New business advocacy model is needed for R.I.

PBN Staff

04/20/2009

In 1912, President Taft, a progressive Republican, believed local businesses across the country could more effectively raise everyone’s standard of living if they were championed in Washington, D.C., by a national organization. He encouraged various local commercial and trade organizations to form what we now call the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Taft’s idea was to share business information and access to opportunities.
Then World War I came and went and, in 1918, a sharp post-war recession, which, combined with the influx of labor from returning troops, resulted in the highest U.S. unemployment figures ever.
Meanwhile, the Russian Revolution and civil war created a fearful capital class. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its state and local members retrenched to defend capital interests from the threat of financial meltdown and socialism.
In 1920, a St. Louis banker named Henry Giessenbier founded the United States Junior Chamber to help young men from obscure backgrounds learn and share practical business skills that would help them get a job or perhaps become entrepreneurs on their own. They were called JCs, or more commonly “Jaycees.”
The movement spread quickly through the Roaring 20s, fanned by economic growth, which created a steady demand for business skills.
Still, the U.S. Chamber and its state and local members were hostile to the Jaycees. The idea of educating young immigrants, ex-GIs and farmer’s sons to the subtleties of business didn’t catch on until the end of the Depression.
After World War II, the GI Bill, which sent returning soldiers to college, replaced the Jaycees’ mentoring educational mission altogether. By then, the U.S. Chamber had become a handmaiden of our military-industrial complex, and global American hegemony.
Today, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents about 2,800 state and local chambers. Many chambers, such as our 2,600-member Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, are held in high regard.
According to its Web site, the U.S. Chamber and its state and local chambers are:
• Against environmental regulation
• Pro-Social Security “reform”
• Pro-ANWR drilling • Pro-offshore oil drilling
• Pro-nuclear power
• Pro-health savings accounts
• Pro-globalization/free trade
• Pro-energy source diversity
• Against tax increases on businesses
• Against raising the minimum wage
These are not values espoused by my Rhode Island neighbors and friends who own businesses. These are values of publicly traded corporations battling it out for growth and dominance in a global economy.
Stockholders of Rhode Island’s blue-chip, publicly held companies such as CVS Caremark, Amica, Hasbro, and all the others, are not expected to be focused on the health of Narragansett Bay, or with Rhode Island workers being exposed to toxic substances and hazardous chemicals, or with Rhode Island low-income citizens paying higher Medicaid copayments. Stockholders are concerned with maximizing the value of their investment. That is why those publicly held corporations exist.
Their executives may sit on the board of Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, but their agenda is the agenda of U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In fact, as officers of those publicly traded corporations, it is their legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value every legal way they can. And that is what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce champions.
One rarely hears about the Jaycees anymore. But in their heyday, they were a true challenge to the status quo. They expanded business with more individual incentive, initiative and opportunity. Most importantly, Jaycees were oriented toward their local communities and economies.
Today, Rhode Island desperately needs a new business-advocacy organization, one that unabashedly champions the power of local commerce and entrepreneurs to transform our economy and enrich community life. This organization would encourage building community business assets such as independent retail, sustainable agriculture and zero-waste manufacturing.
These are the keys for building Rhode Island community wealth in the 21st century, for the next generation and the next.