Usted no se lo cree

Dijo el multimillonario Warren Buffet que, naturalmente, la lucha de clases existe, y que quien la hace son ellos, los súperricos, y que la están ganando. La Business Roundtable, junto a la Philanthropy Roundtable son, sin ningún género de dudas, el estado mayor de uno de los bandos en liza. El bando que, chequera en mano, va ganando por goleada. La clase dominante. Si usted no sabia donde está el poder económico estadounidense (y mundial), ahora ya lo sabe: está, o se reune, en estas dos organizaciones.

La Business Roundtable es una asociación de los primeros ejecutivos de las mayores empresas estadounidenses. El total de las empresas que representan (y poseen) emplea conjuntamente a 16 millones de personas, facturan 7,3 billones de dólares como organización sin ánimo de lucro y constituyen alrededor de un tercio del mercado de acciones de los EE.UU. Las empresas de la Business Roundtable empleaban anualmente más de 9.000 millones de dólares en ‘charitable contributions’, un eufemismo bajo el que se esconde buena parte de la financiación de actividades de promoción de la ideología y la política ultraliberal y del negacionismo climático.

Ficha técnica

Fundadores:

John Harper (ALCOA Aluminum)
Fred Borch (General Electric)

Año de fundación:

1972

Presidente:

John Engler

Miembro del consejo de Universal Forest Products
Miembro del consejo de la Annie E. Casey Foundation
Ex director de la National Association of Manufacturers

Empresas que forman parte del comité ejecutivo:

Representadas por sus presidentes:

American Express Company
AT&T
Boeing
Caesars Entertainment
Caterpillar
Dow Chemical
Eaton Corporation
ExxonMobil Corporation
General Electric
Honeywell
JPMorgan Chase
Mastercard
McGraw-Hill Companies
Proctor & Gamble
State Farm Insurance
Wal-Mart Stores
Xerox

Director:

Misión declarada:

Founded on the belief that in a pluralistic society, businesses should play an active and effective role in the formation of public policy.

Orientación económica:

Ultraliberal, singularmente antisindical y antiecologista
Una de las principales líneas de influencia consiste en evitar la legislación de control de los altos cargos por parte de los accionistas de las empresas

Agencias de PR:

Apco Worldwide
Porter Novelli

Actividades:

Origen de la financiación documentada:

Fuentes

Referencias

Ben Stein – In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning  – The New York Times, 26/11/2006 – http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html«Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare. “There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

T. Boone Pickens – Business Forum: Two Titans Square Off; How Big Business Stacks The Deck – The New York Times, 01/03/1987 – http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/01/business/business-forum-two-titans-square-off-how-big-business-stacks-the-deck.html
“In a series of hostile takeover attempts in the 1980’s, T. Boone Pickens, the founder and head of the Mesa Petroleum Company, based in Amarillo, Tex., learned a simple lesson. In each battle, as he describes it in the following excerpt from »Boone,» to be published soon by the Houghton-Mifflin Company, Mr. Pickens discovered that he was opposing not just the »entrenched management» of an individual company. Instead, he says, he was fighting an entire class of professional managers who hung together, pulling the strings of power to protect their jobs and their life styles. The nexus of this dominant class, Mr. Pickens asserts, is the Business Roundtable.”

About us – Business Roundtable – Accedido el 26/11/2012 – http://businessroundtable.org/about-us/
«Business Roundtable (BRT) is an association of chief executive officers of leading U.S. companies with more than $7.3 trillion in annual revenues and nearly 16 million employees. BRT member companies comprise nearly a third of the total value of the U.S. stock market and invest more than $150 billion annually in research and development – equal to 61 percent of U.S. private R&D spending. Our companies pay $182 billion in dividends to shareholders and generate nearly $500 billion in sales for small and medium-sized businesses annually. BRT companies give more than $9 billion a year in combined charitable contributions.»

Thomas B. Edsall – Conservatives Join Forces for Bush Plans – The Washington Post, 13/02/2005 – http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19782-2005Feb12.html
«In addition, many conservative think tanks have joined Cato in supporting Social Security privatization, recognizing that the proposal offers a rare opportunity to restructure a pillar of liberalism and the social welfare state. The Heritage Foundation, the National Center for Policy Analysis, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and such advocacy groups as the Club for Growth, Progress for America, FreedomWorks, Americans for Tax Reform and the Free Enterprise Fund are now in the middle of the fight … COMPASS [Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America’s Social Security] has hired OnPoint Advocacy to conduct grass-roots lobbying and Apco Worldwide Inc. for public relations. Tita Freeman, communications director at the Business Roundtable, said COMPASS has a budget of $15 million to $20 million, which may grow as the fight progresses.»

J. Craig Jenkins and Craig M. Eckert (2000) – The Right Turn in Economic Policy: Business Elites and the New Conservative Economics – Sociological Forum 15:307-338
“What was the role of business elites in the development of the new conservative economic policies? Corporate elite and class fraction arguments have been invoked to explain this «right turn» but have not been systematically evaluated. Combining a decision-making history with an elite background analysis of the key policy entrepreneurs behind these policies, we show that: (1) moderate conservative and ultraconservative business policy organizations (BPOs) developed the main policy proposals and inserted them on the national policy agenda against the opposition of corporate liberal BPOs; and (2) the corporate elite dominated the boards of all three policy camps while social, regional and industrial divisions accounted for policy divisions. Corporate elite theory needs to be revised to address the social, industrial and regional divisions that create policy divisions and the political pressures from below that condition the dominance of business coalitions.”

Thomas B. Edsall – Conservatives Join Forces for Bush Plans – The Washington Post, 13/02/2005 – http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19782-2005Feb12.html
«In addition, many conservative think tanks have joined Cato in supporting Social Security privatization, recognizing that the proposal offers a rare opportunity to restructure a pillar of liberalism and the social welfare state. The Heritage Foundation, the National Center for Policy Analysis, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and such advocacy groups as the Club for Growth, Progress for America, FreedomWorks, Americans for Tax Reform and the Free Enterprise Fund are now in the middle of the fight … COMPASS [Coalition for the Modernization and Protection of America’s Social Security] has hired OnPoint Advocacy to conduct grass-roots lobbying and Apco Worldwide Inc. for public relations. Tita Freeman, communications director at the Business Roundtable, said COMPASS has a budget of $15 million to $20 million, which may grow as the fight progresses.»

Lori Montgomery – Business leaders say Obama’s economic policies stifle growth – The Washington Post, 23/06/2010 – http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/22/AR2010062205279.html
«In recent months, however, that relationship has begun to fray. First, Democrats included a provision in the health-care bill — over the Roundtable’s objection — that reduced corporate subsidies for drug coverage to retirees, a move that could cost big companies millions of dollars. Then the EPA unveiled rules to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions even without climate-change legislation, creating uncertainty about the future cost of energy.»

Jia Lynn Yang – CEOs from far and wide band against financial bill provision – The Washington Post, 14/05/2010 – http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/13/AR2010051305288.html
«A rush of chief executives from a wide swath of industries has been coming through Washington over the past three weeks, talking to lawmakers about a long-debated issue called «proxy access,» which would make it easier for shareholders at all publicly traded companies — not just banks — to nominate board directors. Opponents say the rule has nothing to do with overhauling Wall Street and doesn’t belong in the legislation. «This is our highest priority,» said John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, which represents 170 chief executives. «Literally all of our members have called about this.».»