The Cham­ber of Com­merce is a jug­ger­naut in the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal sys­tem, and it does­n’t use that pow­er to fight for poli­cies that would ben­e­fit much of any­one besides the ultra-wealthy. That’s one take­away from Alyssa Katz’s new book The Influ­ence Machine: The U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce and the Cor­po­rate Cap­ture of Amer­i­can Life , an enlight­en­ing his­to­ry of the trans­for­ma­tion of the orga­ni­za­tion from its roots as a cen­tral com­mit­tee of busi­ness lead­ers pro­posed by Pres­i­dent Taft to serve as his advi­sors to the elec­toral, legal and media mer­ce­nary that today pro­tects some of the U.S.‘s most vicious­ly destruc­tive cor­po­ra­tions from any gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion. The book fol­lows the Cham­ber down cam­paign trails, into court­rooms and out to its hun­dreds of world­wide out­posts — and doc­u­ments the heavy dam­age to inter­na­tion­al work­ers, con­sumers and the envi­ron­ment along the way.

Katz shows that while the Cham­ber has sharp­ened itself over the 20th cen­tu­ry into a dan­ger­ous polit­i­cal instru­ment for cap­i­tal, it has also been con­stant­ly plagued by its own weak­ness­es, lim­i­ta­tions and crises — some­times as a result of the extrem­ist posi­tions it rou­tine­ly takes. I spoke with Katz recent­ly via tele­phone about her new book.

Let’s start with a gen­er­al descrip­tion of the Cham­ber of Com­merce. Who makes up the Cham­ber, and why would a cor­po­ra­tion decide to join it?

​The Cham­ber of Com­merce is a busi­ness trade asso­ci­a­tion and any busi­ness can join. The Cham­ber claims more than 3 mil­lion mem­bers, and the major­i­ty of those are in fact mem­bers of their local Cham­bers of Com­merce. Those Cham­bers are in turn mem­bers of the nation­al fed­er­a­tion, but the U.S. Cham­ber counts them as mem­bers. But in fact the core mem­ber­ship of the Cham­ber is ​a fair­ly small num­ber of businesses​ that con­tribute a fair­ly large amount of mon­ey — name­ly a few dozen ​that ​con­tribute more than half of the bud­get, and​ about 1,500 that are con­tribut­ing pret­ty close to 94​ or 95​% ​of the total. So while it’s a very diverse group of busi­ness­es, the orga­ni­za­tion is real­ly skewed toward serv­ing the largest of those who con­tribute most generously.

And what does the Cham­ber do for these corporations?

The Cham­ber real­ly works from four fronts. One is as a pure lob­by­ing orga­ni­za­tion. The Cham­ber is the biggest and most active in all of Wash­ing­ton. Over the past 15 years or so, it has spent more than a bil­lion dol­lars on lob­by­ing. If the lob­by­ing does­n’t suc­ceed, the Cham­ber has a whole lit­i­ga­tion unit that will go to court, up to the Supreme Court, to block unwant­ed legislation.

Also, the Cham­ber is very involved in the reg­u­la­to­ry process, fight­ing reg­u­la­tion it doesn’t want. Late­ly, it has tar­get­ed the EPA and the Oba­ma Administration’s green­house gas reg­u­la­tions and pow­er plant regulations.

And final­ly, you have an elec­tion and cam­paign appa­ra­tus. The Cham­ber spends tens of mil­lions of dol­lars every cycle on Con­gres­sion­al races to secure seats for friend­ly and loy­al mem­bers of Con­gress — almost all of them Republican.

The orga­ni­za­tion is basi­cal­ly a lob­by­ist for hire that reach­es into oth­er are­nas of pow­er to set the pol­i­cy agen­da for the nation in areas of cen­tral con­cern for its members.

Now it isn’t like you sign up and pay dues and the Cham­ber does all this stuff for you. Major busi­ness­es hire the Cham­ber to car­ry out very par­tic­u­lar leg­isla­tive or oth­er projects to change poli­cies in ways that have big con­se­quences for Amer­i­can con­sumers, Amer­i­can work­ers, inter­na­tion­al work­ers, the envi­ron­ment, and con­sumer regulations.

Non-prof­it trade groups like the Cham­ber do not have to dis­close their donors. They are pro­tect­ed by Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice rules that gov­ern what they call social wel­fare orga­ni­za­tions. Under this cov­er, ​the Cham­ber can take large con­tri­bu­tions from com­pa­nies that want par­tic­u­lar out­comes in Wash­ing­ton, but do not want to be exposed pub­licly to their cus­tomers and in the polit­i­cal are­na to scruti­ny for their actions.

You men­tioned the role the Cham­ber plays in elec­tions. Can you talk more about how you see this play­ing out in 2016?

The Cham­ber has been very instru­men­tal in alter­ing elec­tion law to allow a greater cor­po­rate role in elec­tions and has in many ways led the way in send­ing anony­mous and unlim­it­ed con­tri­bu­tions from com­pa­nies. Amer­i­cans for Pros­per­i­ty [a con­ser­v­a­tive advo­ca­cy group found­ed by Charles and David Koch] and Amer­i­can Cross­roads [Karl Rove’s super PAC] are all fol­low­ing a play­book the Cham­ber took a lead in writing.

Real­ly, the water­shed year for the Cham­ber in its elec­tion spend­ing was in 2010. What they dis­closed to the Fed­er­al Elec­tion Com­mis­sion was $33 mil­lion for 2010, but it seems like there’s a lot of fund­ing that the Cham­ber fun­nels through oth­er orga­ni­za­tions that we don’t know about. They put this mon­ey into con­test­ed races, where Democ­rats were in ​“pur­ple” dis­tricts or polled with­in some nar­row gap with the Repub­li­can chal­lenger. It proved very successful.

We have no direct evi­dence of coor­di­na­tion with Repub­li­can Par­ty — that would be ille­gal — but clear­ly their spend­ing was in sync with oth­er inde­pen­dent groups and with the Repub­li­can strat­e­gy to cap­ture the majority.

In 2016, we’re now at a very inter­est­ing point. The Cham­ber has suc­ceed­ed, along with allied out­side spend­ing groups, in secur­ing a very sol­id Repub­li­can major­i­ty in the House and a fair­ly sol­id major­i­ty in the Sen­ate. Oth­er out­side spend­ing groups, par­tic­u­lar­ly those asso­ci­at­ed with the Koch broth­ers, have real­ly suc­ceed­ed in get­ting can­di­dates fur­ther to the right of the Cham­ber into a bunch of seats. The rise of a Tea Par­ty fac­tion in Con­gress is mak­ing life dif­fi­cult for the Cham­ber and for its allies in Repub­li­can lead­er­ship. They are a major imped­i­ment to things like infra­struc­ture invest­ment, the renew­al of the export/​import bank, and oth­er agen­da items that are very impor­tant to the Chamber.

So we’re see­ing in 2016 the Cham­ber mobi­liz­ing to pos­si­bly chal­lenge Tea Par­ty-type incum­bents in pri­maries to get rid of them and get more busi­ness-friend­ly can­di­dates in there.

The his­to­ry of the orga­ni­za­tion you pro­vide in your book is fas­ci­nat­ing. You talk about how the Cham­ber spent much of the 20th cen­tu­ry fight­ing Com­mu­nism, in effect start­ing McCarthy­ism in the 1930s even before McCarthy him­self. They even trained 150,000 busi­ness­men to be essen­tial­ly a cadre of pro-busi­ness, anti­com­mu­nist mil­i­tants ​“to make sure cap­i­tal­ism … won the 1960 elec­tions.” Do you think the Cham­ber’s attacks on the Left have con­tributed to their suc­cess today?

We saw a mid-20th Cen­tu­ry effort to tar­get com­mu­nism, but remem­ber this is dur­ing the same era in which we first saw the New Deal and the Great Soci­ety. You have busi­ness mak­ing these efforts, cer­tain­ly legit­imiz­ing McCarthy­ism and anti-com­mu­nism, in part out of a lot of fear of what labor would do, even with­in the con­straints of Taft-Hart­ley and oth­er laws. They were con­cerned that labor mil­i­tants and mobi­liza­tions would have a neg­a­tive effect on their oper­a­tions. It obvi­ous­ly had very, very dev­as­tat­ing impacts for indi­vid­u­als who end­ed up being tar­get­ed by Con­gress, being tar­get­ed by their com­pa­nies. And it clear­ly had a neg­a­tive impact on labor orga­niz­ing and left move­ments, that’s unques­tion­able. McCarthy­ism and the Cham­ber legit­imized that.

That said, after McCarthy­ism was the rise of an incred­i­ble wave of 1960s, 1970s advo­ca­cy and activism with a lot of sup­port from Wash­ing­ton. You had the whole Ralph Nad­er-led and ‑inspired con­sumer move­ment, the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment, labor hang­ing in there and grow­ing. You had an envi­ron­ment in which its pow­er in Wash­ing­ton was grow­ing, and in that moment, the pen­du­lum was swing­ing in favor of a stronger reg­u­la­to­ry state. Gov­ern­ment real­ly oper­at­ed in the pub­lic inter­est in a clas­sic sense. The Cham­ber was pret­ty pow­er­less at that time.

We’ve now again seen this pen­du­lum swing back towards busi­ness­es, which have react­ed with a vengeance to reverse these envi­ron­men­tal, labor and con­sumer gains. It’s only because the advo­cates and their allies in Con­gress and the pub­lic were large­ly sup­port­ive of the strong­ly reg­u­la­to­ry state to pro­tect health and safe­ty that we end­ed up see­ing this backlash.

In the book you talk about how the Cham­ber built up its cur­rent four-front strat­e­gy by pick­ing up tac­tics from its oppo­nents, start­ing with those ​‘60s and ​‘70s labor and social move­ments, and ​“mim­ic­k­ing and out­do­ing” them.

​The most obvi­ous exam­ple was how Tom Don­ahue, the CEO of the Cham­ber and the leader of its trans­for­ma­tion into this polit­i­cal machine, first vis­it­ed the Cham­ber in the 1970s and cre­at­ed Cit­i­zen’s Choice. It was a mem­ber­ship group for pro-busi­ness advo­ca­cy, an ear­ly exam­ple of astro­turf­ing. It was a very delib­er­ate response to the con­sumer move­ment and groups that had risen in Wash­ing­ton, par­tic­u­lar­ly Pub­lic Cit­i­zen cre­at­ed by Ralph Nad­er and allies. It start­ed build­ing mem­ber­ship lists, putting out newsletters.

The Cham­ber very smart­ly took a lot of the play­book of how the move­ments of the ​‘60s and ​‘70s were able to win polit­i­cal power.

But even as the Cham­ber was find­ing its most use­ful mix of polit­i­cal strate­gies, your book comes back to the lim­i­ta­tions and weak­ness­es that are built into the Chamber’s machin­ery. You talk about the ​“tan­gle of para­dox­es” that actu­al­ly under­mine the Cham­ber and keep it from being as big and scary of a shad­ow orga­ni­za­tion as it wants to be.​

I think we’ve seen this play out in a lot of the more high-pro­file con­tro­ver­sies that the Cham­ber has been involved with in the last few years. The Cham­ber takes funds from par­tic­u­lar cor­po­rate inter­ests — when we do know who the fun­ders are, it’s over­whelm­ing­ly com­pa­nies whose prod­ucts cause col­lat­er­al or, like in the case of tobac­co, direct dam­age to the pub­lic — where the com­pa­ny knows that they can­not jus­ti­fy actions that they desire to expand their mar­ket. So they hire the Cham­ber to reha­bil­i­tate the issue and claim that what­ev­er agen­da item they advo­cate for is, in fact, in the inter­ests of all busi­ness, not just their par­tic­u­lar industry.

So you have oth­er busi­ness­es that say, wait a minute, you’re killing peo­ple — we don’t want to be part of this orga­ni­za­tion killing peo­ple. These kinds of con­flicts end up real­ly dam­ag­ing the Chamber’s cred­i­bil­i­ty as an advo­cate for busi­ness when it’s so ready to use its name and pow­er to advo­cate for par­tic­u­lar indus­tries’ interests.

We saw this with the Chamber’s fight ver­sus cap-and-trade leg­is­la­tion in Con­gress a few years ago, and now with its ongo­ing efforts to fight EPA reg­u­la­tions on green­house gas­es and on coal-fire pow­er plants. The Cham­ber is mobi­liz­ing pret­ty aggres­sive­ly on both of those fronts, and you have a lot of Cham­ber mem­bers hav­ing to put them­selves out there to the pub­lic, sign pledges, and be part of oth­er orga­ni­za­tions that are say­ing they are tak­ing steps to stop cli­mate change.

So these com­pa­nies are caught between the Cham­ber and their own pledges. And then their cus­tomers, board mem­bers, and envi­ron­men­tal groups ask, ​“What the heck are you doing as a mem­ber of this group that exists to lob­by in favor of green­house gas emis­sions on behalf of secret donors?” Envi­ron­men­tal­ists have been able to infer that it’s like­ly coal-relat­ed com­pa­nies, like rail­roads that ship a lot of coal, or pow­er com­pa­nies that have a lot of coal-use pow­er plants that are fund­ing the Chamber’s cam­paigns against envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions. But we can only guess because the Cham­ber’s donors are secret.

What role does the Cham­ber and its affil­i­ate orga­ni­za­tions play in the inter­na­tion­al econ­o­my? I found this chap­ter in your book real­ly inter­est­ing, espe­cial­ly how the Cham­ber affects labor in coun­tries like China.

The Cham­ber has — in addi­tion to affil­i­at­ed local orga­ni­za­tions in the US — affil­i­at­ed Cham­bers around the world. They’re inde­pen­dent orga­ni­za­tions, but they’re also mem­bers of the U.S. Cham­ber in an inter­na­tion­al fed­er­a­tion. These are very often viewed by polit­i­cal lead­ers in those coun­tries as, if not rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment, then the barom­e­ter of what Amer­i­can busi­ness­es are seek­ing and of Amer­i­can poli­cies abroad.

The Cham­ber is more active in some coun­tries than oth­ers. Chi­na is the exam­ple I focus pri­mar­i­ly on in my book. The Chi­nese gov­ern­ment rewrote its rules and put for­ward pro­posed labor laws that would have, in their ini­tial form, pre­vent­ed the use of temp labor for any extend­ed peri­od of time. Once a Chi­nese com­pa­ny had a temp in its employ, it would have to give them a job, and the work­ers would have var­i­ous pro­tec­tions against firing.

This caused enor­mous push­back from Amer­i­can busi­ness­es. Their main vehi­cles were one of the two Amer­i­can Cham­ber orga­ni­za­tions in Chi­na. There were also enter­pris­es in Chi­na lob­by­ing against these rules. The rules went back into redraft­ing and came out with much wider clear­ance for com­pa­nies, domes­tic or inter­na­tion­al, to use tem­po­rary labor in Chi­na and nev­er have to hire those work­ers as employ­ees. Temp com­pa­nies, like the major glob­al temp work­er agency Man­pow­er, now see Chi­na as a huge growth market.

It’s amaz­ing. It’s a ​“pro-work­er” state that his­tor­i­cal­ly a lot of work­er pro­tec­tions, and most of the oth­er inter­na­tion­al busi­ness play­ers were com­fort­able with the work­er pro­tec­tions because they were pret­ty equiv­a­lent to what Europe had. But because the proposed​ rules did not offer near com­plete free­dom to use temp labor, the AmChams — the Amer­i­can Cham­bers of Com­merce — real­ly aggres­sive­ly lob­bied and got their way. Labor laws like the pro­posed temp law in Chi­na could be stronger than ours and help ele­vate Amer­i­can work­ers. But instead, the AmCham is push­ing to weak­en those laws and mov­ing the pow­er of work­ers’ rights down­wards glob­al­ly through that action.

How has the Cham­ber more direct­ly helped weak­en unions and cut into their mem­ber­ship here in the U.S.?

Gosh, let me count the ways. I give one seem­ing­ly triv­ial exam­ple in the book, but which I think is such a clas­sic Cham­ber thing since it’s total­ly under the radar for the pub­lic, and even peo­ple in the labor move­ment didn’t real­ize this was going on, but it has had a big impact.

The Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board, not that long ago, sought to ​require notices in work­places that said you have the right to form a union and you have the right to orga­nize with­out retal­i­a­tion. The Cham­ber and the South Car­oli­na Cham­ber of Com­merce went to court to block this reg­u­la­tion on a tech­ni­cal­i­ty. There was no way they could chal­lenge the reg­u­la­tion on its mer­its, but the Cham­ber was able to say the admin­is­tra­tion did­n’t fol­low Admin­is­tra­tive Pro­ce­dure Act, which is this very arcane fed­er­al law that dic­tates how reg­u­la­tions get promulgated.

They were suc­cess­ful in get­ting this side­lined. This may seem like a very small thing, but across every Amer­i­can work­place, it has very big reper­cus­sions and helps main­tain an uneven play­ing field in favor of employ­ers against unions.

The Cham­ber end­ed up hold­ing the line against the Employ­ee Free Choice Act in 2009. It was a bill that would have enabled much eas­i­er work­er orga­niz­ing by facil­i­tat­ing card check orga­niz­ing. This was intro­duced at a time when you had Demo­c­ra­t­ic major­i­ty in both houses.

There was a real chance this could have become a law, but the Cham­ber and its busi­ness allies were instru­men­tal in keep­ing enough poten­tial sup­port­ers and Democ­rats afraid of sup­port­ing the act. Again, a very sim­ple straight­for­ward mea­sure which would have made labor orga­niz­ing much more fea­si­ble, didn’t get to a vote in a cli­mate where the Cham­ber was prepar­ing to spend a lot of mon­ey to attack mem­bers of Con­gress who didn’t vote its way.

So giv­en the fact that Democ­rats and Repub­li­cans are both unable or unwill­ing to push back against the Cham­ber as the Cham­ber attempts to under­mine reg­u­la­tion, what role could the labor move­ment play to enforce this reg­u­la­tion of big corporations?

All you can do is change the bal­ance of pow­er in Con­gress. With the Chamber’s spend­ing for 2016, I think the only way to deal with it is huge mobi­liza­tions with labor and oth­er clas­sic Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty con­stituen­cies — and to some extent ele­ments of the Tea Par­ty as well that have com­mon cause against crony cap­i­tal­ism and favoritism by Con­gress for business.

And you need can­di­dates like Bernie Sanders — which I hope we’ll have in some upcom­ing Con­gres­sion­al pri­maries, if not gen­er­al elec­tions — who can actu­al­ly moti­vate vot­ers to come out, and not just the same old can­di­dates who aren’t going to rep­re­sent people’s interests.