The U.S. Chamber violates its mission

When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1912, its Charter purpose was to help promote American democracy, free enterprise and business — especially small, new start-up business initiatives. Its original terms of reference forbade the Chamber to promote or oppose any individual candidate for political office.

For over half a century, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was true to its Charter purposes. It spawned a network of state and local Chambers that many of us can attest did admirable work across the nation promoting small businesses and commercial enterprise. But today it appears to be a different story.

Contrary to its founding principles, the U.S. Chamber has become a politically activist club, promoting certain candidates for political office, and conspiring with the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to plant legislation clandestinely at state and local levels, favoring Big Business. This includes Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agro, and Big Tobacco, often overriding the interests of small business, local commerce, the small private farmer, and the health and well-being of the “little people” — meaning the majority of working Americans. The U.S. Chamber frequently fails to seek the views of its local Chambers, and sometimes acts in opposition to their interests and expressed needs.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, working with ALEC behind closed doors, promotes political candidates who oppose the minimum wage, oppose equal pay for equal work, oppose labor unions and workers’ rights, oppose public education, oppose affordable health care, oppose Medicaid expansion, oppose immigration reform, oppose tax reform, oppose ExIm Bank financing of small export transactions, oppose campaign finance reform, and oppose anti-pollution standards, as well as virtually any and every form of regulation to protect the environment. However, there is something the Chamber and ALEC are in favor of and are lobbying for: “fracking,” in every state, including Connecticut.

The latest abuse of core principles, recently reported in the New York Times of July 8, 2015, is that the U.S. Chamber has been using its network of affiliates around the world to lobby against and undermine legally adopted national restrictions on tobacco smoking in public spaces and requirement of health warning labels on tobacco products, especially in developing countries.

The U.S. Chamber teamed up with Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco corporations to help sue Australia and Uruguay in the WTO so-called “Free Trade” Tribunal, for alleged “restraint of trade,” meaning “expected future loss” of corporate investors’ profits. What was the dreaded infraction of NAFTA by these two countries? They had adopted public health laws restricting tobacco smoking in public places. Imagine using the slogan of “Free Trade” to sponsor and promote lung and esophageal cancer worldwide!

The lobbying schemes of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are in direct opposition to the efforts of the World Health Organization (WHO) to curb tobacco use around the world. Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director-General of WHO, rightly said recently: “By lobbying against well-established, widely accepted and evidence-based tobacco control public health policies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce undermines its own credibility.”

U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren called the Chamber’s tobacco lobbying “craven and unconscionable.” The CVS Pharmacy has just announced it would resign from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, having stopped selling tobacco products in its stores. To put it clearly and succinctly: What “business” does the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have promoting cancer in other countries, let alone in the USA?

Official spin-masters of the U.S. Chamber, of course, will deny all of this, saying they are merely promoting business interests. But which business interests? At what cost to human health and well-being? Unless the U.S. Chamber can come up with a better explanation, “We the People” must assume (correctly) that the U.S. Chamber and ALEC are bent on replacing constitutional democracy with oligarchy – an elitist plutocratic concentration of corporate investor wealth, influence and power.

It’s time for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to return to its founding principles and act in the interest of all Americans.

Sharon resident Anthony Piel is a former director and general legal counsel of the World Health Organization.