Alyssa Katz's Blog

While everyone was atwitter about the House video ban and attempted ethics oversight evasion, Ryan and McConnell both are sharpening their knives to slay Obama environmental and labor regulations, and can do it under existing laws.

Yes, rules advanced legally, under existing statutory authority granted by Congress. Just cuz.

Since the election of Donald Trump, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been almost as quiet as I have, stunned into…what? The Washington business lobbies have to now confront a putative friend who won election by gleefully abusing the political establishment forces in his path and has all the more reason to keep going now that he needs to keep Congress pliant. In Trumpland, domain of only one king, the Chamber is just another Washington beast the new president will clobber into submission and chain to his will, whatever affinities of interest they may share.

Put it this way: The Chamber spent $32 million on the 2016 election to hold Republican control of the Senate, and CEO Tom Donohue hasn’t even taken a trip up the Trump Tower elevator. Maybe he got the invitation; maybe he didn’t — either way, the atmosphere feels deep-frosty.

On the one very big hand (not the president-elect’s), the cabinet-in-waiting looks to be a deregulatory dream team, including an EPA nominee, Scott Pruitt, who worked intimately with the Chamber as Oklahoma attorney general on its court combat against President Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

Trump promises to work with a friendly Republican-held Congress to enact long-sought corporate tax cuts. Massive infrastructure spending, above and beyond a pointless Mexico border wall, would fulfill another big item on the Chamber’s wish list.

But the raw meat of the Trump economic agenda, the rantings about erecting tariffs and demolishing trade deals and Buy American that won him so much appeal in the job-deprived American heartland, promises to heap profound costs onto U.S. commerce and the earnings of the companies that fund the Chamber — and moreover come as ideologically offensive to a group dedicated to expanding trade and opening global markets.

In a sign of how fast the Washington weather has changed, former Chamber congressional lobbyist Rolf Lundberg, who once lobbied to advance trade-opening agreements, is now on board the Trump team that will enforce a “Buy American/Hire American” agenda.

Trump’s already established habit of calling out companies like Carrier for shutting down U.S. factories and opening operations elsewhere, and demanding re-commitment to American plants even at higher cost, means (as intended) that businesses will think twice and ten times before fleeing. Their undesired choice: pile on costs or suffer brand-crushing bad publicity.

Oh, and forget about expanding immigration now, an employer’s dream dead.

Like all of us, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been thrown into semi-paralysis in processing how to navigate a new order where in place of extended policy deliberations between interested parties behind the scrim, vital decisions about the American economy rest with the whims of one very strange man who flings out his decrees, praises and punishments to millions instantaneously on Twitter.

Once at work, his business-world cabinet members may be the ballast that brings Trump down to the same terra firma on which the U.S. Chamber built its significant political power in a past political era. But that’s not the same thing as the Chamber actually possessing that might.

Forever ago, in 1998, Donohue wrote to woo a tobacco industry donor with big plans to rule Washington: “My goal is simple — to build the biggest gorilla in this town.”

Enter King Kong. Who doesn’t stand for competition.

Prof. Ciara Torres-Spellicsy has written an excellent book, “Corporate Citizen? An Argument for the Separation of Corporation and State,” about the ascendant power of corporations as citizens in American law, including but hardly limited to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling allowing unlimited spending on elections founded on the long-held finding that companies have the same First Amendment rights as individuals.

On Thursday, October 27, at 6 p.m. I’ll have the privilege of interviewing Torres-Spellicsy about “Corporate Citizen?” at a Manhattan event hosted by the Brennan Center for Justice, where she’s a fellow.

Come join us at Civic Hall, 156 5th Avenue (between 20th and 21st streets), 2nd Floor. More information and RSVP here.

In June I wrote a column for the NY Daily News pondering why real estate developers have so often come out ahead of city government deal-making with the de Blasio administration — which, sure, could represent the fruits of corruption (we’ll leave that to U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to determine) but can be more immediately explained by the vast asymmetry in firepower between bureaucrats and the sharks who swim the same infested NYC real estate waters that gave the world Donald Trump (sorry, world).

Today — while hardly ruling out the possibility of influence by a mayoral donor or deliberate acts by City Hall — an investigative report from NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer on the sorry conversion of a Lower East Side AIDS hospice into luxury condo site with the city’s blessings bolsters the shark theory.

Surfaced here is much new detail about the games “nursing home operator” Joel Landau played with the mayor’s office and the city agency in charge of guarding city property, including valuable deed restrictions on private real estate once owned by the city, insisting on full lifting of the deed restriction as necessary when it was well within the city’s power to merely modify it while leaving in place the proviso that the property remain a health facility. Landau made the request, secured his price (a bargain, thanks to the city’s absurdly lowball appraisal of the property’s value), and officials at two city agencies obliged — one affirming on behalf of the mayor, with a rubber stamp, that the action is in “the best interests of the city.”

This is no way to run that city.

I couldn’t have known when I wrote on the rise of corporate political activism for the excellent journal Democracy that North Carolina’s odious ban on LGBT civil rights protections and transgender restroom access would spark the most stirring showing yet, with an extraordinary range of firms boycotting the state, including U.S. Chamber of Commerce stalwarts Pepsi, GE and Dow.

As I say in the article, corporate LGBT advocacy is just part of a wave that also includes tech companies like Uber and Apple enlisting users as political allies, amid plenty of evidence that customers look favorably on corporate activism when it aligns with their values. It does seem only a matter of time before companies openly sponsor candidates for political office as part of building brand identity and loyalty, putting to work their full Citizens United powers until now notably underutilized for fear of consumer or shareholder backlash.

Hello Washington, D.C.: On Tuesday, March 22 at 7 p.m., I’ll be giving a talk hosted by the American Sustainable Business Council and friends on how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came to claim to represent all business in American politics while advancing the pernicious demands of a mere few.

Free. Come one, come all; just make sure to register.

At the Impact Hub, 419 7th St. NW. Twelve blocks from U.S. Chamber of Commerce HQ. I counted.

Full details here.

I’m very fortunate to have The Influence Machine reviewed by the well-informed and thoughtful Ryan Grim in the stellar journal Democracy.

“Katz builds what is a very strong case brick by brick, and it’s remarkable to watch the Chamber’s power rise chapter by chapter,” he writes.

“It is a gun for hire, a façade that corporations can use, for a price, to do work in Washington that they would rather not have associated with their consumer brand. All of this, Katz argues convincingly, has often flown brazenly in the face of tax law, but power in Washington trumps both the spirit and letter of the law.”

Read Grim’s full review.

C-SPAN, don’t ever change. OK, please just change one thing: Make all of your videos web-embeddable, including BookTV, including the recent broadcast of this author giving a talk in October 2015 at the New York Public Library, because frankly speaking it was excellent. 

In the meantime, you’ll just have to settle for watching the proceedings on C-SPAN’s website. Enjoy.

Partisan politics was, for most of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s history, “against its own internal rules, against its founding mandate, against everyt this group stood for. It was about building consensus in Washington, which meant that it was pretty ineffective for most of its history.”

And then….

I explain on the wonderfully unorthodox podcast Unorthodox.

Some thoughtful questions here from host Sasha Lilley (and some decent enough answers from me) on KPFA’s “Against the Grain.”