U.S. Chamber's Agenda

Echo Chamber: How the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Top Corporate Funders Dictate the Agenda for the 112th Congress

Click HERE for full report

In the upcoming days, the Republican leadership will produce its legislative agenda for the 112th Congress, an agenda they’ve already started planning. It wasn’t hard for them to create this agenda: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which pledged to spend more than $75 million in anonymous corporate money to influence this fall’s elections, provided an agenda for them, driven by and for the sixteen companies that provide more than half of the U.S. Chamber’s contributions. The U.S. Chamber has already developed the talking points and plans to implement that agenda. Now that its election war chest has rented it a Congress, look for an agenda from the newly minted Republican-led House that reflects the U.S. Chamber’s priorities – which in turn reflect the interests of the member corporations that make the largest contributions to the Chamber’s coffers.

The bottom line: the handful of corporations that secretly fund the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are influencing national policy, and spent millions of dollars to elect congress members that will pursue their agenda. Here are the top five priorities the U.S. Chamber’s corporate Congress can be expected to pursue.

  • H.R. 1: The Extension of the Bush Tax Cuts: Keeping Corporate CEOs Rich
  • H.R. 2: “Personalize” Social Security: Putting Earned Income Programs at Risk to Pay for Bush Tax Cuts
  • H.R. 3: Repeal/Weaken the Affordable Care Act: Protect Insurance Companies
  • H.R. 4: Protect Tax Benefits for Outsourcers: Keep Jobs Overseas
  • H.R. 5: Gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Choosing Big Banks on Wall Street over Small Business and the Rest of Us

Full Report: Click HERE

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It can be hard to get a big corporation to go on record about anything – much less something controversial.

That’s why I was pleasantly surprised by the answer I got at Google’s annual shareholder meeting when I asked cofounder Larry Page why the company is a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has publicly opposed many of Google’s positions and interests.

After receiving applause for my question, Google’s head lawyer David Drummond – who was helping Page to answer questions – responded that the company’s membership in the U.S. Chamber is something senior leadership debates a lot. He added that while there are some things that the U.S. Chamber is good for, there is a lot of stuff it does that Google doesn’t agree with.

He concluded by saying that, “while we are members for now, it’s something that we do review.”

You can Google anything right?

Well, try going to the search engine and entering “Google’s political spending.”

You’ll get something like this: