Dean has three columns in this ongoing series so far:
Gaming American Democracy: How New Republican Techniques Seek to Change the Political System ItselfGaming American Democracy: A Perfect Storm in Which Republicans Disenfranchise Voters While Giving Corporations Unchecked PowersGaming American Democracy: Recent, Unprecedented Republican Obstructionism and Abuse of the Senate’s RulesIt's the second column, about Republicans giving corporations unchecked powers while disenfranchising voters, that includes the sections on ALEC:
http://verdict.justia.com/2011/10/07/gaming-american-democracy-2Exposing the Shadowy and Secretive ALEC
The American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC—like countless other such 501(c)(3) and (4) non-profit conservative charitable organizations—has an intentionally dull-sounding name, for conservatives prefer to operate behind closed doors, secretly, without attracting attention. I first noticed ALEC during the Bush II years when I read a Mother Jones article about what was described as “one of the nation’s most powerful—and least known—corporate lobbies.” Even then, ALEC had already been “ghost writing” state laws for nearly a decade. Yet I’d not heard of ALEC before. It had no website, and I could find little reported information about its work.
It was Wisconsin’s pugnacious Governor Walker, however, who turned a spotlight on ALEC, which today has a website, where it proudly proclaims its purported non-partisan allegiance to “Limited Government, Free Markets, Federalism”—code words well-known to every conservative for a pro-corporation and business-friendly economic agenda, which is why big corporations have provided robust funding for ALEC. (While ALEC has a few Democratic state legislators as members, they are the “blue dog” breed, and might as well be Republicans.)
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ALEC’s Massive Funding Influences
ALEC’s corporate funding is extensive, and when viewed with the efforts of its sponsors, massive. Based on CMD’s study of ALEC’s publicly available IRS tax returns, 98 percent of its funding comes from corporations and over the past three years, it has raised over $20 million—a sum with which you can develop and promote a lot of state legislation. According to Common Cause, ALEC’s corporate sponsors have further invested, during the last decade, more than $370 million in state elections, not including countless millions for and against state ballot measures, receiving a remarkable return on their investment in 2010. (For those interested in more detail, the CMD’s material at ALEC Exposed, and Common Cause’s report “Legislating Under the Influence,” provide a solid grounding in ALEC’s operations. (They also provide good reasons to contribute to those non-profit undertakings that do operate in the general public’s interest, by trying to keep an eye on ALEC and like-thinking operations.)
ALEC’s business-friendly laws are never identified by their true corporate sponsorship, and some have only been identifiable since the recent leaks to CMD. When NPR’s Terry Gross interviewed ALEC’s current national chairman (this post rotates annually) Noble Ellington, a Louisiana state representative, he was not troubled whatsoever by the fact that ALEC’s laws were written by unidentified corporations, since they went through the legislative process which was transparent and sought public comment. (Of course, until recently, no one knew that corporations—rather than the representatives and their staffs—were doing the work for the legislatures, which is not an insignificant detail.)
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As Dean points out, what ALEC does is "certainly not an instance of government’s serving the general public’s interest" but instead "an instance of corporate money legally corrupting democracy, with its outsized influence, to obtain its special interests—the public be damned."
I hope that Dean, who gets some media attention, will spend some time in the future talking about ALEC when he's on TV. This group is doing incredible harm to our country (more on this in the long compilation topic here on the
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).)
And Dean's entire series is extremely important -- please use the Twitter and Facebook and other social media links on those Justia.com pages to share his analysis of how our democracy is being undermined.
This is especially important because, as he explains in the first column in the series, this right-wing attempt to transform American politics is getting very little news coverage:
http://verdict.justia.com/2011/09/23/gaming-american-democracyThe Reasons This Attempt to Profoundly Transform Our Political System Is Receiving Only Incidental News Coverage
This story—the story of the attempted transformation of our political system itself—has been mostly ignored for two reasons. First, because it deals with political and governmental process. It is conventional wisdom among news people (in both print and television journalism), as well as among many mainstream book publishers, that the American public does not care to be told about so-called “process issues.” This is apparently true, notwithstanding the fact that the political party that controls the processes can control the policy and government.
Authors who have written about process issues tell me that not only have they had difficulty getting published, but if they do, readers are, in fact, hard to come by. Because I know the importance of process, and its overriding influence on politics and government, I am very interested in these matters, so I do not understand the general disinterest that authors face when they seek to write about these vital topics.
There is a second reason for the disinterest, too—and an even more troubling one. Today’s mainstream news organizations are largely controlled by major corporations, which are profit-driven like never before. Most members of corporate management lean toward Republican views, and while top corporate executives typically give their news editors and producers great leeway, news organizations do not go out of their way to annoy their corporate bosses. The big money that is involved in reshaping America’s political processes has been, and will continue to be, a wonderful source of revenue for these organizations. News organizations need advertisers, and they love all the disingenuous advertisements that this political undertaking is generating.
Given these attitudes and institutional realities, the mainstream news media could care less about the impact, meaning, and means involved in changing the political processes to favor conservatives. (Ironically, Watergate, too, was initially a non-story with the national press, and it continued on that way for almost ten months after the arrests of burglars in the Democratic National Committee—because much of the story involved process, at first, and also because news organizations did not want to annoy a mean-spirited sitting president.)
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Emphasis added.
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