ALEC’s Help Wanted Ad

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has a strong hold on GOP-controlled state legislatures around the country, including Ohio. After a few years of bad publicity, nearly 400 lawmakers cut ties with the corporate-backed group, but still, nearly 25% of all U.S. state lawmakers are ALEC members.  No Republicans chose to drop out of ALEC in Ohio, so with drastically gerrymandered Congressional districts in the Buckeye state, the percentage of ALEC members is much higher than the norm.

Corporate membership has also taken a hit, but a new initiative, called The Prodigal Son Project, is aimed at winning back former members who publicly backed away from ALEC due to the controversy of corporations sitting at the same table as legislators to create laws. ALEC also created a new lobbying wing, the Jeffersonian Project, to “provide greater legal protection and lessen ethics concerns,” so corporate members are bound to return. Prodigal Son?  Jeffersonian Project? Who are they fooling with those silly names? Republican legislators!

One can only imagine how ALEC goes about recruiting Republican lawmakers in Ohio:    

HELP WANTED

Job Title: GOP/ALEC Legislator 

Company: Ohio House of Representatives and/or Ohio Senate

Location:  Ohio General Assembly, Ohio Statehouse, Columbus, Ohio

Seeking partisan individuals to act as part-time conservative lawmakers with ability to relocate as needed.  Applicant must be dedicated to sacrificing the environment, human rights, and middle class beliefs in order to promote initiatives of wealthy benefactors.  Must be willing to represent corporate special interests by attacking unions, diminishing public education, suppressing voters, encouraging privatization, and preventing implementation of health care reform.  Position seeker must be experienced at using the “Copy & Paste” feature on the computer.

Position requires no independent thought, nor compromise, but requires complete compliance in following the ALEC agenda.  

If interested, please call Bill Meierling @ 571-482-5007. 

Think.

ALEC’s Aversion to Sunshine

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely
Sunshine almost always makes me high

~John Denver, Mike Taylor, & Richard Kniss- 1971

“Sunshine Week” is an initiative that was created to promote the importance of government transparency and freedom of information, and it’s celebrated nationwide this year from March 16-22, 2014. Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine released his office’s 2014 edition of “Ohio Sunshine Laws: An Open Government Resource Manual,” also known as the “Yellow Book.”  “Part of our mission to protect Ohio families includes protecting the public’s right to know and to hold their government accountable,” said Attorney General DeWine. “The Ohio Attorney General’s Office offers many resources to help Ohioans access open government, including our Sunshine Laws Manual, Sunshine Laws trainings, and our Public Records Mediation Program.”

The Ohio Attorney General professes to offer many valuable resources to help Ohioans access open government, yet since Sunshine Week 2013, the ALEC-controlled Ohio House and Senate passed a law designating that the $100 million a year from the lease of Ohio’s state liquor profits was private money, thus making Governor John Kasich’s JobsOhio exempt from state audits. They also put a provision in the state budget to give government officials the ability to discuss a broad range of “economic development” issues behind closed doors.

Secrecy is ALEC’s strength. The financiers behind ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, don’t want Ohio citizens to know what clandestine dealings are happening at our Statehouse. We voters would be horrified!

In a Sunshine Week Statehouse press conference, Democratic lawmakers called for increased accessibility and accountability in state government. They proposed:

• Requiring state and local governments to provide public records within 20 days after they are requested. Current law has no deadline.
• Creating an independent public-records ombudsman to mediate public records disputes, including those involving state government.
• Allowing Ohioans to more easily recover appropriate attorney fees and damages when winning court cases seeking the release of public records.
• Mandating that all legislative committee hearings be broadcast live online. Committee chairmen now decide if meetings will be streamed online.
•  Forcing JobsOhio, Kasich’s privatized economic-development agency, to disclose corporate donations online within 30 days of receipt.

Let’s shine some light on ALEC’s affair with GOP legislators by demanding that our lawmakers follow these five common sense proposals.  After such a long and brutal winter, we can all use a little sunshine.

Think.

ALEC Engineers Kasich Tax Cuts

Last year, John Kasich angrily reprimanded the Ohio Chamber of Commerce for opposing his plan to lower income taxes by raising sales taxes on most services in the state.  He reamed the chamber with this colorful one-liner:  Hire every lobbyist you can and make sure you preserve what it is that you get by demanding, “Don’t tax me, tax the guy behind the tree.”  

This catchy rhyme was first coined in 1975 by Louisiana Senator Russell B. Long, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who observed that “tax reform” simply meant “taxing someone else.”  Long made this point when he borrowed a children’s song, where a child tells Mister Bear to “don’t catch me- catch that fellow behind that tree,” and changed the lyrics to say, “Don’t tax you, don’t tax me, tax the fellow behind that tree.”

It’s ludicrous that Kasich had the nerve to throw that particular rhyme at the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, because Long’s ditty is a fairly good representation of the governor’s budgetary and “tax reform” policies.  Kasich’s drastic budget cuts to Ohio’s public schools have brought about $1.3 billion in new school levies since May of 2011. Kasich’s extreme budget cuts to local governments necessitated a large number of levy requests to maintain public safety services. His plans for “tax reform” so far have been to move from income taxes to consumption taxes, a scheme that overwhelmingly favors the wealthiest Ohioans, yet hurts the middle class.

The governor’s accomplices at the American Legislative Exchange Council, heavily connected to anti-tax efforts in many states, propose that cutting the income tax rate will spur growth and create jobs, but ALEC’s false claims are not supported by academic research. According to “State Taxes and Economic Growth,” a special series by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “of the six states that enacted large personal income tax cuts in the years before the recession, three states saw their economies grow more slowly than the nation’s in subsequent years, and the other three saw their economies grow more quickly. The three that grew quickly are all major oil-producing states that benefitted from a sharp rise in oil prices in the years after they implemented their tax cuts. In other words, all of the lesser- and non-oil-producing states that enacted big personal income tax cuts in the 2000s grew more slowly than the national average.”

This year, at the 23rd annual tax conference hosted by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, Governor Kasich repeated ALEC’s same old talking points of lowering or eliminating the income tax, even though history has shown it doesn’t work well, as proven by the growing inequality between Ohio’s rich and poor. Kasich’s mid-biennium budget proposal would provide more than $900 million a year in tax cuts, much of which will go to the most affluent Ohioans, and further shift the tax load to everyone else. The governor’s whole attitude about taxation heartily resounds with, “Don’t tax me- tax the guy behind the tree!”

Just who is that guy behind the tree?  The simple truth?  YOU and ME.

Think.

ALEC and Income Disparity

I meant no harm, I most truly did not,

But I had to grow bigger, so bigger I got.

I biggered my factory, I biggered my roads,

I biggered the wagons, I biggered the loads

of the Thneeds I shipped out.

I was shipping them forth- from the South, to the East,

to the West, to the North.  

I went right on biggering, selling more thneeds. 

And I biggered my money, which everyone needs.

~Dr. Seuss

The salaries of CEOs have been breaking records in recent years, and so have corporate profits. While the average American worker took home less pay in 2012, a typical CEO made $9.7 million. Corporate profits were high, because companies found ways to keep their payrolls down – they hired lower paid contract workers, outsourced abroad, and used computers to do more of the work. CEOs convinced their workers to take pay cuts “for the good of the company in these uncertain economic times.”

Corporate greed is at such an all-time high that corporations continue to use their money and power to gain more money and power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a powerful corporate-backed group that writes and lobbies business-friendly legislation at the state level. Citizens United continues to give corporations unlimited power to promote business-friendly political issues and candidates. By “biggering” their own profits, while cutting back on the paychecks of their workers, ALEC corporations have also cut back on the buying power of the majority of American consumers.

Those Americans were raised to believe that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can create a better life for yourself and your family, but that’s no longer a guarantee. Even though the American economy has more than doubled in size in the last forty years, average middle-class incomes have not gone up much during that period in time. In 1970 the top 1 percent of earners took home 9 percent of the nation’s income, but today they receive about 23 percent. That 1 percent holds more than 30 percent of the nation’s overall wealth, while the bottom half controls only 2.5 percent.

How did we get in this mess? Robert Reich says, “Too many of us bought the snake oil of “supply-side” economics, which said big corporations and the wealthy are the job creators – and if we cut their taxes the benefits will trickle down to everyone else. Of course, nothing trickled down. Meanwhile, big corporations were allowed to bust labor unions, whose membership dropped from over a third of all private-sector workers in the 1950s to under 7 percent today. CEOs began taking home 300 times the earnings of the average worker. Part of the reason for this extraordinary U-turn had to do with politics. As income and wealth concentrated at the top, so did political power. The captains of industry and of Wall Street knew what was happening, and some played leading roles in this transformation.”

While most people see that the gap between the rich and the rest of America has widened, ALEC denies that it’s a problem and actively works to increase the gap. The corporations that fund ALEC pay for a policy agenda that targets workers and lowers wages. ALEC’s agenda continues to oppose raising the minimum wage, living wage laws, and equal pay for women and men.  ALEC legislators in the Republican Party use its “model legislation” to methodically and diligently work at eliminating anti-poverty programs in Ohio and throughout the country.

“It’s clear that policies were set to favor the one percent and those policies can, and should, be changed,” Doug Hall, the director of EARN, the Economic Analysis Research Network, said. “In order to have widespread income growth, bold policies need to be enacted to increase the minimum wage, create low levels of unemployment, and strengthen the rights of workers to organize.”

It’s also clear that people need to join the campaign at StandUpToALEC.org to tell state legislators to reject the wants of ALEC and instead focus on meeting the needs of the working families who reside in their districts.

Think.

ALEC is a Political Cult

“Look!  You fools!  You’re in danger!  Can’t you see?  They’re after you!  They’re after all of us! Our wives…our children…they’re here already!  You’re next!”  (Dr. Miles Bennell)

In the classic 1956 movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Miles Bennel was a doctor in Santa Mira, California, and many of his patients began telling him that their loved ones didn’t seem to be acting like themselves- they still looked the same, but they seemed cold and somehow emotionally distant. Miles eventually discovered that aliens from another world were taking over Santa Mira, one citizen at a time. Representatives from another planet sent massive seed pods containing creatures that would assume the physical identity of anyone they chose, so when Santa Mira residents went to sleep, the pod creatures took on the shape of their victims and then destroyed their bodies. The aliens looked the same, but they possessed no human emotions and were concerned only with eventually taking over the earth.

The absolute takeover of the characters in Invasion of the Body Snatchers  was very much like what happens to people in a cult.  According to the American Family Foundation, there are lots of different types of cults, but most share a set of ten similar characteristics:

Members cut ties with family and friends who do not share the same beliefs.

Access to information is controlled, and questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged.

The leadership induces feelings of fear and anger in order to control its members.

The leadership dictates how members should think, act, and feel.

The group’s leadership is not held accountable.

The group teaches that its ends justify the means that members might consider unethical.

The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself.

The group is focused on goals to which members seem to display unquestioning commitment.

The group has an “us-versus-them” mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.

The group is preoccupied with making money.

One doesn’t have to think too long and hard to see that these are the same cult-like qualities involved in the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC’s) indoctrination of the Republican Party in Ohio and throughout the country.  This rebranded GOP is a party of pod creatures that seem devoid of any human compassion, emotion, or individuality. 

Those who are oncerned about climate change, civil liberties, good jobs for all, hunger, poverty, women’s rights, homophobia, racism, gun control, voting rights and other issues must continue to spread the word and resist the ideology of this political cult called ALEC.

“I’ve seen how people have allowed their humanity to drain away. Only it happened slowly instead of all at once. They didn’t seem to mind… All of us – a little bit – we harden our hearts, grow callous. Only when we have to fight to stay human do we realize how precious it is to us, how dear.”  (Dr. Miles Bennell)

Think.

ALEC’s Plan to Diminish Local Government

Office of the Governor

John R. Kasich

77 S. High Street – 30th Floor

Columbus, Ohio 43215

614-466-3555

MEMO

To: Randy Cole, Policy Advisor

From: Gov. John Kasich

Subject: Too Much Government

I need someone to do some smooth talking to convince our constituents that we have way too much government, at least at the local level. It would be real handy if you could travel around Ohio and tell people about this problem and shift attention away from the funding cuts my administration has made in their communities.

As you know, those locals have way too much power- citizens seem to be more connected to their neighbors that they’ve elected to serve them. Local officials don’t get paid that much, so I don’t know why they work so hard to represent their communities. No matter what we offer, they don’t bow down to our big money campaign donors and out-of-state lobbyists. They say they want to do what’s right for the people and the local places they serve. That doesn’t look business-friendly.

My legislature cut local government funds by $400 million and eliminated the estate tax, figuring that the financial strain would get its leaders to further consolidate and share more services, but they still want their old state funding back. They say that my last budget reflects a lack of understanding of the important role they play in job creation and the state’s economic recovery. They say it represents a calculated attack on home rule. Don’t they understand that I’m just fulfilling a grand design, a mission for which I was chosen by God, to save Ohio?

During your road show, use a snapshot of local government, compiled by the Ohio Office of Budget and Management, to help you make the case. Make sure you talk about the recession, state funding cuts, and dwindling local tax revenue. Throw in a little bit of history about how much local government has grown since the 19th century, and then personalize it with how things have changed since you were a kid in the sixties. Be certain to blame those local public-employee unions by claiming that their members are just devoted to protecting their jobs- our conservative constituents will believe anything you say against unions. Do not mention that my friends at ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, have created “model legislation” to limit local governments around the country, because our goal is to take over state governments, and local governments just get in the way.

Steer any discussion away from the fact that since I became governor, my legislature continues to create new state government agencies, instead of assigning their functions to what already exists. It’s local government that’s out of control, not state government. Thanks to gerrymandering and money from out-of-state interests, I now control all of the state government in Ohio.

Say whatever you need to persuade Ohioans that too much government in their city council chambers and county courthouses is a real threat to my Ohio Miracle. The sooner I can reduce that threat from local government power, the better.

Think.