Powerful U.S. corporations have been writing bills themselves and giving them to state assemblies to rubber-stamp
The scandal of paid news in India, whereby politicians, private
businesses, and perhaps others, buy space in newspapers to publish
material which appears to have been written by the papers, has rightly
attracted much critical comment, but the United States appears to be
well ahead of India, with nothing less than a form of paid law. Powerful
U.S. corporations have been writing bills themselves and giving them to
state legislators — whose election campaigns they often fund as well —
to rubber-stamp and pass on to governors for signature into law.
Main lobbying body
The main lobbying body behind this is the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC), which has existed for over 40 years. It numbers about
300 corporations, including oil majors Exxon Mobil and Shell Oil, the
Koch energy conglomerate, IT firms Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Dell,
carmakers General Motors, pharmaceuticals producers Eli Lilly,
GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer, the cigarette firm Philip Morris, the
drinks giant Diageo, and the mammoth retailer Wal-Mart. Nearly 2,000
state legislators are also members.
ALEC now tracks all legislation in all 50 states; Mike McIntire, writing in the New York Times,
adds that over 1,000 state bills a year are based on its models, and
that about 17 per cent of these become law. ALEC itself says its mission
is to “promote free markets, limited government, and federalism
throughout the states”, but the evidence reveals much more than that.
As Ari Berman points out in Rolling Stone, ALEC's agenda is
highly systematic and covers several key areas, starting with an
orchestrated campaign to ‘disrupt voting rights'; in 2011, no fewer than
38 states introduced ALEC-inspired legislation which will impede
voting. The restrictions include the need to prove citizenship before
registering to vote, obstacles for campaigning groups which help people
register, the abolition of election-day registration, reductions in
early voting, the disenfranchisement of convicts who have served their
sentence, and the requirement for government-issued identification at
the polling booth. More than 10 per cent of U.S. citizens have no such
ID, but the figures rise to 25 per cent among African-Americans and 18
per cent among young voters respectively; university students will also
be excluded by residence conditions such as those in new Wisconsin law.
African-Americans and younger voters tend to vote Democrat. Claims that
the restrictive measures prevent voter fraud are absurdly exaggerated;
U.S. voter fraud is almost zero, and strenuous Republican attempts to
prove that it is widespread have all failed.
A second front is the attack on renewable energy sources, or renewable
portfolio standards (RPS). ALEC claims that these, like curbs on
greenhouse-gas emissions, harm the economy and have no environmental
benefits, but Maria Gallucci of Inside Climate News notes (in an article reproduced by the online journal Truthout)
that the $48.1 billion invested in clean energy technologies in 2011
constitutes a 40 per cent increase on the previous year. In addition,
claims that RPS drives electricity prices up are countered by published
evidence that RPS policies slowed the rate of price rises in 12 states;
the introduction of the new technology has also helped create jobs.
Environmental issues
Needless to say, environmental issues pose ALEC some of its toughest
challenges. Exxon Mobil has helped design state laws that enable energy
companies not to name chemicals used in fracking for access to oil,
claiming that the chemicals are trade secrets; keeping such secrets,
however, makes a nonsense of ALEC's own ideology, which is that
consumers are free to make their own informed decisions in a market
system.
This evasion of accountability extends to shielding firms which receive
substantial public monies despite overwhelming evidence of failure. Zaid
Jilani and David Halperin, writing separately in Republic Report,
detail how the for-profit education company Kaplan International, which
is owned by the Washington Post Company and was an ALEC member for a
year until August 2011, has a 68 per cent dropout rate — the worst among
the top 10 recipients of post 9/11 education funding for military
veterans — but its former CEO received a golden handshake worth $76
million when he left. Bridgepoint Education spent $2000 per student on
recruitment in 2009 but only $700 on instruction, and Corinthian College
has the worst default rate, 36 per cent within three years, on student
loans.
Such private colleges can get 90 per cent of their money, totalling over
$30 billion a year, from federal funds, and also charge students very
high fees. Only 11 per cent of eligible students attend such
institutions, but they account for 44 per cent of all student loan
defaults; the colleges concerned have also been exposed for deceptive
and predatory recruiting practices, but have used expensive lobbyists
and consultants to escape being called to account. Even the Chair of the
Virginia Democratic Party, Brian Moran, lobbies for them.
ALEC, for its part, has also tried a form of indirect intimidation
against analysts like Professor William Cronon, but the body has been
severely embarrassed by other revelations. In particular, its then
Criminal Justice Task Force, which Wal-Mart co-chaired at that time, was
behind the so-called Stand Your Ground law, which allows people to
attack others if they believe they themselves are in danger; under this
law they do not have to retreat. The measure, enthusiastically
championed by ALEC, has been passed by 24 states and has led to a 300
per cent increase in “justifiable homicide” verdicts since 2005, when
Florida, overriding law enforcers' doubts, became the first state to
adopt it. ALEC's involvement hit the headlines when George Zimmerman, a
Florida resident, admitted shooting dead an unarmed teenager, Trayvon
Martin, on February 26, and police seemed initially to interpret the law
as allowing them not to arrest Zimmerman (who has since been charged
with second-degree murder). In the ensuing controversy, ALEC disbanded
the committee concerned.
It is highly significant that the revelation of ALEC's involvement did
not occur by itself. A whistleblower passed on details of 800 model
bills, including some explicitly intended to restrict trade union
rights, to the Center for Media and Democracy, a campaigning group which
then put the bills on a dedicated website and has published its own
investigations into ALEC. This level of public exposure quickly caused a
dozen corporations to leave ALEC; among them are Coca-Cola, Kraft
Foods, Procter & Gamble, McDonald's, PepsiCo, and the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation. Mark Engler notes in Dissent that other
departures include Blue Cross Blue Shield and Yum! Brands, which also
owns Pizza Hut and KFC. By May 21, 2012, 51 state legislators, mainly
Democrats, had also cancelled their memberships; earlier, ALEC had
removed the model bills from its main website.
Those companies which have jumped overboard may confirm the truth of the
head of Monsanto's remark to the then President Bill Clinton that
corporates fear consumer backlash more than anything else, but the rapid
departures raise questions about why ALEC has not defended its conduct
more robustly. ALEC will of course find other ways to ensure that
legislators draft the kinds of law it wants, particularly over
regulatory matters and corporate taxation, but it could well face yet
more problems, because its charitable status prohibits it from lobbying —
which it has apparently been doing since its inception.
Wider issues
Wider issues also arise here, which are highly pertinent in view of the
collapse of neoliberalism and the increasingly public global scepticism
about austerity policies. For example, ALEC's recent problems show the
kinds of tensions which are inherent in the relation between the mainly
economic-liberal corporates and the political and moral conservatives
who favour the free market but whose social agenda in the U.S. has been
documented as aiming to restrict, for example, minority voting rights
and women's rights, and as seeking to promote measures like the Stand
Your Ground legislation. Nevertheless, the fact remains that with the
recent exposure of ALEC's activities, U.S. citizens could well have to
face the possibility that their country looks not like the mixed-economy
system the political scientists called a corporate state in the 1950s
and 1960s, but more like a like a corporate-puppet state.
The Hindu
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