This is an encouraging development from the New York Times--actually investigative journalism and reporting on the Chamber of Commerce, the companies who fund it, and their political and policy fights.
The key point: "These records show that while the chamber boasts of representing more than three million businesses, and having approximately 300,000 members, nearly half of its $149 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 donors. Many of those large donations coincided with lobbying or political campaigns that potentially affected the donors."
Some of the specific instances:
Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.
Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed new rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.
And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has helped wage a national campaign to limit the ability of trial lawyers to sue businesses....
And these contributions, some of which can be pieced together through tax filings of corporate foundations and other public records, also show how the chamber has increasingly relied on a relatively small collection of big corporate donors to finance much of its Washington agenda.
There's also the $1 million from Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, a "charity" run by Maurice R. Greenberg, the former chairman of A.I.G. "In just a single week earlier this month, the chamber spent $10 million on Senate races in eight states and two dozen House races, a fraction of the $50 to $75 million it said it intends to spend overall this season. In the 2008 election cycle, it spent $33.5 million."
Then there's the $144 million they spent last year just on lobbying. Perhaps they figure by spending up front in the election to buy a new Congress, they won't have to spend so much on lobbying--they'll have already bought all the members they need.
