White House adviser David Axelrod says the U.S. Chamber has some 'splaining to do. He appeared on "Face the Nation" yesterday and told Bob Schieffer that the U.S. Chamber hasn't proven that the foreign money it funneled to U.S. campaigns is "peanuts":
The fact is the Chamber has asserted that, but they won't release any information about where their money is coming from. And that's the core of the problem.
The U.S. Chamber is probably the single biggest contributor to U.S. political campaigns, and it has long championed NAFTA, CAFTA and all the trade deals that give workers the SHAFTA (as my boss, Jim Hoffa, likes to say).
The Washington Post and the New York Times, both ardent supporters of job-killing trade deals, dismiss the story about the U.S> Chamber's practice of funneling money to pro-free-trade candidates from countries like Bahrain, Egypt and India.
But ThinkProgress, the blog that originally reported the story, produced the chart above that shows how the U.S. Chamber does it.
And ThinkProgress asks two very good questions that neither the Times nor the Post thought to get answered:
How many foreign sources of funding does theU.S.Chamber have? and
Are the foreign funds being directed to the same general account that is being used to pay for partisan attack ads?
Stay tuned.
