Jon Isaacs is probably a great guy. As he’s fond of sharing, he has a family, a baseball card collection, and a knack for coaching Little League. Unfortunately, his day job is evil. Jon is the Executive Vice President for Public Affairs at the Portland Metro Chamber of Commerce. And when he spoke with former Multnomah County DA Mike Schmidt on his podcast, his main mission was to attack the Portland Democratic Socialists of America.

I gritted my teeth and listened to their entire conversation, then listened to much of it again to make sure I pulled accurate quotes. Jon’s talking points, which portray the business lobby as benevolent and the DSA as deceptive, exemplify the rhetoric used by the Portland Metro Chamber. Although Mike is a progressive and later invited DSA city councilor Angelita Morillo for a rebuttal, he wasn’t equipped to debunk Jon’s misrepresentations on air (while Angelita didn’t attempt to do so directly). Therefore, to get this out of my system and put something useful into the world, I will point out the major issues myself.

Jon describes the Metro Chamber as a boring, non-ideological organization which represents beloved small businesses in our city. In most of its work, that’s probably true. However, the Chamber is also far and away the most active lobbying organization in Portland politics, and in that arena, it fights for the interests of the rich and corporations. 

When Jon says the Metro Chamber represents “business,” he doesn’t specify what kind of business. The hope seems to be that Portlanders will associate the organization with small businesses, which as he mentions, are widely popular (01:08:45)¹. When Mike complains that “people on the left … lump Amazon in with business,” Jon agrees with him, implying that this would be unfair (01:09:40). A quick look at the Chamber’s website, though, shows who they really represent. Under a tab marked “Leading Investors,” they list their top membership tiers:

• Diamond Level Members: Bank of America, Cambia Health Solutions, Columbia Bank, US Bank
• Platinum Level Members: Amazon, Portland Downtown Clean & Safe, Google, Nike, Oregonian Media Group, Pacific Power, PGE, Wells Fargo

They then list 48 Gold Level Members, including Adidas, Airbnb, AT&T, Boeing, Comcast, Intel, JP Morgan Chase, Key Bank, Schnitzer Properties, and many others.

It’s clear that the top contributors to the Chamber are major corporations. In spite of Jon’s assurance that “we do everything hyper transparent,” (00:26:25) there are no documents online explaining how they elect their board and policy committees. However, assuming that their Leading Investors are entitled to a greater say, small businesses aren’t the ones in control.

Jon also says that the Chamber is “non-ideological” (00:29:30). If he means “nonpartisan,” he’s definitely correct: besides the usual Democrats and nonpartisan local officials, they also endorsed MAGA Republican Ben West in Clackamas County and hosted Republican candidate for governor Ed Diehl for a speech. This is because their team isn’t Democrats or Republicans — it’s the rich and corporations.

Accordingly, their ideology is whatever benefits the capitalist class. Jon says that effective solutions to local problems “almost always involve …  public-private partnership,” which is a common buzzword for the Metro Chamber². Although a “partnership” sounds harmless, this is an extreme ideology which argues that, at every level of government, business should play a role and get a cut³. This leads Jon to oppose statewide universal healthcare and social housing. Together with the Chamber’s endless opposition to progressive taxes, the goal is clear: more public money for big business and less for Portlanders. The image of the harmless chamber of commerce masks a deeply ideological lobbying group which represents corporations and the rich.

When he attacks the DSA, Jon doesn’t refer to any of the actual campaigns carried out by the Portland chapter and its endorsed politicians, whether to create universal free preschool, unmask ICE, or ban algorithmic price-fixing by landlords. Instead, he says over and over that DSA has “a whole series of goals that [would] be highly alarming to Portlanders if they were just provided the information” (00:54:05). You might expect him to, therefore, provide the information. After all, the national DSA platform he refers to is available in full online. So what does he expect Portlanders to be alarmed by? Medicare for all, college for all, or housing for all? The 32-hour work week or union power? Taxing the rich or the Green New Deal? Perhaps Jon has sophisticated arguments against each of these, but he chose not to “[provide] the information” that he says Portlanders need. Instead, his only argument is that one of the former co-chairs of Portland DSA once facilitated a panel at a conference not hosted by the organization with an author whose writing includes calls to abolish Child Protective Services and abolish the family. That’s his damning evidence.

Leftists love to use passionate language like “abolish _____”, and the panel, available on YouTube, actually seems insightful. However, Jon uses this strange line of reasoning to argue that “the ultimate goal of the DSA is to end [Portlanders] having families” (01:10:40). This ignores the fact that the Portland chapter has a whole agenda dedicated to fighting for families and has spearheaded Preschool for All, protecting it from attacks from none other than the Portland Metro Chamber — plus, the former co-chair in question is a mother herself. As this shows, the Metro Chamber cannot confront the DSA’s ideas head-on. Instead, they rely on tenuous, cherry-picked factoids⁴.

Although he makes other statements that I disagree with, Isaacs doesn’t formulate any other concrete arguments against DSA. He suggests that the organization is equivalent to MAGA and, just like Republican extremism turned Oregon blue in 2006, DSA will lead the state to turn red in a few election cycles. Since DSA candidates are a tiny minority of Oregon Democratic politicians and are the political and moral opposite of MAGA, I don’t see this as a serious argument. At the end of the day, the Portland Metro Chamber’s framing of local politics relies on misrepresentations to whitewash themselves and smear the Left. What they stand for is the class interests of the rich and corporations, not working people. In contrast to the Metro Chamber, Portland DSA is a transparent, democratic organization which is open to all Portlanders. So, unlike Jon, I can say this: don’t take my word for it. Come see for yourself. ◧

1. Here and throughout this text, I have provided the timestamps from the Schmidt Show episode with Jon Isaacs at which you can hear the quoted information or words. ↩︎
2. It caught my attention in the Chamber’s recent announcement of their upcoming annual meeting focused on the Moda Center. See this post from Demi Lawrence on Bluesky. ↩︎
3. Also known as neoliberalism (see on Wikipedia). ↩︎
4. As best I can tell, Jon got the one about CPS and abolishing the family from Bob Weinstein, a local conservative activist and Substack savant. ↩︎