Historically, chambers of commerce have used their political influence to create free market, low tax, business-friendly environments.

The Greater Kansas City Chamber, however, has quietly undermined the historic chamber mission. Through its well-funded political action committees, the best funded in the area, the Chamber is working to create a high tax environment that is indifferent to small business and the free market and downright hostile to the culture of life.

Not a word of this is reported in The Kansas City Star or any other local media.

Nowhere is the Chamber’s indifference to its members more evident than in the excess salary paid its president, Pete Levi. The Chamber’s 990 tax filing for 2006 shows a cool $367,780 in salary and $221,175 in contributions to Levi’s benefit plan, more than $589,000 in total, roughly ten times the income of the average Kansas City area family.

The Chamber is seemingly awash in money.  At the beginning of 2008, the Chamber’s political action committee, or PAC, had $788,295 in the bank.  In 2007, the Chamber PAC had raised more and spent more than any Kansas PAC and had more left over than the next four largest Kansas PACs combined.

As to where the money comes from, one source dwarfs all others: James E and Virginia G Stowers, who have contributed nearly $1 million at last count.  Once thought to be a source of great good in Kansas City, the Stowers have squandered their millions and their reputation in the promotion of embryonic stem cell research.

The scientists who work for the Stowers Institute for Medical Research on the Missouri side have apparently convinced their patrons that they would be unable to recruit top flight scientists to the area unless they could do the cloning essential to embryonic research. 

This anxiety spurred the Stowers to invest some $30 million of their private money in the duplicitous 2006 Amendment 2 campaign.  The campaign labored to persuade Missourians that this effort to give constitutional protection to cloning was, in fact, an anti-cloning measure.

Thinking Missourians did not buy it.  Despite being outspent 15-1, the anti-cloning forces pulled 49 percent of the vote and would likely have won with another week of information spreading.

 Ambitious Kansans meanwhile smelled opportunity in Missouri’s resistance.  The Stowers Institute gave them cause to hope.  Not satisfied with an embarrassingly narrow victory, the Institute put its ambitious expansion plans on hold "until the environment for embryonic stem cell research in Missouri stabilizes." 

This hesitance, of course, unnerved those apolitical business people in Missouri but cheered those in the Kansas development community that dream of building and milking a presumed bioscience empire.

To help “stabilize” the life science environment on the Kansas side, still in the running for a second Stowers campus, the Chamber established two additional PACs, the Life Sciences Fund of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce and the Higher Education Fund of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce.

The chair of the Life Sciences PAC just happens to be David Welte, who is also corporate secretary of the pro-cloning non-profit Kansas Coalition for Lifesaving Cures.

According to Kansas law, there are no limitations on the contributions made to a PAC.  This has allowed the Chamber PAC to transfer an unlimited amount of money to its new offspring. These three PACs can each give maximum contributions to the candidates of their choice and launder additional money through various cut-outs to attack or support candidates as is most appropriate.

These cut-outs range from semi-respectable operations like the Kansas Democratic Party and RINO-heavy Traditional Republican Majority PAC to the fly-by-night fronts like the phantom “Kansas Progress.”

The fact that pro-lifers are understandably the most outspoken opponents of cloning serves everyone’s unholy purpose.  The Stowers’ allies hope to remove the opposition to their imagined bio-science empire.  The Democrats and the liberal Republicans get to pick off their common enemy-- principled, pro-life conservatives.  And the abortion industry can continue to ignore the state’s abortion laws with more peace of mind.

This axis of ethical indifference has already had some success on the Kansas side and is planning more assaults along a common front, both in the August primaries and in the November general election.

The downside for the business community is that social conservatives are usually the most consistent supporters of the free market.  Unlike many “moderate” Democrats and liberal Republicans, they do not promote development merely to plunder it.

Few Chamber members know what is going on in their name and with their dollars.  Unfortunately, the media have so shielded them from the truth about these issues that most don’t care to know.  As to Pete Levi, he is smiling all the way to the bank.

The Week in Review