It’s been a tough couple of months for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s most powerful business lobby. Big corporations have been resigning from the organization in protest over the Chamber’s opposition to cap-and-trade legislation, which I wrote about here. Activist pranksters the Yes Men pulled off a hoax at the Chamber’s expense, sending out a quite convincing press release saying that the organization was reversing its position on climate change legislation, and then holding a press conference on the subject that only ended when an actual Chamber spokesman showed up to interrupt. And now Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones has shown convincingly that the Chamber has at best misreprented and at worst just lied about how many businesses it actually represents.

For more than a decade now, the Chamber has said in myriad venues, including congressional testimony, that it represents three million businesses. That number has been pretty much universally accepted, and I used it in my column. But in a recent post (which came out after my column went to press), Harkinson pretty much demolishes that number, showing that the Chamber’s claim to represent three million businesses likely depends on claiming the members of local chambers of commerce (which often do belong to the national organization) as its own, even though all those individual businesses don’t pay dues to the Chamber or have any say in the organization. In fact, Harkinson suggests, the Chamber’s membership is probably somewhere between two and three hundred thousand.

The Chamber might conceivably try to wiggle out of this by saying that it does “represent” these businesses even if they aren’t official members, or, since its spokesmen have used the phrase “three million members,” by trying, as it has, to redefine the meaning of “membership.” But I think Harkinson has them dead to rights, and that the accurate number is around ten per cent of what the Chamber previously claimed (and I repeated). And in fact, in a follow-up post, Harkinson reported that the Chamber has decided to acknowledge reality. In a press conference to announce its big new campaign to defend free enterprise, Chamber officials said they had three hundred thousand members. Remarkably, this was not another Yes Men hoax, and it only happened thanks to Harkinson’s excellent work.