ALEC4
==
see ALEC 5 for newer
capt 819 (in 5 bak)
VOODOO FAIL
Relationship with Koch family
Throughout his Senate career, Brownback's principal campaign donors were the politically influential libertarian Koch brothers of Kansas, and their enterprises, including Kansas-based Koch Industries—and Brownback was one of the candidates most-heavily funded by the Kochs' campaign donations. Over the course of his political career, they donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns.[40][61][41][98][79]
Brownback's signature tax and regulatory policies coincides tightly with the Kochs' position on those issues.[40][61] It was crafted with the assistance of the Koch-backed American Legislative Exchange Council(ALEC) and Brownback's first Budget Director, Steve Anderson. Anderson was a former Koch employee who previously worked at the Koch's principal political organization, the libertarian think-tank **Americans for Prosperity**(AFP), developing a "model budget" for Kansas,until his appointment as Brownback's first budget director. Anderson remained Brownback's budget director for three years, before returning to a Koch-linked think tank, the Kansas Policy Institute.[100][101][41]
Brownback also hired the wife of a Koch-enterprise executive as his spokesperson.[79]
Brownback, however, has denied that the Kochs have an undue influence in Kansas government,[40] and analysts have noted key differences between Brownback and the Kochs in two of Brownback's main gubernatorial policy areas:
- social issues: (on abortion, Brownback is pro-life, the Kochs pro-choice; Brownback opposes various LGBT rights, the libertarian Kochs accept them);[40][41] and
- renewable energy standards for Kansas, which promote renewable energy (supported by Brownback; opposed by the Kochs, whose chief business is the fossil-fuel industry) ...Brownback converted to Catholicism[98] in 2002 and is associated with the conservative denominational organization, Opus Dei,[265] but still sometimes attends an evangelical church with his family.[266] ===
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqBFXwdY8Ac
DN 2012
The United States of ALEC: Bill Moyers on the Corporate-Legislative Body Writing Our Laws 2 of 2
===
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/louis-dejoy/
The outrageous story about the Postal Service too many know nothing about
Louis DeJoy is plotting more moves to destroy the Postal Service — he must be stopped
Thom Hartmann and Independent Media Institute February 12, 2022
The Republicans are about to win a major battle in their war on electric vehicles, this time with the second largest vehicle fleet in America owned by the US Postal Service. It's an outrageous story that most Americans don't know a thing about.
Transportation, after all, is the single largest source of global warming emissions from the United States. And the Post Office once thought they could do something about it.
To understand what's going on with the Post Office right now, you first must know the backstory that, it seems, most media outlets aren't interested in discussing. It's an issue that's hitting millions of Americans right now.
One of our kids, for example, recently became the first member of our family to buy a fully 100% electric car. She was so excited and has loved it driving around Portland…until she had to drive to another state for a conference, when she discovered what a problem America not having an electric charging infrastructure causes.
The way to solve this problem, of course, is to have a substantial and massive increase in electric vehicles and that's exactly what the Post Office set out to jump-start back in 2006.
Transportation, after all, is the single largest source of global warming emissions from the United States. And the Post Office once thought they could do something about it.
Things were going well for the Post Office in 2006.
They were making money and had a surplus. They were therefore seriously considering replacing a large part of their fleet—the largest fleet of civilian vehicles in the nation—with electric and hybrid vehicles.
It would be a mighty boost for the electric car, and a huge slap in the face of the fossil fuel barons who had an outsized say in the Republican Party.
On May 17, 2006 Walter O'Tormey, the Post Office's Vice President, Engineering, unveiled a new hybrid gas/electric mail delivery vehicle in Boston to an audience of "nearly 100 industry representatives, environmentalists, and Postal Service employees," saying:
"As an agency that delivers mail to 145 million businesses and households six days a week, drives approximately 1.1 billion miles a year, and consumes more than 125 million gallons of motor fuel annually, we are in a unique position to demonstrate to the public and other businesses the growing viability and positive environmental and energy-savings benefits of alternate-fuel technologies."
In their 2006 annual report the Postal Service openly bragged about their ambition to move away from relying entirely on fossil fuels:
"With more than 216,000 vehicles, the Postal Service has the largest civilian fleet in the United States.We continue to evaluate various fuel types and alternative fuel vehicles including hybrid trucks, hydrogen fuel cell vans, electric step vans and liquid natural gas delivery vehicles."
If the Post Office pulled off a massive transition away from fossil fuels, it would jump-start the then-new electric, hybrid and fuel cell technologies, paving the way for wider use, a large national electric "refueling" infrastructure, and a significant reduction in greenhouse gasses.
Americans were excited by the possibility. Speaking on behalf of a coalition of mayors from all parts of the country to the World Congress on Information Technology annual conference in Austin on May 6, 2006, Austin Mayor Will Winn proudly announced:
"Transitioning the Postal fleet to plug-ins would serve as a springboard for the commercial production of delivery vehicles that could be extended to a wide variety of delivery services across America.
"The commercial market would also provide the economic certainty needed by automakers to make the production investments necessary for the mass production of plug-ins.
"The plug-in technology is available right now and represents a realistic near-term solution to the serious problems of over-reliance on foreign oil, out of control gasoline prices, as well as greenhouse emissions."
Given that postal vehicles typically have a 30-year lifespan, this would produce a huge tilt in the balance of alternative-versus-fossil-fuel vehicles on the road.
But the possibility of that transition happening to the nation's largest vehicle fleet was, in a word, intolerable to the morbidly rich rightwingers who'd made their fortunes drilling, refining, shipping and selling fossil fuels, particularly oil, diesel and gasoline.
The Post Office had to be stopped, and Republican Congressman John McHugh (NY) was just the man to do it. He'd been a member of the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and was deeply in the pocket of right-wing interests.
As Wikipedia notes in an exercise of gentle understatement:
"[McHugh] was chairman of the Oversight Committee's Postal Service Subcommittee for six years and worked to pass legislation to significantly reform the U.S. Postal Service for the first time since it was demoted from a Cabinet-rank department with passage of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (Pub.L. 109–435) in 2006."
ALEC, which writes corporate-friendly legislation and relies on its membership of Republican lawmakers around the nation to pass that legislation, just happened to have a model 2006 bill known as the Unfunded Pensions Liabilities Act, which called on state governments to account for exactly how they plan to fund future retiree benefits.
Adapting that ALEC concept to the Post Office, McHugh's bill was passed by a voice vote in a Republican Congress and signed by Republican President George W. Bush. There is no record whatsoever of who voted or how they voted on the legislation.
It was preceded, however, by a virtual waterfall of op-eds and PR efforts by groups affiliated with the Koch network including the Reason Foundation, the National Taxpayer's Union, and the CATO Institute.
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What the law did was ram a poison pilldown the throat of the Post Office.
It required the USPS to pre-fund its Retiree Health Benefits Fund for seventy years into the future, forcing the Post Office to take the money they planned to spend on electric vehicles and set it aside for the health benefits of future retirees who weren't even born yet (and should be eligible for Medicare, anyway).
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It's an obligation that no other private business or government agency has ever had to comply with before.
Costing the Post Office $5 billion a year, it succeeded in stopping their plan to electrify their fleet dead in its tracks.
And it set it up more cleanly for eventual privatization, once enough infrastructure like postal drop boxes and million-dollar high-speed sorting machines was destroyed—a processReagan called "Starve the Beast"—that "customers" were complaining about the service and public opinion finally agreed the Post Office would work better in private hands.
Reagan had tried to do the same thing to Social Security and the IRS, and Trump doubled down on that plan, offering tens of thousands of staffers early retirement to gut both agencies; they're now so hobbled by underfunding and worker shortages that Social Security disability claims can take two years, and extremely wealthy people are no longer generally audited at all because of the cost and manpower needs determined by their complexity.
Which brings us to Louis DeJoy.
The Post Office is finally on the verge of getting out from under that $5 billion-a-year prefunding burden so they can now start buying that new fleet they proposed in 2006.
Postmaster General DeJoy was strongly encouraged by the Biden administration to give the contract to a company that would manufacture electric and electric/hybrid vehicles.
But DeJoy essentially told Biden to go screw himself: he's going to buy fossil-fuel vehicles for 90% of the fleet instead.
The Washington Post laid it all out in the open to an article last week titled: Biden Officials Push to Hold Up $11.3 Billion USPS Truck Contract, Citing Climate Damage, noting:
"The Biden administration launched a last-minute push Wednesday to derail the U.S. Postal Service's plan to spend billions of dollars on a new fleet of gasoline-powered delivery trucks, citing the damage the polluting vehicles could inflict on the climate and Americans' health.
"The dispute over the Postal Service's plans to spend up to $11.3 billion on as many as 165,000 new delivery trucks over the next decade has major implications for President Biden's goal of converting all federal cars and trucks to clean power."
And it's not just the White House that's outraged. CNN reported yesterday:
"Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, called for DeJoy's resignation.
"'Postmaster General DeJoy's plan to spend billions on brand new gas-powered vehicles is in direct contradiction to the stated goals of Congress and the President to eliminate emissions from the federal fleet,' Connolly said in a statement. 'If Mr. DeJoy won't resign, the Board of Governors has got to fire him -- now.'"
Because Republican senators are holding up confirmation of Biden's Postal Board of Governors' appointees, DeJoy can't be fired by the current Trump-appointee-dominated board, a fact that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse pointed out last week, demanding the Senate move the Democratic nominees forward over GOP objections.
But DeJoy is itching to sign the contract for all those gas and diesel vehicles, and he still has the power to do so.
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So, now that the possibility of electrifying the nation's (now second) largest fleet of vehicles is pretty much dead and they're planning to go ahead with fossil fuels, Republicans in Congress are fine with eliminating the retirement prefunding dead weight on the Post Office.
The vote in the House this week was 342-90 to end the prefunding requirement and give DeJoy the money to buy the gas-powered vehicles. Now it goes to the Senate, where the AP noted:
"Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he expects his chamber to 'move quickly' on the measure. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said he's planning a vote before a recess that starts after next week. The bill has 14 GOP sponsors and, with strong Democratic support expected, seems on track to gain the 60 votes most bills need for Senate passage."
When asked Wednesday night on MSNBC why Congress had crippled the Post Office with that bizarre prefunding requirement in the first place, Senator Peters—one of the truly good guys in the US Senate—answered that he had no idea.
As is the case with most members of Congress; the pre-funding was essentially slipped into the bill at the behest of the fossil fuel industry and, at the time, got virtually no publicity. Thus, I tweeted him:
It was incomplete on my part to miss the privatization bonus in the tweet, and the vendor will supply gasoline vehicles as well, but you get the point.
Like so many other weirdnesses in American politics, when you pull back the veil you find the hands of a fossil fuel industry that values profits and right wing ideology over the future of our children, our nation and the planet.
://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/10/16/reporters-memo-coke-and-pepsi-play-hardball-in-attempt-to-prevent-the-spread-of-soda-taxes
Faced with a rising tide of data from the United States and around the world showing that soda taxes work to reduce consumption and improve public health, the soda industry is battling back hard with big-dollar bully tactics geared toward crushing local soda tax campaigns before they even get off the ground.
New tactics being deployed by the soda industry include state bills banning local soda taxes, broad statewide initiatives to ban all grocery taxes or require a supermajority before raising any taxes, and political spending geared toward bending state politicians to their will.
Soda, Like Tobacco, Has Serious Health Effects
The public health community — pediatricians, dentists, the American Heart Association, and more — is energized to take action as never before on soda and other sugary drinks because new data is showing that consuming sugar in liquid formincreases risks of serious health conditions, such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and obesity in a much more significant way than was previously known.
One Harvard study found that consuming just one to two sugary drinks a day increases your risk of developing diabetes by a whopping 26 percent.Another Harvard analysis showed that men averaging one can a day of a sugary drink had a 20 percent increased risk of heart attack. Further, more than three-quarters of American adults are considered overweight or obese, as are 30 percent of children, according to an international study published in The Lancet.
Soda Taxes, Like Tobacco Taxes, Work
Multiple studies, including a recent analysis by researchers at Drexel University, show that soda taxes work. Drexel surveyed consumers before and after the implementation of Philadelphia’s tax and found that daily consumption of soda decreased by 40 percent and energy drink by 64 percent, while consumption of bottled water increased by 58 percent. Researchers at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health found that sugary beverage consumption fell 21 percent in Berkeley after that city’s tax was implemented, while water consumption increased by 63 percent over comparison cities.
Many U.S. localities have implemented a soda tax to reduce obesity and related public health problems: Berkeley, CA; Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco, CA; Oakland, CA; Albany, CA; Boulder, CO; Santa Fe, NM (defeated 2017); Cook County, IL (repealed 2017); and Seattle, WA. In each locality, the American Beverage Association (ABA) has bankrolled a big-dollar PR campaign against the tax.
States with soda taxes include West Virginia (1951), Arkansas, Virginia, and Tennessee. And there are more than 30 countries with soda taxes, including France, Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, Norway, Philippines, South Africa, and the UK. Many other countries are pursuing such taxes.
Leading the Opposition: Coke, Pepsi, and the ABA
As cities and counties in the United States use the tools of local democracy to introduce modest soda taxes, they are facing sophisticated opposition spearheaded by the ABA, the blandly named trade association representing Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, and other sugary drink manufacturers. The use of the ABA name on websites and in anti-soda tax commercials effectively shields the brand-name companies from accountability and culpability for the harms caused by sugary beverages.
The ABA is a $125 million powerhouse bankrolled by the largest players in the soft drink industry. Coke brands include Fanta, Sprite, Fresca, Dasani, Honest Tea, and Minute Maid. PepsiCo brands include Gatorade, 7Up, Tropicana, and Mountain Dew.
In city after city, the ABA has fought grassroots campaigners seeking to implement a soda tax using front groups or big-dollar PR campaigns that spin the tax as a “grocery tax” and a burden on working families. You won’t see the CEOs of Coke and Pepsi making the case against a soda tax. Instead we see sympathetic front men and women, like the African American “single mom” in Chicago who told the camera “We’re being taxed out of Cook County. I’m a single mom. I can’t afford this tax!” The ABA has consistently worked to deflect the conversation away from public health and to frame the tax as an unfair, unnecessary “grocery tax.”
Preemption Strategy to Defeat Soda Taxes Borrowed from Big Tobacco
Municipalities have long played a valuable role as “laboratories of democracy” for important public policy innovations, including in public health. When U.S. cities began to regulate tobacco and create “tobacco free” work environments in the 1980s, the industry jumped into action.
“We could never win at the local level…. So the Tobacco Institute and tobacco companies’ first priority has always been to preempt the field,” said a tobacco lobbyist. Today, the majority of states have some type of tobacco preemption, and the soda industry is borrowing the same technique.
According to Grassroots Change, 12 states have enacted laws preempting local ordinances related to nutrition, including measures rammed through in Michigan, Arizona, and California over the past year.
In Michigan, House Bill 4999 was introduced Sept. 20, 2017, rushed through the legislature, and signed into law on Oct. 31. The bill bans an excise tax “on the manufacture, distribution, wholesale sale, or retail sale of food for immediate consumption or nonimmediate consumption.” Beverage and soda taxes are not mentioned, but included, according to legislative counsel analysis.
A host of agricultural interests were activated to register in favor of the bill, making it a “farm interests” bill. These groups testified in a very vague manner that they make and export many food products and are responsible for a lot of jobs in the state, but did not address any specifics nor mention a beverage tax.
The powerful $100 million National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) also testified in favor of the bill,specifically citing the beverage tax passing in other states. The NFIB has also worked to preempt paid sick days and local minimum wage hikes in other states and was cited by the media as a key player in Michigan.
In Arizona, HB 2484 received its first reading on January 30, 2018, rushed through the legislature, and was signed into law on March 16. This bill also broadly discusses food taxation, not just a beverage tax or a soda tax. The groups registered to lobby for the bill include the Arizona Retailers Association, Arizona Restaurant Association, Arizona Beverage Association, Arizona Food Marketing Alliance, and Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, as well as the Arizona Association of Food Banks. CMD has submitted an open records request to the bill authors for more information.
A bill has been introduced in Illinois (HB 4082) and another is scheduled for a vote in Pennsylvania (HB 2241).
Broad Anti-Grocery Tax Measures on the Ballot in Washington and Oregon
But the strong-arm tactics don’t stop there. The industry is rolling out statewide ballot measures in referendum and initiative states to ban all grocery taxes, including soda taxes.
Seattle’s soda tax took effect in January 2018. Since then, more kids and adults are drinking water, and it brought in more than $10 million in revenue for use on educational and health programs in its first six months. But in February 2018, a committee with the name “Yes! To Affordable Groceries” was launched to make sure the public health measure would not be adopted by any other local governments in Washington. Initiative 1634 is a deceptively simple anti-grocery tax measure that has been run through the corporate spin machine; it opens with the line “Whereas access to food is a basic human need of every Washingtonian.” The soda industry has raised over $20 million for the effort so far, with little organized opposition on the other side.
Heavy-handed industry tactics are also on display in Oregonthis year, where grocers and the ABA have raised $6.5 million on an overly broad constitutional amendment that would not just impact soda taxes but can be read as prohibiting taxes at all stages in the chain of commerce, permanently preventing the state and its cities and counties from levying any taxes related to distribution or sale of groceries. The ABA recently kicked in two enormous cash contributions of $500,000 each.
Opponents of the measures on the ballot in Oregon and Washington appear unlikely to be able to muster the kind of big money wielded by the soda industry. But health groups like the American Heart Association are doing their best to educate the media and voters.
One headline in the Seattle Times summarized what’s on the line for local democracy campaigns well: “Vote for this initiative and you may as well bow down to your corporate overlords.”
Supermajority Strategies and High-Stakes “Hostage Taking” in California
Early in 2018, California had the most soda tax measures under consideration of any state. Cathedral City, Palo Alto, Santa Cruz, and Richmond all seemed poised to join Berkeley, San Francisco, Oakland, and Albany as cities with soda taxes on the books.
That changed in April when the ABA spent millions on a campaign to get an explosively controversial measure on the November ballot that would have required a two-thirds supermajority vote by either voters or an elected body before any tax hike at the local level could be implemented. The move prompted an outcry by mayors across the state and was characterized as an “abomination” by Governor Jerry Brown.
After meeting with the soda industry, the governor cut a deal that resulted in legislators in Sacramento passing a preemption bill to ban local soda taxes until 2030 in exchange for taking the measure off the ballot. The whole incident was called a “shakedown,” “extortion,” and “high-stakes hostage taking” by the media.
Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said, “Industry is aiming basically a nuclear weapon at governing in California and saying if you don’t do what we want, we’re going to pull the trigger and you are not going to be able to fund basic government services.”
This supermajority tactic, popularized by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has peddled a “Super-Majority Act” for decades, is now spreading. Following last year’s repeal of a short-lived soda tax in Cook County, Illinois, a group of county commissioners introduced legislation last month that would require a two-thirds supermajority vote by commissioners to enact any new taxes.
Public health groups campaigning for soda taxes did score one big win this year, when the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania upheld the City of Philadelphia’s 2017 soda tax after an industry challenge.
Consumers can anticipate more deep-pocket PR campaigns and tactics in 2019 to bully localities into abandoning the soda tax idea.
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https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/voter-id-suppressed-vote-exactly-wisconsin-republicans-predicted
mary b cmd
Anew study of registered voters in Dane and Milwaukee Counties who did not vote in the 2016 presidential election found that approximately 17,000-23,000 eligible voters in those counties were prevented or deterred from voting by Wisconsin’s voter ID law. Due to financial constraints, the social scientists were only able to do a study of two of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, but the authors say that extrapolating statewide as many as 45,000 people stayed home because of the law.
Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin by only 22,000 votes, the first GOP presidential victory in the state since Ronald Regan in 1984. The shocking upset garnered national attention and helped deliver the electoral college to Trump as the popular vote went to Clinton.
The study, conducted by Ken Mayer and Michael G. DeCrescenzo, at the University of Wisconsin Department of Political Science, provides definitive evidence that the controversial voter ID bill, passed in 2011 and held up in the courts until 2016, worked precisely as Wisconsin Republicans intended — to make it more difficult for targeted voters to cast their ballots.
Although voter preferences were not included in the study, the survey documents that the burdens of voter ID fell disproportionately on low-income and minority populations considered likely to support Democrats. Among low-income registrants (household income under $25,000), 21.1% were deterred, compared to 7.2% for those whose household income was over $25,000. 8.3% of white registrants were deterred, compared to 27.5% of African Americans.
Roughly 80% of registrants who were deterred from voting by the law, and 77% of those actually prevented from voting, cast ballots in the 2012 election. The number of voters negatively impacted is far greater than the number of “fraud” cases the law was designed to stop. When the law was challenged in federal court and initially ruled a violation of the Voting Rights Act, the state failed to present a single case of voter impersonation that the law would have prevented.
The results prompted the county clerks from Milwaukee and Madison to issue strongly worded statements and a call for a suspension of the voter ID law. “I was shocked by the numbers and am furious to see that Jim Crow laws are alive and well,” said Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson.
“The photo ID law must be suspended until changes can be made to restore every voter’s access to the ballot box,” said Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell whose office commissioned the study.
“What I am concerned about here is winning”
While most Republican stuck to the official talking points that the photo ID law was all about preventing nonexistent “voter fraud,” some forgot the script.
On the night of Wisconsin’s 2016 presidential primary, Republican Congressman Glenn Grothman (R-WI) flatly stated in an interview with WTMJ’s Charles Benson that Wisconsin’s photo ID law would help the GOP win Wisconsin in the November 2016 election.
When asked about the fact that Wisconsin has consistently voted for Democrats in recent presidential elections, Grothman assured Bensen that Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton was a “weak candidate,” then added “and now we have photo ID, and I think photo ID is gonna make a little bit of a difference as well.”
Rep. Grothman was a State Senator in 2011 when Wisconsin debated and passed its voter ID law, so he was privy to the back room conversations and dealings on the issue.
Those back room conversation came to light five years later when the bill was implemented and people immediately started having problems. Former GOP staffer turned coffee shop owner, Todd Albaugh, was frustrated when one of his employees could not vote in the 2016 spring elections and decided to blow the whistle.
“I was in a closed Senate Republican Caucus when the final round of multiple Voter ID bills were being discussed. A handful of GOP Senators were giddy about the ramifications and literally singled out the prospects of suppressing minority and college voters. Think about that for minute. Elected officials panning and happy to help deny a fellow American’s constitutional right to vote in order to increase their own chances to hang onto power.”Albaugh, who once worked for Wisconsin Senator Dale Shultz (R-Richland Center), stated in a social media post:
“A vigorous debate on the ideas wasn’t good enough,” saidAlbaugh “they had to take the coward’s way out and come up with a plan to suppress the vote under the guise of ‘voter fraud.'”
Later on the witness stand in a lawsuit brought by One Wisconsin Now challenging the voter ID law, Albaugh described the tension in closed door caucus as provisions in the bill were being debated.
As described by the *Milwaukee Journal Sentinel*, Albaugh testified that Committee Chair Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) made the case for passing the bill, which made it much harder for students, the elderly and the poor to vote:
“She got up out of her chair and hit her fist or her finger on the table and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to think about what this would mean for the neighborhoods around Milwaukee and the college campuses,” Allbaugh said.
“Grothman said, ‘What I’m concerned about here is winning, and that’s what really matters here. … We better get this done quickly while we have the opportunity,'” Allbaugh said.
Allbaugh named two other senators — Leah Vukmir and Randy Hopper — as being gleeful over passing the bill.
“They were politically frothing at the mouth,” he said of Vukmir and Hopper, who lost a recall election a few months after the voter ID law passed.
ALEC Members Toe the Koch Party Line
All four of the legislators named by Albaugh were at the time members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Leah Vukmir, described as “frothing at the mouth” over the bill, served for years as an officer of ALEC, was ALEC’s national chairman in 2016, and was given ALEC’s “Iron Woman” Award in 2017.
The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) drafted and approved a “model” “Voter ID Act” in August of 2009. The wave of bills that followed were constructed differently by different GOP legislatures, but have a common purpose to disenfranchise constituencies that are more likely to vote Democratic.
ALEC has attempted to distance itself from this ugly history of voter suppression (it did away with its “Public Safety and Elections Task Force” and no longer touts voter ID as a “model bill”) after sustained campaigning by the online civil rights group Color of Change and others, but ALEC has done nothing to get voter ID policies repealed in the states where its members pushed for and passed the bill.
The partisan motivation behind the Voter ID Act comports with vision of ALEC’s founder, the late Paul Weyrich of Wisconsin, who in 1980 told a group of religious fundamentalists: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
https://movetoamend.org/29-states-just-banned-laws-about-seeds
29 States Just Banned Laws About Seeds
August 22, 2017
Kristina Johnson
With little notice, more than two dozen state legislatures have passed “seed-preemption laws” designed to block counties and cities from adopting their own rules on the use of seeds, including bans on GMOs. Opponents say that there’s nothing more fundamental than a seed, and that now, in many parts of the country, decisions about what can be grown have been taken out of local control and put solely in the hands of the state.
“This bill should be viewed for what it is — a gag order on public debate,” says Kristina Hubbard, director of advocacy and communications at theOrganic Seed Alliance, a national advocacy group, and a resident of Montana, which along with Texas passed a seed-preemption bill this year. “This thinly disguised attack on local democracy can be easily traced to out-of-state, corporate interests that want to quash local autonomy.”
Seed-preemption laws are part of a spate of legislative initiatives by industrial agriculture, including ag-gag laws passed in several states that legally prohibit outsiders from photographing farms, and “right-to-farm” laws that make it easier to snuff out complaints about animal welfare. The seed laws, critics say, are a related thrust meant to protect the interests of agro-chemical companies.
Nearly every seed-preemption law in the country borrows language from a2013 model bill drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).The council is “a pay-to-play operation where corporations buy a seat and a vote on ‘task forces’ to advance their legislative wish lists,” essentially “voting as equals” with state legislators on bills, according to The Center for Media and Democracy. ALEC’s corporate members include the Koch brothers as well as some of the largest seed-chemical companies — Monsanto, Bayer, and DuPont — which want to make sure GMO bans, like those enacted in Jackson County, Oregon, and Boulder County, Colorado, don’t become a trend.
Seed-preemption laws have been adopted in 29 states, including Oregon — one of the world’s top five seed-producing regions — California, Iowa, and Colorado. In Oregon, the bill was greenlighted in 2014 after Monsanto and Syngenta spent nearly $500,000 fighting a GMO ban in Jackson County. Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences, and Syngenta also spent more than$6.9 million opposing anti-GMO rules in three Hawaiian counties, and thousands more incampaign donations. (These companies are also involved in mergers that, if approved, would create three seed-agrochemical giants.)
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http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/07/23/the-alec-swampland
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http://www.alternet.org/alecs-scary-plan-electing-your-senators
New York Times and Washington Post reported that President Trump has had conversations with top officials about whether he could pardon himself and his family, and also suggested that the White House could be mounting an attack on the credibility of Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor leading the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 campaign.
Trump’s “election integrity” commission convened for the first time on Wednesday and he wasted no time assailing state election officials who have refused the panel’s unprecedented request for detailed voter data. The president alleged, darkly, that uncooperative states might have something to hide. “One had to wonder what they’re worried about,” Trump said. “There’s something. There always is.”
Then as the session concluded, an MSNBC reporter asked vice chairman Kris Kobach, Kansas’ Republican secretary of state, whether he believed, as Trump has suggested, that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes because of voter fraud. “We will probably never know the answer to that question,” Kobach replied.
With so much news, however, perhaps the most shocking and consequential story of all slipped under the radar: A bombshell report in the Nation that the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC) – the most influential power behind conservative legislation marching through state legislatures – has drafted a proposal to return the power to select U.S. senators to state legislators.
That’s right: ALEC’s “model legislation” would repeal the 17th amendment, end more than a century of American citizens electing U.S. senators at the ballot box, and empower gerrymandered legislatures to choose senators for us, as was the practice in the 18th and 19th centuries.
As John Nichols, who broke the story for the Nation, wrote: “If successful, they will reverse one of the great strides toward democracy in American history: the 1913 decision to end the corrupt practice of letting state legislators barter off Senate seats in backroom deals with campaign donors and lobbyists.”
The language of this draft resolution, however, frames this in precisely the opposite way. It argues that the 17th amendment, ratified in 1914, did not empower voters but instead disempowered states. As a result, there have been “many unintended consequences, including runaway federal deficits, unfunded mandates, overreach by federal agencies and burdensome impositions by the federal government upon the states.”
If this sounds nutty and far-fetched, however, it’s a position with growing weight inside the conservative movement – and as Nichols reports, has generated positive reviews even from some Republican U.S. senators. Utah Sen. Mike Lee has called the 17th amendment “a mistake,” Nichols notes, and Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake endorsed it as “better as it reinforces the notion of federalism to have senators appointed by state legislatures.”
This would also reinforce Republican majorities in the Senate, where the GOP now holds a 52-48 edge. Right now at the state level, however, Republicans control 69 of 99 state legislative chambers, hold both branches in 32 states. Republicans, then, would potentially start with a supermajority of 64 U.S. senators.
That would include both seats in swing states like Ohio – where an effective GOP gerrymander in 2011 helped create a 66-33 supermajority in the state house and a 24-9 advantage in the state senate – and Michigan, where Democratic state house candidates have earned more total votes in 2012, 2014 and 2016, but Republicans continuously win more seats.
Under this proposal, Democratic senators such as Ohio’s Rob Portman, Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow, Virginia’s Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, and Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, for example, would be unlikely to be reappointed if the GOP continued to control those legislatures. Would partisan chambers allow for independent voices such as Bernie Sanders or Angus King? Indeed, the draft legislation might not even tolerate independence in office. It includes a provision stating that “state legislatures may issue instructions to, or recall, their Senators at any time.”
The model legislation hasn’t become an official policy resolution yet. It was scheduled to be debated at ALEC’s annual meeting in Denver this weekend. But what gives ALEC such influence is its direct pipeline into state legislatures through conservative state representatives and senators.
Conservatives legislatures, many of them tilted by gerrymandering, have looked to ALEC to shape their policy agendas. Since its founding in 1973, it has served as a clearinghouse for pro-business legislation. ALEC writes the bills. Legislators introduce them. When similar bills are introduced nationwide and race through Republican legislatures, that’s the influence of ALEC.
DeCesare outlined his plans—targeting the minimum wage and prevailing-wage laws as well as collective bargaining agreements— in a phone summit hosted by ALEC shortly after the 2016 election. “Legislators are not the trailblazers of developing policies,” Michael Bowman, an ALEC official, told the group, aslso reported by ProPublica. “They’re actually the retail consumers.”In Kentucky, Missouri and New Hampshire, three states where Republicans captured new trifectas with both houses of the legislature plus the governor’s office, for example, immediately prioritized passing right-to-work legislation, which strikes at the political power of unions. “We can pretty much do whatever we want right now,” quipped Kentucky state representative Jim DeCesare, as reported by ProPublica.
Ashley Varner, another ALEC strategist, emphasized the opportunities for rapid, under-the-radar change. “There’s a sea of red,” Varner said, adding that hundreds of incumbents from both parties had been ousted. “What are we going to do with these new legislatures?”
Will ALEC be successful in repealing the 17th amendment? It seems like a tremendous longshot, would likely spark outrage among voters, and would face significant legal challenges.
Nevertheless, there is growing evidence that Republican state legislatures are interested in changing longstanding electoral structures to their advantage, In Georgia, changing demographics and the growing influence of minority voters led to a tighter than usual presidential race. Trump defeated Clinton 50–45, but an effective GOP gerrymander returned a 118–62 statehouse supermajority. So in March 2017, in early morning hours, nervous Republicans moved to redraw nine districts, lowering the percentages of Latinos and African Americans, in order to protect newly threatened incumbents. When the suggestion of a rare mid-decade redraw sparked protests, Republicans backed away from the plan.
It also did not take long after Trump’s inauguration for Republican-controlled legislatures to advance—as they did in 2011 and 2015—new legislation designed to gerrymander the Electoral College. Indeed, had those laws been active for 2012, Mitt Romney would have won a majority of electoral votes from Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, despite losing all three states.
The problem was even more stark by 2016. State legislators in Virginia and Minnesota introduced identical bills that would redistribute Electoral College votes based on congressional districts. Several New Hampshire lawmakers also wanted to reapportion their electoral votes. In Virginia, GOP Rep. Mark Cole sponsored a bill that would give one electoral vote to the presidential candidate who carried each of the state’s 11 congressional districts, and two to the winner of the statewide popular vote.
How would that work in practice? Well, Clinton carried Virginia in 2016, defeating Trump by 212,000 votes—49.7 percent to 44.4 percent—to claim all 13 of Virginia’s electoral votes. Virginia’s congressional districts, however, maximize Republican votes. Despite Clinton’s statewide victory, Trump carried 6 of 11 congressional districts. Under this bill, Trump would have nabbed 6 electoral votes from Clinton in a state he lost.
Meanwhile in Minnesota—another state won by Clinton—Republican legislators sought to allocate themselves electoral votes in a state Republicans haven’t won since 1972. Clinton carried Minnesota with 46.4 percent of the popular vote, compared to Trump’s 44.9. That gave the Democrat all 10 of Minnesota’s electoral votes. Trump, however, carried 5 of the 8 congressional districts—meaning that this bill, if successful, would have given Trump as many votes as Clinton from a state the Democrats won. Overall, then, if these bills had been law in 2016, Trump would have nabbed an additional 11 Electoral College votes from states won by Clinton.
Clinton also carried New Hampshire’s 4 electoral college votes. Granite State GOP lawmakers set their sights on one of those electors. Trump won more votes in New Hampshire’s first congressional district, so three GOP state representatives— in their very first days with complete control of the state legislature and the governor’s office—offered a bill that would apportion the state’s four electors in such a way as to guarantee themselves a share.
In Virginia, Cole’s bill passed through its House subcommittee on a party line vote, only to be withdrawn before reaching the full House. “The time isn’t right,” Cole told reporters when he withdrew his bill after its subcommittee success.
A redrawing of our Electoral College system is no longer some fringe idea. And, perhaps, neither is an end to the popular election of U.S. senators. This is how the gerrymander, taken to extremes, turns the GOP hammerlock on states into a leg-up on permanent control of the White House and Senate as well. We stand on the frightening edge of lasting one-party minority rule that may not be undoable at the ballot box.
http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/06/28/reagan-vs-cities-battle-south-african-apartheid-lessons-trump-era
With the Trump administration threatening to withhold federal funds from cities and states offering protections to undocumented immigrants, a new report details similar tactics used by the Reagan administration to pressure cities and states to abandon anti-apartheid sanctions and divestment legislation.
The report “Reagan vs. Cities: The 20th Century Battle Over South African Apartheid & Lessons For The Trump Era” provides historical examples of how cities and states can wield power in the face of threats of retaliation for local policies that defy a president’s political agenda.
Between December 2016 and June 2017, researchers from Jobs to Move America combed through thousands of pages of declassified documents from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library — legal memos, policy guides, court briefings, and correspondence between companies and the Reagan administration.
“Reagan Vs. Cities and States: The 20th Century Battle over South African Apartheid” tells the story of how cities and states joined the fight against apartheid in South Africa and won even as the Reagan administration and special interest groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) sought to suppress those efforts.
ALEC was an early opponent of divestment efforts, distributing a report against divestment to federal, state, and local officials. As this new report details, ALEC was imbedded in the Reagan Administration’s push back on the sanctions movement and was considered by White House insiders to be crucial to providing the intellectual “firepower” for the push back in cities and states. ALEC opposed divestment throughout Reagan’s entire term and up until the dismantling of the apartheid regime, applauding Oregon for rolling back divestment in 1991.
ALEC has never apologized for those activities. ALEC has also long opposed socially responsible investing by states and cities, and to this day has been opposing shareholder responsibility efforts.
Now, the Trump administration is borrowing an idea from the ALEC playbook, threatening “sanctuary cities” with the removal of federal funds if they continue to aid immigrants. ALEC has long had a “model bill” condemning sanctuary cities.
From the report:
By 1991, 28 states, 1 territory, and 92 cities had imposed sanctions, divestment, or other measures on companies doing business in South Africa, costing U.S. corporations substantial sums — in order to stand up for the human rights of black South Africans repressed by a white supremacist regime. The Reagan administration continued to oppose these local efforts, as it had in the case of the New York City law, by implementing measures to undercut cities and states including the threat to withdraw federal funding for many local initiatives.
Notwithstanding the Reagan administration’s efforts, sustained opposition to the apartheid system caused its downfall in 1991. The sanctions and divestment movement is credited for playing a critical role in apartheid’s demise.
In 2017, President Donald Trump’s advisors have revisited the Reagan playbook to advance his bid to engage in mass deportations of undocumented immigrants working in the U.S. A few days after assuming office, Trump signed Executive Order 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States.” The Order requires state and local officials to share information about individuals’ immigration status with federal immigration officials. Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from cities that provide “sanctuary” to undocumented immigrants and do not abide by the Order. Although San Francisco and several other U.S. cities brought legal challenges to the order, the Trump administration continues to look for ways to implement their policies.
In the Trump era, as cities and states around the country prepare to challenge the White House, they can look to the example of the anti-apartheid movement, when grassroots groups and activists joined together with cities and states to fight the federal government’s threats and together helped the movement of black South Africans triumph over a repressive regime.
The report was written by Jobs to Move America, a national organization uniting community, labor, faith, civil rights, philanthropic, academic and environmental groups and the Center for Media and Democracy. CMD’s Executive Director, Lisa Graves, JMA’s Madeline Janis, and Dr. Mary Frances Berry, a leader of the Anti-Apartheid movement, participated in a call to announce the findings of the report this week.
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http://www.alternet.org/food/fast-food-lobbyists-against-regulation
Forbes Magazine
When the city council of Santa Fe, New Mexico, placed a measure on the local ballot to tax sugary drinks earlier this year, the soda industry responded quickly, pouring $1.3 million into the anti-tax campaign. To cover their bases, industry lobbyists also pursued a back-up plan: they backed a bill in the state legislature to strip local governments of the power to levy such taxes.
In the end, the state language was added to another bill that sailed through the New Mexico House before dying in a Senate committee, shortly before Santa Fe voters defeated the local soda tax. But as a growing number of cities consider and increasingly pass soda taxes and other measures designed to combat obesity and promote healthy eating, the food industry has turned to a strategy used extensively by the tobacco and gun lobbies.
:{The strategy, known as preemption, uses state laws to take away the right of cities to enact various kinds of regulations, reserving that power to the state. The tobacco industry used preemption to block or weaken local ordinances that ban smoking in public spaces. The firearms industry used it to beat back local efforts to control gun sales.
Now, lobbyists for numerous industries, including soda makers and fast-food chains, are pushing state laws that block municipal governments from adopting local controls. Aiding the effort is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group backed by corporations and conservative foundations, which brings together state lawmakers and industry lobbyists to draft and disseminate model legislation.}:
At least nine states have passed nutrition-related preemption laws, according to Grassroots Change, a nonprofit group that monitors state preemption efforts. Others have adopted measures that keep cities from requiring employers to provide paid sick leave or nullifying laws that protect gay or transgender people from discrimination.
The federal government can also preempt state and local law. In recent years, Congress has passed several bills with preemption provisions, including a revision of the key 40-year-old federal act regulating chemicals, a law requiring restaurants to display nutrition information, and another relating to disclosure of the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)in food products. These laws also limit states and cities from regulating the same products, though each does so in different ways.
In 2011, the National Academy of Medicine urged in a report that federal and state legislators avoid wording preemptive laws “in a way that hinders public health action.” But a growing number of state legislatures are ignoring that plea.
A 2011 Arizona law bars local governments from regulating restaurant giveaways of toys and prizes like those given to children eating McDonalds Happy Meals or at the Chuck E. Cheese pizza chain.
Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Utah ban regulations requiring restaurants to publicly display nutritional information.
Mississippi and Ohio bar both these types of regulations and Wisconsin prohibits cities from restricting food or drink sales based on size, caloric content or nutritional value.
In New Mexico, the soda tax preemption language was added at the last minute to a 300-page substitute bill addressing a variety of tax issues, said William Fulginiti, executive director of the New Mexico Municipal League, an association representing cities, which opposed the preemption as an infringement on the rights of local communities.
“It was done quickly. I don’t think they were even aware of what was in the bill,” Fulginiti said of House members who passed the substitute tax measure. Fulginiti said the original bill had been supported by The Coca-Cola Co. and that a Coke lobbyist had visited him to push for the bill.
Sarah Maestas Barnes, the New Mexico legislator who introduced the original preemption measure, received a $1,000 campaign contribution last year from Admiral Beverage Corp., which manufactures and distributes Pepsi and other drinks. Barnes didn’t return several phone calls and emails seeking comment
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http://www.prwatch.org/news/2017/01/13199/exxon-illegally-funded-alec-under-tillersons-tenure-cmd-tells-committee
Written Statement of Lisa Graves on Behalf of the Center for Media and Democracy Submitted to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
Hearing on the Nomination of Rex Tillerson to Be U.S. Secretary of State.
January 11, 2017
Dear Chairman Corker, Ranking Member Cardin and Members of the Committee:
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) would like to bring your attention a matter of serious concern regarding the nomination of ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be U.S. Secretary of State. We would also respectfully request that this letter be included in the hearing record on his nomination, which we oppose.
For more than a decade under Mr. Tillerson's tenure, Exxon has poured millions of dollars into nonprofit organizations in order to undermine public confidence in climate science and promote its anti-regulatory agenda.
In the case of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), we believe that course of action was illegal.
On October 15, 2016, CMD and Common Cause filed a detailed account of the scheme with the Internal Revenue Service's Whistleblower Office, backed up by more than 240 exhibits. The submission and all of the supporting documentation can be found at http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2016/10/06/exxon-alec-running-illegal-lobbying-scheme-irs-complaint/.
Between 1998 and 2014, Exxon and its foundation spent more than $1.7 million to finance lobbying activity by ALEC on legislation and public policies that benefit the corporation, while likely improperly and illegally claiming a tax deduction for those expenditures. More than $1 million of that money was given to ALEC while Mr. Tillerson was President and then CEO of Exxon.
Exxon's collusion with ALEC resulted in the coordinated introduction of scores of bills in state houses across the country, which ALEC promoted and carefully tracked. ALEC boasted of its efforts to win passage of that legislation in press releases and statements to its members. Meanwhile, ALEC fraudulently claimed on its tax returns it spent $0 on lobbying.
Exxon was not a passive participant in this arrangement. For most, if not all, of that period, Exxon paid substantial sums to serve in a leadership capacity at ALEC, both on the group's corporate board and on its energy-related issue task forces, where corporations promote "model" legislation for legislative members to push into law. In that capacity, Exxon and other fossil fuel companies held de facto veto power over what bills would or would not be promoted by ALEC. That activity constituted a gross violation of federal tax laws by Exxon.
At the center of Exxon's efforts was a 1998 "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan"developed by Exxon and other oil companies to "inform the American public that science does not support the precipitous actions [the] Kyoto [climate treaty] would dictate." The plan envisioned spending $5 million over two years to "inform and educate members of Congress, state officials, industry leadership, and school teachers/students about the uncertainties in climate science."
Ultimately, Exxon ended up spending at least $30.9 million to support climate denial groups between 1998 and 2014. More than $18 million of that climate-denial cash was spent after Mr. Tillerson became Exxon's President and then CEO.
Exxon also used ALEC to promote its corporate legislative agenda concerning regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, fracking, and the Keystone Pipeline. For example, as detailed in the New York Times, Exxon drafted and introduced a fracking bill that was adopted by ALEC and then introduced in at least six states.
By intentionally using a 501(c)(3) charity to promote its legislative agenda, instead of a 501(c)(6) trade association, Exxon benefited from the arms-length appearance of neutrality the charity provided, and likely claimed the full amount of funding as a tax deduction. Comparable payments to a trade association would not be tax-exempt.
In light of those facts, CMD and Common Cause urged the IRS to expedite its open and active investigation into potential civil and criminal liability for both ALEC and Exxon, to revoke ALEC's 501(c)(3) status,to impose any necessary civil and criminal penalties, and to collect unpaid back and present taxes for nondeductible lobbying activities from both ALEC and its corporate donors, including Exxon.
Eric Havian, a prominent whistleblower lawyer at Constantine Cannon who is handling the case concluded, "It is corrupt to use the tax laws as a cover for corporate lobbying, but it'seven worse in this case. Exxon uses ALEC's charitable status to fuel its disinformation campaign on climate change, so taxpayers are literally paying Exxon to lie to them."
Mr. Tillerson's apparent willingness to illicitly use nonprofit organizations to sway public and political opinion on climate science and promote his lobbying agenda is very troubling.
Notably, Exxon's use of ALEC to advance disinformation on climate change and to obstruct efforts to mitigate climate change behind the scenes occurred while Exxon was conveying to its shareholders that it was working to address climate change That matter is under investigation the Attorneys General of New York and California. The Committee should not consider giving Mr. Tillerson the role of top U.S. diplomat until those legal investigations are completed and if they exonerate Exxon of wrongdoing under Mr. Tillerson's watch.
There are many very strong reasons to oppose Mr. Tillerson's confirmation. The deception Exxon executed through ALEC is one of them. Thank you for considering our views.
Respectfully,
Lisa Graves, Executive Director
==
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https://www.democracynow.org/2017/3/14/alec_for_profit_health_industry_embrace
As the Congressional Budget Office projects 24 million people will lose health insurance coverage by 2026 under the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, we look at who stands to benefit from the law. Lee Fang, investigative journalist at The Intercept, talks about how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the for-profit medical industry is backing the plan despite opposition from health providers. Plus, we look at how the bill is just the first of a three-part plan to repeal Obamacare.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue to talk about healthcare, I also want to bring in investigative reporter Lee Fang of The Intercept. He recently wrote a piece headlined "Next Phase of Obamacare Repeal Will Target Mandate Requiring Prenatal Coverage, GOP Leader Tells Allies." The article begins, "When Republican Congressman John Shimkus expressed outrage during a House committee hearing Wednesday 'about men having to purchase prenatal care' in their health insurance—the video clip of which caught fire on social media as an example of misogyny and cluelessness—he wasn’t going rogue. He was just getting ahead of party leaders, who haven’t publicly announced their next steps quite yet." This is Shimkus making the comment after being questioned by Democratic Congressman Michael Doyle.
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sj peace just ctr showed US of alec
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ALEC4
https://www.alec.org/tag/public-lands/
Navajo tribes in southern Utah enjoy free access to the federally owned region called Bears Ears. The land is managed by both the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management through resource management plans. These plans are developed in collaboration with state, local and tribal governments, even though most of the time the federal agencies ignore their concerns. However, a coordinated campaign of out-of-state environmental groups and Indian tribes are trying to make Bears Ears into a national monument. To do this, they are pressuring President Obama to declare the land a national monument through the Antiquities Act of 1906. Federal regulation could restrict the tribes from practicing their sacred traditions if Bears Ears is declared a national monument.
Currently, the local Indian tribes can worship and perform their traditional rites like hunting, gathering wood and food and harvesting herbs for medicine. However, with a national monument designation, this activity would be illegal or significantly curtailed. If Bears Ears becomes a national monument, the tribes could be subject to fees to enter the park or be barred altogether from visiting sites where ceremonial rituals are performed.
The President does not need congressional or state consent to declare the Bears Ears region a national monument. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gives him full authority to establish national monuments. This Act can be a very valuable policy tool enabling a U.S. President to offer national monument status to protect important historical sites from looting, vandalism and other damaging events when congressional action is not rapid enough. However, Bears Ears is an instance where the declaration is likely to restrict access to the area to the very people for whom access is most culturally vital – Utah’s and the surrounding states’ Native populations.
President Obama has used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to a greater extent than any of his predecessors. To date, he has designated a total of 24 national monuments, effectively rendering 265 million acres of public land “off-limits”. One of his most recent designations was the Katahdin Woods and Waters Monument. Representative Bruce Poliquin, whose district contains the new national monument, has indicated that the locals are completely against it, observing that “several communities most impacted by such a plan voted in non-binding referendums on the proposal in the Katahdin Region and in every instance the people voted in large numbers to oppose the concept.” Residents are distressed that the land will now become inaccessible for traditional outdoor activities and that nearby lumber mills could be impacted, and the new national monument status for this territory disregards local residents’ right to enjoy their own land. This situation mirrors what is happening at Bears Ears.
According to an article in the *Deseret News*, out-of-state interest groups are the main drivers behind making Bears Ears a national monument for conservation purposes. Two California-based groups, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, donated $20 million to the campaign. This past July, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation announced $15.6 million in donations to various environmental causes, including some reportedly for the Bears Ears campaign. This influx of outside money has raised questions about how much local tribal grassroots support there is for the designation.
Currently, Utah Congressional leaders such as like Senator Mike Lee, Rep. Rob Bishop, Rep. Chris Stewart and Rep. Jason Chaffetz are trying to address unreasonable federal overreach. This past year, Rep. Bishop and Rep. Chaffetz introduced the Utah Public Lands Initiative Act of 2016 (H.R. 5780) and Utah Public Lands Initiative Partner Act (H.R. 5781). H.R. 5780 is a compromise between the tribes, conservationists and industry. The bill would allow for a large portion of Bears Ears to be conserved while giving parts to the local Navajo Tribe and business interests who want to develop the land. H.R. 5781 prevents the Federal government from declaring Bears Ears a national monument. Senator Lee has been visiting the Bears Ears region, hosting events where the community is invited to voice its concerns, and actively letting Congress know the Bears Ears community’s thoughts on the matter.
Chronic National Park Service (NPS) budget shortfalls (not to mention a $12 billion backlog of deferred maintenance in national park units) added to the social costs imposed on a population that has long been mistreated by the federal government suggests that now is an inopportune time to designate additional federal lands as national monuments.
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http://www.alternet.org/environment/gop-and-alecs-brazen-plan-sell-americas-public-lands-fossil-fuel-industry
GOP and ALEC's Brazen Plan to Sell Off America's Public Lands to the Fossil Fuel Industry
Western states have already sold and privatized 31 million acres of state lands—an area about the size of Louisiana.
By Brad Brooks / AlterNet February 21, 2017
...Forests, refuges and other public lands have been important to Americans since the realization in the mid-19th-century that our wild places were disappearing. Today, these protected, shared lands are valued for their beauty, recreation and economic values as well as the clean air, water and wildlife habitat they provide.
Protected forests and red rock lands in Nevada and Utah belong to vacationing families in Massachusetts and New Mexico. Parks and refuges in Montana and California belong to campers and birdwatchers from South Carolina and Illinois.
But the political regime change in Washington, D.C. means that our wild American lands—and the outdoor recreation opportunities they offer—are under direct attack.
The armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge at the hands of the Bundys and their allies last January may have seemed distant and unimaginable to most American communities. But what these reckless delinquents are after and what some politicians are supporting in Congress is very similar: reducing the “federal estate”—parks, forests, refuges and monuments that belong to all Americans, and turning them over to private interests to log, mine, drill and otherwise develop for short-term gain. The freedom to access these places for America’s favorite outdoor pastimes like hunting, camping, hiking and fishing will be lost.
A no-trespassing sign in New Mexico, where oil and gas production is by far the largest source of revenue on state lands. (credit: Mason Cummings, The Wilderness Society)]
Anti-federal voices mangle facts and distort the truth about the history behind America’s public lands. For starters, our public lands—all 640 million acres of national forests, wildlife refuges, deserts, grasslands and parks—belong to the American people. They are cared for, on our behalf, by agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. When criminals like the Bundys suggest we need to “give” public lands “back” to the people, they are conveniently distorting the truth to steal these lands from every one of us.
In fact, this effort to reduce and dismantle public lands has virtually no legal merit, according to a 2016 report by 12 western attorneys general, and is nothing more than an attempt to give away the nation’s outdoor legacy. ..
Rep. Chaffetz did the right thing in listening to an overwhelming tide of constituents who castigated him for such an un-American piece of legislation. But this is just one victory in a broader defense of public lands at large.
The congressman’s troubling record on public lands issues in general—including his open push to roll back protection for sacred sites like Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument—means the Wilderness Society and many other sportsmen and conservation groups will keep Rep. Chaffetz and his allies under close scrutiny. At a town hall meeting just last week outside of Salt Lake City, Rep. Chaffetz faced an angry and volatile crowd demanding answers to numerous public lands questions.
Another Chaffetz bill, H.R. 622, would eliminate law enforcement officers from U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands, making it even harder for the chronically underfunded agencies to protect wildlife habitat, prevent poaching, preserve cultural sites, prevent reckless off-road vehicle use and otherwise take care of the nearly 440 million acres of land these two agencies collectively manage.
Furthermore, an association of federal agents and officers said it "vehemently disagrees" with Chaffetz's proposal because it will put public and federal workers at risk and embolden anti-public lands interests like the Bundy family, potentially leading to more violent incidents like the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff.
In early February, a survey highlighted that many staffers from national wildlife refuges and other public lands feel less safe than in the past, with about one in five saying they, their staff or their families have been threatened or harassed over land management disputes. Slashing law enforcement in such places only emboldens anti-federal vigilantes like the Bundys to trash the land and resources we all treasure and take the law into their own hands....
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Oops: Florida Republican Forgets To Remove ALEC Mission ...
https://thinkprogress.org/oops-florida-republican-forgets-to-remove-alec-mission-state...
1.
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ALEC, founded in 1973, acts as a clearinghouse for business-friendly model bills. Among its major donors are the billionaires Charles and David Koch. Members include corporations and their lobbyists, along with hundreds of legislatorswho work together to craft free-market legislation offered in many states at once. The group has successfully advanced bills imposing voter ID rules and loosening labor and environmental regulations.
Because the group generally allies with Republicans, November’s results provide the best chance yet to turn its ideas into law. In Iowa, for example, the party regained dominance in the state Senate, winning a trifecta of both chambers and the governorship for the first time in almost two decades. Republicans expanded their lead in the Pennsylvania Senate to a two-thirds majority, large enough to threaten to override vetoes by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat. Even in North Carolina, where Democrat Roy Cooper eked out a win for governor, Republicans retained their veto-proof majorities in the legislature, where lawmakers have pushed through a series of controversial laws, including one that rolled back protections for transgender people using public bathrooms. The number of states where Republicans control both the legislature and the governor’s office will rise from 23 to 25. The total number of Republican legislators nationwide also has grown....
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http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2016/11/30/hypocrisy-trumpism-agenda-alec-meets-washington-dc-week
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its offshoot the American City and County Exchange (ACCE) are meeting in Washington, D.C., today to strategize on how to advance a far-right agenda under a Trump presidency.
Trump Transition leader, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, is an ALEC booster. Not surprisingly the Trump team has been picking many with Koch and ALEC ties to fill key positions in government including Koch Congressman Mike Pompeo, school privatizer and ALEC funder Betsy DeVos, and South Carolina Governor and ALEC stalwart Nikki Halley.
The ALEC agenda for this year’s State and Policy Summit contains the usual potpourri of anti-worker, anti-government proposals along with quite a few important pay-to-play measures for big telecom, health care companies, and nuclear utilities. But much of the agenda will be taken up with speculation on opportunities presented by a new Trump presidency to advance ALEC’s corporatist agenda and its politicians.
TRANSPARENCY FOR UNIONS AND SCHOOL TEACHERS, BUT NOT FOR BILLIONAIRES OR CORPORATIONS BANKROLLING ALEC
ALEC’s offshoot for local governments, ACCE, is taking a page from the ALEC play book and advancing a measure to harass public sector workers.
ACCE’s “Public Employee Bargaining Transparency Ordinance” targets public sector workers by opening up public sector collective bargaining negotiations to public scrutiny and participation. The bill is nothing but an effort to advance the harassment of a targeted group of public-sector workers. There are no ALEC bills opening closed partisan caucuses or opening up economic development loan negotiations, other areas of state government where millions are spent with no public participation.
Similarly, ALEC’s bill “Substantive Transparency in Education Act” is up for renewal vote by special interest lobbyists and legislators in the Education and Workforce Development Task Force. The bill requires public schools to open up their instructional materials for review by any parent or guardian. Note that the bill does not apply to private schools and many private charters refuse to abide by state open meetings and open records laws.
ALEC, however, is for secrecy when it benefits itself and its donors.
It is notable that another ALEC bill under consideration at this week’s meeting “Resolution in Support of Nonprofit Donor Privacy” recommends that the public be kept in the dark when it comes to finding out which millionaires or corporate interests are bankrolling ALEC, because the poor souls might be subject to public criticism or public pressure to drop their ALEC membership.
The resolution highlights 501 (c) (3) organizations like ALEC, but the operative language also protects 501 (c) (4) dark money groups like the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity. ALEC along with the State Policy Network, the Wall Street Journal, and leaders of dark money groups have been fighting donor disclosure for dark money non-profits active in campaigns and elections. Wrapping dark money in the American flag and the Federalist Papers, they argue in endless articles, books, and speeches, that “anonymous speech” goes back to the founding fathers. But back then no Supreme Court had embraced the deeply flawed and corrosive concept that money is speech. They are sparing no effort to promote the idea that secrecy of donors is essential to protect First Amendment rights, despite the hundreds of millions now being secretly spent in elections without the disclosures the public supports to guard against corruption.
It comes as no surprise that Wall Street Journal editorial writer KimStrassel, who has become the key proponent of this propagandistic effort to shield the billionaire class from scrutiny with her fact deficient new book “The Intimidation Game,” will be addressing the ALEC meeting. Her book attempts to smear concerned citizens and small community organizations across the country that have successfully convinced over 100 ALEC firms to stop funding ALEC’s extreme agenda.
HOSTILITY TO RAISE THE WAGE EFFORTS
ALEC’s offshoot organization for local officials ACCE is advancing a series of muddled measures geared toward keeping wages low and handicapping activist federal agencies.
The “Local Resolution in Support of a State Minimum Wage Law” sounds like ACCE is in support of raising wages, but the cookie-cutter ordinance instructs local governments notto raise the minimum wage and to embrace preemption of local control by state legislatures. This is a rather odd position for a group whose model “Founding Philosophy and Principals Act” teaches American school children government “as close to the people as possible” is best.
But ALEC and its key funders like the billionaire Koch Brothers have long opposed any measure to raise the wage, including living wages and prevailing wages, and the Kochs have even characterized the federal minimum wage as an “obstacle to prosperity.” ALEC opposes even having a minimum wage for workers.
While ACCE favors state preemption of localities on some issues, on others it seeks unconstitutional local preemption of federal policy making. ACCE’s draft “Ordinance for Local Coordination on Federal Regulations” suggests that any local government — from a city or county to a school or water district — or even an NGO can invoke a theory of “coordination” to “force” the federal government to meet with them on an equal basis to work out their differences. “Coordination” is defined as “the process by which an agency of the federal government brings its regulations, whether proposed or established, into consistency with the public policy of [the local jurisdiction.”
So for instance if Superior, Wisconsin, thinks that the federal mercury standards for walleye and perch are too strict, ACCE thinks they should be able to impose their own notions on the federal government. In truth, ALEC has no consistent position on federalism or local control and simply attempts to hamstring any policy it or its funders don’t like.
ALEC’S EXTREME EDUCATION AGENDA ADVANCES WITH TRUMP PICK OF BETSY DEVOS
ALEC education bills were not publicly available at the time of this writing, but the nomination of billionaire Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is a big win for the ALEC crowd and will be a hot topic at the ALEC meeting.
DeVos and her husband of the AmWay fortune have long bankrolled the dark money group, American Federation for Children (AFC), which spends big each election cycle on politicians advancing her agenda to transform Americas public education system into a for-profit “cash for kids” enterprise. As CMD reported recently, AFC aggressively promotes school vouchers for private schools, religious schools, and even sham virtual schools through ALEC where DeVos lobbyist Scott Jensen, the disgraced former Speaker of the Assembly, has played a leadership role.
CMD has also documented how charter schools promoted by DeVos in her home state of Michigan have been embroiled in fraud and scandal, and how the state has even received federal tax dollars for charters that never opened. The New York Timeshas covered in depth how they are failing the state’s children. Even charter advocates acknowledge that her efforts in Detroit represent “the biggest school reform disaster in the country.”
PAY-TO-PLAY FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANIES
ALEC’s Communications and Technology Committee is looking at a number of bills written by big telecom and cable companies to keep prices high for consumers and undermine local control.
ALEC’s “Broadband Deployment Resolution” is deregulatory bill aimed at taking authority away from local municipalities to control and deploy broadband in ways that put the public interest ahead of corporate profits. The bill limits the deployment of municipality-owned broadband networks and also limits the ability of the state and local government to identify and combat corporate broadband monopolies. This is an effort by major telecom companies and ALEC funders like ATT, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon to gut municipality broadband, protect their local monopolies, and pad their already enormous profits.
ALEC’s proposed “Resolution Encouraging the Support of Infrastructure Buildout to Pave the Pathway for Next Generation Networks” advances uniform broadband deployment (“streamlining”) instead of letting municipalities control how broadband is deployed locally. This is part of an attack on municipal broadband, environmental regulations regarding locations of telecom poles, and other local government ordinances.
ALEC’s “Act Relating to Unmanned Aircraft Systems” or drones is written to prevent cities and other municipalities from regulating drone usage by police or other actors within their jurisdictions. Some localities like Charlottesville, Virginia, regulated drones in part due to civil liberties concerns regarding drone surveillance by law enforcement.
In addition, the proposed “Privacy and Encryption Protection Act” comes in response to the Apple versus FBI fight from last year and the ongoing cell-phone encryption debate. This bill authorizes government hacking of cell phones and mandates disclosure of a person’s cryptographic keys after a warrant has been issued. The bill would also require a company to decrypt a device subject to a warrant. Companies like Apple are now building products that the company cannot decrypt even if they wanted to. Civil libertarians have argued that mandating disclosure for some may be a violation of the 5th amendment prohibition on self-incrimination (see US v. Doe).
ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, AND OUR PUBLIC LANDS
ALEC’s Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force will review a raft of old policies to see if they should be renewed as well as a brand new resolution calling on the President and Congress complete the review of the Yucca Mountain license application for nuclear waste disposal halted by Obama in 2010. Edison Electric Institute, which represents companies that operate nuclear energy plants like Exelon and Southern, is a member of ALEC and the Nuclear Energy Institute has given ALEC money in the past. It’s lobbying efforts are lead by a former ALEC staffer.
ALEC has long relied on funding from its coal and oil industry members such as Exxon Mobil and Peabody Energy. It is also a key cog in the climate science denial machine. ALEC has battled the Obama Clean Power Plan every step of the way and has encouraged state Attorneys General to sue to block the implementation of the plan. ALEC also recently attacked new EPA rules to protect American streams—and along with them American families and wildlife—from dangerous pollution caused by surface coal mining.
ALEC has stated that it is not a climate change denial organization, but its raft of pro-carbon policies and its “Energy Principles” statement, which falsely suggests that there is some debate about the “significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions,” puts the group firmly in the denial camp.
ALEC’s Free Trade and Federalism task force is looking at a draft bill to “Clarify State Jurisdiction Over Public Lands” to encourage states to review federal designations of national monuments and battle such designations in court. The bill further feeds the “reclaim our public lands movement” that has embroiled seven Western states in “unconstitutional and quixotic battles” to force the federal government to turn over protected public lands to the states.
HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES BILLS
In addition to a number of bills intended to reduce opioid abuse, the Health and Human Service Committee will discuss the “Site Neutral Payment Policy Act” essentially undermines hospitals financially by reimbursing out-patient facilities with much less over head at the same right for same services, a type of facility especially favored by for-profit operators.
The American Hospital Association has stated that this policy will “freeze the progress of hospital-based health care in its tracks.”
ALEC’s draft “Medicaid Narcotic Prescription Abuse Act” will make it unlawful to use Medicaid funds to pay for prescription narcotic drugs under DEA Schedules II, III, and IV, unless the drugs are administered in an emergency medical facility, hospital, or outpatient medical facility. The goal of the bill is to reduce the usage of narcotics nationally, but in doing so it unfairly targets the poor, the elderly and people with disabilities.
Notably, House Speaker Paul Ryan, a favorite of the Kochs, appears interested in advancing ALEC’s hostility to Medicaid in Congress. With multiple bills, ALEC has fought Medicaid expansions in the states as part of its tactics to weaken the Affordable Care Act and aid insurance companies.
ANTI-TAX AND ANTI-GOVERNMENT AGENDA
ALEC’s Tax and Fiscal Policy Committee will also consider a draft proposal to establish a “tax and expenditure limit” or TEL. ALEC claims that a TEL “is simply an institutionalized restriction on the growth of tax revenue and/or government spending with a goal of restraining budget growth to a level that can fund essential government services.” This type of arbitrary limit shows that ALEC is less interested in fiscal restraint than tax bashing PR stunts.
Similarly, ALEC’s gratuitous anti-government proposals include a bill being considered by the Commerce Insurance and Economic Development Task Force to establish an arbitrary cap on all state regulatory policies with a goal of creating and sustaining a zero net increase after a specific date.
Echoing its big brother ALEC, ACCE also has on the agenda two tax-bashing measures an “Ordinance to Repeal Personal Property Tax Collection” (small taxes levied by local government on items like boats, cars, trailers) and a proclamation to recognizing “Tax Freedom Day.”
FREE TRADE UBER ALLES
ALEC and its corporate funders including Koch Industries have never seen a trade bill they did not like, so it comes as no surprise that ALEC is trying to find a way forward on trade in the face of the recent “Brexit” vote in the U.K. and with the collapse of the Trans Pacific Partnership (which it had embraced) and the election of an anti-free trade president.
ALEC has two new bills, one proposing a free trade agreement with Great Britain made possible by “Brexit” and a proposal to normalize trade with Cuba made possible by the United State’s recent moves to normalize relations.
ALEC-promoted “free trade” agreements, such as the 2000 agreement to normalize trading relations with China, have been a disaster for American workers, but a boon to ALEC corporations.
No word yet on if ALEC will temper its free trade fanaticism in deference to the President-elect.
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American Legislative Exchange Council will push bills toprotect failing charter schools, silence political speech, and obstruct environmental protections in the ALEC 2016 agenda introduced at its annual meeting in Indianapolis this week.
ALEC faces renewed public attention as it gears up for the annual meeting, where corporate lobbyists sit side-by-side with state legislators in luxury hotels to vote as equals on "model bills" that then get pushed to become law in states across the country.
As the Center for Media and Democracy has reported, Donald Trump chose an ALEC ally, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, as his running mate, while his party's 2016 platform was clearly stamped in the Koch-fueled ALEC mold.
Pence Pushed ALEC Agenda in the Hoosier State
As Governor, Pence appointed an ALEC staffer to his cabinet, and pushed parts of the ALEC agenda into law, such as anti-worker bills like repealing the prevailing wage and privatizing public schools in various ways. He even sent a letter to state legislators urging them to join ALEC, which is widely described as a corporate bill mill. ALEC is funded by Koch Industries, Peabody Energy, huge global tobacco and drug companies, and other corporations that pay a premium to access ALEC lawmakers.
Conveniently for him, this year's meeting will be held in the snazzy J.W. Marriott in downtown Indianapolis. Pence is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at lunch on Wednesday, then is slated to speak at an :{evening reception on :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{school "reform":(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: jointly hosted by the Center for Education Reform (CER) and the Jack Kemp Foundation (JKF).
If Pence had time to stay for a few task force meetings, here are some of the new "model bills" he would find voted on behind closed doors by ALEC legislators alongside corporate lobbyists and representatives of special interest groups that are part of the State Policy Network (SPN).
Second Chances for Failing Charter Schools
The for-profit education companies that help fund ALEC, like K12, Inc., have a track record of poor results that tends to result in a high rate of school closures. K12, which was founded in part by junk bond fraudster felon Michael Milken, has a seat and a vote on ALEC's corporate board.
Two new bills being considered by what ALEC now dubs its "Education and Workforce Development Task Force" could help poorly performing charters stay open without having to improve.
Under the Assessment Choice Act, instead of using a uniform assessment for students statewide, charters' authorizers would take their pick from a "menu" of tests, unlike traditional public schools.
If propping up test scores isn't enough to save a charter from closure, the "Student and Family Fair Notice and Impact Statement Act" promises to add new hurdles. Before closing or restructuring a charter school, this act would not just require that families be notified. It would also create a public hearing process in which parents, teachers, and "experts" could give testimony about the school, and the charter board would be allowed to suggest a response plan.
In case it wasn't obvious that the bill is meant to keep the charter in operation, the drafter of that model bill added:
"[drafting note: it should be clear the school can present an alternative for supporters of the school to rally around.]"
School privatization proponents have slowly been dropping the pretense that the "school choice" movement is about helping underprivileged children. At a workshop titled "The Path to Universal Choice: From Theory to Passage to Implementation," lawmakers will be schooled on how to "open up more options to the middle class."
ALEC Aims to Silence Political Speech With Anti-Divestment Bill
While ALEC purports to support "limited government," its bills show that is code for unlimited corporate power, even from democratic control by stockholders.
For example, ALEC bills have leveraged right-wing ALEC control of state legislatures to try to stifle political movements that are winning the battle for public opinion, as CMD has previously reported in its coverage of ALEC's preemption strategy, among other areas.
This ALEC meeting includes a proposal opposing the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions Movement (BDS), which has been growing in strength, especially on college campuses.
The BDS Movement is an international campaign to use economic pressure to push the state of Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories and to allow Palestinian refugees the right of return to their homes.
While a healthy public debate is ongoing about the pros and cons of BDS, ALEC's proposal as described doesn't merely express opposition to the movement. Instead, it apparently aims to silence political speech and activity:
"The goal of the resulting model policy will be to create disincentives to engaging in (and prohibit to the extent possible) secondary boycott activities."
ALEC host Indiana and a handful of other states have passed similar anti-boycott bills, which the American Civil Liberties Union has criticized as unconstitutional limits on speech.
This is all par for the course for ALEC, which opposed anti-Apartheid sanctions, as CMD's Nick Surgey uncovered with Calvin Sloan. ALEC has long opposed citizen stockholder movements to urge socially responsible investing.
Still Attacking Public Sector Unions After Losing in the Supreme Court
Earlier this year, a split U.S. Supreme Court left standing a lower court's decision to uphold public sector union fees in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. As CMD documented, ALEC sibling group SPN organized anti-union protests at the Court before the case was decided.
Undaunted, ALEC's "Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development" Task Force is presenting a combined version of its long-standing "Right to Work" Act and Public Employee Choice Act. The new version has been re-branded the "Friedrichs Public Employee Freedom Act" to try to get more mileage from the case. Its namesake Rebecca Friedrichs is a photogenic school teacher and rightwing activist who tried to pave the way for free-riders to get out of union dues. Friedrichs herself is an invited speaker at the conference.
To advance this agenda, the task force meeting will hear just from proponents at a presentation titled, "A State Strategy toProtect Public Employees' Free Speech Rightsin the Wake of Friedrichs v. California Teachers' Association." The presentation will likely unfold the next steps of ALEC's Koch-y anti-union strategy.
Leaning Hard on Attorneys General to Block Climate Change and Environmental Protections
ALEC has long relied on funding from its coal and oil industry members. It is also a key cog in the climate science denial machine.
This year its "Energy, Environment, and Agriculture" Task Force is proposing yet another resolution opposing the Clean Power Plan (CPP). The CPP takes important steps toward reducing carbon pollution from coal power plants that are contributing to climate changes underway.
Another proposed resolution attacks a new EPA rule to protect American streams -- and along with them American families and wildlife -- from dangerous pollution caused by surface coal mining.
Mimicking ALEC's "guerilla warfare" strategy against the CPP, the resolution calls on state attorneys general to actively oppose the rule. ALEC, whose focus has long been legislators, has been increasingly coordinating with top law enforcement officers to thwart an array of legislation, including the CPP and the Affordable Care Act.
As Long as ALEC Is Amending the Constitution. . .
As CMD has previously detailed, one of ALEC's top priorities in recent years has been calling to amend the U.S. Constitution with a balanced budget requirement. Such an amendment would straitjacket the federal government's ability to respond to crises, opportunities, and economic downturns.
Now that the movement may be getting close to the numbers needed to call a constitutional convention under Article V. One estimate counted 28 states of the required 34 having passed resolutions. It looks like ALEC's "Federalism and International Relations" Task Force is piling on to make the most of the opportunity.
Two proposed "model bills" aim to guarantee technicalities don't derail the effort.
The "Article V Records Transparency Act" would enlist the U.S. Archivist to keep track of convention calls. Another model bill conveniently combines and unifies three of ALEC's previous Article V policies.
A presentation on a "Congressional Term Limits Amendment" underscores the potential dangers of the Article V strategy that some have expressed. That's because it appears thatany change could be made to the Constitution during a convention (just as the entire Articles of Confederation were scrapped at the last Constitutional Convention in 1787).
It's clear that some proponents see it as an opportunity to tack on a wishlist of right-wing policies without oversight or accountability, based on pre-selecting who gets a vote at such a convention.
An Updated ALEC Agenda for Big Pharma and "Home Sharing"
As usual, ALEC's agenda also includes plenty of bills that aid the corporate interests that bankroll ALEC.
Drug companies are a perennial favorite at ALEC. Representatives of Pfizer and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America trade group have seats and votes on sit on ALEC's private sector board. A Takeda lobbyist is the "private sector" chair of the "Health and Human Services" Task Force.
The "Federalism and International Relations" Task Force is considering a resolution against Canada's "Promise Doctrine," which requires that a patent applicant actually demonstrate the utility of an invention before being awarded a patent.
ALEC's "Communications and Technology" and "Tax and Fiscal Policy" Task Forces are pulling out the preemption playbook for "home-sharing" operations like Airbnb and HomeAway. HomeAway is a member of the trade association NetChoice, which has a seat and a vote on ALEC's private sector board.
As the hotel alternatives cut into tight housing markets, cities like San Francisco and Phoenix have been experimenting with local rules to ensure the businesses comply with safety and tax rules, and to keep big investors from tying up residential housing.
The proposed Model Act Relating to Online Lodging Marketplaces, Uniform Standard for Lodging Taxes Act, and Resolution in Favor of Tangible Personal Property Tax Repeal would block those local measures.
Corporate Lobbyists Get a Vote on "Tort Reform" Bills
The "Civil Justice" Task Force continues to focus on helping corporations escape liability and the costs of worker injuries. Meeting behind closed doors, the task force includes some of the defense lawyers who represent corporations whose products or practices injure Americans, who will vote as equals with state legislators on bills.
On the docket this meeting is an amendment to ALEC's Statement of Principles on Workers' Compensation Reform. The task force will also hear a presentation on "Sports Industry Liability: Helmets, Concussions and Medical Duties."
Uncoincidentally, the National Athletic Trainers Association will also be welcomed as a new member of the "Health and Human Services" Task Force at the Indianapolis meeting.
Legislators rubbing elbows with so-called"tort reform"lobbyists will be told about "Lawsuits in the Age of Big Data: Bringing Discovery Reform to the States." A presentation titled "The Threat of Groupthink in Jury Decision-Making" will teach them about perceived problems with the democratic check on the criminal justice process, the right to a trial by jury.
ALEC's Local Offshoot ACCE: Defer Local Decisions to the States
ALEC's project, the American City County Exchange, is ostensibly meant to be a municipal version of ALEC.
ALEC reliably leans on rhetoric about local control in its opposition to federal policies. But ACCE's "model bills" are strangely bifurcated between seizing and abandoning local power.
On the one hand, ACCE's Ordinance for Local Coordination on Federal Regulations demands local control over federal land-use and environmental policies. A workshop on "24- hour building permits" looks poised to justify limiting democratically adopted rules governing building codes, purportedly in order to encourage "economic growth." Meanwhile, the workshop "Right to Work or Not, Taxpayers Come First" tries on new rhetoric to peddle limits on collective bargaining for local government workers.
Yet ACCE just as often urges municipalities to turn decision-making power over to the states. This is likely because cities are at the forefront of progressive policy-making, as with the incredibly popular efforts to raise the minimum wage and expand access to earned sick days. Indeed, as CMD documented, most CEOs support those measures by overwhelming majorities, even though business lobbies routinely claim companies oppose such legislation.
ACCE's Ordinance to Repeal Personal Property Tax Collection would interfere with cities like San Francisco, which is experimenting with ways to tax property in short-term HomeAway-type rentals similarly to hotels.
ACCE's Local Resolution in Support of State Minimum Wage Law even urges city officials to claim that the "do not have the authority" to set minimum wages that are appropriate to the conditions in the cities they were elected to represent.
Peddling Harmful Myths, From Guns to Climate
Such efforts are part of ALEC's larger pre-emption playbook, which dates back to its efforts to help the tobacco companies funding it and the gun industry trade groups fueling it thwart progressive city policies to address the deadly harms of inherently dangerous cigarettes and guns.
Four years ago, CMD connected the dots between the Koch-backed ALEC and the Stand Your Ground legislation that initially prevented the arrest of George Zimmerman -- and ultimately prevented his conviction -- for killing Trayvon Martin. Under public scrutiny, ALEC announced it was parting ways with the NRA.
ALEC is hosting another shooting range event this Saturday.
Like ALEC, Mike Pence has cast his lot with industry, peddling deceptive claims like smoking doesn't cause cancer and opposing laws to reduce gun violence.
It should come as no surprise that he has also claimed that climate change is "a myth," just as ALEC has preached to its legislators numerous times over the years, as it has been funded by Exxon, Koch, Peabody, and other climate change denial operations.
http://www.alternet.org/environment/alec-agenda-boosts-coal-and-corporations
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exxon knew 8/1//16
In any case, according to its own figures posted last week, ExxonMobil spent $1.96 million on 16 denier and obstructionist groups last year. Ten of them, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Federalist Society and Hoover Institution, were among those listed in the 2007 UCS report.
So what is ExxonMobil getting for its money? Let's take a look at a handful of last year's grantees to find out.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce:
Half of ExxonMobil's 2015 denier donations—$1 million—went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the same amount it gave the Chamber in 2014.
The chamber acknowledges that climate change is happening, but discounts the prevailing scientific consensus that it is largely due to human activity, mainly burning fossil fuels. When pressed about the Chamber's position during a March 2014 Senate hearing, Karen Harbert, head of the Chamber's Institute for 21st Century Energy, replied that there is a "robust debate" over what is causing climate change. "It is caused by a lot of things," she insisted.[tobacco scam]
Harbert's scientifically indefensible comment was not surprising. The Chamber has a long history of disputing climate science and that has alienated some of its members. In 2009, Apple, Exelon, Nike, PNM Resources and PG&E, for example, cancelled their memberships after Chamber Vice President William Kovacs demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) convene a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" on climate science with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge ruling on the reality of global warming. "It would be evolution versus creationism," Kovacs explained. "It will be climate change science on trial."
Those high-profile defections apparently had little impact on the Chamber's position. In May 2014, just days before the EPA announced its draft Clean Power Plan to reduce power plant carbon pollution, the Chamber released a grossly misleading report attacking the proposed rule. The report, which was also sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, was denounced not only by the EPA, but also by PolitiFact.com and the Washington Post. Among its many faults, the report wildly inflated the cost of the rule and failed to consider the benefits of cutting carbon emissions.
Last October, the Chamber and 14 other business associations filed a lawsuit against the EPA, arguing that the Clean Power Plan exceeds the agency's authority to regulate the energy sector and the Chamber's priorities for 2016 include opposing EPA efforts to curb carbon emissions as well as the agency's science-based finding that global warming endangers public health and the environment.
Manhattan Institute:
ExxonMobil gave the Manhattan Institute $200,000 in 2015, boosting the company's total donations to the self-described free-market think tank to $1 million since 1998. In turn, the institute has been cranking out papers and articles denouncing efforts to cut carbon and maligning renewable energy technologies.
Last summer, for example, Manhattan Institute Senior FellowOren Cass dismissed the idea of a carbon tax—ExxonMobil's supposed preferred policy—as a "shell game" in an article he wrote for National Affairs. He followed up that essay in October with a white paper calling the impending UN climate negotiations in Paris a "farce." What did Cass propose as a better solution? He urged policymakers to "abandon fruitless negotiations and focus instead on the realistic option of promoting innovation and preparing for any future adaptation that may be necessary."
The institute's longtime point man on energy,Robert Bryce—who previously worked for the ExxonMobil-funded Institute for Energy Research—says he's "agnostic" about climate change. Over the years he has written numerous columns for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications praising oil, natural gas and coal and disparaging wind and solar. A recent Bryce column in the National Review, for instance, denounced tax breaks and subsidies for the wind industry but ignored the fact that, since 1918,federal oil and gas industry subsidies have averaged $4.85 billion a year in today's dollars.
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC):
ALEC, a secretive lobby group that drafts sample corporate-friendly legislation for state lawmakers, has received $1.79 million from ExxonMobil since 1998 and that investment is still paying dividends. At ALEC's annual meeting last July, for example, corporate and legislator members collaborated on bills and resolutions that would inhibit state implementation of the Clean Power Plan, hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to homes and businesses and undermine state renewable energy standards by restricting investment in wind and solar.
One of the keynote speakers at that meeting, Stephen Moore—founder of the Club for Growth and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation—declared at a plenary session that the "biggest scam of the last 100 years is global warming." ALEC's official position on climate change is only slightly more nuanced, leaving open the question of the role human activity plays. "Climate change is a historical phenomenon," its website states "and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions."
With that scientifically challenged position, it's no wonder ALEC invites speakers for its conferences from such notorious climate science denier groups as the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the Heartland Institute and, of course, the Heritage Foundation—all former ExxonMobil grantees.
While ExxonMobil and other major carbon producers Chevron and Peabody Energy remain steadfast ALEC members, more than 100 corporations have severed ties with the organization for a variety of reasons, including its stance on climate change. Those companies include a number of heavy hitters in the energy sector, including American Electric Power, BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell.
National Black Chamber of Commerce:
From 2002 through last year, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) received $1.1 million from ExxonMobil and the organization's president, Harry C. Alford, is unapologetic about taking fossil fuel industry money. "Of course we do and it is only natural," Alford states on the NBCC website. "The legacy of Blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil fuel ... [F]ossil fuels have been our economic friend."
Last summer, NBCC published a report that falsely claimed the Clean Power Plan would pose "economic hardship" on poor and minority Americans. A UCS analysis found that the report was based on fraudulent claims from previously published studies, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's anti-Clean Power Plan report from 2014. In fact, unchecked climate change would likely hurt poor and minority communities most.
More recently, Alford wrote an opinion piece attacking the Clean Power Plan for The Hill, a Washington political trade publication. Like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's bogus 2014 report, Alford's June 29 column vastly exaggerated the cost of the proposed rule and did not factor in the billions of dollars in health and economic benefits that would result from cutting carbon pollution.
ExxonMobil's Pretzel Logic
Last fall, UCS and reporters at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Exxon's own scientists had warned the company decades ago about the potential for climate catastrophe. The new revelations also showed that the company responded to that bad news by downplaying climate risks and helping establish the climate science denial network.
A number of journalists did follow-up stories, pressing ExxonMobil officials about the company's longtime support for denier groups. They didn't always get the same answer.
During an interview last September with Richard Keil, ExxonMobil's senior media relations advisor, WNYC's On the Media host Bob Garfield pushed Keil for an explanation. "Please clarify this for me: Are not funding or did not fund them?" Garfield asked. Keil's response was unequivocal. "We are not funding," he said.
When asked the same question by the New York Times in early November, then-Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Kenneth Cohen likewise said no. "We stopped funding them in the middle part of the last decade because a handful of them were making the uncertainty of the science their focal point," he said. "Frankly, we made the call that we needed to back away from supporting the groups that were undercutting the actual risk" of global warming.
Cohen's response wasn't a surprise. He made the same disingenuous claim back in February 2007, a few weeks after UCS disclosed that ExxonMobil had been spending millions of dollars on climate science denier groups. Greenwire, a trade news organization, reported that Cohen said the company "has stopped funding them."
The surprise came on November 9, three days after the New York Times story ran, when PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff asked Cohen if ExxonMobil has been funding denier groups. This time he took a different tack.
"Well, the answer is yes," replied Cohen, who retired from the company in January. "And I will let those organizations respond for themselves."
But before anyone declares a victory for corporate transparency, it turns out that Cohen's moment of candor was, well, momentary.
On December 1, a Washington Post story quoted yet another ExxonMobil spokesperson who qualified Cohen's remark. Alan Jeffers, a media relations manager, said the company "rejects the premise" that it has been funding climate science denial.
"We were engaged with funding public policy groups on policy issues, not on science," Jeffers explained. "We made our position known on some climate policies that made us unpopular with environmental activists and they tried to position that as us funding climate denial. And that's just not accurate."
Not accurate? As Jeffers, Keil and their former boss, Cohen, surely know, the think tanks, advocacy groups and associations ExxonMobil has been sponsoring all these years lie about the science to strengthen the argument against doing anything to address climate change. After all, if people believe climate science is a fraud—or at least "far from settled"—they will see no reason to support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade system or any other climate policy. And that line of reasoning, which protects the status quo, seems to suit ExxonMobil just fine.
Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists
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tries to infl prez primary: http://www.vermontbiz.com/news/january/vermont-ranks-49th-again-alecs-rich-states-poor-states-report
ALEC report is based mostly on taxes and tax policy. For instance, Vermont in the subcategories ranked 49th for Personal Income Tax Progressivity and 48th for Property Tax Burden, but fifth for Debt Service and seventh for Sales Tax Burden. There are also non-tax items factored in, like workers' compensation and minimum wage (high is bad and Vermont ranked 47th). Being a "Right-to-Work State" (a union-option question) is also bad but is not supported by data as to why this is so; still the state ranked 50th.
Nor is the report indicative of actual wealth within a state. There, Vermont is 14th (just below North Dakota and above the national average), while Indiana, for instance, is 39th (below the average). SEE TABLES BELOW.
The ALEC report, co-authored by Reagan-era economist Dr Arthur Laffer, seeks to change policy at the individual state level to reduce tax burdens and other costs to businesses, because where there is less cost there is more opportunity for future growth. So, the report is not a snapshot of existing economic conditions as it is an attempt to be predictive of future prosperity.
laffer
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5/16
In states across the country, concerned citizens are asking state and local policymakers to raise the minimum wage, enact workplace reforms including earned sick days and the right to organize, stop the privatization of public schools, and help mitigate climate change. Opposition to these initiatives is fierce and growing and often nationally-driven and coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Working in tandem with deep-pocketed corporations, trade associations, conservative groups and mega-donors--including operatives of the Koch brothers--ALEC is driving an agenda you should know about. As legislators and lobbyists fly toPittsburgh for ALEC's Spring Task Force Summit May 6, the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org, has the lowdown on ALEC bills moving in states this year.
Background on ALEC
More than a quarter of all the state legislators in the country belong to ALEC, although the secretive group does not disclose its list of more than 2000 legislative members. ALEC gets 98 percent of its funding from corporations and sources like the Koch family foundations, and it acts as a conduit for special interest influence in state legislatures. ALEC convenes legislators, corporate lobbyists, and right-wing think tanks to vote as equals, behind closed doors, on "model bills" that benefit ALEC's corporate members, industry funders, and right-wing allies. These bills are then introduced, often word for word, in state legislatures around the country.
ALEC's long-term agenda is reflected in the current crop of bills now being filed in state houses. They undermine action on climate change and environmental protections; promote school privatization; defund unions and stop progressive wage and benefits policies; and, among other things, call for a convention to amend the U.S. Constitution to restrict the federal budget.
ALEC is also the force behind the increased use of "preemption" laws designed to strip local governments of their power to ban fracking, pass minimum wage hikes, and enact earned sick day laws. ALEC is pushing bills to stop cities from banning plastic bags, made from derivatives of oil refining. ALEC is funded by some of the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world, like Koch.
Over the last three years, 109 corporations--from Ford to Google--have dumped ALEC after the public learned more about this shadowy group, particularly its role pushing national model bills like the "Stand Your Ground" law cited for exonerating Trayvon Martin's killer, along with bills that make it harder for Americans to vote and peddling extreme climate change denial.
Priority Bills ALEC Is Pushing this Session
ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT:
Attacking Federal Efforts to Rein-in Carbon Pollution
Over the last three years, ALEC has penned and promoted several bills to stop the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which establishes state-by-state targets for carbon emissions reductions, and offers a flexible framework that allows states to meet those targets. The Clean Power Plan is also a major part of the U.S. commitment to reduce carbon pollution under the recent Paris international climate conference to try to mitigate the consequences of climate change.
In addition, since December 2013, ALEC has been organizing regular conference calls with its members, apparently urging them to speak with their state's Attorney General and to pushing them to prepare for and engage in litigation against the Clean Power Plan. Twenty-nine states have subsequently filed suit against the Clean Power Plan.
Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has engaged in an unprecedented act of judicial activism to put the rule on hold, some states--including Kansas and Missouri--have already seen legislation introduced that would block all work on developing the state pollution reduction plans required under the Clean Power Plan. Although this legislation is not yet adopted by ALEC, it is consistent with the central agenda in many of the model bills being promoted by ALEC.
ALEC model bills opposing the Clean Power Plan include:
- The State Power Accountability and Reliability Charter (SPARC), would effectively block states from complying with the Clean Power Plan, by disallowing essential pollution reduction tools such as requiring energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy. The nation's largest privately-held coal company in the world, Peabody Energy, promoted this model bill to ALEC at its July 2015 Annual Meeting, where it was adopted.
- The Act Requiring Approval of State Plan to Implement EPA's Carbon Guidelines, adopted by ALEC in December 2015, would require state legislators to affirmatively vote to approve a state plan to reduce carbon pollution before it is sent to the EPA, causing more delay and politicization.
- The Reliable, Affordable and Safe Power (RASP) Act would block the use of state funds to comply with the requirements of the Clean Power Plan, mirroring the "just say no" approach advocated by U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The model legislation was developed and promoted by David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, and discussed at ALEC's December 2015 meeting, although not yet approved by the board.
- ALEC has also adopted and promoted numerous resolutions opposing the Clean Power Plan, including: the Resolution Concerning EPA's Proposed Guidelines for Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants and the Resolution in Response to EPA's Plan to Regulate Greenhouse Gases under the Clean Air Act.
- The Environmental Impact Litigation Act, adopted by ALEC in September 2015, would establish a "slush fund" financed by gifts from corporations and individuals to be used to pay for state litigation against the Clean Power Plan and other environmental protections. It would also create a board to control the fund including representatives from "energy trade associations."
Other Elements of ALEC's Anti-Environment Agenda:
- The Electricity Freedom Act would repeal individual state requirements for utilities to generate a proportion of the energy they produce from renewableenergy sources.
- The misleadingly-named "Disclosure of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Composition Act" would allow oil and natural gas companies to keep details about chemicals they pump into the ground during the fracking process secret. The bill was brought to ALEC by the America's lead fracking corporation, ExxonMobil, one of the largest companies in the world.
- The Environmental Literacy Improvement Act would require that educators teach students about issues such as climate change from "a range of perspectives."Although climate change is not a scientifically disputed fact (with 97% consensus), the bill would require that students be taught "countervailing scientific and economic views."
- The Disposal and Taxation of Public Lands Act is one of several ALEC model bills that would ostensibly allow states to take control of and then sell federal lands to corporations for the extraction of coal, oil, and gas—or other corporate interests.
- The Updating Net Metering Policies Resolution would increase costs for energy users who generate their own electricity through solar panels at their home or business. An ALEC staffer described home solar users to the media as "free riders on the system."
- The State Withdrawal from Regional Climate Initiatives would withdraw a state from regional efforts to lower carbon pollution.
- The Resolution to Retain State Authority Over Coal Ash as Non-Hazardous Waste asserts that states should have jurisdiction over regulating coal ash pollution, rather than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Blocking local environmental laws. ALEC has also sought to undermine local efforts to protect our environment.
- Dozens of towns and cities in states across the country have banned hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, citing public health concerns about water contamination and earthquakes. After voters in Denton, Texas, passed a referendum limiting fracking, ALEC legislators in the Texas statehouse pushed bills to override local control over public health. At the December 2015 meeting of ALEC's new project to solicit corporate cash, the American City County Exchange (ACCE), members were warned of an "epidemic" of "draconian" local restrictions against fracking, according to a report from the meeting.
- Plastic bag preemption was a hot topic at the most recent ACCE meeting, with a bag industry representative warning that local plastic bag regulations serve as "stepping stones to the regulation of all packaging." ACCE's Executive Director Jon Russell has also written in favor of states overriding local control over shopping bags—an odd position for the head of a group purportedly committed to strengthening local government.
EDUCATION: More Privatization
ALEC's education agenda is focused on privatizing America's public schools. Its bills undermine public education and teachers' unions and also divert taxpayer dollars from accountable public schools to unaccountable for-profit education corporations. ALEC masks its true agenda in "feel-good" language, such as shifting from terms like "vouchers," which are broadly unpopular and rooted in segregation, to "opportunity scholarships" or "tuition tax credits." ALEC bills expected to crop up in 2016 include:
- "Parental Choice Scholarship Program Act" creates a voucher system for ‘low- and middle-income families" for private, for-profit, or religious schools.
- Under ALEC's "Education Savings Account Act" money for public schools is put into an account for parents to use for private school tuition or for homeschooling. To try to short-circuit potential opposition from the state education officials, the bill authors recommend contracting "with a private nonprofit to administer the program."
- "Great Schools Tax Credit Program Act" implements a "tuition tax credit" program, which some have dubbed "neo-vouchers." Corporations get tax-credits for funding student "scholarships" to private and religious schools.
- "Next Generation Charter Schools Act" shields charters from accountability and by giving charter approval to unelected statewide authorizers.
- "Indiana Education Reform Package" creates a voucher program, using taxpayer funds to subsidize private for-profit and religious schools and limits teachers' rights to collective bargaining. One of its key components--the "Charter School Act"--automatically converts low-scoring public schools into charter schools.
- "Parent Trigger Act" would allow parents to seize control of a school and fire the teachers and principal, or privatize it entirely, for years to come.
- "Virtual Public Schools Act" recognizes online virtual education providers as public schools–and, incredibly, requires that virtual schools receive the same per-pupil funding as brick-and-mortar schools, virtually ensuring high profit margins for for-profit providers like ALEC funder and corporate board member K12 Inc.
- "Founding Philosophy and Principles Act" requires every high school student take a semester-long course with a "conservative" focus on "the limitations on government power to tax and spend and prompt payment of public debt," even though the U.S. Constitution expressly grants Congress the power to tax, spend, and incur debt.
- "Environmental Literacy Improvement Act" mandates that states "provide a range of perspectives presented in a balanced manner" on climate change, despite the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence that it is happening.
Wages and Benefits: Weakening Worker Rights and Hurting Movements
In 2016, ALEC will be pushing several new initiatives designed to undermine worker rights, limit reduce wages and benefits, weaken job standards, and break unions, both on the state level and by undermining the power of local governments.
Weakening Unions. Several states have introduced ALEC's anti-union "Right-to-Work Act" in recent years, and the ALEC model has become law in Michigan, Wisconsin, and West Virginia--bringing the total number of "right to work" states to 26. ALEC's "Public Employee Freedom Act" is its right-to-work bill for public sector workers. These laws have the aim of defunding unions by encouraging workers to free-ride on union representation by allowing them to opt out of paying union dues to cover the costs of representing employees on the job.
- ALEC's city and county offshoot, the American City County Exchange (ACCE), is also pushing a legally dubious local-level Right-to-Work Ordinance in states where they have not been able to pass a state bill. A federal court in Kentucky recently found the ACCE legislation illegal but its backers plan to appeal up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
- ALEC also has a number of other models drawn up to drain unions of funding and crush the voice of workers in the workplace. The "Public Employee Paycheck Protection Act" prevents unions from arranging for automatic payroll dues deduction. The "Prohibition on Paid Union Activity (Release Time) by Public Employees Act" complicates worker representation by outlawing paid release time, and Resolutions on "Binding Arbitration" and "Reporting Requirements for Public Sector Unions" are similarly disruptive.
Lowering Job Standards. ALEC is also backing efforts to undermine workplace standards:
ALEC opposes a minimum wage and state efforts to set a higher wage or cover more workers through bills like the "Starting (Minimum) Wage Repeal Act," "Resolution in Opposition to any Increase in the Starting (Minimum) Wage," and "Resolution Opposing Increases in the Minimum Wage Linked to the CPI."
The ALEC "Living Wage Mandate Preemption Act" overrides local control by prohibiting city and county governments from enacting a minimum wage higher than the state minimum
ALEC's "Prevailing Wage Repeal Act" would repeal a state's prevailing wage requirements for construction projects and building services. Prevailing wage laws ensure that states do not undercut local wage standards and that public works contracts are awarded on quality rather than price.
Public employee pensions are a particular ALEC target. ALEC's "Defined Contribution Pension Reform Act" and "Public Employees' Portable Retirement Option Plan" aim to cut pensions for public sector workers. Its "State Employee Health Savings Account Plan Act" cuts health insurance benefits. And its "Resolution to Align Pay and Benefits of Public Sector Workers with Private Sector Workers" argues, against the facts, that public employees are higher paid compared to their private sector counterparts and urges cutting public sector wages and benefits across the board.
State "Preemption." A key ALEC method of undermining worker rights and other progressive policies is through state "preemption" measures that override the authority of local governments to enact progressive policy initiatives.
- In addition to the "Living Wage Mandate Preemption Act," ALEC has been tied to the spread bills to block local paid sick day laws. Since Wisconsin's paid sick days preemption bill was shared at ALEC's August 2011 meeting, similar laws have been passed in 12 other states.
- In the first months of 2016 alone, bills to preempt minimum wage and/or earned sick days have already been filed in at least seven states, including Alabama, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Washington.
- Legislation has also been filed in Indiana, Kansas, Michigan and New Mexico to stop local action on fair scheduling ordinances. Unions are bracing for bills in a spate of states aimed at limiting municipal labor standard-setting.
- 2015 saw more efforts to undermine local control on more issues than any year in history: last year, state legislatures in at least 29 states introduced bills to block local control over a range of issues according to Preemption Watch. Seventeen states considered more than one preemption bill.
In addition to an increase number of preemption bills, state lawmakers are also seeing historically broad, hardline bills being introduced across a wide range of issues.
- An Oklahoma bill (SB 1289) was just introduced which would effectively end home rule by prohibiting local governments from doing almost anything that isn't specifically authorized by the state legislature. There is a new bill in Arizona that would deny state-shared revenue to local governments that violate state law. It allows any lawmaker who thinks that may have happened to order an investigation by Arizona's attorney general.
- ALEC members in some states have pushed broad "Death Star" preemption bills that work in one stroke to deny communities power to act on a range of employment and workplace issues including minimum wage, living wage, paid leave or sick days as well as to enact local environmental protections.
Constitutional Convention for a Balanced Budget Amendment
- One of ALEC's top priorities is to amend the U.S. Constitution via a Convention under Article V of the Constitution, and it is getting closer each year. Here's the latest:
- ALEC's balanced budget amendment campaign has attracted little media attention, but the pieces of legislation that could trigger a constitutional convention are moving forward much more quickly than many might anticipate.
- Although there are many unanswered legal questions about how a convention is triggered, 27 states have enacted such measures, including three in 2015.
- The Constitution provides that 34 states (two-thirds) can trigger a convention to propose amendments, which must then be ratified by 38 states (three-fourths).
- That puts convention proponents just 7 states away from victory. (Any controversy over how states are counted would be settled by Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.)
- The Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, which is closely allied with ALEC, has targeted 13 states this year, many of which are deep red: WA, MT, ID, WY, AZ, OK, MN, WI, SC, KY, WV, VA and ME. The biggest threats appear to be VA, WV, OK, SC and WI.
- This is not a grassroots movement; it is a highly organized and well-funded attempt capitalize on the Republican's historic takeover of state legislatures to lock in the right-wing's discredited "supply-side" economic policies.
- The balanced budget amendment--which could force deep cuts in vital programs like Social Security or limit the ability of the government to deal with economic or natural disaster or even war--has been supported by Koch-backed groups like David Koch's Americans for Prosperity and the National Federation of Independent Business. ALEC and it's "Jeffersonian Project," a new 501(c)(4) arm, are lobbying for it.
- Throughout U.S. history, the Constitution has only been amended through a two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress on a specific amendment, which is then ratified by two-thirds of state legislatures. If a constitutional convention is triggered it is unclear that it could actually and constitutionally be confined to the balanced budget, and some groups –like the Convention of States–are pushing for much broader amendments to limit the power of federal government, including adding term limits.
For more on what is happening at the ALEC meeting in Pittsburgh this week see our article on the Spring Task Force Summit.
==
This year, the American Legislative Exchange Council's winter meeting, which it calls the "States and Nation Policy Summit," will be held in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa from December 2-4.
ALEC has promoted this event as an invitation for legislators to use the meeting to "plan your 2016 agenda."
Controversy over the organization's role as a bill mill for special interest cookie-cutter legislation and as the key group teaching climate change denial to legislators has led 106 mainstream corporations to stop funding it since 2012, including Shell, BP, Northrup Grumman, T-Mobile, Allergan, and the biggest rail network in Canada this year.
In Arizona, ALEC lawmakers will hear from a number of prominent speakers in corporate-sponsored plenary sessions and workshops, then retreat into "task force" meetings to vote as equals on "model bills" with corporate lobbyists and special interest groups.
The meetings where corporations vote on bills alongside legislators continue to be closed to the press and the public, although ALEC touted allowing press to see ALEC alum Scott Walker speak at its summer meeting before he exited the presidential campaign in failure.
ALEC's little brother--its new project dubbed the "American City County Exchange" (ACCE)--will also be meeting at the ALEC meeting and its local municipal officials will be attending many of the same ALEC sessions, in addition to the parties at fancy restaurants in the evenings.
One of the most significant funders of ALEC is Koch Industries, and other Koch-led entities like Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners as well as Koch-funded and think tanks, sit on a number of ALEC task forces and have multiple votes within the organization..
Here are some of the items on the top of ALEC's legislative agenda described in more detail below: further efforts to undermine climate action, to help corporations defeat consumers seeking justice in the courts, to facilitate a race to the bottom in occupational standards, to back Israel, and to push more privatization of public schools.
ALEC Features Controversial Figures Dr. Ben Carson and Gov. LePage
ALEC's new National Chair, Wisconsin State Senator Leah Vukmir, is a registered nurse and a far-right ALEC loyalist who has introduced numerous ALEC bills in Wisconsin, including the Right to Work Act, the Health Care Savings Account Act, the Special Needs Scholarship Act and more. She and her staff went to great lengths to avoid lawful open records requests about her communications with ALEC as a legislator. She ultimately settled the Center for Media and Democracy's lawsuit and paid damages.
- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/11/12981/alec-agenda-scottsdale-2015#sthash.PDswm3Mv.dpuf - See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/11/12981/alec-agenda-scottsdale-2015#sthash.PDswm3Mv.dpuf
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12/15
Two conferences are taking place this week 5,438 miles apart.
The agendas could not be more different. The stakes could not be any higher.
In Paris,120 world leaders are meeting under the auspices of the United Nations in an urgent effort to prevent catastrophic climate change, which threatens the lives and livelihoods of millions around the globe.
In Arizona, global fossil fuel companies and giant utility firms will go behind closed doors with American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) politicians in a continued effort to derail any global agreement with state lawsuits designed to sink President Obama’s Clean Power Plan with cement boots.
ALEC Spearheads State Legal Efforts to Tank the Clean Power Plan and Paris Accord
To rein in carbon pollution that causes severe health and environmental impacts, the Obama administration developed the 2015 Clean Power Plan (CPP), which requires states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants 32 percent by 2030.
Although experts say it falls short of what is needed, it is also the the most ambitious effort of any American administration to address the climate crisis.
While Republicans in Congress can do little but rant and rail over the measure, states have the power to bog down implementation with aggressive lawsuits and other legal countermeasures.
ALEC has been a key vehicle for advancing this goal.
In 2013, ALEC legislators called for “Guerrilla Warfare” against the EPA and passed resolutions objecting to the EPA’s plans to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. At the same time, ALEC ramped up its efforts to roll back renewable portfolio standards and undermine solar energy by "taxing the sun.'" An ALEC measure to tax solar was pushed by corporate members in Arizona and elsewhere.
In 2014, before the Clean Power Plan was finalized, ALEC adopted a model bill requiring legislative approval of any state plan to implement the EPA’s carbon guidelines. It organized conference calls with industry, and encouraged members to meet with and lobby their own attorneys general, governors, and even those in neighboring states to combat the CPP with lawsuits. More than a dozen bills were introduced in statehouses reflecting this effort.
"ALEC has become quite well known and notorious for promoting model legislation. This is different," CMD research director Nick Surgey, told *The*Guardian. "ALEC is engaging much more broadly in the campaign against the EPA regulations, and they are doing so by asking their members to advocate for the coal industry with attorney generals. That is very unusual for them."
In July 2015, ALEC went further, adopting a model bill ordering state agencies not to implement the power plan without specific new state authorization. ALEC passed another model bill that would allow private corporations and fossil fuel interests to pay for state litigation against the CPP, a corporate slush fund just in case taxpayers got upset about the use of taxpayer dollars to fight on behalf of polluters.
In October 2015, the day the CPP was published in the Federal Register, 24 state attorney generals sued in federal court to stop it. The litigation is being lead by Patrick Morrisey, the West Virginia Attorney General, who is joined by Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Arizona and North Carolina.
The overarching goal of these efforts is to cast doubt on Obama’s ability to deliver on U.S. commitments and scuttle the Paris talks and future negotiations. The goal is also to delay, delay, delay in hopes that a new president will pursue a more polluter-friendly agenda.
ALEC will be meeting behind closed doors with polluters in Scottsdale, Arizona, December 2-4 to consider a model bill to discourage subsidies for electric cars. Apparently, the ALEC crowd is not at all concerned about the annual $37.5 billion Uncle Sam pays in fossil fuel subsidies.
ALEC is not just out of touch with the world, it is out of touch with its own base. Prominent GOP pollsters have shown that 72 percent of conservative Republicans want to accelerate the development of clean energy to reduce pollution and create jobs; a solid majority 54 percent believe the world’s climate is changing and that mankind plays a role in the change.
Polluters of the World United Behind ALEC
you are wondering what is behind ALEC’s suicidal tendencies, look no further than the ALEC corporate roster.
106 firms have cut ties with ALEC since CMD published ALEC Exposed in 2011. Recently Google, Shell, and others have quit citing ALEC’s retrograde climate policies.
Yet the ALEC corporate funders list is still is packed with utility companies, fossil fuel firms, pipeline firms, and oil speculators who play dirty. Many have track records of contempt for the law, public safety, and the environment.
Chevron, Exxon, Peabody, Dominion, Duke Energy, and ALEC stalwart Koch Industries are just a few of the big names orchestrating ALEC’s pushback on the CPP. These firms have something in common: million of dollars in fines and penalties for repeat violations of federal law. The total penalties for just the top ten ALEC energy firms is $543,051,962.
A deeper dive into the data exposes the tragic details behind the dry statistics.
Examining Duke Energy using Violation Tracker, the first online data set to track corporate misconduct across federal agencies, the public can see that between 2010 and 2015, Duke Energy and its subsidiaries were subject to 20 penalties totaling a whopping $112,150,534.
These include five OSHA violations for the tragic electrocution of a 36-year-old husband and father in 2014 and a massive toxic coal ash spill in North Carolina’s Dan River in 2015 that resulted in three subsidiaries of Duke Energy pleading guilty to nine criminal violations of the Clean Water Act.
Duke Energy also appears to be part of an array of polluters, hiding behind the name “Utility Regulatory Group,” who are also suing to prevent the implementation of the CPP.
Conclusion
New scientific reports are offering incontrovertible evidence that the destructive and costly effects of climate change “have already begun to sweep the planet,” reports the New York Times.
“Never have the stakes of an international meeting been so high, since what is at stake is the future of the planet, the future of life,” said President Francois Hollande of France told Paris conference attendees, which included over 120 world leaders. Russia’s Vladimir Putin called climate change humanity's “greatest challenge,” while the Pope called inaction “suicide.”
But you won't hear any of this at this week’s ALEC meeting, where legislators are encouraged by ALEC funders to keep their heads firmly in the tar sands.
Opponents to President Obama’s effort to reduce U.S. carbon pollution for the benefit of the nation’s citizens and the world “are on the wrong side of the law and the wrong side of history,” says Howard Fox, a lawyer with the environmental law firm Earthjustice.
The only problem is that our history of carbon pollution is rapidly catching up with us.
Read more about ALEC's agenda in Scottsdale here. CMD Research Director Nick Surgey and Phil Mattera of Good Jobs First contributed to this report along with Alec Armon and Jordan Barden.
- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/12/12984/alec-works-scuttle-global-climate-agreement#sthash.a4mtS03z.dpuf
- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/12/12984/alec-works-scuttle-global-climate-agreement#sthash.a4mtS03z.dpuf
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/12/12984/alec-works-scuttle-global-climate-agreement
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A few years ago, as anti-immigrant sentiment roiled the country, Arizona enacted a draconian law, SB 1070, that expanded the role of local police in enforcing federal immigration policies, requiring them to determine someone's immigration status if there was "reasonable suspicion" they were not in the U.S. legally. Several states including Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina soon followed Arizona's lead with laws targeting immigrants.
At the end of October, North Carolina joined the ranks of states with harsh immigration policies when Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed into law HB 318. The new law expands requirements to verify employees' immigration status and invalidates consular IDs and other alternative forms of identification except in certain situations with law enforcement. It also bans local ordinances limiting police involvement in federal immigration enforcement — what are known as "sanctuary city" or "community trust" policies since they're intended to foster cooperation between local police and immigrants.
North Carolina's law was passed amidst a conservative backlash against community trust initiatives nationwide sparked by this summer's murder of Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant who had been released by local police in accordance with city policies. The news of her death led to the introduction of federal legislation banning such policies, including a version that passed the U.S. House but was blocked last month in the Senate. Steinle's story was also referenced by North Carolina legislatorsduring their discussion of the local ordinance ban, which was added to the bill in late September a few months after her death.
But language in North Carolina's sanctuary city ban predates Steinle's death: It comes from a model bill, titled "No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants," crafted in 2009 by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit that brings together corporate representatives and conservative state policymakers to craft model state legislation that member lawmakers then introduce in their home states. While ALEC is officially tax-exempt, its 501c3 status has been challenged by good-government advocates who say it operates more like a corporate lobby than a charitable nonprofit...
https://us-mg5.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.rand=d1fmffoar7nog#471183328
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/fearsome-four-leading-governors-seeking-2016-gop-nomination-are-all-dismal-right
kasich, christie, jeb, walker ALEC
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7/15 conference
School vouchers were never about helping poor, at-risk or minority students. But selling them as social mobility tickets was a useful fiction that for some twenty-five years helped rightwing ideologues and corporate backers gain bipartisan support for an ideological scheme designed to privatize public schools.
But the times they are a-changin'. Wisconsin is well on its way [3] toward limitless voucher schools, and last month, Nevada signed into law [4] a universal "education savings account" allowing parents to send their kids to private or religious schools, or even to home-school them—all on the taxpayers' dime. On the federal level, a proposed amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that would have created a multi-billion-dollar-a-year voucher program was only narrowly defeated [5] in the U.S. Senate.
The American Federation for Children (AFC), chaired by Amway billionaire Betsy DeVos, estimates that vouchers and voucher-like tax-credit schemes currently divert $1.5 billion [6] of public money to private schools annually. But that is not enough. By expanding "pro-school choice legislative majorities" in state houses across the country the organization hopes that $5 billion a year will be siphoned out of public schools by 2020 and applied to for-profit and religious schools.
With vouchers gaining momentum nationwide, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC [7]), which is meeting in San Diego this week, has decided to drop the pretense that vouchers have anything to do with social and racial equity, and is now pushing vouchers for the middle class—a project which, if pursued enough in numbers, will progressively erode the public school system and increase the segregation of students based on race and economic standing.
ALEC Comes Clean, Vouchers Are for the Middle Class
The agenda [8] for this week's ALEC meeting includes a presentation entitled: “Problems in Suburbia: Why Middle-Class Students Need School Choice, Digital Learning and Better Options.”
Perhaps more importantly, ALEC's revisions to three of its "model" voucher bills make clear that it is changing focus from underserved inner-city schools to middle-class suburbia. The talking points at the end of the bills state:
- "Legislators … should keep in mind the financial burden many middle-class families face in paying for private schools."
- “The authors believe that all children from low- and middle-income families should receive public support for their education regardless of whether they are attending a public or private school."
- “The authors do not adjust the amount granted to an ESA [Education Savings Account] student based upon the student's income because states do not adjust the public investment for a student attending a traditional public school or a charter based upon their household income.”
As if to further nail down the point that school vouchers are not about equity, ALEC also advises legislators against including language “banning discrimination in hiring.” But if they choose to do so, they should “take care not to interfere with the ability of religious institutions to hire individuals who share their religious beliefs.”
"Abolishing the Public School System"
ALEC is not the only organization coming clean on vouchers.
At the American Federation for Children’s [9] National Policy Summit held in New Orleans, lobbyist Scott Jensen—who, before being banned from Wisconsin politics for violating the public trust [10] served as chief of staff to governor Tommy Thompson, and was a prime mover behind the first voucher program in the nation—admitted that vouchers were really all about “pursuing Milton Friedman’s free-market vision” even though the ideological agenda was nowadays sugarcoated with “a much more compelling message ... of social justice.”
So what exactly was the brave new world Milton Friedman envisioned when he first floated the idea of school vouchers? While lecturing rightwing state lawmakers at a 2006 ALEC meeting [11], Friedman jumped at the opportunity to explain what his vision was all about. It had nothing whatsoever to do with helping “indigent” children; no, he explained to thunderous applause, vouchers were all about “abolishing the public school system.”
Here is an excerpt from Friedman’s ALEC speech:
If I were to ask everyone here, what would be your idea of the right way to conduct, to have an educational system constructed, you would say the ideal would be to have parents control and pay for their school's education, just as they pay for their food, their clothing and their housing. That, of course, would leave some indigent and problems of charity. Those should be handled as charity problems, not educational problems. The reason we cannot do that is because taxes are used to pay not for education, but for schools, for teachers.
How do we get from where we are to where we want to be—to a system in which parents control the education of their children? Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private schools, but you're not gonna to do that. So you have to ask, what are politically feasible ways of solving the problem. The answer, in my opinion, is choice, that you have to change the way government money is directed. Instead of it being used to finance schools and buildings, you should decide how much money you are willing to spend on each child and give that money, provide that money in the form of a voucher to the parents of the children so the parents can choose a school that they regard as best for their child.
Ditching the Marketing Plan
By shifting the focus from poor, minority children to the predominantly white middle class, ALEC has come full circle. Vouchers were first proposed in the 1950s [12] as a way for white families to get around the desegregation resulting from the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision. ALEC first pitched vouchers to legislators in 1984 as a way to “introduce normal market forces" into education and to "dismantle the control and power of" teachers' unions. While there was a narrative of parent "empowerment" at that time, there was not even a passing mention of children—let alone minority children.
But when William Bennett joined Ronald Reagan's cabinet in 1985, vouchers soon gained a unique selling point. In the words of The Black Commentator [13]:
“Former Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett understood what was missing from the voucher political chemistry: minorities. If visible elements of the Black and Latino community could be ensnared in what was then a lily-white scheme, then the Right’s dream of a universal vouchers system to subsidize general privatization of education, might become a practical political project. More urgently, Bennett and other rightwing strategists saw that vouchers had the potential to drive a wedge between Blacks and teachers unions, cracking the Democratic Party coalition. In 1988, Bennett urged the Catholic Church to “seek out the poor, the disadvantaged…and take them in, educate them, and then ask society for fair recompense for your efforts”–vouchers. The game was on.”
Conservative think tanks and advocacy groups across the nation soon launched massive whitewashing campaigns; they started churning out policy reports and books purporting to show how school vouchers would actually benefit minority students. Examples include: We Can Rescue Our Children: The Cure for Chicago's Public School Crisis (Heartland Institute, 1988) and Liberating Schools: Education in the Inner City (Cato Institute, 1990).
By proposing schemes with vouchers weighted to boost racial diversity, or restricted to children from low-income families, the organizations pushing vouchers were able to kill two birds with one stone. They made them acceptable by obscuring the segregationist history [14], and, crucially, they could now cast themselves as the "new" civil rights movement.
In state after state, politicians were in on the trick. They would sign limited voucher programs into law as “civil rights” measures only to gradually expand the programs to higher-income white families. The Milwaukee program—the first in the country—was originally restricted to families learning less than 175 percent of the federal poverty level. But under Gov. Scott Walker, the income ceiling was recently upped to 300 percent. A married couple with two children can currently earn [15] $78,647, which is far more than the median U.S. family income of $52,250 [16], and still send them off to private schools at the public’s expense. Most students receiving vouchers last year were already attending private schools [17]--meaning vouchers were being used a taxpayer subsidy for private education rather than as a way for students to escape underperforming public schools. Walker's newest voucher expansion in the state budget could suck some $600-800 million [18] out of public schools over 10 years.
“They have high-jacked the program,” Annette “Polly” Williams, an African-American lawmaker who co-sponsored the original bill, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel [19].
This is a pattern across the country. The voucher-like corporate tax credit program in Georgia was originally billed as a way of helping African-American and Latino families, but most scholarships have been awarded “white students from upper income families,” the Southern Education Foundation wrote in a scathing report [20]. In 2013, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana raised the income requirements of the voucher program in the Hoosier State, and last year, Florida's Republican governor Rick Scott lifted the income bar for the state voucher program [21], allowing a family of four making up to $62,010 a year to participate—$20,000 higher than the previous ceiling.
With upped income ceilings in multiple states—not to mention the universal "Education Savings Account" system signed into law in Nevada last month—ALEC seems poised to ditch the civil rights "marketing plan [22]," (as the rightwing Heartland Institute aptly put it in a 1991 paper) and get back to basics: school vouchers are for privatizing public education.
ALEC makes this abundantly clear when it recommends in its talking points that legislators not adjust the amount granted based on family income. The upshot of this is that vouchers will be a welcome bonus for well-off families whereas poor families may not be able to afford private school tuition even with the extra money.
This, in turn, will lead to increased segregation "based on race, socio-economic status, disability, English language proficience," as public school watchdog Educate Nevada Now [23] warned when Gov. Sandoval signed the universal ESAs into law in June—a prospect that does not seem to faze ALEC legislators who are set to renew and refresh these policies in San Diego today.
Jonas Perrson is the Center for Media and Democracy's writer focused on education policy.
===
sued slapped common cause:
Alan P. Dye
Partner
Webster, Chamberlain & Bean, LLP is the leading law firm in the United States specializing in the provision of a full range of legal services to non-profit and tax-exempt organizations. Since 1970, WC&B has provided comprehensive legal services to a broad range of trade associations, professional societies, public charities, private foundations, scientific organizations, churches, clubs, schools and civic groups, lobbying groups, and political committees and candidates.
...
In addition, the firm advises clients regarding the underlying legal framework governing "lobbying" including compliance with the Lobbying Disclosure Act, gift rules and federal election laws; and lobbying administrative agencies. The firm's practice also involves setting up Section 501(c) and 527 organizations, as well as Political Action Committees (PAC's), and is often involved with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
General Information
Alan Dye has specialized in the representation of non-profit organizations since joining Webster, Chamberlain & Bean in 1975. His practice includes not only trade associations, but numerous think tanks, lobbying organizations, and political committees, with an emphasis on tax issues, charities, social welfare organizations, political and election law, and general corporate governance.
Education & Honors
Duke University (AB, Economics, 1968);
University of Florida (JD, 1971);
New York University (LLM, Taxation, 1973).
Assistant Professor and Director, Eastern Water Law Center, University of Florida College of Law, 1971-72.
Bar & Court Admissions
Admitted to the Bar: 1971, Florida; 1973, U.S. Tax Court; 1974, U.S. Claims Court; 1975, District of Columbia, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia; 1982, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Judicial Circuit, U.S. Supreme Court.
Publications
Co-Author: Association Legal Checklist, 1994.
Co-Author: Trade Associations, Bureau of National Affairs, 1982.
Professional Activities
Mr. Dye is a Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel. Attorney Advisor to Judge Austin Hoyt, U.S. Tax Court, 1973-1975. Member: American Bar Association (Exempt Organizations Committee of the Taxation Section, 1977-, past Chairman, Subcommittee on Trade Associations); Federalist Society; American Society of Association Executives, past member of the Council of the ASAE Legal Section. Board of Directors: Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation, 1985- , Chairman, 1994-1996; Capitol Hill Restoration Society, 1975-1979; American Franklin Friends Committee, 1991-1995; Lee Fendall House, 1992-2003, Chair, 1996-2000; Freedom House, 1996-; Barracks Row Main Street, 2000-, Greater Educational Opportunities Foundation, 2000-; Fund for the Endowment of the State Department Reception Rooms, 2008-; Chairman, Washington Non-Profit Legal & Tax Conference, 1997-. Who's Who in America.
==
SLAPP
ALEC v common cause
Heidi K. Abegg
Senior Counsel
General Information
Ms. Abegg focuses her practice on the representation of non-profit organizations, including charities, social welfare organizations, professional societies,trade associations, 527organizations, candidates and political action committees, and for-profit and non-profit organizations related to running and road racing.
Ms. Abegg advises clients on all areas of business, transactional and contract law, as well as federal, state and local campaign finance laws, lobbying registration and reporting requirements, government ethics requirements, as well as privacy issues, including financial and medical privacy laws, security breach laws, and employment and general corporate matters.
Representative Experience
Ms. Abegg assists clients with obtaining federal, state and local tax-exempt status, group exemption rulings, and other tax matters, as well as litigation regarding tax-exempt status.
Ms. Abegg assists clients with responses to and appearances in connection with FBI, Federal Election Commission and state agency investigations. She assists clients with lobbying registration and reporting under the federal Lobbying Disclosure Act, and with state and local authorities.
Ms. Abegg litigates campaign finance cases in state and federal courts, most notably:
Gov. Gray Davis v. American Taxpayers Alliance, 102 Cal.App.4th 449 (Cal.App.Ct.2002)
Griset v. Fair Political Practices Comm'n, 23P.3d 43 (Cal. 2001)
Perry v. Bartlett, 231 F.3d 155 (4th Cir. 2000) (argued and on brief)
Citizens for Responsible Gov't State PAC v. Davidson, 236 F.3d 1174 (10th Cir. 2000)
Anderson v. Spear, 189 F.Supp.2s 644 (E.D. Ky. 2002)
Education & Honors
JD, Valparaiso University School of Law
BA, Valparaiso University, cum laude
Bar & Court Admissions
Admitted to bar, 1996, Indiana; 1997, Florida; 1999, District of Columbia; 2000, U.S. Supreme Court.
United States Courts of Appeal for the Fourth, Tenth, Eleventh and D.C. Circuits.
Publications
Author: Presidential Election Year Activities, Doors & Hardware Magazine, Oct. 2008.
Author: Obama Administration Brings Change to Employment/Labor Law, Doors & Hardware Magazine, July 2009.
Author: Can Employers Check Social Networking Websites Prior to Hiring?, Doors & Hardware Magazine, Feb. 2008.
: Staying Out of Legal Trouble: Job Advertising, Applications and Interviews, Doors & Hardware Magazine, Feb. 2007.
Author: Drafting an Employee Handbook, Doors & Hardware Magazine, Dec. 2007.
Author: Worker Centers: Charities or Labor Organizations Masquerading as Charities, and the Impact of an IRS Decision on the Question, Non-Profit Legal & Tax Letter, OMI, 2013.
Co-Author: The Developing Constitutional Standards for Coordinated Expenditures; Has the Federal Election Commission Finally Found a Way to Regulate Issue Advocacy?, Election Law Journal 209 , 2002.
Co-Author: Lobbying and Political Expenditures, Tax Management, Inc., 2002.
Co-Author:Free Speech and the Christian Coalition Case, Free Speech and Election Law News, Summer, 1999.
6/15
Powerful interests are facing off on the future of renewable energy in North Carolina.
A bill to freeze the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS) — a mandate on how much clean energy utilities have to use — was shoved through committee last month, but despite a wide Republican majority (34-16), the bill hasn’t been brought to the Senate floor. Similar legislation has been introduced and shot down in past years.
Environmental and business groups fighting the bill say that reintroducing the same bill until it passes is a classic American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) tactic. The North Carolina bill was brought by a legislator affiliated with ALEC, the conservative group backed by the Koch brothers, whose billion-dollar enterprise is built largely on fossil fuels.
But despite the time and money ALEC is pouring into fighting the transition to renewable energy, it seems that wind and solar have some powerful supporters, as well. Big businesses, including data services and clean energy developers, have paired with environmental advocates to stymie many of ALEC’s challenges.
Last year, ALEC-affiliated legislators in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, and Ohio proposed rolling back state RPSs. New Mexico and New Hampshire saw efforts, as well. Only the efforts in Ohio were successful, while Kansas reached a different agreement this year.
Across the country, supporters have relied on free market rhetoric to say RPSs make electricity more expensive. “The high cost of renewable energy is paid by all state citizens, including those who already struggle to pay the cost of electricity,” according to ALEC’s sample legislation for repealing an RPS.
In North Carolina, where a companion bill already passed in the House, Americans for Prosperity’s North Carolina state director Donald Bryson echoed ALEC’s position, saying that the customer fees were set to triple.
“This compromise measure provides relief to families who pay their utility bills and work hard to grow the economy without taxpayer support or government favors,” Bryson said.
The local utility company, though, disagreed with that analysis.
Duke Energy, North Carolina’s giant electricity company — which doesn’t have the cleanest record — doesn’t have a problem with the RPS, and says that ratepayers have not been put on the hook for clean power investment in the state.
We don’t think the current REP is a cost burden to customers.
“We did not ask for this legislation; we are actually neutral on this legislation,” Randy Wheeless, a spokesman for Duke Energy, told ThinkProgress. The utility has stayed “well under” the cost cap stipulated in the RPS, Wheeless said. “We don’t think the current REP is a cost burden to customers,” he said. In his home area, customers pay about 50 cents a month to support renewable energy development.
North Carolina has been something of a solar success story. Last year, the state was in the top five for solar job growth, adding 2,500 workers, , $652 million was invested in solar installations, and 13 times more solar was installed than in 2010. In fact, North Carolina recently extended an investment tax credit for solar, and the state has attracted some of the biggest names in technology. Data centers use a phenomenal amount of power, and for tech companies, renewable energy is a key component in plans to go green.
While the bill flounders awaiting Senate vote, Apple, Facebook, and Google co-signed a letter to state leadership last week, saying the RPS actually saves money for ratepayers. The companies cited the RPS as a reason they have located in North Carolina.
“The undersigned companies have chosen to locate in North Carolina in part because the state’s existing energy policies enable us to operate and grow our businesses in furtherance of the goals mentioned above,” the lettersays.
Renewable energy might save money, but it also has widespread support. A recent University of Michigan pollfound that the majority of Americans, “of every race, income and education level, and religious and political affiliation,” support state-level mandates on renewable energy.
The more popular renewable energy is, the more pressure companies have to get off fossil fuels. In one stark example, Amazon has been asked to account for its energy mix after announcing new cloud computing centers in coal-heavy Ohio (which did freeze its RPS last year). Yahoo, Hootsuite, and 17 other online companies have all asked the company to reveal its energy sources.
...
http://www.globalpossibilities.org/the-tide-is-turning-against-alec-in-the-renewable-energy-battle/
http://www.prwatch.org/node/12829
Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy sent federal authorities new evidence today that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is falsely passing itself off as a tax-exempt charity and effectively using taxpayer dollars to subsidize its lobbying on behalf of private interests.
Common Cause filed a supplement to its three-year-old tax whistleblower complaint against ALEC, and the two groups sent a joint letter to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen demanding an investigation, collection of fines and back taxes, and the revocation of ALEC’s status as a tax-exempt charity. Supporting evidence available here.
"Our whistleblower complaint, which includes statements, letters and correspondence from ALEC member companies and previously undisclosed public records of ALEC’s lobbying activities, demonstrates beyond doubt that ALEC is – and always has been – a lobby, not a charity," said Common Cause President Miles Rapoport.
The filing comes on the heels of ALEC’s threat in March to file suit against Common Cause and two other groups that have criticized ALEC’s positions on climate change and telecom issues. "This whistleblower supplement is unrelated to our dispute with ALEC on climate issues," Rapoport said, "but I hope that with today’s filing ALEC gets the message that we will not be deterred from working to expose its activities."
The new trove of documents includes statements by 20 corporations that admit that they joined and maintained membership in ALEC to influence legislation and gain access to lawmakers. The corporate admissions included in the complaint are from Yelp, Pfizer, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Honeywell, Yahoo, eBay, Eli Lilly, Duke Energy, Altria, American Electric Power, Anheuser-Busch, BP, Chevron, Cox Communications, CSX Corporation, ExxonMobil, Overstock, and Peabody Energy. Several of those companies no longer are part of ALEC.
The new filing also includes the recent finding of the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board that "ALEC’s primary purpose is the passage of state legislation in the various states and that all of its wide-ranging activities are in support of this primary purpose."
ALEC continues to deny that it is engaged in lobbying, submitting annual reports to the IRS with "$0" filled in on a line designated for the amount it spends on lobbying.
"Our powerful new evidence demonstrates that ALEC continues to operate as a 'corporate lobbying group masquerading as a charity,'" said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, publisher of PRWatch.org and ALECexposed.org. "Clearly, in their own words, many of the corporations that fund ALEC use it as a vehicle for their lobbying agenda."
"ALEC is a pay-to-play operation where corporate lobbyists pay for a seat and a vote as equals with legislators on model bills to benefit the legislative agenda of those very same special interests," Graves added. "Though ALEC claims that it is now a legislator-driven, bottom-up enterprise, our evidence shows that the corporations underwriting ALEC continue to drive its legislative priorities and do so to benefit their bottom lines. ALEC operates for the private gain of its corporate funders like a trade group, offering them one-stop shopping for lawmakers nationwide."
In response to the groups’ past exposure of its misreporting and illegal schemes, ALEC formed a lobbying arm, the Jeffersonian Project, in 2013; it also made some changes on its tax forms, and now admits responsibility for a "scholarship" fund used to finance legislator travel.
"ALEC tried to outsource some of its more obvious lobbying to the Jeffersonian Project, an entity that ALEC controls," said Eric Havian, an attorney representing Common Cause on the submission. "But hiding its lobbying behind a different corporate mask doesn’t absolve ALEC. ALEC still manages the most critical lobbying activities, such as hosting junkets to bring legislators and lobbyists together at posh resorts to strategize about how to pass favored legislation."
Today’s submission to the IRS is the third challenge Common Cause and CMD have made against ALEC for masquerading as a charity at taxpayer expense.
"It has been almost exactly three years since we uncovered ALEC’s tax misrepresentation and first reported it to the IRS," Rapoport said. "Three years later, the IRS Whistleblower Office has not taken action, despite its legal mandate to investigate complaints. Meanwhile, ALEC continues its secretive lobbying activities that often benefit the corporations’ bottom line."
The growing scandal surrounding ALEC’s tax status, secretive lobbying activities, and extremist agenda has led to an exodus of more than 100 corporations since 2011.
"The work of a robust national coalition has pushed more than 100 companies to dump ALEC," Graves said. "Other companies and elected officials should seriously reconsider sticking with a group that has misled and continues to mislead the public and the IRS about its true purpose."
Click here for a fact sheet on the submission.
- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/node/12829#sthash.nHj6loLG.dpuf
Energy and Environment
This conservative group is tired of being accused of climate denial — and is fighting back
By Tom Hamburger, Joby Warrick and Chris Mooney April 5
Facing a loss of high-profile corporate sponsors, a conservative state-level policy group — the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — threatened action in recent weeks against activist groups that accuse it of denying climate change.
Attorneys for ALEC sent letters to Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters asking them to immediately “cease making false statements” and “remove all false or misleading material” suggesting that ALEC does not believe in global warming.
The activist groups refused the request, saying ALEC’s advocacy of legislation on climate issues and its public discussion of the topic support their claims.
The legal demands from ALEC follow an exodus of some of its best known corporate members, including Google, British Petroleum, Facebook, Yahoo and Northrop Grumman. Activist groups had pressured these corporate sponsors in recent years to abandon their support for organizations that they believe oppose action to stem climate change. Google publicly connected its decision to stop funding ALEC to the climate change issue.
The legal spat is an escalation of the conflict and suggests ALEC is feeling the heat of the activist groups’ efforts. It also suggests a new risk to organizations that rely on the donations from companies that do not want to be associated with organizations accused of denying that human activity is warming the atmosphere at an alarming rate.
The dispute comes at a time when conservative states and lawmakers and some energy sectors — especially coal interests — are also amping up their battle against the Obama administration’s push to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, a move that will shift the nation toward more use of natural gas and renewable energy.
In a separate example that echoes ALEC’s plight, Southern Co., the country’s fourth-largest electric utility, recently decided to quietly drop its funding for controversial scientist Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a solar physicist at the the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory who has challenged the consensus view that links recent climate change to man-made greenhouse gases. Some of Soon’s research came under question following revelations that he did not disclose that this work was paid for by fossil-fuel interests, including Southern, which operates coal-fired utility plants.
The company had been underwriting Soon’s research through a grant to the Smithsonian-affiliated laboratory where the scientists works, but the company has decided to end the relationship later this year, a spokesman confirmed. Soon declined a request to comment.
Lobbyists for the industry say they no longer focus on questioning scientific consensus.
“The science issue just isn’t as salient as it once was,” said Scott Segal, who represents energy interests at Bracewell & Giuliani. Debate over climate science was “all the rage” in the past, he said. “But today, the key issue is whether proposed regulations cost too much, weaken reliability or are illegal.”
ALEC officials insist that their nonprofit state-level policy organization does not deny climate change and that they have been overhauling their organization to be more transparent and more welcoming to divergent views. ALEC’s attorneys cite the organization’s model legislation, distributed to state lawmakers, acknowledging that “human activity has and will continue to alter the atmosphere of the planet,” which “may lead to demonstrable changes in climate.”
Environmental groups, however, have been increasingly worried about the role played by ALEC, which is made up of several thousand mostly GOP state legislators and financed by several hundred corporate and foundation members. The group has a successful track record of designing and passing state level legislation on issues such as gun rights, criminal justice and voting rights.
In a letter last week, attorneys for Common Cause cited the model legislation as evidence that its complaints about ALEC are “entirely consistent with how ALEC has discussed, characterized, and approached the issue of climate change.”
In 2013, ALEC offered the “model legislation,” still available on its Web site, to state legislators saying that the science was uncertain about the role of human activity in changing the atmosphere. The model resolution noted that “such activity may lead to deleterious, neutral or possibly beneficial climatic changes. Further, a great deal of scientific uncertainty surrounds the nature of these prospective changes, and the cost of regulation to inhibit such changes may lead to great economic dislocation.”
“We don’t think ALEC or organizations like it are done attacking progress on climate change,” said Kert Davies, a longtime environmental activist who now leads a small non-profit called the Climate Investigations Center, which has distributed documents showing that industry funding has flowed to scientists who publicly dispute climate change. “It is hard to imagine these organizations turning a corner and suddenly being open to an honest discussion of real environmental policy.”
Along with Common Cause, the League of Conservation Voters has repeatedly criticized ALEC for pushing legislation to undercut renewable energy, such as solar and wind power. A 2014 campaign sought the defeat of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a former ALEC board member who said during a debate last year that they he does not believe climate change “is a fact.”
Common Cause and LCV officials said the legal demands from ALEC would not alter their position.
“We don’t appreciate the attempt to silence LCV just because we disagree with ALEC’s positions,” said David Willett, LCV’s senior vice president for communications. “Usually if someone wants to get serious about tackling climate change, they ask about working with us, they don’t threaten to sue us.”
In addition to the model legislation, environmental groups point to ALEC’s national meetings. At ALEC’s December meeting in Washington, for example, two speakers led a seminar emphasizing the ways in which carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere provide benefits to the environment and the economy over time. One of the speakers, Craig Idso, said he does not deny climate change but disagrees with the dire consensus view of international scientists convened by the United Nations.
“We all think carbon dioxide has an impact on climate, it’s a question of how much of an impact,” said Idso, former director of environmental science at Peabody Energy, the coal company. He currently chairs a small climate science think tank.
ALEC officials don’t dispute that skeptical presentations have occurred at meetings in the past, sometimes under sponsorship from energy interests. But they insist that ALEC, under new leadership, welcomes debate, including new members who support renewable energy, a carbon tax and other measures to curb global warming.
ALEC’s efforts comes at the same time as a number of major corporations — including some in the fossil-fuels industry — are seeking to avoid taking positions on climate change that are at odds with mainstream science.
ALEC came in to the public eye following the shooting a few years ago of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin. The organization backed model gun rights bills similar to the controversial “Stand Your Ground” law first passed in Florida.
Since then, corporate funders have been pressured to leave as Common Cause and other organizations complained it is little more than a lobbying shop for corporate interests, a charge ALEC has long denied.
Last year, ALEC refashioned itself, naming a new chief executive, Lisa B. Nelson, and announcing it would drop gun rights and other controversial social issues from its portfolio to concentrate on issues of economic liberty.
Nelson and her team also vowed to make the secretive organization more transparent.
“There is a new ALEC now that is interested in dialogue and discussion. It is a big sandbox, and there is room for a lot of ideas,” says Bill Meierling, ALEC’s vice president for public affairs. But, he said. ALEC won’t tolerate guilt by association. That is why lawyers at the Washington firm representing ALEC — Webster, Chamberlain & Bean — sent letters demanding immediate retraction of statements suggesting ALEC denied climate change.
Tom Hamburger covers the intersection of money and politics for The Washington Post.
Joby Warrick joined the Post’s national staff in 1996. He has covered national security, intelligence and the Middle East, and currently writes about the environment.
Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment.