Enter The Whoop Ass

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce tried to protect its neck. Now it’s too late. President Barack Obama pulled out a new move that has mercifly eradicated the power of the corporate advocacy group, or so we think. It was no small feat leashing the Chamber either.

NEW YORK CITY, N.Y. — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce tried to protect its neck.

 Now it’s too late.

President Barack Obama pulled out a new move that has mercifly eradicated the power of the corporate advocacy group, or so we think.

It was no small feat leashing the Chamber either.

In the third quarter of 2009 alone, the business lobby threw away a record $34.7 million against Obama’s proposed reforms to national energy policy, financial regulation, and health care finance.

In response to its expensive anti-reform campaign, Obama tore into the Chamber in front of the press in the East Room of the White House on Oct. 9.

“They’re very good at this, because that’s how business has been done in Washington for a very long time,” he said, referring to the Chamber. “In fact, over the last 10 years, the Chamber alone spent nearly half a billion dollars on lobbying — half a billion dollars.”

But that wasn’t Obama’s clever move; his strike came when he went around the Chamber’s lobbyists to seek his reformist agenda from its members directly.

In fact, the day prior to Obama’s public upbraiding of the Chamber, he met with Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos. Lewis Hay III of Florida Power & Light, Antonio M. Perez of Eastman Kodak, and Irene B. Rosenfeld of Kraft.

In all, Obama lunched with chief executives on three separate occasions since taking office.

It also helped Obama that other high-profile corporations softened the Chamber by either leaving the group as Apple, Exelon, PNM Resources, Pacific Gas and Electric, Mohawk Fine Paper, and Levi Strauss & Co. did, resigning from its board of directors as Nike did, or issuing statements as Johnson & Johnson and General Electric have.

The issue at stake for corporations like Apple, Nike, and Johnson & Johnson was climate change of which the Chamber continues to deny the existence and the science that backs it up.

For Obama the issue that lead to the death blow was the Chamber’s effort to deep-six new economic regulations, namely his proposed new federal consumer protections agency.

But the issue that set off the Chamber against Obama was the proposed public insurance option to national healthcare finance reform.

Friday before last, Chamber COO David Chavern lashed out at its “normal adversaries — trial lawyers, activist unions and environmental extremists” in a letter to members.

“Interest groups are looking for public leverage to force us to do things against the best interests of the business community… We intend to continue being successful, so we expect the negative messages to your organization may continue,” Chavern wrote.

However, if by “interest groups” Chavern meant IBM, Wal-Mart Stores, Time Warner, Eastman Kodak, Starbucks, Amazon.com and Coca-Cola, then he is in trouble since all them met with Obama and his top staffers (aid Valerie Jarrett and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel) at the White House.

R. Bruce Josten, the Chamber’s longtime lobbyist, even ridiculed Obama by describing the president’s avoidance of lobbyists as a hollow trick.

“Does he get some probably good input from CEOs? I’m sure he does,” Josten told The Washington Post. “Are they going to actively go up to the Hill and lobby? I’m sure they’re not.”

So the honeymoon is over between Obama and the Chamber. Both had worked together all last fall during his transition to Washington. The Chamber also backed the administration’s economic stimulus package and Obama’s nominees to economic positions in the federal government.

But the Chamber actually cut its own throat when it petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency for public hearings to clear up the science of climate change, according to SF Gate’s City Bright’s blogger Yobie Benjamin.

“Hearings would be a modern day Scopes Monkey Trial,” said Bill Kovacs, Chamber vice president.

However, what more science does the Chamber need, Benjamin argued, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its First Assessment Report in 1990.

Noted Benjamin, “The (IPCC) reports were approved after a painstaking peer review process by hundreds of leading scientists and experts. The reports confirmed the scientific basis for climate change.”

He added, “The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s road to irrelevance is riddled with ignorance and a clear lack of understanding of science and appreciation of public sentiment. Like most intellectually challenged groups, they will try to bulldoze their path by spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt.”

So while both Obama and Chamber camps bicker over allies within the Chamber’s membership, questions still remain as to how strong Obama will lead on economic regulation, national healthcare, and climate change.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told the conservative propaganda machine Fox News via email that the administration is still willing to work with the Chamber.

“We have an open door to the ideas and suggestions of the business community including the Chamber,” she said.

At the same time, economist Paul Krugman noted the recent “change in tone” from Obama’s top economic brass on the financial beast known as Goldman Sachs.

Krugman quoted none other than Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s chief economist who helped create and implement the Obama’s bank policy, (i.e. leave Wall Street be and forget about Main Street):

“There is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the financial system.” Indeed: Goldman has made a lot of money in its trading operations, but it was only able to stay in that game thanks to policies that put vast amounts of public money at risk, from the bailout of A.I.G. to the guarantees extended to many of Goldman’s bonds.”

Krugman is still flabbergasted that Summers continues to believe Big Bank nationalization would have never worked to solve the financial crisis last year.

However, Krugman preferred to drop the issue in support of job growth as a means to get banks lending again, though financial reform is greatly needed.

“For if we don’t, bankers will soon be taking even bigger risks than they did in the run-up to this crisis. After all, the lesson from the last few months has been very clear: When bankers gamble with other people’s money, it’s heads they win, tails the rest of us lose,” he wrote in The New York Times.

Former New York Governor and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer on Slate.com gave this call to action: push public pension funds and mutual funds to take politics out of corporate management through shareholder activism.

“They have failed to control the management of the companies they own because the actual owners of those mutual funds and pension funds — you and I — have failed to raise our voices,” he wrote. “We haven’t even asked questions.”

Spitzer added: “As long as the Chamber and the CEOs who are supposed to be our representatives are using our money to be overtly political, it is our duty to respond. If we are passive, we permit the chamber to hijack our funds and companies to support positions antithetical to our own views. Waking pension funds and mutual funds from their slumber on this relatively easy issue might finally begin the necessary process of fixing mismanaged corporations.”