There's a great piece up at the Center for Media and Democracy about the work of ALEC or American Legislative Exchange Council. The group has been working at the state level to fundamentally change America, state by state. If there's an unpopular governor passing unpopular laws through an unpopular state legislature, ALEC is behind them. Voter ID laws, union-busting laws, laws shifting the tax burden away from the wealthy to the poor and middle class, cuts in state services, etc. -- all can be traced back to ALEC.In fact, many of these bills have the same language from state to state. Since ALEC describe themselves as the largest "membership association of state legislators," it would seem that these state officials were writing these bills with the help of legislators for other states. This would go a long way toward explaining why so many of their bills look cut-and-paste. But closer scrutinity proves this assumption wrong.
In April 2011, some of the biggest corporations in the U.S. met behind closed doors in Cincinnati about their wish lists for changing state laws. This exchange was part of a series of corporate meetings nurtured and fueled by the Koch Industries family fortune and other corporate funding.
At an extravagant hotel gilded just before the Great Depression, corporate executives from the tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds, State Farm Insurance, and other corporations were joined by their "task force" co-chairs -- all Republican state legislators -- to approve "model" legislation. They jointly head task forces of what is called the "American Legislative Exchange Council" (ALEC).
There, as the Center for Media and Democracy has learned, these corporate-politician committees secretly voted on bills to rewrite numerous state laws. According to the documents we have posted to ALEC Exposed, corporations vote as equals with elected politicians on these bills. These task forces target legal rules that reach into almost every area of American life: worker and consumer rights, education, the rights of Americans injured or killed by corporations, taxes, health care, immigration, and the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink.
"It is a worrisome marriage of corporations and politicians, which seems to normalize a kind of corruption of the legislative process -- of the democratic process--in a nation of free people where the government is supposed to be of, by, and for the people, not the corporations," writes Center for Media and Democracy Executive Director Lisa Graves.
As always when dealing with the backroom workings of the Republican Party, there is also hypocrisy here. "Unelected" is a standard GOP buzzword; we have to worry about unelected judges "legislating from the bench," about unelected bureaucrats making our healthcare decisions, about unelected regulators hampering businesses -- and here they are, letting unelected corporate lobbyists write law.
But it goes deeper, gets more disturbing, than that. In an unrelated piece about the Washington standoff over the debt limit, political analyst Stuart Rothenberg explains where the sticking point lies:
Most recently elected House Republicans believe that government can’t and shouldn’t do all it has done. Cutting spending is merely the means to cutting government, as Ronald Reagan understood.
Yes, Republicans complained about the costs associated with the Democrats' health care bill, with the 2009 economic stimulus and with the Democrats' cap-and-trade proposal, but that's not the real reason why they opposed those initiatives.
They don't believe that government should involve itself in the market that directly, or in picking winners and losers. They regard the health care bill's individual mandate as excessive government intervention into individual rights. And they don't trust bureaucrats or government officials to decide what's good for people.
Apparently, the logical conclusion this line of reasoning leads to is that corporations get "to decide what's good for people." The same people who told you smoking was good for you, that asbestos was fine, that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was completely under control. Those are the people who get to decide what's best for you -- not the people you elected for that job.
It's the obvious solution to the Republican logical equation; if A=B and B=C, then A=C. That is, if government is bad and that government is a democracy, then democracy is bad.
A sham democracy it is, then.
-Wisco
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vet · 716 weeks ago
If government doesn't provide those services, then someone else will. Best case, that "someone else" will be an honest corporation, charity or church. Worst case, it'll be freelance gangsters. Middle case - which I think is what rich Republicans are shooting for - it'll be well-organized gangsters (think Mafia, who have traditionally provided many of these services in their homeland of Sicily), who are in many ways indistinguishable from a corporation.
The thing is - whichever way you do it, you create winners. If the government does it, then you're giving jobs to lots of people who will be reluctant to let them go, and patronage power to politicians. If a corporation does it - even an honest one - it becomes a lobby group with influence and interest to keep the job no matter what. If the mafia does it, it takes a literal war to get anything to change.
We in the west have found that some services that can be done by government can also be done quite well by the private sector. (Electricity, gas and phone services, for instance.) Other services (health, education, post) seem to be done better by government, but there's still huge contention about them because there are people who stand to make good money out of whichever model gets chosen.
And there are politicians who've hitched their wagons to private-sector companies who are willing to provide services like these, and will use every trick they can to persuade people to let those companies take on the work. And those people push their agenda to get more and more work into the domain of "things that they personally can make money out of". Thus you get outsourced garbage collection, firefighting, prisons...
GriperBlade 70p · 716 weeks ago
We'd all be a lot better off with fewer corporations and a lot more smaller local companies. But the problem is a political party bought and paid for by the well-organized gangsters, giving everything away to corporations for a pittance.
mdanz · 716 weeks ago
Of course we pick winners and losers. That's a role of government.
If you're poisoning people-- you should lose.
If you're undermining democracy and the judiciary-- you should lose.
If you can't function with respect to the health of society-- you shouldn't be allowed to do business.
Promote and provide is written into the constitution and that= money. Taxpayer money. You should vote for people who would use that money to promote good people and organizations-- Not to simply empower multinational corporations who then use that money to acquire too-big-to-confront political power.
The constitution establishes the idea and parameters for self governance.
When this power and responsibility is deferred and delegated to undemocratic, or unelected interests, such as polluters and corporate theocrats, the constitution is just another outsourced tool as a legalized means for decriminalizing unelected power.
GriperBlade 70p · 716 weeks ago