As reported by one attendee, on June 1st of this year at the America's Future Now conference [on a panel with Roger Hickey (OurFuture.org), Mitch Stewart (Organizing for America), Anna Burger (SEIU), Deepak Bhargava (Center for Community Change) and John Podesta (Center for American Progress)], Ilyse Hogue, the Campaign Director for MoveOn stated that "Part of the progressive agenda needs to be fracturing the US Chamber." And thus began an orchestrated "corporate campaign-style" attack designed to intimidate and harass the Chamber and its members.

As the AFL-CIO has described it "Corporate campaigns swarm the target employer from every angle, great and small, with an eye toward inflicting upon the employer the death of a thousand cuts rather than a single blow." Labor unions, advocacy groups, and left-leaning columnists, publications and websites have sought to mischaracterize a variety of Chamber positions and pressured members to withdraw, while trying to intimidate, harass, and threaten our allies, members, and staff. And taking Rule 12 from Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals, which says "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions," they are personally attacking Tom Donohue and other Chamber executives.

The ultimate goal is to stop the Chamber from effectively promoting our agenda so let's look for a moment at what our agenda is: to put it quite simply we want to get jobs growing again. Over the next 10 years, our nation must create 20 million new jobs just to put the unemployed back to work and keep up with a growing population. Twenty million jobs in 10 years. Who is going to create and sustain these jobs? The government? Big Labor? Politicians in Congress and in the statehouses? Can we tax, regulate, or sue our way to those jobs? No. Only a strong private sector powered by free enterprise can do it.

That is why we have recently launched our Free Enterprise Campaign. To remind all Americans that our free enterprise system built the greatest economy the world has ever known, and is the only system that  can provide prosperity in the future. We don't define progress as the creation of massive new bureaucracies, entitlements, and deficits -- we define progress in the creation of jobs and economic growth. The question we want every Representative and Senator to ask before they cast a vote and every Administration official to answer before issuing yet another regulation is this: "What will be the economic impact?"

When it comes to the policies being pushed by unions and their progressive allies the answer to that question is clear. And that's why we're going to keep asking. We have created a page at uschamber.com/facts where we will be addressing these attacks against us. Unfortunately it looks like we will be updating it frequently, but that isn't going to stop us from representing our members, or insisting on quality legislation. The businesses who create jobs and the workers who fill them deserve nothing less.