The Chamber of Money Laundering

In case you haven't heard, which of course you wouldn't if you rely on corporate mainstream media for your daily news, the president and CEO of the United States Chamber of Commerce, Thomas J. Donohue, made a recent proclamation that there are legitimate and good reasons to outsource and move American jobs overseas. His statement is on tape and can't be interpreted to mean anything other than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce condones...no, encourages...the movement and loss of American jobs to foreign countries around the globe. Do you think his statement, and the fact that the Chamber accepts and receives millions of dollars annually from foreign enterprises, go hand-in-hand? Luckily, for now anyway, because campaign finance laws prohibit foreign entities from contributing to political races here in the United States, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is playing the coy game that, "of course, we wouldn't use illegal money -- trust us". Nous? Nosotros? Uns? לנו? لنا؟

Look, it doesn't take a crystal ball to figure out the myriad of reasons foreign corporations are seeking to displace Democratic candidates next month. After all, the Chamber "has repeatedly sent out issue alerts attacking Democratic efforts to encourage businesses to hire locally rather than outsource to foreign count[r]ies." Before Donohue's arrival at the Chamber in the late 1990s, "the Chamber of Commerce used to be a trade association that advocated in a bipartisan manner for narrowly tailored policies to benefit its members. Since 1997 or so, it has become a fully functional part of the partisan Republican machine, with Donahue raising its budget to $150M a year from corporate chiefs satisfied with his ability to move policy through a Republican Congress." 

Although Democrats are certainly in the pockets of every multinational banking and corporate interest that exists, it's no secret that Republicans are their personal bellhops and will do their bidding much more quickly than the less whorish, though not by much, Democrats. Sure, these oligarchs still will undoubtedly get drunk on Democratic favors, but why wait for a high when you can mainline on the heroin of Republican gift-giving. That's what's apparently happening this election cycle. With all the corporate money flowing into the coffers of Republican candidates, of all persuasions, they're awash in an orgy of undocumented and unaccounted cash. And who do we have to thank for this? None other than the five maverick activist Supreme Court justices who claimed that money equals free speech, and thus allowed the floodgates to open to corporate cash from not only U.S.-based corporations, which previously was illegal, but also to foreign corporations. Nice, huh? It seems to me that when organized crime syndicates, the term used before today's "banksters", did similar things, it was called money laundering. What's the difference?

Watch the following segments from The Rachel Maddow Show from last week (Tuesday and Thursday). If this doesn't bunch your panties into a wad, I don't know what will.