Pressure Chamber

I think most people aren’t aware of the difference between their local CoC and its seal of approval and the U. S. CoC. I heard on the radio that a number of large US corporations withdrew from the US CoC several years ago.

“his cranky liberal base”

In lieu of telling you to FO, might I politely recommend a different adjective?

“For weeks, Obama has been warning disaffected Democrats that not voting on Nov. 2 will ensure Republican gains likely to squelch the liberal agenda.”

And since I’ve been busy/tuning out most of the administration’s messaging of late, has he used the term “liberal” to define his agenda?

OregonJC,
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Not that I’VE noticed, anyway. I think he’s stuck on “vote for us… the others are going to be worse”.
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Enacting a truly “progressive” agenda doesn’t seem to be in the battle plan.

And local CoCs have as well. It’s a big story, as is the US CoC’s apparent existence for the sake of fundraising. A reporter wrote a great article about it a while back.
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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.verini.html
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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.

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.”

But corporate members, including some of the larger ones, have been alienated too. …

MC: The Village meme continues. The anti Chamber initiative isn’t working. Michael, what reporting have you done to help us understand the effect the National CC has on elections?

“his cranky liberal base”

In spite of all that, I just thought this morning that if we had not elected him, we would have two more justices in the mold of John Roberts which would affect our lives negatively from now until long after Obama is playing with his grandchildren.

That thought will keep me from voting for a Republican in the foreseeable future.

Thanks afguy. In fact, I’ve never heard Obama refer to his agenda as liberal, and the only thing that would be ostensibly “squelched” would be the administration’s agenda (i.e. not liberal).
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And many might argue that rebublicans might enhance this president’s ability to achieve 3rd way goals (market-based solutions to what ails America).

Not to mention Palin, Angle, Miller, etc.

“In fact, I’ve never heard Obama refer to his agenda as liberal…”
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Are you effing kidding me?! The guy’s just about let the country fall off a cliff just to burnish his centrist bona fides in the Village and to avoid the dreaded L-word in the traditional media. He going to start calling his agenda “liberal” when hell freezes over.

“In the near term, however, Ezra Klein cites evidence that the Chamber attack isn’t really working.”
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I wonder if it would be working any better if someone in the noooze business bothered to tell the public what the Chamber was doing, rather than showing them the latest Sarah Show video.

Wonger, I know petulant firebaggers are pretty slow on the uptake, but I’m fairly clear on how Obama’s self-identified heretofore, as well as the fact that he’s not remotely liberal. What I was wondering about, given that I’m more and more resistant to the US strain of media-flu, was this line by MC:
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“For weeks, Obama has been warning disaffected Democrats that not voting on Nov. 2 will ensure Republican gains likely to squelch the liberal agenda.”
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B/C if this is true, then he’s obliquely (misre)presenting his agenda as a liberal agenda. IOW, he’s f@cking lying to his base again, and sadly many of them will fall over themselves like a roomful of poodles jonesing for a treat.

Here in California the state CofC is running lots of ads for Republican candidates and business-friendly propositions on the November ballot.

Some corporate members protested the plan, and still fear a backlash, but the Chamber continues funding the ads.

Some people tell me that they hate for businesses to look so publicly partisan; others argue that they have the right to express their opinion – the Supreme Court says so!

The National CC promotes unleashed capitalism. Many posters here decry regulations. Rand Paul thinks mine owners can be trusted to self-regulate.
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Chile had little regulation on their private mine operations. When the Chilean men were trapped, it was the Chilean government with outside assistance that had to rescue them. The company that employed them declared bankruptcy and did not participate.
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Unfettered free enterprise. The National CC supports outsourcing. I guess the Chilean government outsourced when it got help from other governments.

Declaring bankruptcy is always what happens to a company or corporation that is facing possible lawsuits that would take all its assets.
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It’s part of the regulations.
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I don’t believe in total laissez faire capitalism, but you must understand that “regulations” don’t always favor the consumer either.
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Here’s my prediction on what will happen with all those solar panels that subsidiaries of GE is producing in China. In California they have to be guaranteed for 20 years. Ten years from now they will be found faulty, cause damage to the homes electrical system or be just plain junk. The subsidiaries will have long gone out of business making the warranty worthless. It’s what happened in the past with solar water heaters and other products. The consumer is being set up again.

“Some corporate members protested the plan, and still fear a backlash, but the Chamber continues funding the ads.”
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I’m against this C of C attack because there is absolutely no solid evidence behind it and making an accusation of criminal activity and then saying “well, can you prove it’s not true?” is about as un-American as you can get.
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On the other hand the C of C claims that in recent years when they have disclosed some of their donors, those people/businesses caught the wrath of groups like SEIU and were victims of threats and intimidation.
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That puts the shoe on the other foot, if the C of C is going to make that allegation against unions or whoever these alleged intimidating groups are, then the C of C is the one who needs to provide some proof that this has actually happened.

So, you would trust mine owners to self-regulate, pharmacutical companies to determine drug safety, food producers to decide food quality, airlines CEOS could make their own safety requirements, no need for work safety rules?
I don’t think it is part of the regulations that companies declare bankruptcy because of lawsuits. After all, BP is still with us.
The mine owners in Chile were already doing poorly financially despite their necglect of worker safety.

Actually, the only people I hear saying that the Demo attack on US Chamber of Commerce spending isn’t working is the Washington press and the cable talking heads — everyone I talk to here in flyover land is disgusted by massive foreign spending, and getting really angry at Republicans for courting it.
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And where did this meme of a “failed message” come from? Why, Karl Rove, of course, who would really like the spotlight pointed somewhere else, if you please, because the attack IS working and he has no defense except misdirection.
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But I don’t blame Rove. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and political thugs have gotta lie and smear and roll in the mud. What annoys me is hearing everything Rove says repeated without attribution as if it’s the gospel truth. I’ve forgotten what the world was like before the Washington press corps allowed the RNC to frame every debate before it started. It must have been a strange time, without the Village having a script provided for them. It must have been very scary, having to think on your own like that, instead of safely following the pack, maintaining “access” and working on your inevitable book.
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Joe Conason at Salon blogs about an NPR poll that shows the GOP surge has peaked and reversed. Pertinent to this conversation:
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Finally, the NPR survey shows the Democrats winning the “message debate” in recent weeks, a development that the pollsters call “amazing” – and it is, considering how poorly the Democrats have fashioned their messaging in this election. In the June poll, Democrats “lost every message contest” by 12 points; now, the Democratic message is prevailing. If this is a “wave election” that will produce a Republican tsumami, voters ought to have tuned out the losing party by now.
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Of course, the Village is ignoring this.
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As Democratic activist and analyst Simon Rosenberg noted today, a Democratic resurgence meme surfaced and then disappeared within a matter of days.
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Ultimately, though:
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But the NPR poll ratifies a growing strain of analysis suggesting that the Republican tide has crested — and that voter sentiment has begun to reverse direction.
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For those interested, here’s the URL:
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http://www.salon.com/news/politics/2010_elections/index.html?story=/opinion/conason/2010/10/16/nprpoll

No, I didn’t say that I would allow mine owners to set their own regulations.
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In a former life I worked in a Rock, Sand and Gravel mine. A union worker. In reality, the regulations weren’t enforced. The union came around once every three months or so. Did nothing. MSHA (Mining Saftey Hazard Agency) the federal mining agency was about the same. Until the early 1990s safety violations were just ignored. Then a guy got killed at a neighboring plant and things started to change very slowly. But MSHA was only there maybe 2 days out of the year. The rest of the time, it was business as usual for both the owners and the union.
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You can have all the regulations and laws you want and do. But, if they aren’t enforced, then it really doesn’t matter. More laws and regulations will only go unenforced. Same with the border, and employers hiring illegals. We already have laws barring employers from hiring illegals, but they aren’t enforced. We already have laws making it illegal to stay here undocumented, not enforced.
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What I am trying to say with all this is that regulations give people a false sense of security. You still have to look out for you. The government isn’t going to be there. All those people that signed loans for $500,000 homes should have known, and maybe they did know, that they couldn’t afford the payment. Their are pages and pages in loan applications to warn the consumer. All those loans were legal. Regulations didn’t do a bit of good.
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We have seat belt laws. The death rate from accidents has remained the same. The seat belt laws didn’t do anything in the larger picture to reduce traffic deaths. People snap on a seat belt, and because the government tells them that they are safer, they drive faster and take more chances. Have you driven lately? These people are crazy, but they have their seat belt on. At least the paramedics won’t have to go looking in the bushes to find them when they slam into the trees. They are safely belted in.
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Most people will read that and think that’s nuts. But some things are counter intuitive. Seat belts save lives. Seat belt laws don’t.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/01q2/a_shocker_notion_about_seatbelts-column

According to Buescher’s graphing of each of the 50 states’ death rates between 1980 and 1999, before and after seatbelt laws were passed, only six states-Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina-experienced reductions in their death rates. Five other states-Georgia, Kansas, New Jersey, Oregon, and Virginia-saw no change, before and after seatbelt laws were passed. “They needn’t have bothered,” Buescher argues.

Maine and New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die”) ignored federal mandates and did not pass any laws regarding seatbelts. Their trend lines still continued downward. Two states, Washington and Tennessee, saw their death rates increase the same year their seatbelt laws were passed-even as Tennessee passed the toughest DUI laws in the nation. In 1986, the year the Volunteer State took action, its death rate leapt upward from 3.0 deaths per 100 million miles to 3.4 deaths, while the same year in Washington it jumped from 2.2 to 2.9 for no explicable reason.

Now comes the weird part. Based on simple statistics of per-state death rates per 100 million miles, plotted on a trend-line graph, the 35 other states saw their death rates go up after the passage of seatbelt laws. As indicated in the California graph here, the death rates should have trended downward following the seatbelt law implemented in 1986. But, in fact, the rate trended upward, reaching its statistical potential only once in 1992. The same basic story exists in 34 other states

Not to keep flogging a dead horse here, but I suspect this story will magically disappear very rapidly now that the Center for Responsive Politics has done an investigation into all PAC’s affiliated with foreign companies, and found some surprising results:
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Amount of money received from PAC’s affiliated with foreign companies:
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Republicans: Approx. $510,000
Democrats: Approx. $1,020,000
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That’s right, scream about the C of C all you want, but the Democrats took almost exactly twice the money from these “shady” groups as the Republicans did, and those PAC’s don’t have open books either.