Chamber of Commerce vows to punish anti-business candidates
WASHINGTON -- Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business. ...
"I'm concerned about anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency, members of Congress and the media," he said. "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."
I wondered, when I read this article in todays L.A. Times, whether the "Business Community" understands that for us, there is a huge distinction between "anti-corporation" and "anti-business"? The two are not synonymous in the least. One look on this guy's face, though, and it seems clear he's in the same kind of cloistered bubble of perception as are most DC Beltway Politicians and their consultants.
I think this is a very important issue that gets overlooked because it is easy to meld the two. And I wish our Presidential Candidates would address this issue and explain it very carefully to America:
That liberals/ progressives/ Democrats have, for too long, been mislabeled as "anti-business", when nothing could be further from the truth. And there are usually enormous differences in scale of business-operation when we rightfully complain about this peculiar construct called a "corporation" which is really a fairly recent development in the course of American History, whereby these business structure are given "personhood" status, which in turn create all sorts of unusual advantages/shields for the actual human persons who are always responsible for illegal/unethical actions like at Enron, Arthur Anderson Consulting, and Halliburton, to name a few.
The fantastic documentary The Corporation made this whole murky area very clear, and very accessible for ordinary Americans to understand, without any prior knowledge of the high-stakes business world. The basic premise of the movie, which is based on a book called The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Power, is that the behaviors committed by the unethical corporations, when catalogued, match one-to-one with the behaviors diagnosed in a psychotic human being -- the kind we lock away for mental health treatment so as not to be a menace to society. Thus, if you want to treat corporations as "persons", then by all means do so, but not selectively. That in order for America to prosper as a nation, we need to address this pathology which is supported by and enabled by federal laws which protect corporations in ways any citizen would not be afforded.
Here's a 7 minute sampler, the opening of the film. The whole thing can be watched on YouTube or purchased on DVD
There are sometimes esoteric distinctions one could make between various compound-formations of business structures, from sole proprietorship to partnership to small business to LLC to corporation all the way up to conglomerate.
And one such distinction I have tried to make many times at this site focuses on one industry sector: Big Media. I think we do a disservice to our message at large when we term the media "the corporate media". I have long argued that the problems we see are not manifest by the mere fact that these businesses are corporations -- for god's sake, DailyKos is a publication of the Limited Liability Corporation called Kos Media. Likewise, Talking Points Memo is a publication of the Limited Liability Corporation "TPM Media". The McClatchy Company, which bought out Knight-Ridder, is a corporation.
Thus, when we tag our complaints about media distortion and non-coverage and factual lies by pointing to the purveyors as "corporate media", I'm not so sure ordinary Americans would really get the distinction between "oh well I'm not talking about THAT corporation, that one's okay. It's these over here who are pillaging our nation and war profiteering and dumbing down the American public -- which lead to most Americans backing a fictitious war.
The enemy is the Conglomerate Media -- the consolidated media corporations with layers and layers of parent corporations and child corporations, all wrapped up in a mega package like Time Warner or Viacom or NBC-Universal.
But this is just one example among many where we on the left routinely slam corporations --- and many a small American business owner is organized as a corporation, and certainly any business over the size of 20 people. These are home to the workers of America, the innovators of America, the risk-taking entrepreneurs who invest R&D money into new ideas like "multi-touch" touchscreen technologies, which go on to become key components of the iphone and other mass appeal products at least partially "made in America".
This article re the U.S. Chamber of Commerce perceiving populist rhetoric about fighting big-business, fighting the corporations as emblematic of the liberals who need to be kept out of public office, lest they turn America into a doomed socialist state, just prompts me that we have a real language problem -- and this ties right into the STILL-VALID yet largely still-ignored precepts of FRAMING and clarifying our shared beliefs evangelized by George Lakoff and others.
In advance of today's news conference, Donohue told The Times of his plans to be active in 140 congressional districts this year, as well as the presidential contest.
At the state level, Donohue said his organization would be active in nearly four dozen contests for attorney general and state supreme courts. Both state courts and attorneys general are involved in decisions affecting business, including consumer protection and a wide range of litigation.
The chamber has become a significant force in state and national politics under Donohue's decade of leadership. Once a notably bipartisan trade association with a limited budget and limited influence, it has hugely increased its political fundraising and developed new ways to spend money on behalf of pro-business candidates.
I'd be curious if the majority of people in this community view themselves as "anti-business". Yet sometimes our framing of issues certainly sends that message. Make an effort to make the distinction between "corporations" at large, and the big conglomerates who abuse the American system in a psychopathic manner.
rh+