Anyone who's ever been to a Chamber of Commerce meeting knows the idea of those overfed, self-satisfied incompetents* actually getting out of their comfy office suites to build anything is too hilarious for words.
But it seems the impudence of presidential candidates daring to utter "populist" ideas has got the chamber's national president sputtering empty threats:
From The Los Angeles Times:
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.
"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said....
Although Donohue shied away from precise figures, he indicated that his organization would spend in excess of the approximately $60 million it spent in the last presidential cycle. That approaches the spending levels planned by the largest labor unions....
"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."
Okay, leaving aside the sexual-sado-masochistic metaphors that bring to mind corpulent 19th-century factory owners buggering their starving child laborers, Donohue's got this completely backwards.
(More after the jump.)
As I wrote in a comment to TPMMuckraker:
Companies do NOT create jobs; consumers of products that companies manufacture create jobs.
Seen the horse-whip industry creating many jobs lately?
High time someone reminded the Chamber that "labor" is not a bunch of non-consuming Martians outside the economy. "Labor" is consumers.
Decades ago, a GM exec showed UAW leader Walter Reuther an auto-building robot and crowed, "Let's see you get him to join a union!":
Ruether retorted: "Let's see you get him to buy a car."
It was Henry Ford, a capitalist who makes the fascists in the Chamber seems like Commies, who paid his assembly-line workers the un-heard-of sum of $5 per day for one purely capitalist reason:
So they could afford to BUY the cars they were BUILDING.
Wake up, assholes. By opposing populism, you're digging your own graves.
*The Chamber, especially in its lobbying-centric national form, is hardly friendly to the entrepreneurial small business people who are the true backbone of the U.S. economy.
Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.
