There's a great profile of Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, up at Washington Monthly. The basic premise of the piece is this: Donohue's enormous lobbying group has made millions, and will continue to spend millions, purportedly supporting the interests of small businesses, while really supporting an extremely conservative pro-business, anti-little guy agenda that ultimately supports Big Banks, Big Oil, and, of course, Big Lobbying. An example:

The Chamber pounced early on Congress to dissuade it from passing the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act. Donohue’s troops mounted grassroots and media onslaughts around the country, dispatching local chamber officials and business members to lobby local lawmakers, and running local advertisements directly targeting them. In Montana, the Chamber aired an ad targeting Senator Jon Tester that showed a man lying awake in bed in the middle of the night, staring at the alarm clock, while a voiceover intoned, “Call Senator Tester. Tell him to stop the CFPA, because small businesses can’t afford more economic pain.” The Chamber put millions into this sort of advertising.

Even uglier:

In other words, a large part of what the Chamber sells is political cover. For multibillion-dollar insurers, drug makers, and medical device manufacturers who are too smart and image conscious to make public attacks of their own, the Chamber of Commerce is a friend who will do the dirty work. “I want to give them all the deniability they need,” says Donohue. That deniability is evidently worth a lot. According to a January article in the National Journal, six insurers alone—Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group, and Wellpoint—pumped up to $20 million into the Chamber last year.

My emphasis. I'm not sure it's a surprise, in the post-Citizens United world, to find out that the Chamber is a big, ugly, personified lobbying institute that has the backs of its biggest members. Yet I'm hard pressed to think of any other political entity that has so many openly proud members. Sure, many millions of people are registered Democrats or Republicans or even NRA members, but very few of us take those affiliations and post them on the wall at the place where we work as a sign of our credibility. When you walk up to a cash register, though, at nearly any small business, one of the first things you're likely to see is a plaque with that all-important first dollar earned, framed with a certificate issued by the Chamber of Commerce.

Membership in the local Chamber still holds a certain power and, strangely, a certain credibility. Want to be taken seriously as a local business? Join the Chamber. There is, however, absolutely no truth to that idea. The Chamber neither polices its membership nor particularly cares who joins. What does it take to join the Chamber? Short answer: money. (Long answer available at my Web site).

There's an enormous gap between the reputation of the Chamber locally and what its national function is. In part, this may be because local Chambers of Commerce tend to be less overtly political than the national chapter. Sure, they get involved in local issues -- zoning in particular comes to mind -- but the big national debates of the day, like health care and the environment, happen often without any influence from local chapters. Still, it's money from those little clubs and their members that make the big club's spending -- and its bragging about how it's 95 percent composed of small businesses -- possible.

The benefits of the Chamber seem to have decreased or at least become less relevant in recent years. There was a time, not that long ago, when a weekly networking meeting or a directory of other Chamber businesses might have been a big deal -- but with the advent of the Internet, getting your name out there isn't as door-to-door difficult as it used to be, and finding a business with which to, well, do business also isn't as challenging. So those who buy into the Chamber seem really only to gain the benefit of being in a club that has name recognition and a bunch of other members who also paid to be there. It is essentially a fraternity for businesses.

Like any fraternity, the bad deeds of a single chapter may not reflect the goals of the whole; the reputation of the national chapter, however, most likely will and should influence the make up of the regional and local houses.

So here's my question: why doesn't this work? Why do businesses -- progressive businesses, businesses led by those who want better health care and a cleaner environment -- keep on signing up for the Chamber even as it continues to work against the interests of everyday Americans and consumers? In my own town, where many businesses pride themselves on being model community citizens, even the restaurants most often lauded for their sustainability are members of the Chamber. I'd guess this is true of many other cities, too.

There's something to be said for the idea that if a whole bunch of forward-looking, environmentally friendly, anti-big-banking businesses joined the Chamber, it might have to change its ways, but that seems as likely as a Handgun, Inc. takeover of the NRA. Without these small-town, small-time memberships, the Chamber would lose if not most of their revenue, at least a great chunk of its legitimacy, but small businesses keep shooting themselves in the foot and joining up every single year.

Why?