Chamber Fills Its Pot o’ Gold

Posted on Oct 22, 2010

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been a bastion of pro-business, anti-environment and anti-labor ideology since its founding in 1912. And so it is unsurprising that modern-day corporations have donated millions upon millions to the Chamber to fight such perilous things as, say, security requirements on chemical facilities. —JCL

The New York Times:

Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicked off 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 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 been critical of growing federal regulation and spending. These large donations — none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group that keeps its donors secret, as it is allowed by law — offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in 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.

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