I’m on the board of the Mountain View (California) Chamber of Commerce. I’ve been a proud member of the Chamber for 8 years and on the board for 5. In Mountain View, we’re lucky to not only have some of the best and most entrepreneurial small businesses around, but also some of the bigger names in high tech: Google, Hewlett Packard, Synopsis, Intuit, and Microsoft. And in spite of a struggling economy where local chambers across the U.S. are really struggling, ours keeps chugging along nicely. Morale is positive, the excitement level high. In short, it’s good to be here.
A few years ago, I started a whisper campaign among my colleagues to drop our membership to the U.S. Chamber. As a progressive, I didn’t like what the U.S. Chamber was doing with respect to Climate legislation. Since then, it has really become clear that they are a dishonest lobbyist for the Republican platform. And they are liars. Remember a when they claimed to have 3,000,000 members? They were counting the members of their members. So even though we (the Mountain View Chamber) should only have been counted as one member to the US Chamber, they counted our entire membership of over 700 businesses as member. That’s some padding!
Even though I’ve been trying for a couple years, I couldn’t seem to get this on the agenda of our meetings. Most people that have heard of any of the myriad controversies surrounding the US Chamber, simply didn’t care enough to elevate it to any type of importance. But recently, our Membership Director announced that we have lost one prospective new member and one current member due to the fact that we have had a lengthy membership with the US Chamber. When that information came out last month, I was finally able to put this subject on the calendar.
I’m also the Treasurer of the organization. With the belt tightening that we’re undergoing as we prepare next fiscal year’s budget, it was an easy sell to the Board this morning to discontinue our membership. It was an unanimous vote. Effective July 1st of this year, the US Chamber of Commerce will have one fewer (or is it 700 fewer) members.
Perhaps I’ll write them a letter to tell them their policies are costing them revenue.