Chamber Apologizes!

The campaign to discredit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as the leading voice of business in Washington is getting stranger by the day.

By now, you’ve probably heard about the bogus press release sent out Monday by environmental activists, purporting to be Chamber officials, announcing that the organization had reconsidered its position on climate change and now supports pending legislation to cap carbon emissions. Or maybe you’ve seen clips of their bogus press conference (check it out on YouTube), which was interrupted by a real Chamber official who walked in and announced, “This is a fraudulent press activity.”

The stunt was embarrassing, not so much for the Chamber as for CNBC, Reuters, and other news organizations that ran stories about the chamber’s “about-face” without checking with the Chamber. “The news is broken” is how Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank described this latest version of Balloon Boy, Washington-style.

But the hits keep coming. On Tuesday, the StopTheChamber.com coalition issued a press release calling for the firing of Chamber CEO and president Tom Donohue, and a criminal investigation of its “unethical and illegal activities.” That’s quite an escalation from just calling on Chamber members to resign over its climate-change policy, which is where all of this fun activity began.

Click on StopTheChamber.com, and you’re directed to VelvetRevolution.us, a network of 120 progressive organizations that joined together “to stand up against a corrupt anti-American agenda in D.C.” About a dozen of these organizations are listed as supporters of StopTheChamber.com, including ProsperityAgenda.us, which also is recruiting 1,000 people to stage nonviolent sit-ins at insurance company offices “to end insurance abuse and win health care for all.”

It’s safe to say that these folks aren’t Chamber members, and wouldn’t care for its pro-business agenda even if Barack Obama, not Tom Donohue, were its president.

The Chamber, however, sent a message to its members Tuesday, stating that it understood they may have received emails and letters from groups that urged them to quit the chamber.

“Please note that these calls against the Chamber are part of a broad-based, multisource campaign against us being carried out by our normal adversaries—trial lawyers, activist unions, environmental extremists, etc.,” read the message from David Chavern, the Chamber’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. “It is a ‘corporate campaign’ in the classic sense, where interest groups are looking for public leverage to force us to do things against the best interests of the business community. Frankly, these efforts are simply the result of how effective we have been in opposing card check, as well as aspects of proposed healthcare, capital markets, and climate-change legislation that we believe would be onerous to business and impede job creation.

“Our efforts to fix these key pieces of legislation are not going to stop,” Chavern wrote.

The message goes on, and it warns members that that “the negative messages to your organization may continue.”

“I apologize for any annoyance and inconveniences these efforts against us might cause you,” Chavern wrote.

Well, David, no apology is necessary as far as we’re concerned. We’re enjoying the spectacle—we just hope the business community’s perspective on important issues isn’t lost in all the fireworks.