Justin's Political Corner
While the White House, governors, Congress and other public officials grapple with policy responses to last month’s mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, many Americans wonder whether the massacre of young children will provide momentum for more effective laws that previous killing sprees – even one that gravely wounded a member of Congress – have not.
Some assume, wrongly, that nothing can be done. Politicians’ fear of the $200+ million National Rifle Association (NRA) is generally cited as the reason for weak gun laws that undermine law enforcement and put citizens at higher risk from gun crimes. The power of the NRA to determine the outcome of elections may well be more myth than reality, but even the perception of such power can give the group tremendous political muscle, along with its aggressive lobbying and strong-arm political tactics.
The NRA is not alone in attempting to prevent effective regulation of guns and promoting reckless policies that leave Americans vulnerable to crime. Its efforts are supported by the same kind of coalition that undermines the nation’s ability to solve a wide range of problems. Corporations, right-wing ideologues, and Religious Right leaders work together to misinform Americans, generate unfounded fears, and prevent passage of broadly supported solutions.
Understanding the extremism and dishonesty at the heart of right-wing obstructionism is crucial to overcoming it.
Who’s Extreme?
Opponents of stronger gun laws portray any effort to regulate the sale of even military-style weapons as radical assaults on American freedom. For instance, Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel, a Religious Right legal group, called President Obama a “slime ball,” claiming falsely that Obama used his remarks at a memorial service for the Connecticut shooting victims to push “radical” gun control and saying of Obama, “His extremism knows no lows.”
But it is Barber and NRA officials who are staking out an extreme position. They emphatically do not speak for the American people. More strikingly, the NRA leadership and its allies do not speak for the group’s own members. Huge majorities of NRA members support sensible policies that the group opposes. For example, 82 percent of the public, and 74 percent of NRA members, support requiring a criminal background check of anyone purchasing a gun. NRA leaders strongly oppose requiring background checks for gun sales. And a recent poll taken after the Newtown shooting found that a majority of people who live in gun-owning households support a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.
At the urging of NRA officials, Congress has even passed laws that undermine law enforcement officials’ ability to fight gun crimes, forcing the Justice Department to destroy within 24 hours records about the buyer in approved purchases and making it harder for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to track sales of certain guns used in crimes. How do anti-gun-regulation activists prevent action in the face of broad public support? They deploy a range of strategies and tactics that right-wing activists use on a variety of issues:
Denying and Masking Reality
On issues from gay rights to climate change, right-wing activists stick stubbornly to their ideology even when it is clearly controverted by scientific consensus and other reality. On gun violence, NRA officials and their allies refuse to acknowledge that the availability of assault weapons and high-volume ammunition clips, or the lack of background checks for private sales of guns, are problems that make it easier for a shooter to kill more innocent people quickly. They ignore evidence that stronger gun laws can and do reduce gun crimes. According to an October 2012 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, “When states expand firearm prohibitions to high-risk groups, and adopt comprehensive measures to prevent diversion of guns to prohibited persons, fewer guns are diverted to criminals, and there is less violence. ”
One way to mask reality is through rhetoric that distorts or hides the truth. Tea Party leaders and their allies rallied opposition to federal health care reform by portraying “ObamaCare” in lurid end-of-freedom, America-destroying rhetoric. They were successful in building public opposition to the generic “ObamaCare” – even though there was strong majority support for most of the substantive elements of the plan. By portraying advocates for stronger gun regulation as government thugs who want to take guns from hunters’ hands, NRA leaders and their allies have been able to generate some poll numbers indicating opposition to “gun control,” but the more relevant fact for policymakers is that huge majorities of Americans, and of NRA members themselves, back many of the most commonly discussed approaches to reducing gun violence. Stronger efforts to keep dangerous guns out of the hands of dangerous people are simply not attacks on the right recognized by the Supreme Court under the Second Amendment of law-abiding citizens to have guns for hunting or self-defense.
Shifting Blame
The speech by the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre a week after the Connecticut shootings was a memorable display of blame shifting. He attempted to cast blame for the killings on everyone but his own group’s resistance to stronger controls on assault weapons and the firearms or ammunition themselves.
Religious Right leaders and right-wing pundits played their usual parts in the spin. Religious broadcaster James Dobson said the shooting was God’s judgment for the country turning its back on scripture and on God. Franklin Graham said much the same: “This is what happens when a society turns its back on God.” Radio host Steve Deace blamed public schools for promoting a “culture of death” and teaching students “there is no God and thus no real purpose to their lives.” American Family Association spokesperson Bryan Fischer said God wasn’t there to protect students because schools were not starting the day with prayer. Newt Gingrich blamed “an anti-religious secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life,” along with video games. Culture warriors Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder wrote in Movieguide:
By removing God, the Bible, God’s Law, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit from society, including the mass media and the schools, we are raising generations of people with no faith in God or Jesus and, hence, no moral conscience, and no self-control. If so many people have no faith, no moral conscience and no self-control, then it’s no wonder our society is suffering from all these mass murders by evil lone gunmen.
Tea Party Nation blamed teachers’ unions, liberals, and an “over-bureaucratized society.” The Oathkeepers, a Tea Party offshoot for military and law enforcement officials, argued that the federal government was “complicit in the deaths of these children, and in fact an accessory to their mass murder, by forcibly disarming (with the very real threat of prison) all the teachers, all the staff, and any parent who may have been on school property.”
The consequence of such blame-spreading is that it creates distractions from addressing the real problems. One Religious Right leader appearing on American Family Radio called the shooting a “gracious” act of divine punishment designed to “bring us to our senses and bring us back to Him.”
Hostility to Compromise
The absolute refusal to compromise – indeed, the vilification of the very idea of compromise – is at the heart of the right-wing movement and much of the modern Republican Party. That has been the story of GOP obstructionism on tax policy, judicial nominations, and more. Just as the Tea Party and its corporate backers have gone out of their way to punish Republicans they see as insufficiently “conservative” – even when it meant nominating extremists who could not win a general election – leaders of the NRA and other groups like the Gun Owners of America react with fierce hostility to talk of compromise. Their political power comes largely from the fear they have created among elected leaders that the group will spend lavishly to punish even the tiniest dissent from its ideological dogma. The NRA’s leaders loudly pulled out of current conversations convened by the White House, denouncing the effort to find policy solutions to gun violence as “demonizing” the Second Amendment, and they launched a “Stand and Fight” campaign even before the details of the White House proposals had been announced. Rep. Steve Stockman from Texas even threatened to file articles of impeachment.
One way Religious Right leaders justify their opposition to compromise is claiming a biblical mandate for their favored policies, something Religious Right leaders do on issues like taxes as well as issues involving privacy and sexuality. Discredited Religious Right “historian” David Barton calls the Second Amendment “the biblical right of self-defense” and says it requires that individual Americans have access to any weapon the federal government has.
Smearing Opponents
Just as Religious Right groups smear political opponents as hostile to religious liberty, anti-gun-regulation groups smear as enemies of liberty anyone who advocates for stronger oversight on the purchase of weapons capable of mass violence. Even though polls show that NRA members believe support for the Second Amendment goes hand in hand with preventing gun crimes, the group’s leaders falsely equate any effort to strengthen gun laws to advance public safety with a desire to confiscate Americans’ handguns and hunting rifles.
Religious Right leaders are prone to make claims that only fellow believers are capable of moral action and decision making. Snyder and Baehr, in their post-shooting column, wrote, “Without God, without faith and values, we are just soulless meat machines who can kill without mercy.”
Promoting Conspiracy Theories
The right-wing base of the Republican Party is fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories about liberals and other perceived enemies. That’s why so many Republicans believe President Obama is a secret Muslim bent on the destruction of the US, or that he was not born in the United States. During the Obama administration, right-wing websites have circulated conspiracy theories about the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security administration stockpiling ammunition intended to be used against Americans and building concentration camps for conservatives.
National Rifle Association leaders claimed during the 2012 election that President Obama’s lack of action on gun issues during his first term was an elaborate ruse to mask his radical intentions to disarm gun owners. Larry Pratt of the Gun Owners of America insisted that the federal health care reform law was meant to “take away your guns.”
Some went even further: Christian radio host Bradlee Dean, a close ally of Rep. Michele Bachmann, suggested that the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, like earlier murders at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, were actually orchestrated by the government to create a pretext to ban guns.
Extremist Interpretations of the Constitution
A Wyoming legislator has introduced legislation that would make it a felony to enforce a federal ban on assault weapons or high-capacity ammunition. The idea that a state could imprison federal agents for enforcing a federal law may excite right-wing activists, but it doesn’t reflect a reality-based view of our constitutional system of government. And that’s a widespread problem. David Barton insists that the founding fathers’ view of the constitutional right to bear arms means that any weapon the government possesses must also be available to the population at large: “…whatever the government’s got, we’ve gotta have the same thing, because if they’ve got an AK-47 and come through and we’ve only got a BB gun on the inside, this is not a deterrent. So the whole purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure you have equal power with whatever comes against you illegally.” If Barton is really saying that citizens have a Second Amendment right to anything that is in the U.S. military arsenal – chemical weapons, fully automated machine guns, bombs, and more – that is emphatically not a view endorsed by the Supreme Court.
Ted Cruz, a new U.S. senator from Texas elected with major support from Tea Party activists said recently that efforts to restrict the sales of assault weapons and ammunition are unconstitutional. In fact, even the conservative Supreme Court has said clearly that regulating the sale of dangerous guns is not prohibited by the Second Amendment. According to Justice Antonin Scalia, “the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns.”
Harnessing Corporate Money
Right-wing causes, including the Tea Party, anti-unionism, and anti-environmentalism, have benefitted from a flood of corporate money in the wake of Supreme Court decisions gutting the nation’s campaign finance laws. In addition, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing group that acts as matchmaker between corporate interests and lawmakers eager to do their bidding, has produced literally hundreds of model bills that right-wing legislators have enacted into law – attacking unions and public education and otherwise supporting the predatory privatization of public assets and government services. Among the model bills ALEC has previously promoted is the so-called “stand your ground” law originally adopted in Florida. ALEC deemed it a national “model” law, and it was enacted in more than two dozen states. The Florida law was cited initially to prevent the prosecution of the man who killed Trayvon Martin.
Some analysts believe the NRA has morphed from a grassroots group teaching marksmanship to a trade association for gun manufacturers – a “lobbying, merchandising and marketing machine.” Business Week reported in January 2012 that more than 50 firearms-related companies had given at least $14.8 million to the group. The NRA has boosted gun makers several ways: its rhetoric about gun confiscation has spurred binge buying by gun enthusiasts; it has pushed a federal law that limits liability against gunmakers as well as state laws that bar cities from suing gun manufacturers (in conjunction with ALEC); and the NRA’s legislative arm has also “helped ensure the end of the federal assault weapons ban” in 2004 (which the NRA and ALEC opposed in 1994). Business Week quotes the former NRA President Sandy Froman claiming that it “saved the American gun industry from bankruptcy.”
Anything Goes
A hallmark of right-wing activism over the past four years has been a willingness to say and do anything to try to undermine the effectiveness of the Obama presidency and to try to prevent the president’s re-election (as well as his initial election). Rhetorically, that has meant equating health care reform and other initiatives with tyranny. In response to recent reports that some aspects of gun regulation could be strengthened by executive order, the right-wing Drudge Report posted photos of Hitler and Stalin.
Before the 2012 election, NRA leaders portrayed President Obama as conspiring to abolish Americans’ Second Amendment rights. But NRA efforts to bring down the Obama administration went well beyond political rhetoric and campaign spending. The NRA leadership played a significant role in the failed effort by congressional Republicans to turn the ATF’s botched “Fast and Furious” operation into an administration-destroying scandal. NRA officials even announced that the group would “score” a House vote on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, getting votes from Republicans and some Democrats eager to preserve a 100-percent NRA rating.
Money, Power, and Perception
Back in August, Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore said, “Democrats have decided, I think wrongly politically and morally, that it’s only an issue they can lose on.” Indeed, even though the group’s recent political spending is heavily weighted toward Republicans, the lack of desire to cross the NRA’s lobbyists and activists is bipartisan. In 2009, a Democratic Congress complied with demands for federal laws allowing people to bring guns onto Amtrak trains and into national parks; in 2010 the group demanded, and got, a special exemption from identifying its donors in the DISCLOSE Act under consideration.
Working out of an nondescript brick rowhouse in suburban Virginia, a little-known organization named Donors Trust, staffed by five employees, has steered hundreds of millions of dollars to the most influential think tanks, foundations, and advocacy groups in the conservative movement. Over the past decade, it has funded the right’s assault on labor unions, climate scientists, public schools, economic regulations, and the very premise of activist government. Yet unlike its nearest counterpart on the progressive side, the Tides Foundation, a bogeyman of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, Donors Trust has mostly avoided any real scrutiny. It is the dark-money ATM of the right.
Founded in 1999, Donors Trust (and an affiliated group, Donors Capital Fund) has raised north of $500 million and doled out $400 million to more than 1,000 conservative and libertarian groups, according to Whitney Ball, the group’s CEO. Donors Trust allows wealthy contributors who want to donate millions to the most important causes on the right to do so anonymously, essentially scrubbing the identity of those underwriting conservative and libertarian organizations. Wisconsin’s 2011 assault on collective bargaining rights? Donors Trust helped fund that. ALEC, the conservative bill mill? Donors Trust supports it. The climate deniers at the Heartland Institute? They get Donors Trust money, too.
Donors Trust is not the source of the money it hands out. Some 200 right-of-center funders who’ve given at least $10,000 fill the group’s coffers. Charities bankrolled by Charles and David Koch, the DeVoses, and the Bradleys, among other conservative benefactors, have given to Donors Trust. And other recipients of Donors Trust money include the Heritage Foundation, Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the NRA’s Freedom Action Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, chaired (PDF) by none other than David Koch.
In a recent interview, Ball, who calls herself a libertarian, went to great lengths to stress that she’s no Koch brothers stooge, and that Donors Trust is not yet another appendage of the almighty “Kochtopus.” She insists, “We were not created by them at all.”
Donors Trust is a so-called “donor-advised fund,” a breed apart from a family foundation like, say, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which helped build the conservative movement over decades with donations totaling tens of millions of dollars. The people who donate to Donors Trust don’t get final say over how their money is spent. But they get to recommend where their cash goes, and in exchange for giving up some control, they get a bigger tax write-off than they would with a family foundation. (And those who wish it get anonymity.)
Ball says she travels all over the country courting wealthy conservatives and libertarians, and attends Koch donor retreats and Cato “shareholder” meetings. The crux of her pitch is this: Rich folks can give to Donors Trust and rest easy knowing that their millions will continue bankrolling the conservative movement long into the future, even after their death.
Donors Trust grew out of the fear among right-leaning donors that their family foundations might end up in the hands of those who would fund centrist or, even worse, left-of-center causes. At the behest of the late Bruce Jacobs, a Seattle-area businessman and “paleocon” who didn’t want to underwrite a local community foundation, Ball and a conservative strategist named Kimberly Dennis created Donors Trust.
Donors Trust is the only honey-pot of its kind for right-leaning donors. But on the left, there’s theTides Foundation, which gives out tens of millions of dollars each year to thousands of left-leaning groups in the US and overseas (including Mother Jones’ nonprofit arm, the Foundation for National Progress). Tides is a target of conspiracy theorists such as TV and radio host Glenn Beck, who hasfeatured Tides on his infamous connect-the-dots chalkboard. But Donors Trust’s strategic intent is far narrower and more coherent than Tides’. The groups funded by Donors Trust more or less pursue the same agenda—eliminate regulations, kneecap unions, shrink government, and transfer more power to the private sector.
Donors Trust keeps its contributors secret. Funders can ask Donor Trust to publicly identify their donations, but very few do, Ball says. The reasons for preferring anonymity are many. Some donors want to avoid attention; others don’t want their mailboxes and inboxes filling up with unwanted solicitations for more money.
Tax records, however, reveal some of the sugar-daddies of the conservative and libertarian movement who funnel big money through Donors Trust. The Knowledge and Progress Fund, a charity bankrolled by Charles Koch, gave $2 million in 2010. The DeVos family charity, another pillar of conservative politics, contributed $1 million in 2009 and $1.5 million in 2010. And yet another long-time bankroller of conservative politics, the Bradley family, donated $650,000 through their charity between 2001 and 2010.
h/t: Mother Jones
Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker, who became nationally known for severely limiting the union rights of teachers and other public employees, has indicated support for arming those same school officials who apparently cannot be trusted to collectively bargain.
As Americans search for answers and policy solutions in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Gov. Walker has apparently decided that the problem is not too many guns — it is that there are not enough.
Giving guns to teachers should be “part of the discussion,” he said on December 19. Walker refused to endorse an assault weapons ban or other limits on the types of guns or ammunition that can be sold.
Teachers Need Guns, Not Unions?
Walker’s infamous Act 10 legislation drastically curtailed the collective bargaining rights of most public employees in the state, prompting months of historic protests and a recall effort. The governor justified the harsh legislation — which he never mentioned during the campaign that installed him in office — largely by demonizing unionized teachers as overpaid and underperforming.
The six teachers killed in the Newtown massacre, all members of an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union chapter, have been widely praised for their heroism, with many shot while trying to shield their students.
“This has kind of pulled the curtain away to show who teachers really are,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told In These Times’ Mike Elk. “Teachers’ instinct is to serve, to protect and to love. And you saw that in full view in Newtown this week.”
For Weingarten, the way to prevent additional mass shootings is not through arming teachers. Unions have historically not taken a position on gun issues, but in the wake of the Newtown massacre, AFT is now taking up support for gun control.
Wisconsin Site of Two Mass Shootings in 2012, Walker Given NRA Award
Two of the last six mass shootings in the United States have occurred in Wisconsin.
On August 5, a white supremacist killed six people and wounded four others at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, then killed himself during a shootout with police.
On October 21, a man entered a day spa in Brookfield and murdered three women, one of whom was his wife, and wounded four others before taking his own life. The killer had a domestic violence restraining order against him, and despite Wisconsin law prohibiting domestic abusers from purchasing guns, he avoided a background check by purchasing the gun from a private dealer.
But the state’s Republican Attorney General does not think Wisconsin has a gun problem, and Walker and the Republican-controlled state legislature have marched lockstep with the gun manufacturer’s lobby.
In 2011, Walker signed into law a version of the Florida-style “Stand Your Ground” bill implicated in the Trayvon Martin tragedy as well as a new concealed-carry law that allows the public to carry guns inside the State Capitol, even while restrictive access rules prohibit cameras or signs. Legislators are now allowed to bring guns onto the Assembly and Senate floors.
In April, the National Rifle Association (NRA) gave Walker the Harlon B. Carter Legislative Achievement Award, honoring him for passing the “Stand Your Ground” and concealed carry laws. As the Center for Media and Democracy has reported, both laws echo American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “model” legislation, and ALEC has been one of the key avenues by which the NRA has exerted its influence over state law and policy.
ALEC is also an organization through which corporate interests have pushed anti-union legislation, most recently in Michigan, where legislators copied the ALEC Right to Work Act almost word-for-word.
h/t: AlterNet.org
The American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate-funded group that generates nearly a thousand pro-business model bills per year and feeds them to state legislatures nationwide, is holding its annual policy summit in the nation’s capital this week to meet with new state lawmakers and “prepare the next generation of political leadership.” This coincides with the release of a report showing that ALEC’s economic prescriptions are not good for the economy.
Each year, ALEC ranks the states on how tightly they adhere to the group’s policy recommendations—from personal and corporate tax rates, to public sector employment levels, to right-to-work laws—as a predictor of their economic growth. The study released Wednesday, by the Iowa Policy Project and Good Jobs First, two policy groups that promote economic growth at the state level, introduces those rankings to reality. It concludes: “A hard look at the actual data finds that the ALEC…recommendations not only fail to predict positive results for state economies—the policies they endorse actually forecast worse state outcomes for job creation and paychecks.” (Though the report is careful to maintain that though ALEC policies are correlated with less prosperous state economies, that doesn’t necessarily mean the policies caused economic decline.)
Instead of boosting states’ fortunes, the report finds that ALEC’s preferred policies seem to provide “a recipe for economic inequality, wage suppression, and stagnant incomes, and for depriving state and local governments of the revenue needed to maintain the public infrastructure and education systems that are the true foundations of long term economic growth and shared prosperity.”
The lower the turnout tomorrow, the better Mitt Romney will do. It’s always been this way for Republicans. Anyone who doubts that needs to watch the video below.
The media frequently reports on right-wing and GOP voter suppression efforts, but they rarely acknowledge the root cause – Republicans do better when fewer people vote. This is the driving force behind the GOP’s draconian voter ID laws and efforts to limit early voting, voter registration drives, and provisional voting.The right wing and GOP have whipped up hysteria around voter fraud, which is virtually non-existent, in order to justify roadblocks to voting for millions of Americans. I’ll let Paul Weyrich explain why.“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.”
WASHINGTON — The same group that exposed the previously little-known American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as a dominant force advancing corporate interests at the state level has now turned its sights on exposing the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB).
NFIB is hardly operating in near-secrecy, like ALEC was. The organization, which describes itself as “the voice of small business,” was the lead plaintiff in the ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, taking it to the Supreme Court.
The left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy has posted on NFIBexposed.org, its new website, a study that reveals how consistently the NFIB lobbies on issues that favor large corporate interests rather than small-business interests; its thoroughly partisan agenda; and the millions it receives in secret contributions from groups associated with Karl Rove and the Koch Brothers.
“I think that this new site helps expose the fact that the National Federation of Independent Business is not so independent, and it certainly is not acting as the voice of small business,” said Lisa Graves, the center’s director.
But Jean Card, NFIB’s vice president for communications, lashed out at the new website Wednesday. In an emailed statement to The Huffington Post, she wrote: “It is an insult to small-business owners across the country for another organization, with no connection to small business whatsoever, to imply that job creators don’t know what’s best for themselves.”
“NFIB is a member-driven, issue-driven organization. All of our advocacy and legal efforts are based purely on the positions of our membership, whose views and priorities we monitor constantly … and its membership are not concerned with party affiliation; we focus on policies, not party.”
The NFIBexposed.org website, however, chronicles how 98 percent of NFIB’s campaign contributions so far in the 2012 election cycle have gone to Republicans, and how 100 percent of its advertising budget supported either Republicans or opposed Democrats.
Looking at all donations since 1989, the NFIB is ranked third highest on Opensecrets.org’s list of political “heavy hitters,” based on the percentage of its contributions going to Republican candidates. NFIB’s 93 percent is higher than Koch Industries with 90 percent; Exxon Mobil with 86 percent; and the National Rifle Association with 82 percent.
By contrast, small-business owners are not as partisan. In fact, a recent poll showed that 47 percent of small-business owners plan to vote for President Barack Obama, compared to 39 percent who plan to vote for Mitt Romney.
The website also links to documents that detail NFIB’s top executive Dan Danner’s compensation package, totaling $743,676 in 2010. “That tells me that there’s some big-money interests willing to pay a real big-business corporate salary for the head of this organization,” Graves said. “That is not on par with a typical small-business owner’s salary. It’s a big-business salary.”
NFIB’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act is the perfect example, he said. Obama’s signature law “will enable more small business to offer coverage to their workers and get some tax exemptions for doing that,” Potter noted. “In the past, small businesses have not enjoyed the same benefits from the tax point of view that the larger companies have.”
So, in fact, NFIB was “working against the interests of small business,” Potter said.
Mother Jones recently noted that the NFIB lobbied heavily against Obama’s plan to increase taxes on the wealthy, even though “[o]nly 3 percent of small businesses net more than $250,000 a year, the lowest income that would be affected by Obama’s tax plan.”
“They’re actually throwing the voice of big businesses,” said Graves. “That has an impact on media coverage. The media will highlight the perspective of the NFIB as if it were representative of small business.”
Amgen, a biotechnology firm withapproximately 17,000 employees, joined 30 other companies today that have broken ties with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC provides “model” legislation, often drafted by industry lobbyists, to state lawmakers with the intention of having those model bills be enacted into law. Although ALEC recently eliminated a task force that pushed voter suppression laws and the so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws that played a significant role in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting, the conservative group remains committed to other priorities such as repealing minimum wage laws, eliminatingcapital gains and estate taxes, and blocking safeguards that protect children from eating rat poison.
A new video updates a classic Schoolhouse Rock concept to explain the basics behind the American Legislative Exchange Council controversy.
“ALEC Rock,” produced by Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore and a number of advocacy groups including the Center for Media and Democracy, introduces us to “ALEC,” a malevolent replacement for the traditional Bill.
Alec enters the scene by literally running over Bill before boasting about his plans to influence the political process by using corporate money to sway politicians and put together corporate-friendly legislation.
The so-called “bill mill” has been the target of increasing attention from liberal and progressive groups this year, leading to 30 corporations distancing themselves from the group, and at least one lawmaker saying ALEC is “really feeling the heat.”
Two more large American companies, headquartered in the Midwest, have responded to their customers and cut ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC): General Motors (GM) and Walgreens. This brings the total to 30 corporations and four non-profits — 34 total private sector members — that have cut ties to the right-wing corporate bill mill.
Although the full extent of GM’s ALEC membership is not known, it was a member in 1992. In 2011, it paid for a seat on both ALEC’sCommerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force and itsEnergy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force. The commerce task force is the primary source of anti-worker and anti-consumer legislation such as the “Paycheck Protection” and “Right to Work” Acts and other “model” bills that limit workers’ rights and drain labor unions of resources for protecting employees, undermine consumer protections, favor the Wall Street financial agenda, and limit the ability to cap exorbitant interest rates on credit cards and big bank fees.
One of Walgreens’ major competitors, CVS Caremark, announced earlier this month that it had discontinued its ALEC membership, asCMD has reported. Like CVS, Walgreens was a member of ALEC’sHealth and Human Services Task Force, which works to privatize Medicare, deregulate health insurers, protect negligent doctors, and cut holes in the safety net. These anti-patient “model” bills erode the rights and health of Americans. Walgreens was also a “Trustee” level sponsor of ALEC’s 2011 annual meeting. It is not known whether or not Walgreens has already funded ALEC’s 2012 annual meeting, where corporations and state legislators are meeting behind closed doors this week in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The Rush to Dump ALEC
Corporations that have publicly cut ties to ALEC in recent weeks include EnergySolutions, Connections Education, Express Scripts/Medco, Best Buy, Hewlett-Packard, MillerCoors, CVS Caremark, John Deere, Dell, Johnson & Johnson, Wal-Mart, Medtronic, Amazon.com, Scantron Corporation, Kaplan Higher Education, Procter & Gamble, YUM! Brands, Blue Cross Blue Shield, American Traffic Solutions, Reed Elsevier, Arizona Public Service, Mars, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Intuit, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola. The addition of GM and Walgreens brings the total to 30. Four non-profits — Lumina Foundation for Education, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), and the Gates Foundation — and 56 state legislators have also cut ties with ALEC.
h/t: PRWatch.org
Five corporations recently announced they were no longer members of the American Legislative Exchange Council after being confronted by liberal and progressive groups.
John Deere, CVS Caremark, MillerCoors, HP, and Best Buy all said they would stop funding the organization, which drafts model legislation for state lawmakers and describes itself as “policy making program that unites members of the public and private sectors in a dynamic partnership.”
ALEC received little scrutiny until recently, when organizations like ColorOfChange, Common Cause, People for the American Way, Progress Now, the Center for Media and Democracy, CREDO Action and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee began a campaign targeting the organization’s corporate sponsors — who pay tens of thousands of dollars every year to be members.
Computer technology giant Dell has decided to drop its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing corporate front group behind the spread of voter suppression laws and Stand You Ground legislation.
Pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson announced todaythat they are dropping their membership from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Johnson and Johnson has been facing mounting pressure following a push from Color of Change and other progressive groups to leave the conservative agenda-setting group.
Other groups that have dropped ALEC include: Walmart, Amazon.com, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo,Kraft, Wendy’s, Mars, Inc., Arizona Public Service, the National Board for Professional Teaching StandardsScantron, The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Kaplan, Procter & Gamble, Yum! Brands, five Pennsylvania legislators, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Reed Elsevier,American Traffic Solutions, Intuit, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, has become the nineteenth group to leave the American Legislative Exchange Council. Walmart’s departure from the right-wing legislation-crafting group is particularly salient because the big box chain is also the largest purveyor of firearms in the country.
Eighteen other groups have dropped ALEC since their ‘Stand Your Ground’ legislation came under scrutiny in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Walmart is now the largest company to do so.
Groups that have dropped ALEC include: Amazon.com, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, Wendy’s,Mars, Inc., Arizona Public Service, the National Board for Professional Teaching StandardsScantron, The National Association of Charter School Authorizers, Kaplan, Procter & Gamble, Yum! Brands, five Pennsylvania legislators, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Reed Elsevier,American Traffic Solutions, Intuit, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Here are some of the 18 reasons why Walker should get the boot:
1. Repeal of Equal Pay for Women)
In April, Scott Walker signed SB 202, which effectively repealed an equal pay law that has protected women from pay discrimination since 2009. For three years, women had the ability to take legal action against their employer at any time it was discovered that they were being paid less than a male colleague for doing the same work. The repeal of this law is just a piece of the Republican war on women and gives employers the freedom to pay women less money, weakening women’s ability to have purchasing power in the economy.
2. Anti-Abortion Laws)
Speaking of the war on women, three days after repealing the equal pay law, Scott Walker signed three anti-abortion bills into law. One bill bans insurance policies offered through the state health insurance exchange program of the Affordable Care Act from including abortion coverage, which could also ban coverage of some contraceptives.
Another bill signed by Walker basically repeals a law requiring educators to teach about contraception as a birth control method. The new law allows teachers to not discuss contraception at all and forces teachers to promote abstinence as the ONLY way to prevent disease and pregnancy.
The third bill forces women to be alone in the doctor’s office when seeking an abortion so that the doctor can interrogate her about why she wants an abortion. Scott Walker is certainly not an ally of women’s health.
3. Relationship with Koch Brothers)
It was a prank phone call that revealed a lot about Scott Walker and his allegiance to Koch Industries. When a David Koch impersonator called to congratulate Scott Walker on his 2010 Election victory, he was immediately connected directly to the new Governor with little to no investigation. The caller of course was revealed to be a fake, but just the fact that Walker rushed to talk to the billionaire right-winger showed who was important to him. Since that day two years ago, Walker has worked hard to turn Wisconsin into the national testing ground of the Koch agenda. Working closely with Koch funded group Americans for Prosperity, Walker has gutted Wisconsin’s labor unions, killing collective bargaining, and supporting bills that kill environmental legislation. The Kochs have poured millions of dollars into Wisconsin to keep Walker from being recalled. All of this should be worrying to any voter in Wisconsin, because if any politician in America is a puppet of the Koch brothers, it’s Scott Walker.
4. Wisconsin’s Terrible Jobs Record)
Dead last. That defines Walker’s record on jobs. In his second year as Governor, Wisconsin lost over 20,000 jobs. That’s way worse than the second worst jobs record in the nation: Rhode Island with only 4,000 jobs lost. And no one can really say there is any bias in those numbers either because Wisconsin’s neighboring states of Iowa and Michigan, both Republican controlled, have job gains. That’s embarrassing for Walker, considering he touted his policies as being a blueprint for job creation.
5. Union Busting)
Walker’s tenure as Governor will forever be marked by his decision to mercilessly attack labor unions and collective bargaining. Following the commands of his Koch donors, Walker signed a bill in March 2011 that ended most union rights in the state of Wisconsin, including the right to collectively bargain for pay and benefits. Walker said the law would grow popular over time, but what it actually did is get him recalled, which is why an election is taking place in June. Under the law, police, firefighters, teachers, nurses, and many other public employees will no longer get to negotiate their pay. Ending collective bargaining changed nothing in the budget but Walker gleefully threw these workers under the bus to please the Kochs. But he also did it to purposefully divide the people of Wisconsin. In a damning caught on tape moment, Walker described to big campaign donor Diane Hendricks how he was going to turn Wisconsin into a ‘right to work for less’ state. His plan? Divide and conquer.
“Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”
This quote alone should infuriate the people of Wisconsin enough to want to end Walker’s career.
6. Killed High Speed Rail Funding)
Upon winning election in 2010, Scott Walker vowed to kill high speed rail funding. And he did exactly that. Walker gave back over $800 million in federal assistance to build a high-speed train between Milwaukee and Madison, which cost the people of Wisconsin thousands of jobs. The high speed rail would not only have created thousands of jobs, it would have created a greener mass transit system that would have helped alleviate America’s dependence on oil, and would have helped America catch up to the rest of the developed world. Europe and Asia have invested heavily in high speed rail, which makes transportation much faster and cheaper across land. The people had a chance to help get America moving again, but Scott Walker took away the money and the jobs that would have made it possible.
10. Over Half Of Campaign Cash Is From Out-Of-State Sources)
Money in politics has become a real problem and nowhere is this more evident than in Wisconsin, where Scott Walker has taken in millions of dollars from the Koch brothers and Americans for Prosperity among other outside sources. Because of this out-of-state money and a law that gives a recalled governor the ability to take in unlimited amounts of cash to defeat their opponent and limits the money raising ability of the opponent, Walker has been able to raise and spend $21 million to the Democrat’s $2 million as of May 2012. Two-thirds of Walker’s campaign cash has come from donors outside of Wisconsin.
Because of this outside money, the people of Wisconsin can’t really be certain that their governor is beholden to them or the outside entities who are basically buying the election for Walker. That should any citizen in Wisconsin, since it is clear that outside forces want Wisconsin under their thumb.
13. Gutted Public Education Funding To Pay For Tax Breaks For Corporations)
How are people in Wisconsin supposed to compete for jobs if they can’t get a top notch education? That’s a question Scott Walker failed to ask when he slashed aid to public schools by almost $800 million to fund his tax cuts for the rich and corporations. It was by far the largest reduction in Wisconsin history and the second biggest cut to education in the country. Walker says he wants to bring jobs into the state by enticing businesses with tax relief, but what kind of business would want to hire people who don’t have a decent education? And that’s exactly the point. To compete in today’s global economy, education is the key to getting a job. But that kind of logic is apparently lost on Walker who has been waging war on teachers and students since taking office. Teachers have been laid off, students are being forced to learn in bigger classes sizes, and money is so tight that many programs such as art and music have had to be scrapped to save cash. That significantly harms the overall education of our kids. Education cuts do not create jobs, cuts only take away the tools that help create jobs.
Scott Walker should be thrown out of office by the people of Wisconsin. Based on Walker’s record, it would be foolish for Wisconsinites not to do so, especially when they are already so close to getting their state back. The result of this recall election will be felt for many years to come. Wisconsin can either be the state that fires the first shot against the dangerous Republican agenda that is sweeping the country like a plague, or they can keep Walker in office and encourage Republicans to keep destroying America without consequence.
According to an email ThinkProgress received from the Center for Media and Democracy, one of the leaders of a progressive campaign to push corporations and other funders to break with the American Legislative Exchange Council, online retail giant Amazon.com just announced that it will part ways with ALEC.
Other groups that have dropped ALEC include: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, Wendy’s, Mars, Inc.,Arizona Public Service, the National Board for Professional Teaching StandardsScantron, TheNational Association of Charter School Authorizers, Kaplan, Procter & Gamble, Yum! Brands,five Pennsylvania legislators, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Reed Elsevier, American Traffic Solutions,Intuit, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
