The U S Chamber : Yes They Did It Again

I’ve written about the U S Chamber a number of times. My last favorite was when they attacked TV advertising and then I found out they were wrong with their numbers. There were all of the ads that they were running in movie theaters that were cases that they changed the facts on:

U S Chamber Hides The Facts In ADA Lawsuit Ad, Mike Bryant | May 22, 2009 9:52 AM

U S Chamber Back With Another Abuse Of Kids, Mike Bryant | September 11, 2009 9:26 AM

U S Chamber Exploits A Seven Year Old, Mike Bryant | May 05, 2009 9:58 AM

But now we may have their biggest lie yet. that is until they try to answer some of Steve Lombardi’s questions:

Are Americans Really What the U.S. Chamber Cares About?, Steve Lombardi | December 30, 2009 2:50 PM

Is Santa a member of the US Chamber of Commerce?, Steve Lombardi | December 25, 2009 1:54 PM

This lie is part of a national commercial the US Chamber is running that is again attacking trial lawyers. The key point in the ad is that 52 percent of all lawsuits" target small businesses". It’s the rally cry to get small business owners up in arms to go out and run the lawyers out of town. The thing is that there is a problem:

Their source for the claim actually found that the number was less than 15%.

Fact check.org actually found :

So the Chamber is spending millions of dollars to put out an ad that is absolutely untrue. Why? Well, I think my friend Rick Shapiro nailed it with his blog when he pointed out:

The very expensive T.V. ads are paid for by an arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and some of the largest corporations and insurance companies have ponied up the monies.

How many times are we going to go through this? Hopefully, the deception and frivolous arguments will be seen through. The problem is that these are interests with big bank accounts and who will do anything to make more any way they can.

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The SBA study cited by the Chamber was based on a sample of 12,102 randomly drawn federal lawsuits filed between July 2002 and June 2003. The report states: "Manual review of the parties in the cases by members of the research team reduced the total of 12,102 cases to 1,791 cases potentially involving a business." (See pages 5 and 6.)

That actually shows that only 14.8 percent of federal lawsuits are "business cases" that target any business at all. And how many of those are "small" businesses? The study’s authors examined a small sub-sample, consisting of 222 of the businesses or locations that had been sued, and concluded that 52.7 percent were "small," which they defined as having 50 or fewer employees.

So only about half of all the "business" cases involve "small" businesses, and fewer than 8 percent of all federal lawsuits target businesses with 50 or fewer employees.