What is the Kansas Chamber of Commerce Hiding?
” The answer is, “The Truth”.
Many high-profile disasters such as the Challenger explosion, the Deepwater Horizon debacle, and the Chevrolet Corvair which asphyxiated its passengers, can be traced to a failure of ethics. For Kansans who value people’s rights, healthcare, the environment, fiscal responsibility, lower food taxes, fair courts, and good schools – the 2021/2022 legislative session was an unmitigated disaster. The ethics failure that made it all possible was that of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce (KCC). In the 2020 election, they used unethical tactics to purge the legislature of moderates, leaving a supermajority of Republicans and far right extremists.
Two core values of the KCC are to be ethical in all that the Chamber advocates for and does, and to be passionate about the economic growth of Kansas and its people. However, the KCC is not passionate about the economic prosperity of all Kansans or all businesses as the KCC does not represent the small businesses in Kansas well. Those businesses are embedded in their communities and tax cuts take money away from things they value: roads, schools, hospitals, healthcare, and social services. This caused many local chambers of commerce to become disgusted with the KCC. As the Junction City Chamber of Commerce explained: “So when the Kansas Chamber decides to endorse a tax policy that only benefits very large industries… it just stands to reason that that tax policy is not a fit for most of their members.”
Under the leadership of CEO Alan Cobb, the KCC has increasingly aligned itself with Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which favors the prosperity of the already wealthy. That is not surprising, as Mr. Cobb once managed Government Affairs for Koch Industries and he later founded the AFP organization in Kansas. Not only does the KCC now favor the wealthy, but it has acquired questionable ethics.
After the 2020 elections, Don Hineman, past Majority Leader of the Kansas House, wrote an article, What is the Kansas Chamber of Commerce Hiding? Alan Cobb had recently claimed the Chamber’s political endorsements are 100% fact-based. Representative Hineman disagreed, writing “That is not the whole truth, and in some cases, it is an outright lie. Besides endorsements, the KCC sends out postcards that demonize the incumbent legislators they want to defeat. One of their most damaging postcards claims the targeted legislator voted to ‘retroactively raise our state taxes by $1.2 billion’. The card implies that, if re-elected, they would vote to raise your taxes. That is wrong, but it is only part of the story. That $1.2 billion tax increase, which passed in 2017, was deemed necessary by more than 2/3 of the Kansas Senate and 2/3 of the Kansas House. It was passed to correct earlier tax cuts that had devastated the state’s finances.”
He continued, “The state would have gone broke unless the tax increase passed. Most of the Republican Leadership and many staunch Republicans voted for the bill. However, the KCC is not targeting ALL the legislators who voted for the tax increase. The KCC’s leaders have mastered the craft of appearing unbiased and truthful when they are not. They are selectively targeting the independent-minded incumbents who do not obediently go along with whatever the Chamber wants.” My constituents received this card, even though I wasn’t even in the legislature then. So much for “100% fact-based”.
One thing the KCC really wanted was an additional tax cut for corporations who had repatriated intellectual property hidden offshore, even though those corporations had already received a lower Federal tax rate. The Republican leadership was happy to comply. They passed a tax bill which would have cost the state about $600 million over the next three years, most of that going to large corporations. The Governor vetoed it. Several moderate Republicans joined the Democrats in sustaining the veto, even though they had received severe arm twisting from the Republican leadership. One of the moderates spoke on the House floor, “We teach our children not to be bullies, yet the leadership is trying to bully us into voting for this bad bill “. He went on to explain how people had died on roads in his district because there wasn’t money to repair them, and how the state needed many things it couldn’t afford because of tax previous cuts. After the veto was upheld, the disappointed corporations proceeded to “Postcard” that legislator, flooding his district with postcards attacking him, until he had had enough and resigned in the middle of his term, citing stress as the reason.
In the next election, the KCC and AFP ran a smear campaign against many of the moderate Republicans who had voted to sustain the veto. They sent out dozens of postcards demonizing them, distorting their positions, misquoting them, and using misleading photoshopped pictures. The postcards were lies and bullying at its worst, but there was little the moderate candidates could do as political lies are considered protected speech. The negative campaigning worked, and the number of moderate Republicans in the legislature went from about thirty to just five. In the next session, the KCC got the tax cut they wanted, and Kansas is now suffering the disastrous consequences.
This article is specific to Kansas, but If your state has a chapter of Americans for Prosperity or a state Chamber of Commerce like the KCC, then you should try to to elect independent-minded legislators who will vote for legislation in the best interest of the average citizens. There is really no requirement for being a Chamber of Commerce. The Kansas City Greater Chamber of Commerce takes great pains to be sure they are not confused with the KCC.
Please note: This article was taken from one published in the Kansas Reflector at https://kansasreflector.com/2022/05/25/where-did-the-kansas-legislatures-moderates-go-the-kansas-chamber-targeted-them/.
Tags: Americans for Prosperity, CEO Alan Cobb, disasters and ethics violations, GILTI, Kansas Chamber of Commerce (KCC), offshore intellectual property, purging Kansas moderates, unethical behavior by the KCC
Posted on July 13th, 2022 at 10:26 pm
Thanks for posting this. Discouraging to see the chambers (and legislators) as a tool for the already successful businesses while ignoring start-ups and small firms.