Bill McKibben, Kossack, author, and co-founder of 350.org, a global campaign to fight climate change writes the definitive short history of the Chamber of Commerce.

From the outside, you'd think the U.S. Chamber of Commerce must know what it's doing. It's got a huge building right next to the White House. It spends more money on political campaigning than the Republican and Democratic National Committees combined. It spends more money on lobbying that the next five biggest lobbyists combined. And yet it has an unbroken record of error stretching back almost to its founding.

It starts with the New Deal. The Chamber "accused Roosevelt of attempting to 'Sovietize' America; the chamber adopted a resolution 'opposing the president's entire legislative package.'" Opposition to FDR continued, shockingly, through the Lend-Lease program, designed to supply the allies with critical material to fight the Germans, and which brought a tremendous boon to American manufacturing. But more, the Chamber opposed American involvement in the war, the war which "triggered the greatest boom in America's economic history."

But it's precisely the kind of blinkered short-sightedness that has led the U.S. Chamber of Commerce astray over and over and over again. They spent the 1950s helping Joe McCarthy root out communists in the trade unions; in the 1960s they urged the Senate to "reject as unnecessary" the idea of Medicare; in the 1980s they campaigned against a "terrible 20" burdensome rules on business, including new licensing requirements for nuclear plants and "various mine safety rules."

Now, of course, the Chamber fights everything from healthcare reform to environmental action. It's in the environmental realm, McKibben argues, that the Chamber is shooting American business in the foot, yet again.

If there's a modern equivalent of World War II, of course, it's the fight against global warming. Again a majority of Americans want firm action, because they understand the planet has never faced a bigger challenge -- but that action's been completely blocked in Washington, and the U.S. Chamber is a major reason why. They've lobbied against every effort to cut carbon, going so far as to insist that the EPA should stay out of the fight because, if the planet warmed, "populations can acclimatize via a range of range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations." .... But that doesn't mean that business is a force for evil. Though the U.S. Chamber claims to represent all of American business, their constituency is really that handful of huge dinosaur companies that would rather lobby than adapt. Around America, the local chambers of commerce are filled with millions of small businesses that in fact do what capitalists are supposed to do: adapt to new conditions, thrive on change, show the nimbleness and dexterity that distinguish them from lumbering monopolies.... That's why thousands and thousands of American businesses concerned about our energy future have already joined a new campaign, declaring that "The US Chamber Doesn't Speak for Me." They want to draw a line between themselves and the hard-right ideological ineptitude that is the U.S. Chamber. Some of those businesses are tiny -- insurance brokers in southern California, coffee roasters in Georgia, veterinarians in Oklahoma -- and some are enormous. Apple Computer, for instance, which has... a pretty good record of seeing into the future.

Apple vs. the Chamber? Yeah, I'd place my bets on the former for predicting the profitable course of action for the future. And the profitable course of action for the future is in actually securing a future, which is what fighting climate change is all about. There's also a lot of money to be made and jobs created in building a green future. The Chamber, however, is much more interested in fighting change, and they've unfortunately got the money to do it. To wit, $132 million spent on lobbying Congress and $32 million in buying a new Congress in 2010, alone.