The Winkest Link

By Wink

The phrase ‘chamber of commerce’ always makes me think of the Andy Griffith Show. Really.

I think of a tiny town, and a meeting of three or four ‘town fathers’ trying to think of ways to bring new business to town. Any new business, no matter how small, would bring new jobs to the town, and everybody would prosper.

The men (it is always men in my imagination) are the ‘chamber’ and the businesses they were promoting were the ‘commerce.’

In this quaint scenario the principals were always trying to create jobs. Naturally these were American jobs. Mayberry is, after all, in America.

Others must share this mental picture with me, right? I cannot be alone.

Well, there is a much bigger organization that uses the phrase ‘chamber of commerce.’ It is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  Are you familiar with it?

Like other chambers, it is pro-business.

But, unlike our Mayberry chamber, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn’t give a damn about American jobs. More on that in a bit…

American corporations are booming. Stock prices are rising and they have two trillion in cash reserves. Let us illustrate two trillion dollars….      $2,000,000,000,000.

Even after lavishing their execs with billions in bonus’s, they still have $2,000,000,000,000 sloshing around in their cash drawers.

These enormous cash reserves were created, in part, by shedding American jobs and shipping them overseas.

With all that dough laying around, maybe this would be a good time to start reinvesting in America, rebuilding roads and bridges and bringing more jobs back to our shores.

Nope. Probably the only thing better for these execs than having have two trillion dollars in cash reserves, would be to have three trillion in cash reserves. More bonus’s for execs!

To achieve this, Thomas J Donohue, the President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, believes in creating jobs. Not American jobs mind you, but jobs in other countries.

Think that’s just hyperbole?

In 2004 he urged American companies to send jobs overseas.

Didn’t Donohue know to sending our jobs overseas would hurt American workers? Sure he did, and he had advice for the Americans affected by the offshoring of jobs:   Just “stop whining.”

Been out of work for two years because your company shipped all the jobs to China?  Stop whining.

Is your mortgage being foreclosed? No money for college?  Stop whining.

Don’t be fooled by letters “U.S’”. This Chamber of Commerce is simply a lobbying group, not in any way affiliated with the U.S. government.

(The cynical would say the Republican Party is just an arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, but you won’t catch ME saying that. I WOULD note that 93% of the money they spent on the last election was spent on ads that either supported a Republican, or trashed a Democrat. Make of that what you will.)

If Republicans and the U.S. C. of C. don’t care that 13.9 million Americans are out of work, they don’t care about America.

I am therefore recommending the U.S. Chamber of Commerce should just remove the “U.S.” from their title, because they clearly don’t give a rats a$$ about the United States.

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