I have known Susan Bradley for several years as a SD 9 Committewoman and a fellow member of Grand Prairie Democrats. When I decided to run for US 24 in 2008, Susan contibuted money, time, expertise, and support that was extemely beneficial to my race. While I did not win, I gathered 111,659 votes in the contest against a 30- year policitican in my initial and only foray into electorial politics.
Susan has a unique ability to stay truthful in her analysis and to project knowledge and insight about the political process that I sorely needed to measure my effectiveness on the stump.
I wholeheartly endorce her bid for this position and I know she will strive to be the best SD Committeewoman ever in SD 16 as she was in SD 9.
Sincerely.
Tom Love
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Paul Krugman on How to Fix the Economy - and Why It's Easier Than You Think By Julian Brookes
Four years after the start of the Great Recession, nobody would mistake U.S.
economy for a thrumming engine of growth, prosperity, and human flourishing.
Sure, we're officially out of "recession." But the recovery is painfully slow
and uneven, and 24 million Americans are still unemployed or underemployed.
There's a lot of pain out there, and a lot of potential going to waste.
The worst part? It doesn't have to be this way. Or so says Paul Krugman. In a new book, End This Depression Now!, the Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist makes an urgent, even passionate case that our economic problems are, at root, fairly simple, and we have the knowledge and the tools to solve them. We've been here before, Krugman argues, during the Great Depression, and the actions that got us out of that crisis will get us out of this one, too.
The basic issue, says Krugman, is a lack of demand. American consumers and businesses, aren't spending enough, and efforts to get them to open their wallets have gone nowhere. Krugman's solution: The federal government needs to step in and spend. A lot. On debt relief for struggling homeowners; on infrastructure projects; on aid to states and localities; on safety-net programs. Call it "stimulus" if you like. Call it Keynesian economics, after the great economic thinker (and Krugman idol) John Maynard Keynes, who first championed the idea that government has an essential role in saving the free market from its own excesses. Whatever you call it, it worked in the late nineteen-thirties and forties, when the U.S. government started shelling out on the military in the build-up to World War II, bringing an abrupt end to years of economic misery and laying the foundation for decades of prosperity. Krugman is not calling for an increase in military spending, much less a global war! But the WWII example shows that large-scale government spending can kick-start the economy. It worked then, he says, and it will work now.
Krugman's diagnosis and prescriptions cut sharply against the conventional wisdom in Washington, according to which "austerity," – throttle back on government spending, tackle the budget deficit now – is the way to get the economy back on track. Not only is this wrong, he argues, it's making a bad situation even worse. He writes: "Now is the time for the government to spend more, not less, until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again." On the positive side, people are starting to look at the train wreck that is Europe, where austerity has failed – and how – to produce growth, and at our own protracted slump, and concluding that people like Krugman – who, truth be told, has been right about a lot in recent years – might be onto something. "All indications are that the economy will remain weak for a very long time unless our policy makers change course," he writes in his introduction. "And my aim here is to bring pressure, by means of an informed public, to get that course change and bring an end to this depression."
Krugman, who dedicates his book to "the unemployed, who deserve better," spoke to RollingStone.com by phone the other day from his home in Princeton, New Jersey.
Passion isn't something we expect from economists, but this strikes me as a passionate book.
It's easy to become deadened to this depression. But I think it's really important to step back and think and realize that, hey, this is an ongoing terrible thing that does not have to be happening. Everyone, unless they're completely secluded, knows somebody who's suffering terribly. The passion is not always there for me because, like everybody else, I get used to days and weeks going by when nothing much changes. But I need to keep hold of it and I tried to tap into it for this book.
You say we’re in a "depression," but isn’t the economy improving?
A depression is being down for an extended period, even if there are ups and downs along the way. What we call the Great Depression actually contained two recessions and two recoveries. We're technically not in a recession anymore, but things are deeply depressed, and the economy is operating well below its productive capacity.
And the basic problem is a lack of overall demand?
The economy is suffering because there isn't enough spending. Not because there aren't enough resources out there. Not because of hard choices we're refusing to make. But because there isn't enough spending. It's really that simple.
Really?
A lot of people find emotionally unacceptable the idea that economic suffering on this scale could have a relatively trivial cause. But this has happened again and again through history. And it could be fixed fairly easily, by having government step in and spend.
Something else a lot of people find emotionally unacceptable is increased government spending! And anyway, didn't Obama already try to juice the economy with the "stimulus" and come up short?
Well, the Obama administration’s stimulus didn't work as well as many people had hoped – but it didn't work any worse than other people, myself included, predicted. When the stimulus was being promoted and discussed, I was very publicly tearing my hair out, saying this is way inadequate. And sure enough, it was.
Even so, this is tough sell politically.
It is. But you have to keep on hammering on the right argument, even if it appears that it's a political nonstarter right now. Things change. If you give up on making the point that's right, you have no hope at all. Also, I think we're approaching a watershed here – there's been a palpable change in the last seven or eight months in the discussion of deficits and austerity.
Because of what's happening in Europe?
Yes. In Europe, the failure of austerity, which has been obvious for some time, has suddenly reached the threshold where everybody's saying it. Two years ago, it was, "Slash now, or you'll turn into Greece." Now people are saying, "If you do austerity at a moment like this, you'll turn into Europe." So the background noise has changed.
Even so, Republicans will need to get on board, and they've shown an amazing ability to brush off evidence that calls free-market dogma into question. Not even the apocalyptic financial crisis has shaken their certainty. How do you make sense of that?
Part of it is that if you've been brought up to believe that capitalism is wonderful and perfect then the notion that it could use some help every now and then becomes alien to you, and there are a lot of people who are so deep into that mindset that it's very hard for them to get out. And then, a lot of conventional wisdom is shaped; it doesn't just come from nowhere. It comes from the long-term operation of a lavishly funded propaganda operation. When you've had 40 years of [right-wing mega-donor Richard Mellon] Scaife and the Koch brothers and the Heritage Foundation and so on pushing a line about the perfection of markets and the evil of doing anything that encroaches upon the unfettered right of billionaires to do what they like, that is coloring the way people think about economics, even people who've never heard anything directly from any of these think tanks.
Given that, what are the chances the congressional GOP will come around to your way of thinking?
I don't think John Boehner is going to announce next week that Republicans were wrong and we need more government spending, but I do think that some time next year we might be able to have a discussion that turns around at least some of the mistakes that were made in the past few years.
OK, so where would you start?
You could get a lot of stimulus, about $300 billion, just by providing aid to states and localities so they can reverse their budget cuts. That would create a million jobs, including those 300,000 schoolteachers that were laid off.
Don’t you worry about the impact on the deficit?
The deficit is way overstated as an immediate action-forcing issue. It's something to worry about over the next decade, but not something that should be dictating your policies right now. And the fact of the matter is that austerity, when you're in depression economics, doesn't even work from a fiscal point of view. Slash government spending and the economy contracts and it cuts into the economy's long-run prospects.
You’ve criticized Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke for not doing enough to right the economy. He's lowered interest rates to the basement. What more can he do?
It’s true that the interest rates the Fed controls directly are as low as they can go. But Bernanke could change expectations about the Fed's future behavior and convince people it will hold off on raising rates. If somebody's thinking about borrowing for a project or a business is deciding whether to sit on cash or invest it, it makes a big difference whether you think that money you borrow now will be paid in dollars that have less purchasing power than they have now. If you can convince people they can borrow at 2 percent interest right now and the rate will stay at 2 for 10 years, and inflation will be 4 percent, then borrowing becomes a much more attractive proposition than borrowing at 1 percent with 2 percent inflation. It's just textbook economics applied to a very nonstandard situation, which just happens to be world we live in. The depressing thing is that the Fed has basically said: We wash our hands of this.
You say in the book that higher inflation would be a good thing. That’s not something you hear very often.
There’s nothing in the Fed's charter that says inflation has to be at 2 percent. Back when Ronald Reagan was president they used to consider 4 percent perfectly OK.
You’ve called Obama out on his too-timid approach to the economy. How hopeful are you that he’ll get religion on this?
You never know, but my sense from talking to people in the administration and watching their behavior is that they and he have had something of a defining moment. At some point, they finally appreciated that the people they were negotiating with were not negotiating in good faith. They're looking at the news coming in from Europe and understand that we've had a rather drastic demonstration of the wrongheadedness of the policy approach that's been dominating our discussion. I think the chances that they'll do the right thing are reasonably good.
And the chances they'll play hardball?
Also pretty good. It's going to be rough. We have to expect more scorched-earth politics until something changes about the nature of the modern Republican Party, but I think the notion that a second Obama term would be just like the disappointments of the first is probably wrong.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/paul-krugman-on-how-to-fix-the-economy-and-why-its-easier-than-you-think-20120502
The worst part? It doesn't have to be this way. Or so says Paul Krugman. In a new book, End This Depression Now!, the Nobel-winning economist and New York Times columnist makes an urgent, even passionate case that our economic problems are, at root, fairly simple, and we have the knowledge and the tools to solve them. We've been here before, Krugman argues, during the Great Depression, and the actions that got us out of that crisis will get us out of this one, too.
The basic issue, says Krugman, is a lack of demand. American consumers and businesses, aren't spending enough, and efforts to get them to open their wallets have gone nowhere. Krugman's solution: The federal government needs to step in and spend. A lot. On debt relief for struggling homeowners; on infrastructure projects; on aid to states and localities; on safety-net programs. Call it "stimulus" if you like. Call it Keynesian economics, after the great economic thinker (and Krugman idol) John Maynard Keynes, who first championed the idea that government has an essential role in saving the free market from its own excesses. Whatever you call it, it worked in the late nineteen-thirties and forties, when the U.S. government started shelling out on the military in the build-up to World War II, bringing an abrupt end to years of economic misery and laying the foundation for decades of prosperity. Krugman is not calling for an increase in military spending, much less a global war! But the WWII example shows that large-scale government spending can kick-start the economy. It worked then, he says, and it will work now.
Krugman's diagnosis and prescriptions cut sharply against the conventional wisdom in Washington, according to which "austerity," – throttle back on government spending, tackle the budget deficit now – is the way to get the economy back on track. Not only is this wrong, he argues, it's making a bad situation even worse. He writes: "Now is the time for the government to spend more, not less, until the private sector is ready to carry the economy forward again." On the positive side, people are starting to look at the train wreck that is Europe, where austerity has failed – and how – to produce growth, and at our own protracted slump, and concluding that people like Krugman – who, truth be told, has been right about a lot in recent years – might be onto something. "All indications are that the economy will remain weak for a very long time unless our policy makers change course," he writes in his introduction. "And my aim here is to bring pressure, by means of an informed public, to get that course change and bring an end to this depression."
Krugman, who dedicates his book to "the unemployed, who deserve better," spoke to RollingStone.com by phone the other day from his home in Princeton, New Jersey.
Passion isn't something we expect from economists, but this strikes me as a passionate book.
It's easy to become deadened to this depression. But I think it's really important to step back and think and realize that, hey, this is an ongoing terrible thing that does not have to be happening. Everyone, unless they're completely secluded, knows somebody who's suffering terribly. The passion is not always there for me because, like everybody else, I get used to days and weeks going by when nothing much changes. But I need to keep hold of it and I tried to tap into it for this book.
You say we’re in a "depression," but isn’t the economy improving?
A depression is being down for an extended period, even if there are ups and downs along the way. What we call the Great Depression actually contained two recessions and two recoveries. We're technically not in a recession anymore, but things are deeply depressed, and the economy is operating well below its productive capacity.
And the basic problem is a lack of overall demand?
The economy is suffering because there isn't enough spending. Not because there aren't enough resources out there. Not because of hard choices we're refusing to make. But because there isn't enough spending. It's really that simple.
Really?
A lot of people find emotionally unacceptable the idea that economic suffering on this scale could have a relatively trivial cause. But this has happened again and again through history. And it could be fixed fairly easily, by having government step in and spend.
Something else a lot of people find emotionally unacceptable is increased government spending! And anyway, didn't Obama already try to juice the economy with the "stimulus" and come up short?
Well, the Obama administration’s stimulus didn't work as well as many people had hoped – but it didn't work any worse than other people, myself included, predicted. When the stimulus was being promoted and discussed, I was very publicly tearing my hair out, saying this is way inadequate. And sure enough, it was.
Even so, this is tough sell politically.
It is. But you have to keep on hammering on the right argument, even if it appears that it's a political nonstarter right now. Things change. If you give up on making the point that's right, you have no hope at all. Also, I think we're approaching a watershed here – there's been a palpable change in the last seven or eight months in the discussion of deficits and austerity.
Because of what's happening in Europe?
Yes. In Europe, the failure of austerity, which has been obvious for some time, has suddenly reached the threshold where everybody's saying it. Two years ago, it was, "Slash now, or you'll turn into Greece." Now people are saying, "If you do austerity at a moment like this, you'll turn into Europe." So the background noise has changed.
Even so, Republicans will need to get on board, and they've shown an amazing ability to brush off evidence that calls free-market dogma into question. Not even the apocalyptic financial crisis has shaken their certainty. How do you make sense of that?
Part of it is that if you've been brought up to believe that capitalism is wonderful and perfect then the notion that it could use some help every now and then becomes alien to you, and there are a lot of people who are so deep into that mindset that it's very hard for them to get out. And then, a lot of conventional wisdom is shaped; it doesn't just come from nowhere. It comes from the long-term operation of a lavishly funded propaganda operation. When you've had 40 years of [right-wing mega-donor Richard Mellon] Scaife and the Koch brothers and the Heritage Foundation and so on pushing a line about the perfection of markets and the evil of doing anything that encroaches upon the unfettered right of billionaires to do what they like, that is coloring the way people think about economics, even people who've never heard anything directly from any of these think tanks.
Given that, what are the chances the congressional GOP will come around to your way of thinking?
I don't think John Boehner is going to announce next week that Republicans were wrong and we need more government spending, but I do think that some time next year we might be able to have a discussion that turns around at least some of the mistakes that were made in the past few years.
OK, so where would you start?
You could get a lot of stimulus, about $300 billion, just by providing aid to states and localities so they can reverse their budget cuts. That would create a million jobs, including those 300,000 schoolteachers that were laid off.
Don’t you worry about the impact on the deficit?
The deficit is way overstated as an immediate action-forcing issue. It's something to worry about over the next decade, but not something that should be dictating your policies right now. And the fact of the matter is that austerity, when you're in depression economics, doesn't even work from a fiscal point of view. Slash government spending and the economy contracts and it cuts into the economy's long-run prospects.
You’ve criticized Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke for not doing enough to right the economy. He's lowered interest rates to the basement. What more can he do?
It’s true that the interest rates the Fed controls directly are as low as they can go. But Bernanke could change expectations about the Fed's future behavior and convince people it will hold off on raising rates. If somebody's thinking about borrowing for a project or a business is deciding whether to sit on cash or invest it, it makes a big difference whether you think that money you borrow now will be paid in dollars that have less purchasing power than they have now. If you can convince people they can borrow at 2 percent interest right now and the rate will stay at 2 for 10 years, and inflation will be 4 percent, then borrowing becomes a much more attractive proposition than borrowing at 1 percent with 2 percent inflation. It's just textbook economics applied to a very nonstandard situation, which just happens to be world we live in. The depressing thing is that the Fed has basically said: We wash our hands of this.
You say in the book that higher inflation would be a good thing. That’s not something you hear very often.
There’s nothing in the Fed's charter that says inflation has to be at 2 percent. Back when Ronald Reagan was president they used to consider 4 percent perfectly OK.
You’ve called Obama out on his too-timid approach to the economy. How hopeful are you that he’ll get religion on this?
You never know, but my sense from talking to people in the administration and watching their behavior is that they and he have had something of a defining moment. At some point, they finally appreciated that the people they were negotiating with were not negotiating in good faith. They're looking at the news coming in from Europe and understand that we've had a rather drastic demonstration of the wrongheadedness of the policy approach that's been dominating our discussion. I think the chances that they'll do the right thing are reasonably good.
And the chances they'll play hardball?
Also pretty good. It's going to be rough. We have to expect more scorched-earth politics until something changes about the nature of the modern Republican Party, but I think the notion that a second Obama term would be just like the disappointments of the first is probably wrong.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/paul-krugman-on-how-to-fix-the-economy-and-why-its-easier-than-you-think-20120502
Sunday, April 22, 2012
My Dogs
In a week where stories abound about dogs on the roof of cars, and societies where dogs are on the menu; I for one, want to announce my love for the ones who provide unconditional love, my dogs Cherie and Little Bit. Both are rescue dogs that I adopted. When my day is long or my day is difficult both greet me with happiness and the affection truly born of a perfect bond between man and dog. This is a bond older than written history and greater than between any two non-related species as I can attest.
Dogs are a species that apparently adapted themselves with selective breeding from grey wolves to more than 150 different breeds in 10 different types. They are as diverse in their size from the tiniest Chihuahua to as large as a giant Great Dane. All created from the dawn of our own advancement from cave dwellers to tribal bands. Some argue we used breeding to achieve this wonder and others argue dogs taught us how to effectively hunt as we mutually evolved in response to each other.
Certainly no other bond is as complete as to infer communication by look, whistle, pointing, or vocal command as between dogs and man. So give me a week of no politics, no scandal, or of no disappointment among humans in our so called advanced civilization, and let me share company with a much better show of manners, my dogs.
Dogs are a species that apparently adapted themselves with selective breeding from grey wolves to more than 150 different breeds in 10 different types. They are as diverse in their size from the tiniest Chihuahua to as large as a giant Great Dane. All created from the dawn of our own advancement from cave dwellers to tribal bands. Some argue we used breeding to achieve this wonder and others argue dogs taught us how to effectively hunt as we mutually evolved in response to each other.
Certainly no other bond is as complete as to infer communication by look, whistle, pointing, or vocal command as between dogs and man. So give me a week of no politics, no scandal, or of no disappointment among humans in our so called advanced civilization, and let me share company with a much better show of manners, my dogs.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
What Is ALEC & Why You Should Care
ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. We agree. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door.
More than 98% of ALEC's revenues come from sources other than legislative dues, such as corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations. Each corporate member pays an annual fee of between $7,000 and $25,000 a year, and if a corporation participates in any of the nine task forces, additional fees apply, from $2,500 to $10,000 each year. ALEC also receives direct grants from corporations, such as $1.4 million from ExxonMobil from 1998-2009. It has also received grants from some of the biggest foundations funded by corporate CEOs in the country, such as: the Koch family Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Koch-managed Claude R. Lambe Foundation, the Scaife family Allegheny Foundation, the Coors family Castle Rock Foundation, to name a few. Less than 2% of ALEC’s funding comes from “Membership Dues” of $50 per year paid by state legislators, a steeply discounted price that may run afoul of state gift bans.
ALEC describes itself as a non-partisan, non-profit organization. The facts show that it currently has one Democrat out of 104 legislators in leadership positions. ALEC members, speakers, alumni, and award winners are a “who’s who” of the extreme right. ALEC has given awards to: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George H.W. Bush, Charles and David Koch, Richard de Vos, Tommy Thompson, Gov. John Kasich, Gov. Rick Perry, Congressman Mark Foley (intern sex scandal), and Congressman Billy Tauzin. ALEC alumni include: Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Congressman Joe Wilson, (who called President Obama a “liar” during the State of the Union address), former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, former House Speaker Tom DeLay, Andrew Card, Donald Rumsfeld (1985 Chair of ALEC’s Business Policy Board), Governor Scott Walker, Governor Jan Brewer, and more. Featured speakers have included: Milton Friedman, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, George Allen, Jessie Helms, Pete Coors, Governor Mitch Daniels and more.The organization boasts 2,000 legislative members and 300 or more corporate members. The unelected corporate representatives (often registered lobbyists) sit as equals with elected representatives on nine task forces where they have a “voice and a vote” on model legislation. Corporations on ALEC task forces VOTE on the "model" bills and resolutions, and sit as equals with legislators voting on the ALEC task forces and various working groups. Corporate and legislative governing boards also meet jointly each year. (ALEC says only the legislators have a final say on all model bills. ALEC has previously said that "The policies are debated and voted on by all members. Public and private members vote separately on policy. It is important to note that laws are not passed, debated or adopted during this process and therefor no lobbying takes place. That process is done at the state legislature.") The long-term representation of Koch Industries on the governing board means that Koch has had influence over an untold number of ALEC bills. Due to the questionable nature of this partnership with corporations, legislators rarely discuss the origins of the model legislation they bring home. Though thousands of ALEC-approved model bills have been publicly introduced across the country, ALEC’s role facilitating the language in the bills and the corporate vote for them is not well known.
(ALEC legislators sometimes compare the organization to the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL), yet the two organizations could not be more different. NCSL has zero corporate members. It is funded largely by state government appropriations and conference fees; it has a truly bipartisan governance structure, and there is a large role for nonpartisan professional staff; it does not vote on or promote model legislation; meetings are public and so are any agreed upon documents. Corporations do sponsor receptions at NCSL events through a separate foundation. For more information, see the document ALEC & NCSL.)
Although ALEC claims to take an ideological stance (of supposedly "Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty"), many of the model bills benefit the corporations whose agents write them, shape them, and/or vote to approve them. These are just a few such measures:
· Altria/Philip Morris USA benefits from ALEC’s newest tobacco legislation -- an extremely narrow tax break for moist tobacco that would make fruit flavored tobacco products cheaper and more attractive to youngsters.
· Health insurance companies such as Humana and Golden Rule Insurance (United Healthcare), benefit directly from ALEC model bills, such as the Health Savings Account bill that just passed in Wisconsin.
· Tobacco firms such as Reynolds and pharmaceutical firms such as Bayer benefit directly from ALEC tort reform measures that make it harder for Americans to sue when injured by dangerous products.
· Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) benefits directly from the anti-immigrant legislation introduced in Arizona and other states that requires expanded incarceration and housing of immigrants, along with other bills from ALEC’s crime task force. (While CCA has stated that it left ALEC in late 2010 after years of membership on the Criminal Justice Task Force and even co-chairing it, its prison privatization bills remain ALEC "models.")
· promote private on-line schools.
Connections Academy, a large online education corporation and co-chair of the Education Task Force, benefits from ALEC measures to privatize public education and In most ordinary people's view, handing bills to legislators so they can introduce them is the very definition of lobbying. ALEC says "no lobbying takes place." The current chairman of ALEC’s corporate board is W. Preston Baldwin III, until recently a lobbyist and the Vice President of State Government Affairs at UST Inc., a tobacco firm now owned by Altria/Phillip Morris USA. Altria is advancing a very short, specific bill to change the way moist tobacco products (such as fruit flavored “snus”) are taxed-- to make it cheaper and more attractive to young tobacco users according to health experts. In fact, 20 of the 24 corporate representatives on ALEC’s “Private Enterprise Board” are lobbyists representing major firms such as Koch Industries, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Wal-Mart and Johnson and Johnson.
ALEC makes old-fashioned lobbying obsolete. Once legislators return to their state with corporate-sponsored ALEC legislation in hand, the legislators themselves become “super-lobbyists” for ALEC’s corporate agenda, cutting out the middleman. Yet ALEC enjoys a 501(c)(3) classification, which allows it to keep its tax-exempt status while accepting grants from foundations, corporations, and other donors. In our view, the activities that corporate members engage in should be considered lobbying by the IRS, and the entity that facilitates that effort to influence state law, ALEC, should also be considered to be engaged predominantly in lobby-related activities, not simply “educational” activities. Re-classifying ALEC as primarily engaged in lobbying facilitation would mean that donations to it would not count as tax-deductible for businesses and foundations. Common Cause filed a complaint with the IRS on July 14, 2011, setting forth evidence supporting its complaint that ALEC is engaged in lobbying despite its claims to do no lobbying.
ALEC’s operating model raises many ethical and legal concerns. Each state has a different set of ethics laws or rules. The presence of lobbyists alone may cause ethics problems for some state legislators. Wisconsin, for instance, generally requires legislators who go to events with registered lobbyists to pay on their own dime, yet in many states, legislators use public funds to attend ALEC meetings. According to one study, $3 million in public funds was spent to attend ALEC meetings in one year. Some legislators use their personal funds and are reimbursed by ALEC. Such “scholarships” may be disclosed if gifts are required to be reported. But should the legislators be allowed to accept this money when lobbyists are present at the meeting? Still other legislators use their campaign funds to go and are again reimbursed by ALEC; in some states, campaign funds are only allowed to be used to attend campaign events.
In short, many state ethics codes might consider the free vacation, steeply discounted membership fees, free day care or travel scholarships to be “gifts” that should be disallowed or disclosed.
Click here for a list of Worker and Consumer Rights bills (plus Trade, Pensions, Privatization, Banking, Housing, Property Insurance, Transportation, Telecomm & IT). Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Tort Reform and Injured Americans bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Privatizing Schools and Higher Education bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Health, Big Pharma, and Social Welfare bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Environment, Energy, and Agriculture bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Democracy, Voting, and Federal Relations bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Tax & Budget bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Guns, Prisons, Crime and Immigration bills. Click here for a list of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
For more ALEC model legislation available at other sites and not included in these zip files, click here.
http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
More than 98% of ALEC's revenues come from sources other than legislative dues, such as corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations. Each corporate member pays an annual fee of between $7,000 and $25,000 a year, and if a corporation participates in any of the nine task forces, additional fees apply, from $2,500 to $10,000 each year. ALEC also receives direct grants from corporations, such as $1.4 million from ExxonMobil from 1998-2009. It has also received grants from some of the biggest foundations funded by corporate CEOs in the country, such as: the Koch family Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Koch-managed Claude R. Lambe Foundation, the Scaife family Allegheny Foundation, the Coors family Castle Rock Foundation, to name a few. Less than 2% of ALEC’s funding comes from “Membership Dues” of $50 per year paid by state legislators, a steeply discounted price that may run afoul of state gift bans.
ALEC describes itself as a non-partisan, non-profit organization. The facts show that it currently has one Democrat out of 104 legislators in leadership positions. ALEC members, speakers, alumni, and award winners are a “who’s who” of the extreme right. ALEC has given awards to: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George H.W. Bush, Charles and David Koch, Richard de Vos, Tommy Thompson, Gov. John Kasich, Gov. Rick Perry, Congressman Mark Foley (intern sex scandal), and Congressman Billy Tauzin. ALEC alumni include: Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Congressman Joe Wilson, (who called President Obama a “liar” during the State of the Union address), former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, former House Speaker Tom DeLay, Andrew Card, Donald Rumsfeld (1985 Chair of ALEC’s Business Policy Board), Governor Scott Walker, Governor Jan Brewer, and more. Featured speakers have included: Milton Friedman, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, George Allen, Jessie Helms, Pete Coors, Governor Mitch Daniels and more.The organization boasts 2,000 legislative members and 300 or more corporate members. The unelected corporate representatives (often registered lobbyists) sit as equals with elected representatives on nine task forces where they have a “voice and a vote” on model legislation. Corporations on ALEC task forces VOTE on the "model" bills and resolutions, and sit as equals with legislators voting on the ALEC task forces and various working groups. Corporate and legislative governing boards also meet jointly each year. (ALEC says only the legislators have a final say on all model bills. ALEC has previously said that "The policies are debated and voted on by all members. Public and private members vote separately on policy. It is important to note that laws are not passed, debated or adopted during this process and therefor no lobbying takes place. That process is done at the state legislature.") The long-term representation of Koch Industries on the governing board means that Koch has had influence over an untold number of ALEC bills. Due to the questionable nature of this partnership with corporations, legislators rarely discuss the origins of the model legislation they bring home. Though thousands of ALEC-approved model bills have been publicly introduced across the country, ALEC’s role facilitating the language in the bills and the corporate vote for them is not well known.
(ALEC legislators sometimes compare the organization to the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL), yet the two organizations could not be more different. NCSL has zero corporate members. It is funded largely by state government appropriations and conference fees; it has a truly bipartisan governance structure, and there is a large role for nonpartisan professional staff; it does not vote on or promote model legislation; meetings are public and so are any agreed upon documents. Corporations do sponsor receptions at NCSL events through a separate foundation. For more information, see the document ALEC & NCSL.)
Although ALEC claims to take an ideological stance (of supposedly "Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty"), many of the model bills benefit the corporations whose agents write them, shape them, and/or vote to approve them. These are just a few such measures:
· Altria/Philip Morris USA benefits from ALEC’s newest tobacco legislation -- an extremely narrow tax break for moist tobacco that would make fruit flavored tobacco products cheaper and more attractive to youngsters.
· Health insurance companies such as Humana and Golden Rule Insurance (United Healthcare), benefit directly from ALEC model bills, such as the Health Savings Account bill that just passed in Wisconsin.
· Tobacco firms such as Reynolds and pharmaceutical firms such as Bayer benefit directly from ALEC tort reform measures that make it harder for Americans to sue when injured by dangerous products.
· Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) benefits directly from the anti-immigrant legislation introduced in Arizona and other states that requires expanded incarceration and housing of immigrants, along with other bills from ALEC’s crime task force. (While CCA has stated that it left ALEC in late 2010 after years of membership on the Criminal Justice Task Force and even co-chairing it, its prison privatization bills remain ALEC "models.")
· promote private on-line schools.
Connections Academy, a large online education corporation and co-chair of the Education Task Force, benefits from ALEC measures to privatize public education and In most ordinary people's view, handing bills to legislators so they can introduce them is the very definition of lobbying. ALEC says "no lobbying takes place." The current chairman of ALEC’s corporate board is W. Preston Baldwin III, until recently a lobbyist and the Vice President of State Government Affairs at UST Inc., a tobacco firm now owned by Altria/Phillip Morris USA. Altria is advancing a very short, specific bill to change the way moist tobacco products (such as fruit flavored “snus”) are taxed-- to make it cheaper and more attractive to young tobacco users according to health experts. In fact, 20 of the 24 corporate representatives on ALEC’s “Private Enterprise Board” are lobbyists representing major firms such as Koch Industries, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Wal-Mart and Johnson and Johnson.
ALEC makes old-fashioned lobbying obsolete. Once legislators return to their state with corporate-sponsored ALEC legislation in hand, the legislators themselves become “super-lobbyists” for ALEC’s corporate agenda, cutting out the middleman. Yet ALEC enjoys a 501(c)(3) classification, which allows it to keep its tax-exempt status while accepting grants from foundations, corporations, and other donors. In our view, the activities that corporate members engage in should be considered lobbying by the IRS, and the entity that facilitates that effort to influence state law, ALEC, should also be considered to be engaged predominantly in lobby-related activities, not simply “educational” activities. Re-classifying ALEC as primarily engaged in lobbying facilitation would mean that donations to it would not count as tax-deductible for businesses and foundations. Common Cause filed a complaint with the IRS on July 14, 2011, setting forth evidence supporting its complaint that ALEC is engaged in lobbying despite its claims to do no lobbying.
ALEC’s operating model raises many ethical and legal concerns. Each state has a different set of ethics laws or rules. The presence of lobbyists alone may cause ethics problems for some state legislators. Wisconsin, for instance, generally requires legislators who go to events with registered lobbyists to pay on their own dime, yet in many states, legislators use public funds to attend ALEC meetings. According to one study, $3 million in public funds was spent to attend ALEC meetings in one year. Some legislators use their personal funds and are reimbursed by ALEC. Such “scholarships” may be disclosed if gifts are required to be reported. But should the legislators be allowed to accept this money when lobbyists are present at the meeting? Still other legislators use their campaign funds to go and are again reimbursed by ALEC; in some states, campaign funds are only allowed to be used to attend campaign events.
In short, many state ethics codes might consider the free vacation, steeply discounted membership fees, free day care or travel scholarships to be “gifts” that should be disallowed or disclosed.
Click here for a list of Worker and Consumer Rights bills (plus Trade, Pensions, Privatization, Banking, Housing, Property Insurance, Transportation, Telecomm & IT). Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Tort Reform and Injured Americans bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Privatizing Schools and Higher Education bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Health, Big Pharma, and Social Welfare bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Environment, Energy, and Agriculture bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Democracy, Voting, and Federal Relations bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Tax & Budget bills. Click here for a zip file of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
Click here for a list of Guns, Prisons, Crime and Immigration bills. Click here for a list of the bills. Click here for our analysis.
For more ALEC model legislation available at other sites and not included in these zip files, click here.
http://alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Why Indeed Healthcare
The Supreme Court Justices asked why this healthcare law is different than manditory burial insurance or requiring broccoli consumption? The answer is obvious, one only dies once, it can be assumed, and with fairly fixed basic costs other than health insurance which would be possibly substantial without coverage. Health coverage if unexpected, could possibly be continuous and chronic if pre-existing clauses prevent their coverage.
As for an individual mandate, I would ask the Justices to describe the economic damage comparable to death & chronic illness, lack of broccoli consumption would result in.
So neither is a comparable set of circumstances and further shows the uniqueness of health insurance that requires extraordinary measures of a personal mandate to allow a fully functional system. Without this concept, universal coverage is regulated to emergency rather than preventative coverage and escallates costs beyond all foreseeable control
As for an individual mandate, I would ask the Justices to describe the economic damage comparable to death & chronic illness, lack of broccoli consumption would result in.
So neither is a comparable set of circumstances and further shows the uniqueness of health insurance that requires extraordinary measures of a personal mandate to allow a fully functional system. Without this concept, universal coverage is regulated to emergency rather than preventative coverage and escallates costs beyond all foreseeable control
Friday, March 23, 2012
Paul Ryan & The Medicare Kiss of Death by Tom Love
Ah, the Kiss of Death, add the name of Rep. Paul Ryan to the List of the Greatest Betrayers of the Aged, Blind, Infirmed, and Disabled since Judas kissed Jesus. His bill would stab the back of Medicare Recipients for generations and make a mockery of the greatest gift of the New Deal, Social Security. Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Income, all earned since the Great Depression in 1935 gone in a flurry not seen since the High Sheriff of Nottingham rode through Sherwood Forest.
But enough of my purple prose, let us hear the words of Newt Gingrich before he too twisted the knife. I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with Newt Gingrich. But when he says that Paul Ryan’s budget plan is too “radical” and represents “right wing social engineering” it’s hard to deny the truth. So we should say, “Thank You.”
The real Ryan Plan gives tax breaks to billionaires, paid for by tearing Medicare to shreds and its the plan to dismantle Medicare and reward billionaires with more tax breaks and is a strong example of how extreme today's Republican party has become. If only other Republicans saw things the way you did, we'd be much better off. So send a thank you note:
http://www.dscc.org/act4?action_KEY=189.
But enough of my purple prose, let us hear the words of Newt Gingrich before he too twisted the knife. I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with Newt Gingrich. But when he says that Paul Ryan’s budget plan is too “radical” and represents “right wing social engineering” it’s hard to deny the truth. So we should say, “Thank You.”
The real Ryan Plan gives tax breaks to billionaires, paid for by tearing Medicare to shreds and its the plan to dismantle Medicare and reward billionaires with more tax breaks and is a strong example of how extreme today's Republican party has become. If only other Republicans saw things the way you did, we'd be much better off. So send a thank you note:
http://www.dscc.org/act4?action_KEY=189.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
The Breed Amendments
Controversy over women’s reproductive rights by Angry Republican Men has led to a series of issues best described as The Breed Amendments. Personhood Amendments, State Sponsored Vaginal Probes for Women Seeking Abortions, Legislative Hearings on Birth Control and Arguments Limiting or Outright Banning Birth Control without having a single woman testifying, and even Republican Talk Radio Hosts attacking the morals and character of women who dare to attempt to testify are the tools of choice in this version of the War on Women conducted by the GOP.
My grandmother, who was active in the Women’s Suffragette Movement in the late 1800’s and early 20th Century told stories, which I as a child scarcely believed of what is probably described as Men Behaving Very Badly, but here, we will describe as The Breed Amendments. One may recall there is a commercial of a tiny gerbil holding a megaphone and exhorting his fellow gerbils to Row, Row, and Row. Perhaps that same sentiment is at work here with Breed, Breed, and Breed being shouted over the seemingly deaf ears of American Women. Maybe women have become so insulated that comparisons with livestock are appropriate, however my long ago grandmother would certainly have disagreed, and been insulted by these Breed Amendments.
by Tom Love
My grandmother, who was active in the Women’s Suffragette Movement in the late 1800’s and early 20th Century told stories, which I as a child scarcely believed of what is probably described as Men Behaving Very Badly, but here, we will describe as The Breed Amendments. One may recall there is a commercial of a tiny gerbil holding a megaphone and exhorting his fellow gerbils to Row, Row, and Row. Perhaps that same sentiment is at work here with Breed, Breed, and Breed being shouted over the seemingly deaf ears of American Women. Maybe women have become so insulated that comparisons with livestock are appropriate, however my long ago grandmother would certainly have disagreed, and been insulted by these Breed Amendments.
by Tom Love
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