Chamber of Secrets

The ad begins ominously.

Under an overcast, evening sky we see the silhouette of the Capitol. “Senators are supposed to be a check and balance on the White House,” a woman’s voice says in a stern tone. The screen cuts to a still frame of Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who’s running against Republican challenger Scott Brown. Her skin and clothing are colored black, white, and grey, with her left eyebrow raised, as if she were a creepy Tim Burton character.

The voice accuses Shaheen of “parroting” President Obama during the debate over the Affordable Care Act, then cuts to a pained father embracing his two young daughters who appear on the verge of tears. Then a visibly upset senior. Then the Tim Burton-esque senator again, this time with her lips pursed, and the capitalized words “Say ‘no’ to Jeanne Shaheen” in the background.

At the end, the source of the ad is revealed, and it’s not Scott Brown’s campaign, or an affiliated political action committee. Rather it’s from the largest, and perhaps most opaque ‘nonprofit’ in the nation today: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Harvard students tend not to have televisions at school, so most probably haven’t seen these political ads that have seeped down into Massachusetts. But this Chamber-paid advertising blitz has even made it onto YouTube, which is how I stumbled upon it in the first place. The Chamber, it turns out, has dumped $1.5 million into the race to our north, just over $1 million promoting Brown, and about $500,000 attacking Shaheen. In the diminutive Granite State, even during a high-profile election, that’s big money, considering Brown only has a total of $1.5 million cash on hand.

Most Cantabrigians, it’s safe to say, disagree with the Chamber’s politics, and the New Hampshire race is a mild example. The Chamber has oft questioned anthropogenic climate change and still refuses to affirm its existence. In 2000, it published the “Environmentalist’s Little Green Book,” which is stuffed with quotes by Sierra Club and Nature Conservancy officials that Chamber workers call “stupid” and “misanthropic.” It’s historically the go-to organization for coal companies trying shear off mountains in Appalachia. And in 2009, the Chamber called for a public hearing with the Environmental Protection Agency, examining the pitfalls of climate science. It will be the “Scopes monkey trial of the 21^st century,” said the Chamber’s then-vice president to the Los Angles Times.

The organization has been continuously gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, going so far as to run ads in the Mountain West with a middle-aged man lying awake at night, apparently fretting over the welfare of Big Finance. As part of a New York Times exposé in 2009, in which some of the Chamber’s most significant donors were revealed—(the organization keeps this information secret as a matter of policy)—it was found that Goldman Sachs and Prudential Financial were among the organization’s most generous benefactors during the debate over Dodd-Frank.

If there’s one purpose that ties this political activity together, it’s to make dirty hands clean, offering secret influence to corporations that don’t want to be publicly associated the dubious causes they promote. “I want to give them all the deniability they need,” Tom Donohue, the Chamber’s president, said to the Washington Monthly in 2010.

A third of its funding came from just 19 corporations that year—some of them foreign—and though this ratio changes annually, it’s safe to say that the interests of the chamber are weighted to the top of the economic ladder. And yet, the organization is effective on the grassroots when it pumps money into elections—96 percent of the time for Republicans—partly because of its association with the many thousands of friendly local chambers that count themselves as dues-paying members of the national body. A chamber endorsement “is like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” said one Democratic House aide to Time, referencing the fact that many see the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as the local mom-and-pop group down the street, rather than the hardline conservative lobbying giant that it is.

Fortunately, many progressive chambers of commerce realize their role in lending false moral legitimacy to the U.S. Chamber, and the move is on to withdraw, or at least formally denounce, the national body. Locally, the chambers in Needham, Massachusetts, and Manchester, Hudson, and Nashua, New Hampshire, have jumped ship in recent years, among many others in the area.

One might think that green-techie-Marxist-progressive Cambridge would be another likely candidate for withdrawal, especially because Harvard University—the place where the intellectual framework of the CFPB was developed, and where administrators have taken relatively firm stands on the climate—is by far its biggest member, with over 11,000 employees. And, in fairness, the local chamber says it’s a measure they’ve considered. “I’m disappointed by the quality of some of the U.S. Chamber ads,” says Kelly Thompson, CEO and president of the Cambridge Chamber. But, for the time being, she says her organization has decided against such a move, citing the “robust professional development programs” offered by the national body."

Yet as robust as these programs may be, there remains a certain irony: every year Harvard, and the Cambridge community writ large, pumps money into an organization that lobbies against the very values upon which the university, and the city, is built. I don’t know what the Cambridge chamber’s dues to the U.S. Chamber come out to—but it’s clear those “professional development programs” come at a pretty steep price.

J. Gram Slattery '15, a Crimson editorial writer, is a Social Studies concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears every other Tuesday.