Two weeks ago, Tom Donohue and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce brought their extreme right-wing road show to Philadelphia, only to be met by grassroots protests against their cynical attempts to block reform in health care, the financial sector, and climate policy.
Well, yesterday they tried again in San Francisco, and Bay Area residents — including small businesspeople incensed by Donohue’s claims to speak for them while simultaneously shilling for the giant megacorporations they struggle to compete with every day — weren’t having it either:
Scores of activists from environmental, labor and small-business groups took to Huntington Park and the Fairmont Hotel on Wednesday afternoon to demand the ouster of U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue over what they said is the group’s resistance to legislation on climate change, health care and workers’ rights…
“I am perplexed by the U.S. Chamber’s opposition to transitioning our economy from dirty coal and oil to a clean-energy future … from putting our national security at risk to devastating local economies,” Jonathan Kevles, senior representative of the Sierra Club’s Clean Energy Solutions Campaign, told the gathering…
“The Chamber of Commerce is so 20th century,” said Danny Kennedy, co-founder of Sungevity, a Berkeley solar energy firm. “The story of the 21st century is solving climate change, creating green-collar jobs and a clean economy. We need to kick (the chamber) into the dustbin where they belong.”
Meanwhile, Donohue’s dodgy history as a member of scandal-ridden corporate boards and determination to stand by policy proposals so right-wing that even corporate America — the very people the Chamber is supposed to represent — shuns them led Nell Minow of The Corporate Library to dub him “America’s Worst CEO”:
“He’s a terrible CEO,” she said, with her typical bluntness. “I think he is a virulent force in the field of business and corporations. I think he has hijacked capitalism on behalf of executives rather than investors.”
Why? It turns out that Donohue has served as a director of three public companies, all of which have had problems.
He’s a director of Sunrise Senior Living, which suffered from series of accounting problems, a plummeting stock price and a decision to settle shareholder litigation. Two well-respected governance groups, Risk Metrics and Proxy Governance, recommended that Donohue be voted off the board for “failing in is oversight duties,” according to Bloomberg News.
Donohue was also a director of Qwest, the telecom firm which paid $250 million to settle SEC charges that the company fraudulently booked $3.8 billion in revenue over three years, the Washington Post reported.
Finally, Donohue serves on the board of Union Pacific, where, according to Nell, the board “supported the bonuses of executives by attributing revenue from the sale of a division as operating revenue.” Donohue’s role at Union Pacific has left him open to the charge that he has a conflict of interest on the climate-change issue because the railroad carries so much coal, as Pete Altman of NRDC has said.
Said Nell: “Hey, three strikes and he’s out and he should be replaced on those boards. And he should be replaced at the chamber of commerce.”