to other destinations along the way.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This project has passed every environmental test. There is no legitimate reason—none at all—to subject it to further delay. Labor unions and the business community alike are urging President Obama to act in the best interests of our national security and our workers and approve the pipeline. We can put 20,000 Americans to work right away and up to 250,000 over the life of the project.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fact-Checking the US Chamber of Commerce</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">America's most overblown business lobby, busted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Josh Harkinson | January/February 2010 Issue</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With a name that evokes Main Street and Little League teams, and with millions of dollars to spend on lobbying, the US Chamber of Commerce [1] has long been a powerful force on Capitol Hill. But as it's taken more extreme positions on a range of hot-button issues, from flirting with climate change denial [2] to fighting health care reform [3], its reputation as a predictable pro-business group is crumbling.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last fall, Nike, Apple, and three major utilities quit the Chamber or its board of directors over what one company called its "extreme rhetoric and obstructionist tactics." Companies such as Dow and General Electric distanced themselves from the group as environmental and labor groups piled on with criticism of the Chamber's cozy relationship with special interests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Amid the growing backlash, I reported on MotherJones.com that the Chamber had been routinely inflating [4] its membership numbers by 900 percent—claiming 3 million businesses as members when the real number is closer to 300,000. In October, the Yes Men [5] held a fake press conference where they announced that the lobby would now support climate legislation—leading the real Chamber to break with its stance against frivolous lawsuits to sue the anti-corporate pranksters.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The climate farce was just the most visible side of the Chamber's larger agenda to block nearly every major reform effort in Washington. Spending as much as $300,000 a day on lobbying [6], more than any other group or company, the Chamber has opposed efforts to give shareholders more oversight of corporate pay, strengthen the independence of corporate auditors, and create the watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Agency. It's trying to kill the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would make it easier for workers to unionize. It has run TV ads in 20 states warning that a public health care option would lead to "government control over your health."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even after trying to massage its bloated membership claims, the Chamber still insists that it speaks on behalf of a broad cross-section of businesses. But for the past 15 years, it's been taking increasingly extreme, partisan stands, often setting policies in concert with small numbers of powerful donors who may not share the interests of many of the Chamber's members.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It wasn't always this way. The US Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1912 as a counterweight to the increasingly powerful federal government and the labor movement. Back then it generally took a moderate, nonpartisan approach, unlike groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, which opposed efforts to expand workers' compensation and ban child labor. During World War II, the Chamber's president described collective bargaining as "an established and useful reality." Half a century later, as President Bill Clinton prepared to roll out his health care plan, the Chamber's board unanimously backed universal coverage funded by employer mandates.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For members of the Republican class of 1994, however, such consensus building was unacceptable. According to John Judis' The Paradox of American Democracy [7], Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) told the group's chief lobbyist that it was "the Chamber's duty to categorically oppose everything that Clinton was in favor of." Congressional Republicans threatened to ignore the Chamber and hinted that they might start a competing organization. The Chamber caved, reversing its position on the health plan and sending its new lobbyist to apologize to Boehner (now House minority leader). [does this connect to K Street?]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Three years later, Tom Donohue [8], the hard-charging CEO of the American Trucking Association, took the wheel as Chamber president, pledging to end its days as a "sleeping giant, missing in action from many important political battles." The group's tone became more strident. Senior Vice President Bill Kovacs, one of a few nominally Democratic hires, said Clinton's decision to sign the 1998 Kyoto Protocol was not simply "bad for business" but "unilateral economic disarmament."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Chamber's politics became synonymous with its biggest corporate donors'. Donohue established special accounts for companies that feared taking controversial public stands, allowing them to anonymously funnel money to the Chamber, which then advocated on their behalf. In 2001, the Wall Street Journal outed Wal-Mart, Daimler Chrysler, and Merck as secret clients. (The Chamber has long refused to name any of its members.) Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability [9], a shareholder advocacy group, says that the Washington head of an S&P 100 company told him that the Chamber will set up a campaign promoting a company's pet cause if it donates at least $1 million annually.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue has served on the boards of several companies that are among the Chamber's most influential members, including Union Pacific railroad, which has given the Chamber $500,000 since 2006. Since 1998, Donohue has earned roughly $2 million in income and up to $2.2 million in stock and options from the railroad, which gets 40 percent of its business from hauling coal and staunchly opposes the Waxman-Markey climate bill. He's expected to abide by a company policy that prevents him from acting in a way that is "inconsistent with the company's best interests." The Chamber has no similar conflict-of-interest policy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chamber spokesman Eric Wohlschlegel, who declined to comment on its climate stance and membership claims, downplays Donohue's corporate ties, stressing that its policies are ultimately set by its committees and approved by its board of directors. But current and former members say its policy making is sometimes done undemocratically. For instance, neither the Chamber's board nor its energy and environment committee endorsed the most controversial elements of its climate policy. "There was no vote," says Donald J. Sterhan, the committee's chair. The decision to challenge the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases, he says, came from Kovacs, who last August called for a public hearing on climate science that would be the "Scopes Monkey Trial of the 21st century."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Chamber claims that 96 percent of its members are small businesses, yet its self-selected board includes just 6 representatives from small businesses, 1 from a local chamber, and 111 from large corporations. Mark Jaffe, CEO of the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce, which belongs to the national group but disagrees with it on climate change and health care, tells me, "They don't represent me."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The more the Chamber throws its weight around to please a few large donors, the more it risks becoming just another special interest. The shift is already under way. "It's a trade association kind of run amok," says a Democratic Party insider who has consulted for the Chamber. After the lobby ran anti-EFCA ads that also targeted Democratic incumbents in 2008, he says, party leaders let it know that "there will be payback." This fall, Energy Secretary Steven Chu [10] described the defections from the Chamber as "wonderful," and the White House openly bypassed the group to talk directly with CEOs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chamber president Donohue says this won't change anything. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal in October, he declared, "People have criticized us for helping industries or individual companies. What the hell do you think we do? That's our business!"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6/9/2013</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">US CHAMBER OF COMMERCE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">U.S. Chamber of Commerce</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=U.S._Chamber_of_Commerce</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.polluterwatch.com/tom-donohue</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ompany U.S. Chamber of Commerce</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">position President and CEO</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bio</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tom Donohue is the CEO of U.S. Chamber of Commerce.&nbsp; Before taking the helm of the Chamber in 1997, Donahue spent 13 years as president of the American Trucking Association, where he fundraised and lobbied against the Teamsters union.&nbsp; Prior to the ATA, Donohue lobbied for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and worked as a labor negotiator for the U.S. Postal Service. Donohue was born in Brooklyn in 1938, earned a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University and a master’s degree in business administration from Adelphi University.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: WhoRunsGov</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since becoming head of the Chamber, Donohue has received a lot of attention for his lobbying and fundraising practices as well as for his $3.7 million salary,chauffeur-driven cars, and private jets. He is currently the sixth highest paid lobbyist in the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue has been both praised and criticised as a leader by members of the US chamber of Commerce. He has refocused the Chamber's lobbying and outreach efforts on policies that suit the Chamber's largest and wealthiest corporations.&nbsp; This strategy has increased the the Chamber's income through fundraising, but has alienated many of the small businesses that make up the majority of the Chamber's membership.&nbsp; Donahue has also ramped up the Chamber's spending, doling out $120 million in 2009 on lobbying alone, five times what its nearest cohort, Exxon Mobil, spent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Source: Washtington Monthly</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The LA Times notes, "Under Donohue, the [U.S. Chamber of Commerce] has also frequently aligned itself with GOP priorities."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">QUOTES</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We will not allow the business community to be intimidated, and we will use every tool at our disposal to challenge those who try to silence our voice."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Washington Post, January 11, 2011</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Show me the money!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Washington Monthly, July/August, 2010</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“You can never have enough money.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Washington Monthly, July/August, 2010</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“There is no place in our society where there is not warts. The media? Wow. The Chamber business? The lobbying business? The business business? The church? The Boy Scouts? We got jerks every place.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Washington Monthly, July/August, 2010</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“People seem to listen to you more when you’ve got a bagful of cash.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-New York Times, November 28, 2009</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Members come and go all the damn time.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Is the science right?&nbsp; Is the science not right?&nbsp; I don’t know.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If we got the EPA one [ability to regulate greenhouse gases], then we are in deep shit as a country.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Politico, October 26, 2009</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I'm concerned about anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency, members of Congress and the media. It suggests to us that we have to demonstrate who it is in this society that creates jobs, wealth and benefits -- and who it is that eats them."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"I will disclose any funds I am legally required to disclose -- and not disclose any others."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2008</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If energy independence is what we truly want, we can certainly achieve it; we have more than enough energy sources, ranging from coal and oil shale to wind and photovoltaic, that when used in conjunction with one another, can make the country energy independent, but not any time soon and perhaps not even in this century.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">-Congressional testimony, June 28, 2007</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EVIDENCE</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue has used millions of the Chamber’s money to weaken or prevent the passage of bills concerning financial reform, health care reform, andclimate and energy legislation.&nbsp; Donohue himself states that by doing the more unpopular lobby work for companies, they can deny direct involvement in interfering with Congressional efforts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Shortly after the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, Donohue announced that the Chamber would raise $40 million to spend on electing politicians in 2010 who would support the interests of big businesses.&nbsp; The budget later increased to $75 million.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Donohue expresses a willingness to address climate change, he hasopposed viable efforts to do so.&nbsp; Following an EPA decision to classify carbon dioxide as hazardous to human health (due to its effects as a greenhouse gas), the Chamber submitted comments to the agency claiming that planetary warming would “be beneficial to humans.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue oversaw the Chamber’s spending of over $132 million on lobbying in 2010, part of a $494,000,000 lobbying investment over the last five years, including specific amendments to the U.S. House American Clean Energy and Security Act, and energy-relation provisions of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.&nbsp; The Chamber’s Political Action Committee has spent over $1.4 million on electing political candidates since the 2000 cycle. The Chamber spent $33 million on electioneering communications designed to support or oppose target candidates in the 2010 election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As a member of the Board of Directors for Union Pacific Railroad, which depends on shipping coal for 20% of its revenue, Donohue’s role against climate legislation within the Chamber has been questioned as a conflict of interest.&nbsp; Union Pacific Railroad also donates directly to the Chamber of Commerce.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue impressed upon the country that the Chamber boasted 3 million members, although he stopped using this figure when it was revealed that he may have been exaggerating by a magnitude of ten.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">LINKS AND RESOURCES</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">WhoRunsGov</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OpenSecrets</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DeSmogBlog</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">SourceWatch</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">U.S. Chamber Watch - "We'll Get Rid of You": Donohue's Mob Boss Language Scares the Frosh</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.fixtheuschamber.org/tracking-the-chamber/well-get-rid-you-donohues-mob-boss-language-scares-frosh&nbsp; public citizen</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">U.S. Chamber of Commerce</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">former head of trucking industry, tough sob to go up against teamsters?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">OMG:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bill mck RS 8/15</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Left to our own devices, citizens might decide to regulate carbon and stop short of the brink; according to a recent poll, nearly two-thirds of Americans would back an international agreement that cut carbon emissions 90 percent by 2050. But we aren't left to our own devices. The Koch brothers, for instance, have a combined wealth of $50 billion, meaning they trail only Bill Gates on the list of richest Americans. They've made most of their money in hydrocarbons, they know any system to regulate carbon would cut those profits, and they reportedly plan to lavish as much as $200 million on this year's elections. In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming. Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">USCoC: For its part, the chamber claims that it's not attacking the EPA's scientific assessment. Yet its announcement of the lawsuit did just that—charging that the agency failed to perform "careful analysis of all available data and options" before releasing the "flawed" finding. And in its public comments submitted in advance of the release of the endangerment finding last year, the chamber also disputed the science of climate change, suggesting, among other things, that rising temperatures might actually be beneficial for humans, and that any resulting problems could be addressed by the increased use of air conditioners.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">uscoc:&nbsp; One of Boehner’s top individual donors was a U.S. Chamber lobbyist,6 and this year, Boehner invited the Chamber’s top lobbyist to attend a controversial closed-door meeting about the America Speaking Out project.7 On issue after issue that pits the U.S. Chamber against the mainstream business community and the general public, Boehner adopts the Chamber’s talking points. Most egregiously, after U.S. Chamber President Tom Donohue made headlines saying that American taxpayers should help pay for the BP oil spill cleanup, Boehner agreed: “I think the people responsible in the oil spill--BP and the federal government--should take full responsibility for what's happening there,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even after trying to massage its bloated membership claims, the Chamber still insists that it speaks on behalf of a broad cross-section of businesses. But for the past 15 years, it's been taking increasingly extreme, partisan stands, often setting policies in concert with small numbers of powerful donors who may not share the interests of many of the Chamber's members.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It wasn't always this way. The US Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1912 as a counterweight to the increasingly powerful federal government and the labor movement. Back then it generally took a moderate, nonpartisan approach, unlike groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers, which opposed efforts to expand workers' compensation and ban child labor. During World War II, the Chamber's president described collective bargaining as "an established and useful reality." Half a century later, as President Bill Clinton prepared to roll out his health care plan, the Chamber's board unanimously backed universal coverage funded by employer mandates.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For members of the Republican class of 1994, however, such consensus building was unacceptable. According to John Judis' The Paradox of American Democracy [7], Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) told the group's chief lobbyist that it was "the Chamber's duty to categorically oppose everything that Clinton was in favor of." Congressional Republicans threatened to ignore the Chamber and hinted that they might start a competing organization. The Chamber caved, reversing its position on the health plan and sending its new lobbyist to apologize to Boehner (now House minority leader).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Three years later, Tom Donohue [8], the hard-charging CEO of the American Trucking Association, took the wheel as Chamber president, pledging to end its days as a "sleeping giant, missing in action from many important political battles." The group's tone became more strident. Senior Vice President Bill Kovacs, one of a few nominally Democratic hires, said Clinton's decision to sign the 1998 Kyoto Protocol was not simply "bad for business" but "unilateral economic disarmament."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Chamber's politics became synonymous with its biggest corporate donors'. Donohue established special accounts for companies that feared taking controversial public stands, allowing them to anonymously funnel money to the Chamber, which then advocated on their behalf. In 2001, the Wall Street Journal outed Wal-Mart, Daimler Chrysler, and Merck as secret clients. (The Chamber has long refused to name any of its members.) Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability [9], a shareholder advocacy group, says that the Washington head of an S&P 100 company told him that the Chamber will set up a campaign promoting a company's pet cause if it donates at least $1 million annually.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue has served on the boards of several companies that are among the Chamber's most influential members, including Union Pacific railroad, which has given the Chamber $500,000 since 2006. Since 1998, Donohue has earned roughly $2 million in income and up to $2.2 million in stock and options from the railroad, which gets 40 percent of its business from hauling coal and staunchly opposes the Waxman-Markey climate bill. He's expected to abide by a company policy that prevents him from acting in a way that is "inconsistent with the company's best interests." The Chamber has no similar conflict-of-interest policy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chamber spokesman Eric Wohlschlegel, who declined to comment on its climate stance and membership claims, downplays Donohue's corporate ties, stressing that its policies are ultimately set by its committees and approved by its board of directors. But current and former members say its policy making is sometimes done undemocratically. For instance, neither the Chamber's board nor its energy and environment committee endorsed the most controversial elements of its climate policy. "There was no vote," says Donald J. Sterhan, the committee's chair. The decision to challenge the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases, he says, came from Kovacs, who last August called for a public hearing on climate science that would be the "Scopes Monkey Trial of the 21st century."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wa monthly</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Give me a million dollars, please: Thomas Donohue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is a master of “the ask.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thomas J. Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has a well-developed talent for self-promotion. He makes a point of being the last person on any stage, and he leaves no detail to chance. The Chamber’s event staff is famously fastidious: one of Donohue’s parties involved corralling a Clydesdale horse into the Chamber’s lobby. Such grandiosity is of a piece with how Donohue treats his station. He travels in a chauffeured Lincoln and a leased jet, and his salary, $3.7 million last year, makes him the sixth highest paid lobbyist in the country.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This requires funding, which Donohue secures with exceptional skill. Among his office decorations is a desk plaque that reads, “SHOW ME THE MONEY.” “He used to pound his fist on the desk and say, ‘Show me the money!’” a former Chamber lobbyist recalls. “He got his rocks off on it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He leads fund-raising seminars. The same lobbyist recounted what he learned. “Donohue said, first, you walk into the room with the CEO and you hit the key issues,” said the lobbyist. “Then you sit in closer to them. And you make ‘the ask.’ You look right into their eyes and say, ‘As a result of what the Chamber is doing for your industry, I need a hundred thousand dollars.’ Or, ‘I need a million dollars.’ And then you smile and you shut your mouth. Your instinct is to start talking because you’re nervous. Don’t. Just smile and stare. And wait.” The lobbyist, who’d been trained well by Donohue, leaned forward and stared at me as I sat listening. I became nervous. I shifted in my chair. I started laughing, then stopped. He just stared. After a long pause he leaned back and said, “I tell you, there were people in that room who pissed in their pants.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ask works. In 2009 the Chamber doled out somewhere in the area of $120 million on lobbying alone, five times what its nearest cohort, Exxon Mobil, spent. Much of that money went to an advertising and grassroots blitz attacking the congressional health care legislation, making the Chamber very likely the biggest spender in the debate. In the weeks leading up to health care’s passage in March, it was spending $800,000 a day trying to defeat the Democratic legislation. Livid that the law went through, the Chamber has now pledged to funnel $50 million—more than twice as much as the entire cash holdings of the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee put together (as of late May)—into an estimated forty House races and ten Senate races this fall. About eight of every ten dollars of Chamber political donations go to Republicans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With such torrents of Chamber money raining down on the political process, it’s rather ironic that many Americans believe the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to be part of the government. But, in a way, it’s also fitting. With its legions of lobbyists, policy analysts, economists, and attorneys, its own rapid-response media center and law firm, its hundreds of international chapters and steady stream of officials, legislators, and foreign potentates flowing through its immense bronze-relief doors on H Street, the Chamber does act like a federal agency—or like a third political party on permanent campaign. “The Chamber views itself as a shadow-government policymaking body,” a former Chamber economist, Lawrence Hunter, said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Such policy, of late, has consisted of mounting major battles against regulatory initiatives emanating from the Obama White House. In addition to doing its best to block health care legislation, the Chamber also tried desperately to fend off the financial reform bill passed by the Senate on May 21. Meanwhile, its campaign to influence environmental legislation has relied in part on casting doubt on the exigency, even the existence, of climate change.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Chamber has lost major policy battles during the Obama presidency, and its resistance to reform has also been costly. When, last fall, the Chamber made news with what was effectively a rejection of climate science, several major companies, including Apple Inc., dropped their membership in the organization—an exodus that provided a welcome public relations boost for the White House. But under the curious rules of Washington lobbying, losses can be as good as wins. “The worst thing to happen to Tom is to have an issue resolved, even to his own favor, because then he can’t raise any more funds on it,” says John Schulz, a former editor at the trade journal Traffic World, who’s covered Donohue for twenty-five years. “There’s nothing he can’t make a dollar on.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many of the Chamber’s efforts are undoubtedly good for certain businesses. Wall Street would prefer to avoid further financial regulation. Oil companies would prefer to avoid further environmental regulation. Whether the Chamber—which counts as members everyone from Goldman Sachs to British Petroleum, Microsoft to Wal-Mart, PepsiCo to General Motors, and hundreds of thousands of more obscure businesses in between—is good for business as a whole is another matter. With unemployment, statistical and personal, on the mind of every officeholder up for reelection this year, Republicans and Democrats claim to agree on one thing: small business will be the engine of job growth after the Great Recession. But while the Chamber has as legitimate a claim to representing this sector as any organization around—96 percent of its members have fewer than 100 employees—it is also beholden to a cadre of multinationals whose interests are often inimical to those of small business. In 2008, a third of its revenues came from just nineteen companies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This sort of conflict doesn’t appear to bother Donohue. One lobbyist at a trade association that shares many members with the Chamber describes Donohue’s tack as “imperial.” “If you don’t like it, you can leave. That’s their approach to members,” he says. Not all members, though. If there’s a consistent pattern to how the Chamber operates, it’s that it follows the money.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp; first met Donohue on an early December afternoon in Birmingham, Alabama, where he had flown in to make a speech to local business leaders and officials at a convention center. Donohue, who is seventy-one, has a Kennedyesque chin and a slab of chalk-white hair that jabs forward when he talks. His accent has the vestiges of an Irish Brooklyn drawl. “Yesterday there was a job summit,” Donohue said from the podium, referring to a White House gathering put on by the Obama administration. “Of course, a lot of the people they invited to the summit haven’t got any idea how to create jobs, but that was another story!” The crowd laughed appreciatively.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“But I want to tell you that every CEO I know is walking on pins and needles because there are four or five questions he doesn’t have the answer to,” Donohue continued, turning grave. “Tell me, what’s the health care cost going to be? What is this bill going to look like, what is it going to end up like, and what is it going to cost me? Tell me what a climate bill will look like, what is it going to require, what is it going to cost?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Remember Jimmy Carter? He was a nice man, but we had—what—twenty percent interest rates and eighteen percent inflation, or vice versa, depending on which week it was. And we can’t go back there.” Then, as a preamble to decrying unions, trial lawyers (“Those are the people that suck the vitality out of companies and stick it in their pockets!”), and “radical environmentalists,” Donohue pointed out what a good year it had been for the Chamber. “Our revenues this year will be between $200 million and a quarter billion dollars,” he boasted. “Why is that? Because people need somewhere to go to get help. They need somewhere to go where we can bring everybody together and express our views to the Congress and to the regulatory agencies and to the president and to countries around the world and to the press and to the courts!”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue’s pitch evidently worked. From where I was standing in the banquet hall that day, the checkbooks and fountain pens seemed to be emerging from jacket-lining pockets almost of their own volition. “What we always said was the Chamber does best when there’s a Democrat in the White House, because you want businesses to be scared,” a former Chamber lobbyist said. “There’s no better time to raise money than when businesses are scared.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For all the bluster onstage, though, in person Donohue comes across as warm rather than scary. Like many powerful men, he likes to disarm his interlocutors with unexpected bursts of candor. “I’m not much of a Birmingham fan,” he told me after the speech. He’d taken off his jacket and was slumped back in a leather chair in a conference room off the banquet hall, on the other end of a large table from a pile of palettes of crackers, Old Spice deodorant, and gym socks, part of the local Rotary’s Christmas gift drive. Soon he’d be back in the air on a leased jet with his personal assistant (a former marine), his media consigliere (a former Philip Morris tobacco lobbyist), and his wife, Liz. On the agenda was another fund-raiser in Florida. “You can never have enough money,” he told me, with a conspiratorial smirk, which is his smile.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;While Donohue’s travels reflect an avid quest for funds, they also reflect a political process that has grown in complexity. “When I first went to Washington, there were only twelve people you had to give a shit about in Congress,” he said. “Now all the people in Congress, they come in and want to have their say right away. It’s a much different culture.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I asked Donohue what, exactly, the Chamber does. “Two fundamental things,” he replied. “We’re advocates. Sure we do studies, sure we do events, sure we do meetings, sure we have all kinds of stuff, but we’re advocates.” And then he surprised me again with his candor. “The second thing we do is really more interesting,” he said. “We’re the reinsurance industry for individual industry associations and state chambers of commerce and people of that nature.” An example, said Donohue, was when Wall Street found itself on the defensive in opposing new banking regulations. “They can’t move forward, they can’t move back, or maybe they’re being overrun, and they’ll come to us and say, ‘Can we collect our reinsurance?’” he explained. “And then we build coalitions and go out and help them.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The example of Wall Street’s attempts to resist financial regulation—and the help provided by the Chamber—is an illustrative one. The Chamber pounced early on Congress to dissuade it from passing the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act. Donohue’s troops mounted grassroots and media onslaughts around the country, dispatching local chamber officials and business members to lobby local lawmakers, and running local advertisements directly targeting them. In Montana, the Chamber aired an ad targeting Senator Jon Tester that showed a man lying awake in bed in the middle of the night, staring at the alarm clock, while a voiceover intoned, “Call Senator Tester. Tell him to stop the CFPA, because small businesses can’t afford more economic pain.” The Chamber put millions into this sort of advertising.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It used similar tactics against health care reform, launching a campaign that was even larger and more elaborate. The Chamber recruited local political operatives and had them set up front groups to oppose the House and Senate bills, and it also coordinated a national ad onslaught. In Arkansas’s second district, for instance, the Chamber aired ads directly attacking Democratic Representative Vic Snyder for his support of the House bill. (Vic Snyder has since announced that he won’t seek reelection, such an uphill battle is he now facing.) It also established a branch of a front group, the Campaign for Responsible Health Reform, and hired a Little Rock Republican strategist to run it. The strategist, Bill Vickery, told me that his activities were “backed solely” by the Chamber.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In other words, a large part of what the Chamber sells is political cover. For multibillion-dollar insurers, drug makers, and medical device manufacturers who are too smart and image conscious to make public attacks of their own, the Chamber of Commerce is a friend who will do the dirty work. “I want to give them all the deniability they need,” says Donohue. That deniability is evidently worth a lot. According to a January article in the National Journal, six insurers alone—Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group, and Wellpoint—pumped up to $20 million into the Chamber last year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Oddly, while Donohue casts himself as the voice of business, he has never worked for a corporation or any kind of for-profit concern—only for trade associations, nonprofits, and the federal government. The son of a production manager at the American Can Company, he was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island. After high school, he attended St. John’s and Adelphi universities, eventually earning an MBA. Early jobs included a stint as a fund-raiser for the Boy Scouts of America and, later, an aide to legendary disabled-persons rights activist Henry Viscardi, founder of the National Center for Disability Services. In a 1998 interview with Newsday, Viscardi recounted how Donohue made his ambition clear from the start. “I sat him down across the desk from me and asked what job he wanted,” said Viscardi. “He said, ‘I want your job.’ That’s Tom Donohue for you.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1969, Donohue took a job at the U.S. Postal Service, where he stayed for seven years, working his way up the management ranks. Donohue’s first stint with the Chamber of Commerce began in 1976, when he was hired to the Chamber’s development department by the organization’s new president, Richard Lesher. The job involved the recruitment and cultivation of members and supporters, but Donohue soon took on a large variety of other projects as well. After Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, Donohue made sure that the Chamber actively supported the new president’s agenda. “Donohue was a guy who was there—you could feel him. He got the members to get very aggressively behind the president,” says Wayne Valis, a special assistant to Reagan.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue left the Chamber to take over the American Trucking Associations in 1984, quickly turning what was a moribund also-ran into a Washington powerhouse. “Prior to Donohue coming aboard I knew every time I went to work we’d be just kicked in the chops,” remembers Lana Batts, an ATA lobbyist. “When Tom came in, I was not going to be kicked. I’d be the kicker.” Donohue was known for sparing no expense to curry favor with members and impress lawmakers. “Tom’s biggest problem was that he ran out of buildings to name after member companies,” says Tim Lynch, another lobbyist who worked for Donohue at ATA. The funds, says Lynch, poured in. “He essentially scared the bejesus out of people that if they didn’t contribute more money, bad things would happen to their businesses in Washington.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue’s effectiveness at the ATA did not go unnoticed, and, in 1997, he was recruited back to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—this time to be its president. Characteristically, he kept his eye on the money. Recounts John Schulz, the journalist, “He calls me to his office, which he almost never did, and sits me down and says, ‘I’m going to ask you a favor and I don’t want you to fuck this up. You’re going to write that I’m turning down the Chamber for certain reasons. But that’s not what I’m really doing. I’m in negotiations and want to get a better deal out of them. I’m going to reject them publicly and then get more money out of them.’” (The Chamber denies the conversation took place and says that compensation “was never an issue in any of [Donohue’s] negotiations with the Chamber search committee.”)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;When Donohue took over the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the organization had fallen into dangerous disfavor with the Republican Party, with which it has always had a close, if complicated, relationship. It was ushered into existence by President Taft who, seeking out a counterweight to the labor movement, called in 1911 for a “central organization in touch with associations and chambers of commerce throughout the country.” Four months later, on April 12, 1912 (a year prior to the founding of the Federal Reserve), the Chamber of Commerce of the United States was founded.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Chamber naturally leaned Republican, but it maintained mostly amiable relations with both parties. It was a close ally of Herbert Hoover, but it was also helpful to FDR’s National Recovery Administration. It opposed Richard Nixon’s health care proposals but also lobbied him to open trade with Moscow. It was instrumental in mobilizing support for tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and then George W. Bush, but it also helped to press for NAFTA under Bill Clinton, who in 1999 urged Donohue to travel to Havana to meet with Fidel Castro to pitch him on a chain of Chamber-backed Cuban Internet cafés. (The idea didn’t pan out, but Donohue remains a vocal advocate of ending the Cuban trade embargo.) Recently, the Chamber has also come out vocally against new laws targeting immigrants in Arizona, and has chided Republican lawmakers for not supporting subsidies for alternative energy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Under Richard Lesher, who ran the organization from 1975 to 1997, the Chamber’s emphasis was primarily on influencing policy, and many of its ideas were broadcast via Biz-Net, its cable network. Lesher was, by all accounts, a good deal more ideological than Donohue, but also less of a political gamesman. It was this combination of traits that led Lesher to his bravest, but unluckiest, political decision: to cooperate with the Clinton White House on health care reform. Chamber members had been telling Lesher for years that their health care costs were out of control, and many supported a national policy of some kind. “I told the Republicans, ‘Look, guess what, there are some Chamber members who are Democrats,’” says Lesher. “‘Think about that.’ They’d roll their eyes when I said it, but the fact was we had a lot of conservative Democratic members who wanted to see health care get resolved.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the Clinton bill came a cropper, and the Republican minority pounced. John Boehner (now House minority leader) made his name on Capitol Hill spearheading a grassroots campaign to persuade businesses to abandon the Chamber. Hundreds did. The GOP took Congress the next year. “The Republicans made them walk the plank for a long time,” says John Motley, who was a lobbyist at the National Federation of Independent Businesses, one of the Chamber’s main rivals. It was this turn of events that led to the departure of Lesher and the hiring of Donohue to replace him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue had paid close attention to the debacle. When he returned in 1997, he immediately took steps to win the Chamber back into the GOP fold, supporting Republican initiatives and opposing Democratic ones. That practice has continued. Donohue’s chief lobbyist, Bruce Josten, can often be seen at press conferences with Boehner when the Republican leadership comes out opposing one or another bill. (The stimulus package, which promised to pump a lot of money into businesses that are members of the Chamber, was one notable exception: the Chamber supported it, and the Republicans did not.) Donohue’s opposition to any national health care plan under Obama was all but a given.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue quickly closed down BizNet and shifted the Chamber toward brute-force lobbying. “Donohue brought in generalist lobbyists who knew about the politics but not the substance of the issues,” says Willard Workman, a Chamber vice president from 1988 to 2004. “They couldn’t go to the Hill and talk about an export-control regime, because they couldn’t spell ‘regime.’”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Above all, Donohue sought out fund-raising opportunities. “Donohue was much more hands-on than Lesher in terms of pursuing issues he thought were important—important to making money,” a former Chamber lobbyist told me. Inside the Chamber, this strategy was known colloquially as “views for dues.” According to the former lobbyist, “a large company before [Donohue] arrived would be paying maybe ten to twenty thousand, and overnight would be paying a million dollars. The message was to go after these major companies and get money from as many different funding sources as we could. In return they got greater influence and we did more of their bidding, if you will, on the Hill.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A little bit of calculating also revealed to Donohue that the best money was in the behemoths. “Donohue told the membership department to shift away from smaller companies to larger ones who could pay larger dues and get more involved. Member numbers were reduced, but revenue increased,” says Hank Kopcial, who was head of membership services for Fortune 1000 companies when he left the Chamber in 2000.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If the Chamber had an ideology under Donohue, it was opportunism. “I don’t know whether [Donohue] is a Democrat, Republican, or independent,” says Workman. “And I worked with him for seven years.” Workman notes that Donohue has no qualms about receiving federal funds for the Chamber’s Center for International Private Enterprise. “He liked taking money from the federal government as much as from anyone else,” Workman recalls. “He said, ‘It’s all green.’”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whatever his personal political beliefs may be, Donohue does like to assail the traditional right-wing golems—particularly unions, trial lawyers, environmentalists and regulators. (Ironically enough, though, the Chamber’s law firm, the National Chamber Litigation Center, involves itself in lawsuits against the federal government hundreds of times a year.) Rare indeed is the business regulation that the Chamber hasn’t denounced. A former SEC commissioner—a Republican, appointed by a Republican president—told me Donohue “was against just about everything we were trying to do.” Charles Jeffress, who was head of OSHA from 1997 to 2001, noticed a link between his work and the Chamber’s budget. “Everything we did that was regulatory in nature was a way for them to raise money from their members to fight government regulation,” he says.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When I asked Donohue why, for instance, the financial sector shouldn’t be more closely regulated in light of the recent meltdown, he shot back, “Would they have caught Madoff? Would they have caught some guy at Boeing or Caterpillar or anywhere else that was a crook? They wouldn’t have.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He mused on, “There is no place in our society where there is not warts. The media? Wow. The Chamber business? The lobbying business? The business business? The church? The Boy Scouts? We got jerks every place.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I f Donohue has an aversion to stricter rules from Washington, it may be due in part to his own reputation for an easygoing approach to spending. According to a former Chamber employee, Donohue, when he was working under Lesher in the 1970s and early ’80s, was repeatedly rebuked for making use of chauffeured cars, and in at least one instance hiring a private plane for a business trip. “He always needed perks,” Lesher told me.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Donohue left the American Trucking Associations in 1997, his successor, Walter McCormick, publicly accused Donohue of leaving the ATA in a financial mess, as the National Journal reported in 1999. McCormick even hired a Washington litigator specializing in white-collar crime to investigate the ATA’s finances under Donohue, although no lawsuit resulted. The Chamber claims that the investigators concluded ATA “was one of the best run trade associations” and its chief financial officer received an apology from the association’s board. But an ATA employee brought on by McCormick with intimate knowledge of the organization’s finances at the time offered a different view. “There was a whole bunch of organizational units which were odd,” says the employee. “All of those units were separate entities, separately incorporated. Money was moving around from one to the other to the other.” Adds journalist John Schulz: “He said to me once, ‘It’s just sort of one big pot and how we divide it up is immaterial.’”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The company narrative was that Donohue was brought in to recapitalize the Chamber. But as fast as the money came in under Donohue, it seemed to go out even faster. According to Mohammed Babah, who was director of the Chamber’s finance department until 2000, the Chamber held significant savings when Donohue took over in 1997 (a fact corroborated by Richard Lesher). Within two years, however, Donohue had spent the sum in its entirety, claims Babah, much of it going to salary increases for his inner circle, his travel expenses, and his lavish parties, thrown in rented spaces such as Union Station and the Air and Space Museum. “By the time I left I was scared. He was just spending and spending,” Babah says. The Chamber insists that in fact the organization’s reserve account was in negative territory when Donohue started and that Donohue built up the reserves.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By 2001, the Chamber was low enough on cash that it took out a $30 million line of credit on its building on H Street, a lithic beaux arts building situated off Lafayette Park within shouting distance of—and not appreciably smaller than—the White House. (The Chamber claims the line of credit was taken out because the cash balances existing when Donohue came to the Chamber had been pledged to an IT vendor, and that the line is still used for capital improvements.) For extra income the Chamber now rents its roof to Fox News for the network’s White House remotes. In 2008, the last year for which records are available, the Chamber posted operating losses of over $2.5 million and a net asset loss of over $29 million, according to its IRS filings. Meanwhile, Donohue’s salary, the lion’s share of it a revenue-based bonus, has more than tripled since he started. In the estimation of one former Chamber staffer who’s kept close track of its finances, “If Donohue’s plane goes down or he gets sick, the bubble’s going to pop. It’s kind of like the U.S. government: there’s no money in the bank.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Still, it’s not Donohue’s spending that poses the greatest danger to his leadership. It’s that large parts of the Chamber’s base (Donohue likes to claim three million members, but the “U.S. Chamber Web Effort to Set the Record Straight Amid Orchestrated Smear Campaign” page on its Web site puts the total at 300,000) have come to find themselves at odds with the organization’s aims and methods. While I talked to many local chamber heads who said they rely on the Chamber’s resources, I also spoke to many who are coming to resent Donohue. “Their stances have occasionally alienated local businesses,” says Tim Sink, president of the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce in New Hampshire. In Sink’s region, the Chamber ran health care attack ads targeting Congressman Paul Hodes, a popular legislator with bipartisan support who’s now running for Senate. “It put the local chambers in an awkward situation, I can tell you that.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A particularly awkward instance of this took place in 2004, when Donohue publicly exhorted Chamber companies to stop doing business in Mississippi, alleging that the state’s courts had become too friendly to lawsuits against businesses. This came as a surprise to most of Mississippi’s businesses and local chambers of commerce, few if any of whom had been notified of Donohue’s exhortation in advance. That same year, the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform became involved in an attorney general race in Washington State, waging a campaign via a front group called the Voters Education Committee. The Chamber’s interventions met with such broad public disfavor that Steve Leahy, president of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at the time, had to send out 10,000 e-mails distancing his organization from the U.S. Chamber. “We had a lot of cleaning up we had to do on their behalf,” Leahy told me. Even the institute’s director from 1999 to 2002, James Wootton, whom Donohue appointed, regretted at least one attack ad campaign he waged against an Ohio judge, one that resulted in a suit against the Chamber. “I came to believe that we probably shouldn’t have run those ads,” Wootton told me.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other chamber heads have taken similar steps to separate themselves from the national Chamber. “I now have a standard e-mail saying we’re not a chapter of the U.S. Chamber that I have to send out a couple of times a week,” says Timothy Hulbert, president of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce. Stan Kosciuszko, president of the Butler County, Pennsylvania, Chamber of Commerce, which is no longer a member of the Chamber, said, “They’ve abandoned the interests of smaller chambers like mine for their larger corporate members.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But corporate members, including some of the larger ones, have been alienated too. The withdrawal of Apple from the Chamber’s membership roster was the result of a particularly clumsy campaign. It began last summer, when a senior vice president of the Chamber wrote a petition to the EPA calling for a public hearing on the science of climate change in order to present a “credible weighing” of the evidence. The author of the petition, William Kovacs, a vice president of the Chamber, told the Los Angeles Times that it “would be the science of climate change on trial” and referred it as “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.” Not only did Apple drop its membership in response; so did the utilities Exelon, Pacific Gas and Electric, and PNM Resources. Among those who stayed in the fold, several companies, such as Nike and Johnson & Johnson, wrote stern letters of rebuke to Donohue. Donohue upbraided Kovacs but has done little else to address the concerns of the angered companies. “We may have gotten a phone call,” said Brian Herzog, director of government affairs for PG&E. “Within the universe of Chamber members some are more equal than others.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue’s tactics can also raise hackles in the home office. “I used to get strong complaints and resentment from local officials and politicians. They’d say, ‘You have no business here, you don’t know what you’re doing,’” a former Chamber lobbyist said. “But the complaints were rebuffed. The real test was whether we were making money off the effort, and we were.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue and his senior colleagues downplay the internal disagreements. “You’re never going to have one hundred percent unanimity,” Bruce Josten, the Chamber’s chief lobbyist, told me. “Never. There is inherent tension. There is tension between the oil companies and the gas companies. There is tension between the retailers and the wholesalers. There is tension between what used to be investment banks—we don’t have those anymore—and retail banks. I mean, come on. I laugh every day when someone calls and asks what does the business community think.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And Donohue is unconcerned about complaints of alleged favoritism toward large corporations. “What we try to do is build an unholy alliance between big guys and little guys,” he said. “Let’s take a newspaper. Where do they get their money? Who put the ads in? It wasn’t Mary Little Good Shoes, it was Macy’s.” He added, “You can no longer run a huge national organization on the backs of small companies as they did many years ago.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What becomes clear from observing Donohue’s record is that, for all his opposition to federal oversight, he is a quintessential creature of Washington. Like the head of any bureaucracy or agency, he measures his success far less by results than by the size of his budget. That’s why the Chamber’s agenda hews so closely to that of its largest contributors. It’s also why, even in front of dues payers such as Birmingham business leaders, Donohue is happy to trumpet how much money the Chamber is taking from them. Those funds don’t need to lead to accomplishments; they are the accomplishments.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Toward the end of our conversation in Birmingham, Donohue began to talk about the challenges of leading an organization. “The CEO in a major company now, if he lasts five years, he’s a hero,” Donohue said. It was clear that he was in part talking about himself. But Donohue has already lasted twelve years as Chamber president, and at the beginning of his tenure the board amended the bylaws to extend the mandatory retirement age past sixty-five. In 2009, he traveled 166 days of the year, coaxing open checkbooks, visiting twenty-seven states, and giving seventy-five speeches. All of this bodes well for his staying power. Still, “I am not powerful,” he said at one point. “The institution is powerful. If I walked out of the Chamber tomorrow, wouldn’t anybody return my phone calls except for a couple of my friends.” Given the anti-corporate rhetoric among Republicans, and the backlash against him in other quarters, this is a contingency he should consider. But for the moment Donohue is still the undisputed master of getting corporate giants to show him the money. And in a Washington that runs on money, that show must go on.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">who runs gov</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why He Matters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He's never actually worked in the corporate world, but he speaks for more than three million companies. In fact, Donohue's reputation as a tough negotiator may surpass the skills of the chief executives that he represents.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Donohue lobbies for business interests on Capitol Hill. He's an advocate for the companies he represents, big and small, but he is also one of the most powerful political figures in Washington, D.C. When he first took the post at the chamber in 1997, the group had lost membership to rival organizations. Under Donohue's leadership, the Chamber's membership has increased 15 times over to make the trade association the largest advocacy group in the nation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Background</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Career History: President of the American Trucking Association (1984 to 1997); Lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (1976 to 1984); U.S. Postal Service (1969 to 1976)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Birthday: Aug. 12, 1938</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hometown: Brooklyn, N.Y.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alma Mater: St. John's University, BA; Adelphi University, MBA</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Spouse: Elizabeth</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Web site</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Brooklyn, N.Y., born Donohue, grew up in Long Island. He played basketball, where he apparently had an impressive vertical leaping ability, but he wasn't known for his shot. St. Agnes' basketball team, which Donohue played for in high school, won 50 straight games while he attended. Donohue attributes the success, in part, to the way he and the rest of the team carried themselves.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"We all wore ties and jackets and we all said 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir' and 'please, sir,'" said Donohue. "That's how we talked to referees. Late in the game, if there was a close call and we were playing against guys with hair down to their knees and cussing at the refs, they got screwed. We always got the good calls."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By 1997, the chamber's growth and influence had stagnated under President Richard L. Lesher. For a decade, the trade association's budget stood at $60 million, based mostly on membership dues. The chamber had only three lobbyists and Lesher spent much of his time building and participating in the group's television programs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In addition, the group supported President Bill Clinton's 1993 health-care reform push, which many of its members thought would hurt their bottom line. House Republicans called for businesses to leave the chamber and join another trade group that better represented their interests. In response, the chamber began to work closely and support many Republican causes. Still, growth continued to stagnate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donohue has been head of the chamber since 1997 and is one of the biggest political players in the nation's capital. Donohue has worked with other Washington business leaders as part of legislative coalitions supporting or fighting key legislation, including John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, and Bruce Josten, who runs the chamber's lobbying efforts and Dan Danner, president of National Federation of Independent Businesses. Another ally is American Tort Reform Association's President Sherman Joyce.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">James R. Young, CEO of the Union Pacific Corporation sits on the Union Pacific's board along with Donohue.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As the head of the Chamber of Commerce, Donohue has personally donated $7,100 to political campaigns since 2001. This includes $1,000 to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) in 2007 and $2,000 to President George W. Bush in 2003.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The U.S. Chamber of Commerce PAC donated $144,576 to various campaigns in the 2008 election cycle. In the House, the PAC donated $55,076 to Democrats and $46,000 to Republicans. Democratic Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) received $1,000 from the PAC; he was the only Democratic Senator to receive a donation. Republican senators received $42,500 from the PAC in the 2007-2008 cycle.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read more</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Federal Election Commission, Form 9 outlining disbursements/obligations for electioneering communications</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mintz, John, "Chamber's Leader Is All Business; Donohue Puts Group in Attack Mode," The Washington Post, Nov. 18, 1999</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Birnbaum, Jeffrey H., "A Quiet Revolution In Business Lobbying; Chamber of Commerce Helps Bush Agenda," The Washington Post, Feb. 5, 2005</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sunrise Senior Living Corporation 10-K for Fiscal year ending Dec. 31, 2008, Filed March 2, 2009</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MacGillis, Alec, "The Employee Free Choice Bill Battle Is Joined," The Washington Post Online, March 10, 2009</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Federal Election Commission</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Toedtman, James, "Full-Court Press for Business," Newsday, Jan. 4, 1998</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Federal Election Commission, Form 9 outlining disbursements/obligations for electioneering communications</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pearlstein, Steven, "The Hard Bargainer; Donohue Brings Pragmatist's Head and Fighter's Heart to Venerable Business Group," The Washington Post, Sept. 7, 1997</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Regan, Mary Beth, and Borrus, Amy, "Lock 'N' Load at the Chamber of Commerce," Business Week, Sept. 8, 1997</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hamburger, Tom, "Campaign '08: A Warning From Business; Global Interest," The Los Angeles Times, Jan. 8, 2008</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Morgenson, Gretchen and Justice, Glen, "Taking Care of Business, His Way," The New York Times, Feb. 20, 2005</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Greenhouse, Steve, "Democrats Drop Key Part of Bill to Assist Unions," The New York Times, July 16, 2009</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Center for Responsive Politics</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Center for Responsive Politics</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Vandehei, Jim and Allen, Mike, Politico, "Chamber: White House Attacks are Backfiring," Oct. 26, 2009</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Birnbaum, Jeffrey H., "Probe Amplifies Conflict-of-Interest Questions for Chamber of Commerce Chief," The Washington Post, Feb. 6, 2007</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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