FPI / August 21, 2023

Corporate WATCH

Commentary by Joe Schaeffer

The total transformation of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce into an official spoke within the globalist machinery of tyranny has been sealed in the usual manner: Via the exchange of cold, hard cash.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise. The once highly influential organization that spent decades riding the trusty horse of “free market” economic “conservatism” to great effect within the ranks of the pre-2016 Republican Party has now comfortably settled into its natural orbit: That inhabited by moneyed elites pining for an internationalist world order. The time for pretense appears to be over – any lingering attempts to mask the alignment are being cast aside.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this month doled out a crisp $635,000 grant to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation for “general operating support.” Toss in a $300,000 grant issued in October 2022 for a “small business fellowship” and that makes just shy of $1 million bestowed upon the Chamber by the notorious globalist “philanthropist” within the past year.

A search of the Gates Foundation website reveals only one other grant for the Chamber, made back in 2007. At $500,000, it was substantial. Still, what accounts for the 15-year gap? And why has the funding suddenly resumed?

Gates and the Chamber have certainly hashed out a chummy public relationship in recent years. Gates was a featured speaker at the group’s 2021 Global Forum on Economic Recovery. A summary of his talk reveals the extent of the Chamber’s commitment to transnationalism.

In a post on Gates’s address on its website, the Chamber highlights his call for America to be an active part of a worldwide effort to fight climate change similar to the monolithic measures unleashed during the coronavirus pandemic hysteria in 2020:
 

Last year, the United States and other global governments invested heavily in economic recovery and vaccine development. Now, Gates said, they need to make the same investments to conquer climate change and bring the premium cost of being environmentally cognitive down.

“I absolutely believe with innovation that every one of the categories has extra costs for being green... can be brought down,” said Gates.

“Now we need to use all the tools here; [research and development] for the early-stage venture capital for first commercialization,” Gates affirmed. “But then some degree of purchase requirements or tax credits in the money from philanthropists and companies to create a market, to try to get that volume up and create a learning curve.”

In June 2020, Gates and his then-wife Melinda sat down for an interview with the Chamber that celebrates a global corporate-governance approach to harnessing Big Pharma in the fight against COVID. The larger implications are thoroughly alarming:
 

The Solution Rests With a Coordinated Global Response

Adding to their optimism, Melinda Gates said, “We have never seen the companies come together in this way.” What we are seeing for the first time, she continues, is world and business leaders thinking ahead about manufacturing in terms of what it means for the world, not just their own parts of the world.

Meaningful efforts uniting world leaders, from the European Commission to the Vaccine Alliance, means money and other resources coming together and at the ready as soon as the vaccine is, and the ability to purchase it for the rest of the world will follow.

A look at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Governing Board is telling. The first name one sees is Diana Cantor, the uber-connected (former Goldman Sachs VP) wife of ex-Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Eric famously lost his seat in a shocking 2014 primary upset just as he was poised to become House Speaker.

As WorldTribune.com documented at the time, Cantor held so much contempt for the constituents he took for granted that he coordinated with progressive pro-illegal alien activists to perpetrate a false-flag operation intended to shore up his GOP base support. Illinois Democrat Rep. Luis Gutierrez, one of the most fiercely pro-illegal elected officials on Capitol Hill, made a highly unusual trip to Richmond, part of Cantor’s congressional district, to denounce him as the number one enemy of immigration reform at the very time that the notorious RINO was trying to send that message to Republican voters back home. One year earlier, Gutierrez and Cantor had made a public tour together in support of immigration reform. There is very good reason to suspect the stunt went much further than that. As we wrote in 2014:
 

An El Salvador native who said in a speech that he fought U.S. military forces and works for an activist group with reported ties to a communist guerilla organization that killed American soldiers in the 1980s met with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s legislative director last September and then mysteriously popped up repeatedly during campaign season to peg Cantor as a leading foe of congressional immigration reform.

The man in question appeared in public alongside Gutierrez when he came to Richmond to helpfully speak against Cantor. Fast forward nine years and Diana Cantor is sitting on the governing board of a U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation that is steadfast in its support for massive immigration and the normalization of millions of illegal aliens residing here today.

In 2022, the Chamber became a founding member of the Alliance for a New Immigration Consensus. You’d be hard-pressed to find a “bipartisan” organization more stridently opposed to the interests of working Americans. From the release announcing the launch:
 

ANIC builds on two pieces of work that took shape over the course of 2021. Powerful efforts were made by a range of immigrant rights, labor and progressive organizations urging the White House and Congressional Democrats to include reforms in the Build Back Better budget reconciliation package. Simultaneously, the Center-Right Working Group (CRWG), consisting of a range of industry, faith and advocacy organizations, worked to build support for bipartisan legislative solutions that provide permanent legal protections and other reforms for Dreamers, TPS recipients, and agricultural workers.

Among the cheap labor-obsessed corporate and “center-right” organizations listed along with the Chamber as members of the alliance are the George W. Bush Institute, the Idaho Dairymen’s Association, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Retail Federation.

As with the public Gates funding, the Chamber’s keen desire to swell the pool of vulnerable and easily exploitable foreign workers inside the U.S. is now out in the open. In a remarkably forthright interview conducted with the Chamber in July, Microsoft Senior Corporate Counsel, U.S. Immigration Barbara Leen comes clean on the Big Tech goliath’s endeavors in this area. Yes, Microsoft, the company co-founded by Bill Gates, has a legal executive whose job responsibilities solely involve getting more immigrant workers into America:
 

In my role as Senior Corporate Counsel, I have the privilege of supporting Microsoft’s visa dependent employees in their U.S. immigration journey. In addition to my direct legal work, I also work with business coalitions and our U.S. government affairs team to advocate for immigration policy solutions to improve the complex immigration system.

Acquiring more and more foreign labor is the name of the game at Microsoft, Leen makes clear:
 

The United States’ renown as a magnet for global talent is not something to be taken lightly, or for granted. Highly skilled immigrants are an essential part of our country’s innovative capacity, competitive advantage, and economic strength. Nevertheless, continued efforts to decrease access to immigration benefits threaten the country’s ability to attract and retain global talent...

The United States also risks losing hundreds of thousands of DREAMers – undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. Most DREAMers regard the United States as their home and contribute tremendously to their communities and the U.S. economy. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the temporary measure allowing DREAMers to remain in the United States and work, is in jeopardy, and a permanent solution allowing for a path to citizenship is needed.

As always, it’s interesting to see the various dots connect. Bill Gates, Eric Cantor, Progressive Radicals, Major Corporate America, Illegal Immigration, Big Tech. America Firsters have long been aware of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s abject betrayal of the citizens of this nation, and now even mainstream “conservative” Republicans finally seem to have caught on. Big-box conserva-flavored newspaper The New York Post reported in May 2022 that the Chamber had lost massive influence with Republicans on the Hill due to its unalloyed opposition to measures to rein in Big Tech:
 

“The Chamber of Commerce takes a lot of money from Big Tech and so they diligently do their bidding,” said Mike Davis, a former top aide for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). “Today’s conservatives understand that corporate power is oftentimes even more oppressive than government power.”

[...]

There is a perception among Republicans that Big Tech firms effectively control the group, backed up by the fact that executives from Meta and Microsoft sit on the Chamber’s board. In March, the Chamber’s government affairs team moved to a Capitol Hill office building also occupied by Google....

And so now the Chamber quietly takes its place within the ranks of those who unapologetically talk of the obsolescence of sovereign nation states. Accepting nearly $1 million from a man who wants to inject the world with deadly experimental gene therapies misleadingly labeled as “vaccines,” block out the sun and change the very nature of food does not mark a dramatic change of course for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It is merely irrefutable confirmation of what this elitist corporate cabal was about all along.

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