The Deep End

In case you don’t pay much attention to my blog roll, The Earth-bound Misfit doesn’t really fit in with the rest of my choices. (Sorry, no wordplay on “misfit” intended.) EBMisfit isn’t a controller and isn’t a “big name” like Krugman, Fallows or Reich. She’s just a smart person I was fortunate enough to run across on the internet.

She’s further to the left on the political spectrum than I am (about most things anyway) but I love the diversity of topics she covers. And I get tickled by the irreverent way in which she does it. No subject is safe. No punches are pulled. I like that.

All this is just a lead-in to a story I saw on her site about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As you might suspect, I don’t have anything nice to say about them but I always thought they were a respectable organization. (Not that I’ve studied them or anything.) I mean, the President of the United States just spoke at their place the other day, for crying out loud. But it appears as if ThinkProgress has the goods on them.

”According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the Chamber hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt, who once represented Food Lion in its infamous lawsuit against ABC News, was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates, John Woods and Bob Quackenboss, solicited a set of private security firms — HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.”

The story gets more tangled from there. Lawyers, hackers, WikiLeaks and Bank of America all get mentioned. It’s all too deep for me. I have to fall back on Jimmy Buffet and be thankful I’m not a lawyer, a thief or a banker.

I did go to the Chamber’s web site to read their side of the story. I found the comment section most entertaining.

Like I said, it’s all too deep for me. And all too nasty. But at the end of the day, I remember that U.S. corporations are sitting on over a trillion in cash and there are at least 14 million unemployed Americans. (I believe that reality is much harsher than the numbers.)

I don’t expect corporations to be charities. Their purpose is to make money. But their larger purpose is to serve mankind. Right at this moment, they don’t seem to be doing a very good job of that. From my perspective, they haven’t been doing a very good job for 30 years.

Yes, that period does correspond to the Pinkerton-in-Chief busting a union.

Don Brown
February 15, 2011