Pelosi takes on Chamber of Commerce over campaign spending
The phrase “Buy American” may be taking on a new connotation in the rough-and-tumble battle over corporate financing and the midterm congressional elections.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has been pumping lots of cash into the campaign, received multimillion dollar donations from some major companies as it fought against government policies, the New York Times reported Thursday.
“They give new meaning to the term “Buy American”… they want to buy these elections,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said when asked about the article in an MSNBC interview.
“If they win — which I fully intend to stop them from doing — but if they were to win, it would mean that we are now… a plutocracy and oligarchy,” Pelosi said. “Whatever these few wealthy, secret, unlimited sources of money are can control our entire agenda,” she added.
The Chamber is tax-exempt and not obligated to disclose it donors.
The New York Times says what it found offers a glimpse of how the business network raised money as “it ramped up an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections.”
Citing Federal Election Commission filings, a Politico.com article says that in the past week alone, the Chamber has spent more than $5.2 million – more than $1.7 million for House races and about $3.4 million on Senate contests.
Bejeebers! A scary fiscal outlook and Tea Party politics
Tackling huge budget deficits and growing debt is essential for the United States to avoid a financial market crisis that would push interest rates higher and severely damage the U.S. economy, many economists have warned.
Compromise and statesmanship will be needed to cut spending and raise revenues to narrow the budget gap, and that might not be possible in the current political environment, says at least one experienced budget expert.
“We’re certainly going to have a more fiscally conservative Congress next year,” Rudolph Penner, a former Congressional Budget Office director told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce forum. “The Tea Party, if nothing else, has certainly moved both the Republicans and Democratic Party to the right.”
However, that may not translate into a deficit-reducing budget deal that can pass the House of Representatives and the Senate and then get signed by President Barack Obama, he said.
“A real problem here is that the Tea Party is going to scare the bejeebers out of any Republican that is talking about compromise for fear of what will happen in the next primary,” Penner said. “There is no way we’re going to get out of this problem without a compromise between the two parties.”
Tea Party activists are pushing for deep government spending cuts and have threatened to end the careers of Republicans who go along with tax increases. Democrats are reluctant to cut the Social Security retirement program and Medicare and Medicaid health plans for the elderly and poor.
Alice Rivlin, a former Federal Reserve Board vice chairman and member of Obama’s fiscal commission, said U.S. government spending will rise dramatically faster than the economy can grow as the retiring 77 million-strong baby boom generation begins to draw on promised Social Security retirement and Medicare health benefits. Bringing the budget into balance will take compromise, she said.
Butchers offer financial services? “Completely false,” says Obama
President Barack Obama started his day by learning he had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but that didn’t stop him from quickly turning downright prickly.
After a meeting with Americans who had been ripped off by the financial system, Obama on Friday said big banks and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were trying to block some of his efforts at financial regulatory reform.
They specifically want to torpedo his plan for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, he said. Legislation creating the agency is now working its way through Congress.
The proposed agency would help ordinary people who borrow money for homes or other purposes, he told an East Room gathering at the White House.
It would get rid of those “ridiculously confusing contracts” that govern everything from credit cards to home mortgages.
“A lot of the banks and big financial firms don’t like the idea of a consumer agency very much,” Obama said. “In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is spending millions on an ad campaign to kill it.”
It was the ads that aggravated him.
Why is it that progressive-types always want NEW government agencies when the ones they created before prove not to be effective?
It’s like the infrastructure spending – it doesn’t fix hardly anything out there now because a politician can’t put his name on a bridge which was already built by some previous politician. Only NEW bridges (or agencie) can be named after the current politician.
Obama ought to be concentrating on making the government he has work instead of creating another one on TOP of the one his predecessors put in place. Effeciency does not require ‘new’. We don’t need ‘new’ gun laws, we don’t need ‘new’ food safety laws, we don’t need ‘new’ regulations over investments. We just need to punish the people who broke the ‘old’ laws and do a better job with the taxpayers $$ in enforcing the millions of regulations already on the books.
The Republican election chant of 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008 was TERRORISM and how only they could be trusted protecting the country. It worked until Americans realized that without an economy, they didn’t have much to protect.
Fast forward. Chamber of Commerce takes huge dollars from foreign corporations and other sources without disclosing the sources. So how can any conservative in America be sure that the Chamber isn’t a front for foreign interests, some may even be those ISLAMIC FASCISTS TERRORISTS!!! How, you laugh. Well, the only way to prove this isn’t so is to have full disclosure. As far as anyone knows, it could be Al Qaida that is bankrolling the Chamber…
The ultimate realization is that the USA has lost its democracy to the oligarchy of big money. Money wins elections, not votes since the Supreme Court has ruled that a non-person perpetual entity like a corporation is protected under the Constitution to the same limit as a real person. since that ruling democracy has stopped in the USA.