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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

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I read about Glenn Beck soliciting money for the Chamber of Commerce a few days ago, but I didn’t realize he’d put it quite this way (h/t reader n):

“Put your money where your mouth is. If you have a dollar, please go to . . . the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and donate today.” Chamber members, he said, “are our parents. They’re our grandparents. They are us.”

And they work hard and should keep as much of their money as possible. But enough about that.

As is always the case with whatever Beck is saying, no less a person than David Brooks (h/t whoever mentioned this phrase in the comments) was saying the same thing in totebaggerese a few days ago:

Declaring war on the Chamber of Commerce may be a good idea for somebody hosting a show on MSNBC, but there are chambers in towns across America.

Real Murkins love their Chamber of Commerce. My Chamber of Commerce supports my town! They put together a nice brochure for visitors and erected a stone dial on the village green with “Only count the sunny hours” engraved in it. I ran into the head of my local chamber at the Applebee’s salad bar and he said he was worried about being demonized by Obama. He may stop hiring because his taxes are so high.

It’s time for Bobo to cut the fucking chase and tell us why Burke and Hume want us to stock up on gold, canned food, water, and ammo.

Reader Interactions

62Comments

  2. 2.

    BGinCHI

    Hume was a skeptic and would have laughed Bobo’s ass right out of the conversation.

    Bobo thinks being Very Serious is philosophy. Maybe because of all that tuition money he payed.

    Doug, you get that mash-up of I sent you of the Rent is 2 Damn High guy’s speeches in the “Up” movie?

  3. 3.

    ruemara

    US Chamber of Commerce is an entity that is not really your local Chamber of Commerce. They are a collection of fucktards with money whose express purpose is to make fucktards who vote fucktardidly vote with even more fucktardedness than basic self preservation would determine to as a limit. If only Bobo could get his nose out of the Applebee’s salad fixings and learn that.

    but then he wouldn’t be the Bobo I know & scorn.

  4. 4.

    WyldPirate

    Goddamned Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan were spouting the same horseshit Bobo Brooks was the other day about the US Chamber of Commerce being just like your local Chamber of Commerce just trying to bring jobs to your community, that they are your neighbors and are trying to build your community and how regular ‘Merkins wouldn’t fall for the attack on them by the Dems.

    I just can’t believe those sonsabitches are so unsophisticated as to believe the horseshit they are spouting. There’s just no way.

  7. 7.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @BGinCHI:

    Doug, you get that mash-up of I sent you of the Rent is 2 Damn High guy’s speeches in the “Up” movie?

    Is that what it was? I couldn’t figure out what it was a mash up of. Let me check it out again…

  8. 8.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @Laura W.:

    I feel like I used a Blondie one just the other day….but I can’t remember now.

  10. 10.

    Mike in NC

    US Chamber of Commerce is an entity that is not really your local Chamber of Commerce.

    These are the shitbirds who spent millions campaigning against “Obamacare” and who packed the town hall meetings with goons last summer. Just another astroturf group.

  11. 11.

    Mark S.

    @burnspbesq:

    Man you’ve been a dick lately.

    In other news, GOP party chair sends out racist email (and it’s really bad). Day ending in y, but I loved the excuses some of his fellow goopers came up with:

    Bartholomew forwarded it without reading the contents when “he was first getting familiar with the Internet,” Byler said

    What is it, 1998? Then there’s this one:

    Wilson said it was possible Bartholomew sent the email “for awareness,” what she characterized as “sending it to somebody and saying ‘look how pathetic people think this is.'”

    It’s the Instapundit defense: I just link to Stormfront and say Heh Indeed. It doesn’t mean I’m endorsing it.

  12. 12.

    John - A Motley Moose

    @burnspbesq: No, there’s a lot more. The Chamber that is getting hammered is the national chamber. Most local chambers are not members of the national chamber. Entirely separate operations. But then, you knew that already, didn’t you?

  16. 16.

    arguingwithsignposts

    “They are us.”

    Wait, I thought they surrounded us. How can they be us and surround us at the same time. Dammit, that’s some serious quantum physics Beck is playing. I need a chalkboard!

  17. 17.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I ran into the head of my local chamber at the Applebee’s salad bar and he said he was worried about being demonized by Obama.

    Was he wearing Haggar slacks?

  21. 21.

    lacp

    Of course, Burke and Hare would recommend you stock up on something else…..

    Screw this Chamber of Commerce shit: what I want to know is, when are we getting some Star Chambers?

  23. 23.

    Cris

    My local Chamber isn’t exactly the friggin Lions club. Local chambers can be just as reactionary as the national one we seem to feel comfortable maligning. They’re like an eclectic cartel.

  24. 24.

    beltane

    My local chamber of commerce also kind of sucks. It’s just a group of local business “leaders” who like to do whatever they can to prevent new businesses from opening in town so as to prevent competition with existing businesses.

  25. 25.

    The Grand Panjandrum

    One C of C in New Hampshire has decided it has had enough of the national organization. Suck on THIS Bobo!

    On Friday, the Greater Hudson Chamber of Commerce released a statement saying its board of directors has voted not to renew its membership with the national chamber because it felt recent political advertisements by the national chamber in support of specific parties and candidates were in “direct conflict” with the foundation of the Hudson chamber.

    The article goes on to say that many Chambers have either left previously or never were members.

    ApplebeeZ!

  28. 28.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    It isn’t surprising to see Beck going whole hog for the big COC but the little COCs can screw ya a hundred ways too.

  29. 29.

    parsimon

    DougJ:

    I can’t keep up with the comments on this damned blog, but yes, Brooks’s column on outside funding in the midterm elections was particularly egregious, and he doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt any longer.

  30. 30.

    beltane

    @Cris: Cartel is the word I was thinking of. Corruption on a small scale is not a whole lot more charming than corruption on a large scale.

    Does anyone under the age of forty feel the warm fuzzies of capitalist aspiration when they hear the term “Chamber of Commerce”? The sentimental naivete of the older generations is going to be what kills this country.

  31. 31.

    bozack

    @ruemara: Yep, exactly.

    While I talked to many local chamber heads who said they rely on the Chamber’s resources, I also spoke to many who are coming to resent Donohue. “Their stances have occasionally alienated local businesses,” says Tim Sink, president of the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce in New Hampshire. In Sink’s region, the Chamber ran health care attack ads targeting Congressman Paul Hodes, a popular legislator with bipartisan support who’s now running for Senate. “It put the local chambers in an awkward situation, I can tell you that.”… [T]he Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform became involved in an attorney general race in Washington State, waging a campaign via a front group called the Voters Education Committee. The Chamber’s interventions met with such broad public disfavor that Steve Leahy, president of the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at the time, had to send out 10,000 e-mails distancing his organization from the U.S. Chamber. “We had a lot of cleaning up we had to do on their behalf,” Leahy told me. Even the institute’s director from 1999 to 2002, James Wootton, whom Donohue appointed, regretted at least one attack ad campaign he waged against an Ohio judge, one that resulted in a suit against the Chamber. “I came to believe that we probably shouldn’t have run those ads,” Wootton told me… “I now have a standard e-mail saying we’re not a chapter of the U.S. Chamber that I have to send out a couple of times a week,” says Timothy Hulbert, president of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce. Stan Kosciuszko, president of the Butler County, Pennsylvania, Chamber of Commerce, which is no longer a member of the Chamber, said, “They’ve abandoned the interests of smaller chambers like mine for their larger corporate members.”

  36. 36.

    kommrade reproductive vigor

    Shorter Glenn Beck:
    Buy Gold!
    Send your gold to the National CoC!
    Watch me spend my cut of the gold I was paid to tell you to buy and then paid to tell you to send to the National CoC!
    Oh shit, did I say that last bit out loud?

  37. 37.

    SBJules

    @John – A Motley Moose: Are local chapters part of the state Chamber of Commerce? I’m in business and have been encouraged to join the Chamber for years, but I saw the garbage (how to screw your employees, basically) the State Chamber put out some years ago & passed.

  38. 38.

    beltane

    @freelancer: Wait a minute. Are you implying there is no such thing as half-humans/half-monkeys? What is Glenn Beck but a monkey who lacks tree-climbing ability?

  41. 41.

    burnspbesq

    @beltane:

    What is Glenn Beck but a monkey who lacks tree-climbing ability?

    There are approximately 18,000 monkeys in your front yard. They’d like to talk to you about comparing them to Glenn Beck. I have to say that they don’t look at all happy.

  46. 46.

    DougJ is the business and economics editor for Balloon Juice.

    @freelancer:

    You signed it, I just missed the sig. I think your email used to look like it came in under the name freelancer.

  48. 48.

    Mark

    Our local chamber is full of rich businessmen who hate the idea of the government providing health care but love the idea of taxpayers building a minor league baseball stadium in town. But then what’s more important, giving health care to sick people or watching baseball a couple of times a year?

  49. 49.

    kdaug

    “Consider the lillies of the field, how they grow;
    They toil not, nor do they sow”

    Parasites and symbiotes are part of the ecosystem. Always have been.

  52. 52.

    Triassic Sands

    I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

    And I am not a witch.

    Chamber members, he said, “are our parents. They’re our grandparents. They are us.”

    And they are you and me and none of us are witches, bitches.

  53. 53.

    Ruckus

    @beltane:
    This is a perfect description of my chamber as well. Waste of time and money.

    @The Grand Panjandrum:
    My local chamber came by the other day and I told them I was not having anything to do with them if they have anything to do with the national chamber, including not denouncing it publicly. They left without saying another word.

  54. 54.

    Comrade Kevin

    @Mark S.:

    Man you’ve been a dick lately.

    The guy has “esq” in his handle, because he wants to make sure you know he’s a Lawyer, with a Capital L. He probably puts “Esq” in his signature on his credit cart slips. He’s a Prick, with a Capital P.

  57. 57.

    John S.

    @Mark S.:

    I’m also going to guess that ol’ burnsie is a lawyer here in South Florida, judging from some of his comments and the “pb” in his handle. If he is a lawyer in Palm Beach, that would certainly explain the reflexive fellation of the wealthy and/or corporations he engages in anytime anyone (DougJ in particular) assails our Galtian overlords.

    But I like the guy. He’s a smug prick, who is often extra smug and extra pricky while chastising others for being wrong/stupid while himself being wrong/stupid. I find the combination delightful.

  58. 58.

    El Cid

    The behavior of your local Chamber of Commerce will vary vastly by its size and power.

    If it’s a really small town CoC, it’s probably mostly a place where local small businessmen meet about various business promotions and local planning matters, meet & greet events, and the like.

    In addition, government often provides the funds for the boosterism that gives the city name recognition and an image of togetherness, which are considered important by the growth coalitions in attracting industry. Sometimes the money for boosterism is given directly to the government by the local Chamber of Commerce. In some places, it is given to an Industrial Development Commission or a Convention and Visitors Bureau that is jointly funded by government and private enterprise.

    If it’s a pretty good sized city CoC, then it’s probably at the stage of intervening in local politics seriously enough to be a significant representative of class interests on behalf of the business community, with most commonly trying to control local growth and development policies.

    If it’s the national CoC, then it’s purely a lobbying and propaganda campaign for concentrated corporate wealth against policies which may be in the best interests of the grand majority of the population but which interrupt real or perceived profitability.

    [Note this isn’t always the case that CoC lobbying for business class interests must be opposed to the majority interest — they backed the Social Security Act and the Fair Housing Act, and also oppose the continuing idiotic US embargo against Cubans. Still, they’re representing their membership, it just occasionally coincides with what may be good for much of the country.]

    You don’t have to imagine any of this either — you don’t have to assume it’s some soft of ‘left wing’ or conspiratorial imagination. Just look at the reporting on what it is they do and back.

    I mean, if doing that isn’t considered left wing and conspiratorially minded.

  59. 59.

    kay

    Declaring war on the Chamber of Commerce may be a good idea for somebody hosting a show on MSNBC, but there are chambers in towns across America.

    This is the sort of earth-shattering observation that pundits love. I’m sure Brooks is proud of it.

    Obama was a state legislator. He was a Senator. He’s campaigned in thousands of small towns and talked to thousands of people, individually. David Axelrod has spent nearly his entire adult life campaigning.

    Brooks and the rest of the punditry think they have to tell Obama and Axelrod that there are local Chambers?

    I would bet Obama has talked personally with more “real Americans” in the course of his first statehouse campaign than Brooks has met in his entire cossetted, sheltered life.

    Pundits don’t think. They just spout this shit. And it’s ridiculous on its face.

  60. 60.

    El Cid

    @kay: Not to mention that no one (among the political classes) is declaring ‘war’ against even the US Chamber of Commerce — just on its massive, massive secretly funded propaganda campaign to elect the candidates and party they prefer.

    If the local CoC was pouring money from anonymous donors to run hostile and outrageous ad campaigns against the rival mayoral candidate, do you think the whole fucking town would be sitting around talking about how ‘the CoC here isn’t a witch, it’s me!’

  61. 61.

    kay

    @El Cid:

    Our local Chamber is actually discredited. They’re a bunch of political hacks who think they’re Very Important and they openly campaign for local Republicans.
    Their office is across the street from the courthouse, and I sometimes watch them self-importantly striding into meetings in the middle of the day, when everyone else is working.

  62. 62.

    chopper

    @ruemara:

    these are the same ‘tards who can’t tell the difference between their local school board and the department of education.

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