9 Horrible Gun Laws Backed by the Right Wing

The corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council works hand-in-glove with the National Rifle Association.

December 17, 2012  |

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

It makes sense that everyone’s eyes angrily turned to the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the wake of the mass killing in Newtown, Connecticut. For too long, the NRA’s deep war chest and lobbying apparatus has shaped the debate over guns in this country.

But there’s another group working hand-in-glove with the NRA that deserves scrutiny: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC, the Koch Brothers-backed group that is funded by big corporate interests, first attracted attention in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing. The group, which brings together corporate interests, right-wing lobbyist groups and conservative politicians, passes model legislation that politicians take back ready-made to their state. The NRA has funded ALEC and co-chaired ALEC’s “Public Safety and Election Task Force,” which passes model bills on guns.

By way of the Center for Media and Democracy’s ALEC Exposed project, Digby’s Hullabaloo blog posted links to some of the model legislation on guns the group is pushing. Here are 9 of the awful gun bills ALEC wants to bring to a state near you.

1. Guns on Campus

Dubbed the “Campus Personal Protection Act,” this model legislation would allow handguns to be carried on campus. The ALEC bill would also “limit” regulations that the governing boards of colleges imposed on the carrying of guns on campus.

The bill is part of a wave of “concealed carry” gun laws that have passed around the nation–some with ALEC’s help. As the Center for Media and Democracy notes, “allowing ‘concealed carry’ has been a long-standing part of the NRA-ALEC agenda, passing in Wisconsin a year ago at the urging of Governor Scott Walker, who was given an award by the NRA for making this item law along with a version of the controversial ALEC-NRA “Stand Your Ground”/”Castle Doctrine” bill. A concealed carry law also was just passed last week in Michigan.”

2. Immediate Firearm Purchases

ALEC wants you to be able to get your gun–and get it fast. Blueprint legislation passed by the group’s NRA-chaired “Public Safety and Election Task Force” would prohibit waiting periods from being used on gun purchases. “The imposition of ‘waiting periods’ for firearms purchases is a diversion of scarce law enforcement resources away from violent crime and criminals,” the bill reads.

3. More ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws

The Trayvon Martin case made “stand your ground” laws, or “Castle Doctrine” laws, a household name. Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, claimed that he acted lawfully in “self-defense” when he shot the unarmed teenager. Florida has a “Stand Your Ground” bill on the books that makes it more difficult to prosecute people for killing someone if they claim “self-defense.”

ALEC wants to bring more of these laws to your state. Here’s how they sum up what the bill does: “This act authorizes the use of force, including deadly force, against an intruder or attacker in a dwelling, residence, or vehicle under specified circumstances.” Many states already have have “stand your ground” laws.

4. No Borders to Firearm Movement

This ALEC bill would, if passed, require states to recognize “concealed carry” permits or licenses from other states. This would mean that the state where guns are being carried in would have no recourse to go after people with guns if they have a permit and came from a state that allows “concealed carry” permits.

5. Annulling Local Regulations on Guns

For all its talk of federalism and love of local democracy, ALEC still wants to be able to impose its agenda–even if a locality wants nothing to do with it. One model bill the group wants passed in states is a provision that would “prohibit local jurisdictions from independently enacting restrictions on the possession of firearms.” If a city wanted to restrict guns, they’d be out of luck–this bill would take away their authority to do so.

6. Defending an Unregulated Gun Market

Governments, local officials and law enforcement groups have tried to push for gun manufacturers to adhere to some basic ground rules for the sale of weapons. One way to do this is by pushing for a “Code of Conduct” that gun manufacturers adopt. One example of what a “code” like this would do is getting a pledge from firearms makers to not promote weapons for extremely dangerous uses, like killing police officers with special bullets.

ALEC wants none of that. A blueprint for legislation calls such codes “politically-driven.”

7. Guns for Emergencies

This ALEC-backed legislation would prohibit states from confiscating firearms in the wake of a declared “state of emergency.” The group claims such a law would run afoul of the Second Amendment. It also calls for public employees who confiscate firearms to be found “guilty of the crime of larceny of a firearm or ammunition,” if such a law were on the books.

8. Semi-Automatics for Everyone

The killer at Sandy Hook Elementary School used a semi-automatic rifle to carry out his massacre. ALEC wants to restrict regulations that would curb the use and sale of semi-automatic rifles.

A resolution pushed by the group decries laws and regulations concerning semi-automatic rifles. The “American Legislative Exchange Council recommends the rejection of current proposals at the local, state, and federal levels that arbitrarily restrict the possession of the semi-automatic class of firearms by law-abiding American citizens,” ALEC writes.

9. Bolstering the Second Amendment

The Second Amendment is not going anywhere. But ALEC remains worried about attempts to regulate firearms, and passed a resolution decrying gun control while celebrating the amendment. The “American Legislative Exchange Council recommends the rejection of further restrictive firearms laws that only serve to limit law abiding citizens in the exercise of their Constitutionally guaranteed rights while having no effect on the activities of the criminal element in our society,” the resolution reads.

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Is ALEC Anticipating an IRS Audit?

Saturday, 15 December 2012 11:25 By Brendan Fischer, PRWatch| Report

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) appears to be anticipating an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit, after multiple complaints challenging the “corporate bill mill’s” charitable status, based on documents recently obtained by Bloomberg News.

According to internal ALEC documents, the organization has discussed forming a nonprofit organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, apparently in anticipation of the IRS revoking ALEC’s current “charitable” status. Charities (which are organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code) as well as nonprofits are tax exempt, but ALEC’s charitable status had allowed its corporate members to write-off their ALEC membership dues and costs as tax-deductible charitable contributions.

ALEC’s charitable status has been challenged in multiple IRS complaints in the past year — and despite publicly dismissing the allegations as “patently false” and “ignor[ing] applicable law,” behind the scenes, ALEC’s leadership apparently recognizes their vulnerability.

ALEC Executive Director Ron Scheberle discussed forming a 501(c)(4) called “ALEC NOW” in an August memo, claiming that if a 501(c)(4) were “operating fully prior to an IRS audit,” the agency might allow the newly-formed (c)(4) to continue operating and take over activities impermissible for a (c)(3) charity.

“ALEC is now grasping at straws,” said Nick Surgey of Common Cause, which has challenged ALEC’s charitable status. “This leaked memo exposes a desperate attempt to find a “get out of jail free card” before an inevitable full-scale IRS audit.”

IRS rules are clear that a charity which loses its exemption for excessive lobbying cannot reorganize as a 501(c)(4). But nonprofit law experts tell the Center for Media and Democracy that ALEC may be able to get around this rule by forming the (c)(4) in advance of the audit.

ALEC’s Charitable Status Challenged

ALEC is afforded a variety of government-conferred benefits by virtue of its “charity” status — not least of which is giving corporations a tax deduction for paying ALEC membership dues — but in exchange for those benefits, ALEC is supposed to engage in minimal lobbying and primarily serve public or charitable interests, rather than private interests.

In April, Common Cause filed a whistleblower complaint, backed by hundreds of pages of documents, alleging ALEC violates its charitable status by engaging in substantial lobbying through the development, promotion, and dissemination of corporate-sponsored “model” bills.

In July, former IRS Exempt Organizations head Marcus Owens (on behalf of a group called Clergy VOICE) filed another complaint arguing ALEC exists for the private benefit of its corporate members and had misrepresented itself in its tax filings. Owens filed a followup complaint in October based on contradictory claims ALEC had made to the IRS and Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board about the “scholarship” program that allows corporations to pay for legislators’ flights and hotel rooms; those contradictory claims were initially highlighted by the Center for Media and Democracy. The Voters Legislative Transparency Project (VLTP) also filed a complaint.

“The evidence of ALEC’s abuse [of its charitable status] is so extensive,” Surgey said, “that it is difficult to think the IRS could be fooled by a non-profit law version of the cup and ball magic trick,” where ALEC continues functioning after revocation just by setting up a new nonprofit entity.

Rough Year for ALEC

The leaked memo caps a difficult year for ALEC that has seen it shed over 40 major corporate members and the loss of more than 70 legislative members.

ALEC came under particularly intense criticism starting in March 2012 for its national drive to promote the “Stand Your Ground” gun law that initially shielded 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s killer from prosecution, and weathered additional criticism in the following months over its role in advancing laws that make it harder to vote, that criminalize immigrants, protect corporations from civil liability, thwart environmental regulations, and cut holes in the social safety net — all while enjoying tax-exempt “charitable” status.

Most recently, ALEC has been directly tied to Michigan’s anti-union “right to work” push, with the language in the Michigan law lifted verbatim from the ALEC model.

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ALEC Loses Ground in Election

Wednesday, 05 December 2012 11:22 By John Light, Moyers & Company| Report

The Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch reports that during the primary and general elections in the 2012 election cycle, and during recall elections held since 2010, 117 members of the American Legislative Exchange Council lost their seats. Arizona, Wisconsin and Minnesota were three states where ALEC lost considerable ground.

ALEC is a national organization that brings state-level legislators and corporate lobbyists together to write legislation behind closed doors. The model bills developed by ALEC have been the subject of criticism by groups including Color of Change and CMD, which launched the site ALEC Exposed. Earlier this year, Moyers & Companytook a closer look at ALEC with the documentary “United States of ALEC,” which will be rebroadcast this weekend on many public television stations.

We’ve updated our interactive map, which identifies state legislators who are members of ALEC, to reflect the recent elections. But many ALEC legislators still serve at the state level, and it’s unclear how many newly elected state representatives will join the group.

You can help us complete our map of ALEC legislators by calling your local representatives — if you discover that they’re ALEC members, or if you discover that they were once members but have publicly renounced the group, let us know using our the form on our ALEC map.

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Watch: Teacher Infiltrates ALEC Education Meeting, Confronts Members

December 3, 2012  |

At the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C., on Friday, December 1, members of the Education Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council got an earful when education activist Sabrina Joy Stevens infiltrated their closed-door meeting to confront the ALEC members on their own turf.

This two-minute video is well worth watching, especially for the part where one of the task force members mansplains to Stevens that she doesn’t understand how ALEC really works. Why, the task force doesn’t set policy, he says, implying that Stevens had chosen the wrong target.

In reality, ALEC’s task forces draft policy recommendations that are taken up by the national body.

Stevens wrote on her YouTube posting:

On November 30, 2012, I had the rare and deeply disturbing experience of witnessing part of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Education Task Force meeting: a closed-door policy-shaping session open only to the state legislators who help to pass them, the corporate lobbyists who pay big money to shape and sponsor them– and scrappy activists like me, who are no longer willing to cede our policy-making processes to unaccountable, undemocratic organizations who hide from the people their decisions ultimately affect. Here’s me speaking from my heart as a teacher driven from the classroom into activism by destructive policies like theirs.

Stevens formerly worked as a teacher in Denver, Colo., and in another capacity with students in Philidelphia, Penn. She took her ALEC mission on as a “rogue operation” she says, wholly on her own. She is currently employed by the American Federation of Teachers.

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After a Controversial Year, ALEC Convenes in Washington; Damage Control at Top of Agenda

November 29, 2012  |

(Photo: Mark Haller / Flickr)

At the end of a tumultuous year that has seen the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) come under unprecedented scrutiny for its role in advancing a slate of right-wing legislation, the corporate-friendly organization of state lawmakers and special interest lobbyists convenes this week in Washington, DC to try and salvage its viability.

At this week’s meeting, ALEC members will by treated to presentations like “Best Practices for Debt Collection and Tax Amnesty” from student loan company Sallie Mae and a talk on state unemployment from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center. Representatives of the Mortgage Bankers Association will present to the Financial Services Subcommittee, which is co-chaired by a lobbyist for Visa. The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk (whose work is funded by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation) will discuss ”how to limit union influence.”

But only a handful of new “model” bills are on the agenda. According to ALEC task force documents obtained through open records requests, the meeting will largely consist of deciding which bills from its vast library to “sunset” and which to retain or amend — an apparent effort to scrub their history of far-right model bills, and likely a response to a year of intense criticism. Hopefully the organization is reviewing some of its more retrograde proposals, such as its stalwart opposition to minimum wage laws and support for climate change denial. At least for this meeting, ALEC is focused less on proactively developing legislation and more on damage control.

ALEC Under Fire in 2012

ALEC came under particularly intense criticism starting in March 2012 for its national drive to promote the “Stand Your Ground” gun law that initially shielded 17-year-old Trayvon Martin’s killer from prosecution, and weathered additional criticism in the following months over its role in advancing laws that make it harder to vote, that criminalize immigrants, protect corporations from civil liability, thwart environmental regulations, and cut holes in the social safety net — all while enjoying tax-exempt “charitable” status.

In response to the criticism, more than 40 corporations, including General Motors, General Electric, Amazon.com, and Coca-Cola, have severed ties with ALEC. ALEC has also been the subject of multiple IRS complaints alleging that it has violated its charitable 501(c)(3) status by acting primarily as a conduit for corporate interests to lobby state legislators, thereby allowing these special interests to write-off their lobbying expenses as a charitable deduction.

ALEC legislators — who in many cases receive substantial campaign contributions and gifts of flights and hotel rooms from the corporations that stand to benefit from the introduction of ALEC model legislation — have also been under fire from their constituents, who have expressed concern that their elected officials have become more accountable to special interests than the people in their district. At least 70 legislators have publicly dropped their ALEC membership in the past year and 117 ALEC member legislators lost their seats in the 2012 elections.

ALEC has been around since 1973 but has never faced this level of scrutiny. In past decades, ALEC has successfully allowed corporate interests to advance an agenda to privatize everything from schools to prisons and to reshape state laws in the corporate mold, but with the public never knowing a particular bill originated from ALEC or was initially drafted by the same corporations that profit from its passage.

Now that ALEC has been exposed, it has shifted into damage control mode – not by making a case for why corporate influence over politics is a good thing, but by covering its tracks and attacking its critics.

Damage Control and Coverups

ALEC is seeking to scrub its history of reactionary proposals at this week’s meeting but the damage control effort has been underway for months.

In April 2012, ALEC claimed to disband the task force responsible for its most controversial legislation — such as Stand Your Ground, voter suppression, and anti-immigrant bills — purportedly to focus exclusively on “economic” issues. At its July 2012 meeting, ALEC pledged to expand membership among“underrepresented segments,” perhaps in response to critiques that ALEC laws disproportionately impact people of color, despite the vast majority of ALEC members being white.

The organization has also taken steps to cloak their activities in even greater secrecy. Instead of sending legislators proposed model bills and meeting agendas through an email that might be released through an open records request, ALEC is now sending its members a link, which expires within 72 hours, to an Internet drop box where they can access the relevant documents, in an attempt to conceal these records from the public. Many ALEC legislators are also corresponding with the organization through personal email accounts (like Gmail or Yahoo) in an apparent effort to evade state open records laws; in Wisconsin, the Center for Media and Democracy and Common Cause had to file a lawsuit to gain access to these public records and prevailed.

ALEC has also been using a public relations firm to investigate public interest groups asking questions about ALEC’s activities. ALEC has sent multiple emails to its legislative members attacking the character of its critics — but notably failing to respond to the content of their critiques.

Echoes of Trayvon Martin Tragedy Reverberate

As the organization gathers this week at the Grand Hyatt Washington, echoes of the Trayvon Martin tragedy are again reverberating in Florida, with another African-American 17-year-old shot dead and his killer seeking to avoid responsibility by invoking the ALEC-ratified, National Rifle Association-sponsored Stand Your Ground law.

On Friday, 17-year-old Jordan Russell Davis was sitting in a car with friends when 45-year-old Michael David Dunn confronted the group for playing their music too loud. Dunn then fired nine shots into the car after “there were words exchanged.” None of the teenagers were armed, but Dunn said he felt “threatened” and plans to invoke the state’s Stand Your Ground law at trial. As was the case with the Trayvon Martin tragedy, the victim was African-American and the shooter was not.

The shooting comes just weeks after a panel appointed by Florida Governor Rick Scott to review the Stand Your Ground law endorsed the legislation, ignoring empirical evidence showing the laws correspond with an increase in homicides. Half of the lawmakers on the panel are ALEC members.

At this week’s meeting ALEC will try to purge its library of its most controversial model bills. But in many states the damage has already been done. To truly repair the organization’s reputation, ALEC legislators should go a step further and start to repeal the laws, like Stand Your Ground, that have already caused so much harm.

Wisconsin’s effort to open the state to predatory lenders using American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) legislation has paid dividends for the ALEC legislators behind it.

In May of 2011, Rep. Robin Vos, the ALEC State Chair in Wisconsin and head of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, rolled a provision into the 2011-2012 budget bill resembling ALEC model legislation and that legalized auto title loans. Democrats voted against the provision, but it ultimately passed the Republican-led Finance Committee and state legislature.

Officials with Georgia-based title loan company LoanMax then gave over $24,000 in campaign contributions to Republican Assembly candidates, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel‘s Dan Bice reported this week.

LoanMax is a member of the ALEC Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Force and is a pioneer in the car title loan business.

Predatory Lending Practices “Trap Borrowers in a Cycle of Debt”

Auto title loans are a form of high-interest, short-term lending that many states have recognized as unfair and predatory to low-income consumers. Research from the Consumer Federation of America and the Center for Responsible Lending indicates that “the typical car title loan has a triple-digit annual interest rate, requires repayment within one month, and is made for much less than the value of the car,” with many borrowers eventually paying fees well in excess of the amount originally borrowed.

Consumer groups have opposed this type of lending not only because the high interest rates and short-term repayment period can trap consumers in a cycle of debt, but also because they risk losing their cars, which they often need to get to work.

The ALEC “Title Pledge Act” has the same impact as Rep. Vos’ budget amendment. It advances the interest of lending companies by giving short-term, 30-day renewable loans with very high interest rates and backed by a borrower’s car title. The spiraling interest payments are very difficult for people in tough financial circumstances to keep up with, but the bill provides few consumer protections, for example failing to include a private right of action with strong remedies, and requiring that all claims be brought within one year. This provides little deterrence for predatory lenders, and because the budgets of regulatory agencies are limited, the state cannot adequately protect against abuses.

Former Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle had outlawed title loans using a veto in 2010 but Rep. Vos’ budget motion opened the state to the practice.

“It’s fair to say that if Democrats had been in control, might they have done things that hurt their (title loan) business? Probably,” Vos told the Journal Sentinel. As for the title loan industry’s generous campaign contributions to Republicans, Vos said, “It makes sense to buy — you know — to have insurance.”

Consumer Groups Gave Warnings About Title Pledge Industry

The Consumer Federation of America, U.S. PIRG, and the Center for Responsible Lending sent a letter to ALEC in November 2005 warning that title pledge loans “trap borrowers in a cycle of debt” and noting that the ALEC model bill failed to include adequate consumer protections.

The letter also pointed out the distorting influence of “generous campaign contributions” from the title pledge industry.

“These people have the conscience of a pit viper,” state Senator Bob Jauch told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Jauch, a Democrat who voted against the title pledge proposal, said there’s no doubt LoanMax officials are giving to Republicans as a reward for last year’s legislative action — or, as Rep. Vos put it, as “insurance” to protect their industry. “There is no moral basis for these contributions,” Jauch said.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) sent a message to hundreds of legislators and corporations across the country attacking the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the creator of ALECexposed.org. Among other things ALEC claimed, “CMD is an attack-dog, not a watch-dog.”

The error-filled missive, which was intended to buck up the ALEC faithful as more and more corporations flee the organization, has us here at CMD pondering the old adage, “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they want to attack you and then you win.”

ALEC Attempts to Spin Legislators about Corporate Exodus

ALEC’s August 13 message claimed that CMD “continue[s] to spread half-truths and lies” about ALEC in order to “weaken [ALEC's] resolve” and “create the false impression that companies are departing from ALEC.”

As CMD has reported, 38 corporations, four non-profit organizations, and 70 state legislators have distanced themselves from ALEC by either dropping their funding or their membership or both. These major corporations include General Motors, Walgreens, Best Buy, Hewlett-Packard, MillerCoors, John Deere, Dell, Johnson & Johnson, Wal-Mart, Amazon.com, Procter & Gamble, Mars, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Kraft Foods, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola.

We reported on six new departures, including Sprint and GE, just days ago. In every instance, CMD relied on a formal communication from the firm, a statement, letter, email, or conversation with staff.

Yet ALEC is attempting to make hay over whether some of the corporations that have said they are no longer funding ALEC are funders through paying membership dues and pay-to-play fees or whether they were funders of ALEC through sponsoring its meetings. Such distinctions among funders that have stopped funding ALEC are, to quote Shakespeare, “much ado about nothing.”

Amgen: ALEC claims in its note to legislators that “Amgen is not severing ties with ALEC . . . . Amgen has informed us that it is letting its membership with us expire after this year.” CMD reported on August 8th that Amgen had “dropped” is membership with ALEC. CMD’s article attached the letter Amgen’s assistant secretary and associate general counsel, Andrea A. Robinson, sent to Timothy Smith of Walden Asset Management which said, “After careful consideration, we have determined not to renew our membership in ALEC when our current membership expires this year.” So Amgen is on the record dropping its membership after sustained pressure by community groups and shareholders.

As for ALEC’s attempt to spin Amgen’s public statement in August, the company’s letter of departure speaks for itself.

Louis Dreyfus: ALEC claims, “Louis Dreyfus never had a membership in ALEC to drop. . . . ALEC has partnered with Louis Dreyfus in past programs and has counted Louis Dreyfus as a sponsor of past annual meetings.” After a conversation with a spokesperson at the company, CMD originally mentioned, in a July 30th article about the 46 firms that had disappeared from ALEC’s annual meeting brochure, that it looked as though Louis Dreyfus was no longer a member of ALEC. Later, in announcing the departure of the firm from ALEC’s circle of sponsors, we clarified, “Louis Dreyfus confirmed to CMD that it had decided not to fund ALEC this year.” CMD’s website lists Louis Dreyfus as a “Vice Chairman” level sponsor of the 2011 ALEC Annual Conference (in 2010, this level of sponsorship equated to $25,000).

The bottom-line is that Louis Dreyfus chose not to fund ALEC’s annual meeting this year after sponsoring “past annual meetings.”

And, despite ALEC’s spin, neither Amgen nor Louis Dreyfus ever contacted CMD to request a correction about their decisions not to fund ALEC. However, some corporations have contacted CMD: firms anxious to distance themselves from ALEC and asking CMD to remove documented references to their past funding of ALEC, requests which were declined.

ALEC Uses Edelman PR and Media Attack Dogs to Try to Discredit ALEC Critics

In May 2012, PRWeek reported that ALEC had hired the notorious global PR firm Edelman. Edelman is the firm of choice for big tobacco, big oil, and big pharma, all key sponsors of ALEC. ALEC also held a special meeting asking right-wing bloggers, such as the Breitbart operation, for help in “a very aggressive campaign to really spread the word about what we actually do,” as CMD has reported.

An “aggressive campaign” is clearly underway.

ALEC’s recent note claims that CMD’s “top investigative reporter” has a “lengthy criminal background.” It links to a attack-piece published by a newly created entity called The Washington Free Beacon (WFB), the online publication of the self-proclaimed “conservative advocacy group” the Center for American Freedom.

In that piece, recent college grad CJ Ciaramella focuses on Beau Hodai, a freelance reporter who has written for the Center for Media and Democracy, In These Times, Prison Legal News, Extra! (a publication of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and the investigative news publication he founded, DBA Press.

Beau has been researching and reporting on ALEC since late 2009. His reporting has detailed the relationship between ALEC and private prison contractors in the dissemination of bills based on Arizona’s SB 1070.  And he has identified ALEC as one of the key forces behind attempts to destroy public employee unions and privatize public services.

Notably, the WFB attack job does not find any material errors in any of Beau’s extensively documented reports on ALEC, but focuses on misdemeanor court records. It dwells on the fact that his legal first name is Mohamad. Beau has been nicknamed “Beau” since birth. (It is worth noting that “CJ” is not Ciaramella’s legal first name but the nickname he uses instead of “Carl.”)

Beau recently stirred the pot with a special report detailing corruption in the Ohio General Assembly based on public records that raise questions as to whether the state’s elected officials in ALEC are complying with Ohio’s ethics laws regarding gifts.

Interestingly enough, Beau learned that exactly one week following the publication of the Ohio ALEC corruption story, a private investigation firm requested court records concerning a past arrest. Allegations from those same court records emerged as the centerpiece of the WFB attack article.

The Washington Free Beacon’s “Aerial Hunting Operation”

WFB’s Matthew Continetti (who previously was an opinion editor at the right-wing Weekly Standard, where he remains a contributing editor) outlined the WFB’s strategy as part of its recent launch:

“What would happen if the media wolf pack suddenly had to worry about an aerial hunting operation? You are about to find out. The Washington Free Beacon is here to enter the arena of combat journalism. [...] At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.”

And this is the team ALEC is using to attempt to discredit CMD as an “attack-dog”?

This is not the first such piece to come out of WFB. In the past few months, Ciaramella has written three pieces personally attacking reporters and activists working to expose ALEC. In addition to the piece on Beau, he published a similar attack on Color of Change staffer Gabriel Rey-Goodlatte, as well as The Nationreporter Lee Fang. Fang has also written for Think Progress (the blog of the Center for American Progress) and Republic Report, and he has reported critically on ALEC over the past year. Color of Change has been instrumental in the call for ALEC corporate members to sever ties with the organization.

The latest piece also takes a shot at George Soros by attempting to link Beau to the philanthropist throughPRWatch. But CMD openly discloses on its website that the past grant it received from the Open Society Institute was focused on homeland security, not ALEC. Notably, neither the WFB nor CAF disclose to the public which corporations, organizations, or individuals bankroll their operations or smear campaigns.

The People Behind the “Center for American Freedom”

WFB is a creature of the Center for American Freedom (CAF), which was incorporated in Washington, D.C., on August 18, 2011, as a not-for-profit corporation. According to District of Columbia Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) records, CAF has two active trade names: “Free Bacon” [sic] and “Washington Free Beacon,” both of which were formally effected in March 2012.

DCRA records list the names of two founding CAF “governors,” Michael Goldfarb and Aaron Harison.

Harison, currently CAF’s president, previously served as director of communications for the Republican National Committee (RNC). Harison is joined at CAF by former RNC acting director of communications, and current CAF research director, Tim Killeen.

Harison is also the former executive director of Keep America Safe, an operation co-founded in 2009 by Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney. William Kristol, the founder and editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, is a founding board member of Keep America Safe. Kristol is currently listed as a board member of CAF, and is the former executive director of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a neocon “think tank” that had strong ties to the American Enterprise Institute.

Michael Goldfarb, CAF’s chairman, has reportedly worked as an advisor to Keep America Safe and the militaristic Emergency Committee for Israel. (Kristol is also a board member for the Emergency Committee for Israel). Goldfarb is also listed as a contributing editor to Weekly Standard.

In addition, Goldfarb is a partner in the lobby/PR firm, Orion Strategies LLC. Not surprisingly, given Goldfarb and Kristol’s warmongering predilections, Orion has lobbied on issues of arms sales and foreign relations for very special interests like defense contractors and foreign governments.

While these ties may explain some of the content on the WFB, what does any of this have to do with its efforts to defend ALEC by attacking the corporate bill mill’s critics?

According to Politico, right-wing financiers Charles and David Koch also employ the services of Orion Strategies and, as CMD has documented, Koch Industries and/or the Koch family fortune have helped fund ALEC and numerous ALEC private sector members that help operationalize the brothers’ ideological and financial agenda. There is no indication that the Kochs asked WFB to jump to the defense of ALEC. However, the right wing has been howling that the press and progressive groups have been too persuasive in exposing ALEC and in making the case about how ALEC helps make the corporate wish list into law through its members and operations.

CMD Wins Awards for ALEC Exposed and Investigative Breakthroughs

In the letter to its members, ALEC also attempted to impugn CMD as a “highly partisan, fringe organization.” The charge brings to mind pots and kettles. When CMD surveyed ALEC’s political leadership in July 2011, it documented that 103 of the 104 legislators serving on ALEC’s Board of Directors or holding the post of co-chair on its task forces or of a state were Republicans. It’s difficult to imagine a more lopsided partisan make-up of a body of elected officials than that, other than in groups that are expressly described by their party label, such as the Republican Governors Association.

CMD is a non-partisan watchdog group that has taken heat for being highly critical of President Obama’s financial policies and the Democrats’ campaign financing practices. We have filed briefs challenging the Obama administration, including its detention powers under the recent National Defense Authorization Act, and have been critical of Democrats and Republicans who push the agenda of their corporate benefactors in dozens of areas.

CMD has been honored to receive several journalism awards for its work to expose ALEC: the “Sidney Award” for Investigative Journalism, along with The Nation magazine, in September 2011; the “Izzy Award” for outstanding achievement in independent media, along with Democracy Now! correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who covered the uprising in Egypt from the ground; and most recently, the “Professional Freedom and Responsibility award” from the Cultural and Critical Studies Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication — an honor that has previously been awarded to Bill Moyers, Molly Ivins, I.F. “Izzy” Stone, Noam Chomsky, Studs Terkel, and Bob McChesney. Earlier this year, CMD also recieved one of the Milwaukee Press Club’s 2011 “Excellence in Journalism” awards for its investigative work.

ALEC Ups the Ante But the Odds Are on More Defections and Inquiries

While ALEC is fighting CMD with misleading missives to its members and media smears, it is still shedding corporate board members, funders, and sponsors. And it is still getting hammered in the press for its extreme agenda and its corrupting influence, for the fact that corporate lobbyists vote as equals with elected officials on templates to change the law, and its repeated claims it does not lobby despite proof to the contrary. ALEC has also received continued scrutiny for its corporate-funded scholarships. CMD has learned at least one state has had trouble maintaining corporate donors to cover the usual trips for legislators to attend ALEC events.

As calls for investigation of ALEC’s lobbying activities and financing practices mount (with three complaints now filed before the IRS and other ethics investigations at the state level), it will take more than Edelman PR and “combat journalism” to rescue ALEC from the trouble it is in.

A right-wing group that pledged to “continue the excellent work of the American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC) and promote voter ID has published a thinly-sourced blog post that purports to show people of color and the poor are actually helped by voter ID laws, an unsupported claim that is being hyped as a “study” by outlets like Fox News and the Daily Caller. More comprehensive research has demonstrated that these laws threaten to disenfranchise around 5 million people nationally, primarily people of color, students, and the poor.

In April, ALEC disbanded its Public Safety and Elections Task Force to distance itself from the controversial “Stand Your Ground” and voter suppression laws that had prompted a public backlash and an exodus of corporate funders (30 corporations have dropped their ALEC membership as of August 6). Soon after, a right-wing group called the “National Center for Public Policy Research” (NCPPR) announced that it would “continue the excellent work of [ALEC]” and form a Voter Identification Task Force to promote voter ID laws.

The only activity thus far from the NCPPR task force appears to be a blog post that tries to turn the tables on critics of voter ID laws and divert attention away from the well-documented fact that the laws are a cynical and politically-motivated effort to suppress the vote of Democratic constituencies like people of color, college students, and the poor, who disproportionately lack the state-issued IDs the laws require.

Weak Blog Post Described as “Study” by Fox News

“A new study says requiring ID would actually help increase minority participation,” exclaimed Fox News personality Steve Doocy (as Media Matters reported). “According to a brand new study from the National Center for Public Policy Research, blacks and the poor are the most common victims of voter fraud and would be protected by voter ID laws. … Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department though, has sued to block voter ID laws across the country claiming they are unfit to minority voters.”

The “study” from NCPPR adjunct fellow Horace Cooper is actually a 1,898-word blog post that is long on rhetoric and short on research — its cited sources are primarily opinion pieces or slanted articles from sources like Fox News and the Daily Caller, with minimal analysis. While Cooper (and the right-wing news outlets covering his article) claimed that these “findings” support the need for voter ID laws, in reality the types of fraud Cooper cites would not be affected at all by ID requirements.

Most of the “fraud” involved felons who said they did not know they were ineligible to register or vote. Other allegations in Cooper’s posting involved registration errors and absentee ballot fraud. None of this would have been prevented by requiring a photo ID at the polls, and Cooper cites no examples of the kind of in-person fraud that stricter identification requirements might prevent.

In fact, the one legitimate news article Cooper cites to support his allegations of “voter fraud,” a Richmond Times-Dispatch piece on election irregularities, includes this line: “None of the cases appeared to involve someone who misrepresented his or her identity at the polls to vote.”

Daily Caller Stretches NCPPR’s Unfounded Claims

Cooper’s entire thesis is based on the unsupported assertion that “fraud” primarily happens in African-American and low-income communities, and therefore the allegedly “fraudulent” ballots cancel-out legitimate votes from black or poor citizens.

Cooper provides no source for this claim, other than a few isolated examples in upstate New York and Richmond, Virginia not related to voter ID and allegations by Democrat-turned-Republican Artur Davis that “fraud” happens disproportionately in African-American communities. Davis has recently become a right-wing rockstar and outspoken proponent of voter ID, speaking at this month’s ALEC conference in Salt Lake City and at events sponsored by groups like the Heritage Foundation.

But this hasn’t kept right-wing media outlets from breathlessly reporting on Cooper’s blog post as if it were authoritative.

“Criminal justice data shows that blacks and poor people are the most common victims of voter fraud and are the greatest beneficiaries of voter identification rules, according to a new study,” reports the Daily Caller. In fact, Cooper cites no “criminal justice data” in his blog post (he just lists a few isolated and anecdotal examples). And his comparison of turnout in Georgia and Indiana circa 2008 to show that African-American turnout did not decline after passage of voter ID laws is not credible, because it failed to account for the surge in turnout when an African-American was at the top of the ballot.

Additionally, the Daily Caller’s sweeping claim that people of color and the poor are “the most common victims of voter fraud” appears to be based entirely on a single case Cooper cited from upstate New York — a case involving absentee ballot fraud, which has nothing to do with requiring voter identification, and which would not have been prevented if a voter ID law had been in place.

The Daily Caller article also quotes Cooper saying “the courtroom evidence completely contradicts the [progressive claim] that blacks, seniors, college students and other disadvantages groups are being victimized.” On the contrary, Cooper’s blog post fails to cite any “courtroom evidence” that would support this claim. The one case he cites — Crawford v. Marion County, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Indiana’s voter ID law — actually found only minimal instances of in-person voting fraud. And the upstate New York example has nothing to do with voter ID laws, and it does nothing to “completely contradict” the well-documented fact that imposing voter ID laws disproportionately impact people of color, college students, and the elderly.

The Brennan Center has found that nationwide, voter fraud is less statistically likely than getting struck by lightning, but voter ID laws can have a statistically significant impact on elections. More than 5 million people in the U.S. do not have the state-issued IDs required under the laws (many of whom are poor or people of color), and many of those individuals face significant challenges to obtaining an ID.

Political Rather Than Legal?

Cooper concludes with the allegation that the Department of Justice’s refusal to pre-clear new voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina “is political, not legal.” But as Justin Levitt notes in his annotated takedown of Cooper’s NCPPR blog post:

“The Justice Department’s job is to enforce the law. [Section V of the Voting Rights Act of 1965] prevents covered states from implementing new election practices — including practices intended to deter fraud — unless the state can demonstrate, with real data, that the new practices do not make it more difficult for minorities to effectively exercise the franchise. Neither Texas nor South Carolina was able to do so, and so the DOJ applied the existing law. In this context, failing to enforce the Voting Rights Act would actually demonstrate the political agenda alleged.”

Cooper’s, NCPPR’s Ties to Abramoff Lobbying Scandal

Though their “voter fraud” claims are largely unsupportable, both Cooper and NCPPR are quite familiar with other forms of fraud.

As CMD reported in April:

NCPPR was involved in part of the scandal that brought down [Republican National Committee] buddy and disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. According to a U.S. Senate investigation of the financial dealings and influence peddling of Abramoff, NCPPR’s founder and president, Amy Moritz Ridenour, directed money received by NCPPR at Abramoff’s direction, to other “charities,” again at his direction.

This included funneling money to a charity intended to benefit inner-city children, but which then funded luxury golf trips for members of Congress and bought products like sniper scopes for West Bank settlers in Israel.

Talking Points Memo also reports that:

Cooper was indicted in 2009 on five public corruption charges, charged with exchanging political favors for gifts from Jack Abramoff. Cooper allegedly accepted bribes as a staffer to former Majority Leader Dick Armey, as chief of staff for Voice of America and when he worked for the Department of Labor. Cooper later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of falsifying a disclosure report and was sentenced to 36 months of probation.

“Kicking it up a notch?”

In NCPPR’s tough-sounding press release from April announcing its effort to pick up where ALEC left off on voter ID, the group took a defiant tone, declaring that “We’re putting the left on notice: you take out a conservative program operating in one area, we’ll kick it up a notch somewhere else. You will not win. We outnumber you and we outthink you.”

If NCPPR thinks that Cooper’s ‘study’ is “kick[ing] it up a notch,” they have a long way to go.

A letter from a Louisiana state representative asking a corporate representative for money is another example of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “scholarship” program at work, and how it creates an overly cozy relationship between corporations and legislators that allows for improper influence. The “scholarship” program has allowed corporations to do what lobbying laws in most states prohibit — give legislators expensive gifts of flights through ALEC which can buy increased influence over public policy.

The Louisiana Tri-Parish Times revealed that Republican Rep. Joe Harrison, the ALEC Public Sector State Chair for Louisiana, sent out letters, on state letterhead, asking corporations for $1,000 donations to send “over thirty Louisiana legislators” to the ALEC conference being held July 25-28 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Topics under discussion would be important “to the entire lobbying community” said Harrison and he asked that the funds be sent to his state office.

Through ALEC “scholarships,” corporations can funnel gifts to ALEC politicians in the form of flights, hotel rooms, and other perks so they can attend ALEC conferences, which are often held at fancy resorts and look a lot like a vacation. Once at the conference, corporations and legislators vote as equals to approve ALEC “model” bills which in many cases benefit the same corporations that funded the legislators’ travel costs. ALEC politicians then bring those bills back to their state and introduce them in their own name, in many cases without revealing to the public that corporations had pre-voted on the bills and without disclosing that those same corporations had given the legislators gifts of flights and hotel rooms — which some might call a bribe.

The $1,000 corporate donations solicited by Harrison will allow public servants in his state to fly to Utah and stay at Salt Lake City’s swanky Grand American Hotel and indulge in a host of other events set up by corporate sponsors at the conference, such as a shooting event hosted by the National Rifle Association. Louisiana legislators make only $16,800 per year (and they get only $6,000 per year in expense allowance), so for many Louisiana politicians the trip would otherwise be unaffordable.

As CMD has reported:

In most states, ethics laws prohibit companies or organizations with an interest in the outcome of legislation from offering gifts above a certain value to legislators (or their families). Additionally, lobby laws in many states prohibit corporations that employ lobbyists from offering anything of significant value to elected officials. ALEC member corporations covering hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of plane tickets for lawmakers and hotels for them and their families raises serious concerns about such gifts under many states’ ethics and lobbying laws. But by calling this spending a “scholarship” and filtering it through a bank account designated as the “ALEC scholarship fund,” corporations have, so far, been maneuvering around laws designed to limit improper influence.

“The Definition of a Bribe?”

Watchdog groups like the Center for Media and Democracy, DBA Press, Common Cause, People for the American Way, Progress Now, and others have compiled a mounting list of evidence to argue that these gifts constitute improper influence over legislators.

For example, open records requests submitted by DBA Press have revealed long lists of corporate donors to the Ohio ALEC scholarship fund, such as $1,000 from an Eli Lilly lobbyist and $10,000 from a Time Warner Cable lobbyist. And an examination of IRS filings show the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) reporting a whopping $365,075 contribution to the Wisconsin ALEC scholarship fund.

In March, CMD filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board alleging the scholarship scheme violates the state’s ethics and lobbying laws. In the complaint, CMD argued, “It makes little sense to prohibit corporate principles and lobbyists from offering anything of value to public officials, but to allow such giving if it is filtered through a segregated ALEC ‘scholarship fund.’” ALEC claimed only a couple thousand from PhRMA went to fund Wisconsin legislative travel and the rest was for legislators in other states.

This month, the former chief of the IRS’ nonprofit division, Marcus Owens, filed a complaint with the IRS on behalf of Clergy VOICE, a group of Christian ministers in Ohio, alleging that ALEC is violating the terms of its charitable status and intentionally misleading the IRS, in part because of the scholarship scheme.

As CMD reported, Owens and Clergy VOICE alleged that the gifts of flights and hotel rooms provide a “private benefit” to state legislators, in violation of ALEC’s 501(c)(3) status, and more importantly, ALEC repeatedly told the IRS that it provides no scholarships and funds no travel or entertainment expenses for elected officials.

“They have to hide the fact they are making payments to state legislators,” Owens told CMD. If the scheme was made public, “it would taint their efforts at the state level. People would know Exxon Mobil or someone else is funneling money to legislators,” he said, as “inducement to act in a certain way.”

“That’s the definition of a bribe.”

(Photo: brianjmatis)

This is the fourth and last article in Sarah Blaskey’s and Steven Horn’s series, “The Other ALECs Exposed.”

For over 30 years, corporate America and its allies on both sides of the political aisle have carried out an assault on US workers, pushing down wages, slashing benefits and busting unions.

But after decades of repeated and near-fatal assaults, the US labor movement has waged a fight back, with teachers in the forefront of the battle. Public schools have become the centerpiece of the struggle. Through an array of recent policy initiatives, influential policy wonks are attempting to restructure education fundamentally. According to Jesse Hagopian, a teacher and union activist in Seattle, part of this restructuring process is happening through model bills being enacted systematically in statehouses nationwide.

“Most famously ALEC [the American Legislative Exchange Council] has been ghostwriting bills and passing them out to astroturf organizations around the country to put forward legislation that undermines teachers’ unions and helps in this effort to restructure education based on test scores,” Hagopian told Truthout.

But ALEC is not the only organization using model bills to push the corporate-friendly education agenda in the states. Rather, a few corporate-funded “Groups,” or “Other ALECs,” significantly influence education policy in every statehouse nationally. Aside from ALEC, the most influential Groups are two bipartisan trade associations, the Council of State Governments (CSG) and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

These entities ensure that teacher-blaming and union-busting policies constitute the “reform” agenda in the vast majority of states. Dozens of reports of cuts to states’ education budgets accompanied by privatization campaigns demonstrate the effectiveness of this coordinated attack on public education.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 34 states and the District of Columbia cut education funding between 2008-2011. For public schools, the financial situation is indeed dire and has worsened in the wake of the 2008 economic crash. The Groups have used the crisis to accelerate the implementation of so-called “reform” policies.

“Eighty-four percent of school districts describe their funding as inadequate and the number of teachers laid off since the economic crisis began is likely to top three hundred thousand without federal assistance to the states,” wrote Gillian Russom in the newly released book, “Education and Capitalism.”

The economic crisis has created a rationale for ALEC and other stealth lobbyists to push privatization campaigns while claiming that they are necessary “reforms” for improving our failing education system, according to Brian Jones, a teacher and New York-based activist featured in the education documentary “The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman.”

“For the charter operators, ‘reform’ means more money, bigger salaries, etc. For the politicians, it means they get to shout to working and poor people about how they’re reforming education, while doing a huge favor to wealthy, powerful interests,” Jones told Truthout

A Battle Brewing in the Windy City

In early June, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which represents more than 26,000 of the city’s teachers and other school employees, called a strike authorization vote. The vote took place in the immediate aftermath of what many see as labor’s drubbing in the Wisconsin recall elections, which failed to unseat Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Adding to the challenge for CTU, in 2011, the Illinois legislature passed SB 7, which mandates that 75 percent of a teacher union’s membership vote “yes” to authorize a strike, rather than a simple majority of voters. To put that into perspective, when the CTU organized a 91 percent voter turnout, it needed at least 83 percent of those members who voted to vote “yes” for its potential strike to be legal.

Though they might not have realized it at the time, the Chicago teachers, who ultimately voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if they do not reach an agreement with the school district on a raise to compensate for an increase in their working hours, were directly challenging the corporate model for education that CSG and ALEC have both promoted in recent legislative cycles.

National Precedent and IL SB 7

In October 2011, the CSG Suggested State Legislation (SSL) Committee – the well-respected bipartisan committee that selects state-level model bills for CSG to publish – voted to include IL SB 7 as a nationally distributed model bill in its 2013 SSL Volume.

The Illinois bill’s summary statement acknowledges the similarities between SB 7 and legislation recently passed in other states that also aims to limit or altogether abolish teachers’ unions. But the statement also claims that SB 7 is uniquely effective and explains:

“The legislation in Illinois was enacted by a Democrat-controlled legislature and signed by a Democratic governor, unlike in Ohio, Idaho and Wisconsin. Perhaps a more important difference is that the Illinois bill passed with support from the state’s three largest teachers unions, which helped to counteract opposition from the rank-and-file or other unions.”

SB 7 was drafted by a consortium of corporate-friendly organizations, including Stand for Children and the Illinois Business Roundtable. Adding insult to injury, it was also endorsed by unions – including the CTU, though teachers later voiced strong concerns with the union leaders’ position.

Mike Klonsky wrote that the three unions that originally signed onto the bill “accepted a spanking in order to avoid a real beat-down.” The “beat-down” seems to reference what happened in Wisconsin after Walker’s Act 10 passed and unions were stripped of the majority of their collective bargaining rights.

Due to the initial success of SB 7′s more seemingly “humane” form of union-busting, overseen by a Democratic Party gubernatorial office, the bill’s policies have now become bipartisan-endorsed model legislation, now destined for cookie-cutter replication across the country.

The bill’s summary explains that the law “establishes new standards for teacher tenure, empowers school districts to remove poor performing teachers from the classroom and updates regulations about teacher strikes.”

Tenure can only be achieved after four years, except for “top-rated” teachers who can take the three year fast track. SB 7 also set new guidelines, including a 120-day waiting period, designed to make going on strike nearly impossible for teachers’ unions.

The implicit purpose of laws like SB 7: weaken the last and biggest bastion of organized labor in the country. Furthermore, SB 7 is merely one of a dozen or so CSG model bills from the past five years geared toward privatizing K-12 education and undermining teachers’ unions.

The Corporate Playbook for Public Education

In Part Two of this series we described a “corporate playbook” for influencing state-level legislation through nonprofit organizations like ALEC and CSG. As a reminder, the playbook works approximately like this (with variants depending on the group):

1. Donate to a “Group” (like CSG and/or ALEC), thus gaining access to the Groups’ legislative membership.
2. Use corporate money to get lobbyists on boards and task forces associated with the Group.
3. Use lobbyists’ positions on the task forces to set the education agenda for these Groups. Groups are where state-level legislators receive most of their job training.
4. Use free time at educational events to “schmooze” powerful legislative leaders.
5. Write, introduce and influence the passage of business-friendly model legislation through CSG and ALEC.
6. Lobby your model bills into enactments in as many states as possible.

This playbook process describes how state-level education policy is shaped by corporate America.

Most major Groups’ education platforms reflect some aspect of the big-business model for education.

For instance, CSG seeks to build a “culture of entrepreneurship” and create a “skilled workforce” ready for 21st-century labor tasks. The NCSL Education Task Force promotes “flexibility,” charter schools and “common academic standards” based on testing. ALEC’s education task force promotes “efficiency” and “parental choice” in schools.

Sarah Knopp, a high school teacher of economics and an activist in her union in Los Angeles, told Truthout that these new policies pushed by the Groups “reflect both a restructuring of education and a continuation of the past.”

Public education has always been a “sorting ground” for the next generation of workers.

“Around the time of WWII, when mass participation in industrial manufacturing became the norm, high schools began to resemble factories,” she explained. “And now we’re going through another shift that nevertheless maintains the same basic goal – conditioning the behavior of students and preparing them for today’s economic hierarchy.”

The Financiers of Education “Reform”

Why is education policy driven by near bipartisan consensus at the state level? Follow the money.

Many of the same foundations sponsor both CSG and ALEC, giving these billionaire donors disproportionate amounts of influence when it comes to state-level education policy. One of the most notable sponsors of the corporate-friendly education agenda is Bill Gates, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation alone gave $400,000 to a CSG program dedicated to “reforming” public education and pushing charter schools. Gates also financially supports a CSG initiative to collaborate with Boeing to create “fair and reliable measures of teacher effectiveness that are tied to gains in student achievement.” None of these contributions even account for Microsoft’s sizable donations to CSG.

What interest does a billionaire like Gates really have in shaping education policy?

“Part of it is promoting free market ideology,” explained Russom. “Charter schools, closing and ‘econstituting’ schools deemed to be ‘failing,’ judging schools and teachers based on test scores – all these measures help to promote an ideology of competition and undermine the idea of a public sector where people have a guaranteed right to education and other services. Major parts of the reform agenda of these business foundations are also intended to undermine unions.”

In 2011, CSG launched a Gates-funded education initiative, Policy Academies for Newly Elected Legislators (PANEL), specifically targeting recently elected state officials. A fifth of all state legislators elected in 2010 had never been in office before. PANEL was designed to educate these legislators on how to transform education to make students “career ready.” Democrats and Republicans co-mingle and feel right at home at PANEL.

Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, DC, public schools from 2007- 2010 and notorious for championing the charter school agenda, also spoke at the 2011 CSG Southern Legislative Conference, cheerleading for the charter school cause during her presentation to the Education Committee.

“Crafting a system that recognizes and rewards the best teachers and identifies those who are in need of improvement and either quickly accelerates their professional skills or moves them out of the classroom, helps to advance the opportunities for all children,” Rhee said at the conference.

The 2012 CSG National Leadership Conference featured other lecturers including Ulrich Boser, senior fellow of the Center for American Progress, who spoke on the “return on education investment,” and Adam Miller, of Astellas Pharma US, who introduced a new plan for teaching science in schools. Neither have actually been teachers nor worked in a school, yet they are the education “experts” nonetheless, tasked with educating the legislators in attendance.

Out of this process, corporations apparently hope to leave with business-friendly policy resolutions and model bills. Models from the well-respected and bipartisan CSG rather than partisan and now-stigmatized ALEC may be preferred.

CSG’s “Model” for Public Education

CSG has a slew of recent, or soon-to-be released, models for public education legislation that deserve a brief primer.

Charter Schools

In the 2010 SSL Volume, CSG published model language intended to open states’ regulations to allow virtual charter schools. Then in the 2012 SSL Volume, CSG published the “Charter School Collaborative“based on a 2010 Colorado enactment.

Despite Gates and Rhee telling legislators otherwise, a 2009 Stanford University Study showed that only 17 percent of charter schools examined “provide superior education” to their public school counterparts. This datum suggests educational improvement isn’t the motive behind the charter school agenda.

Knopp explained that the 83 percent of charter schools that do not perform better than public schools “are simply there to grab market share and privatize a public good.”

With regard to the 17 percent of charter schools that outperform public schools, Knopp offers the following explanation: “In order to remain competitive, the American economy needs a small percentage of highly skilled and intelligent workers. This is where those few high-performing charter schools come in. They skim the talent off the top.”

Teacher Tenure/Education Identifier Initiatives

In the 2012 SSL Volume, CSG also promoted a model “Educator Identifier System,” based on a Colorado pilot program designed to compile information on “teacher effectiveness” and use the information to close the “teacher gap.”

The teacher gap is defined by the model as a “documented phenomenon that poor or minority students are more likely to be taught by less-qualified or less-experienced teachers than those students’ more advantaged peers.”

This type of legislation promotes a blame-the-teachers mentality that is at the heart of the education “reform” lobby. Knopp calls these policies “business accountability models” and says they have growing relevance in education today.

“Pilot programs to measure teachers based on their students’ test scores, usually known as Value-Added Metrics, such as the ominously named Educator Identification System legislation in Colorado are almost everywhere,” Knopp told Truthout.

CSG has also endorsed the “Value-Add Metrics” Knopp mentioned above as the solution to the testing question and wrote, “Value-added assessment assumes that teachers are the most important factor in student learning and that the amount of ‘value’ the teacher ‘adds; to each student can be precisely measured.”

Russom argues, however, that “Value Added Measures” are “completely unstable and inaccurate” in measuring any teacher’s classroom success. She points to another motivator behind legislation that promotes so-called educator effectiveness – union busting, an easy way to get rid of unruly teachers. But the testing causes problems in the classrooms, too.

“They [standardized tests] rapidly lead to a narrowing of the curriculum – more test prep, less arts and authentic curriculum as teachers’ own job security begins to depend on their students’ scores,” Russom said.

Innovation Zones

CSG also influences education policy by promoting models for Innovation Zones (2012) and Promise Zones (2010). Through these market-oriented programs, schools are forced to compete with each other for customers – aka students – and through this competition somehow create better learning environments for students.

“The problem is that the business model, based on profits and competition between ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ and serving basic human needs are as incompatible in education as they are in the healthcare market,” Knopp said, as she spoke of her experience with “Zone of Choice” policies in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where she teaches.

Labor at the Chicago Crossroads

All of the CSG models and resolutions combined – SB 7, charter school initiatives, teacher identifier and effectiveness programs based on standardized testing, “Innovation Zones,” and so many other still unmentioned CSG policies – create a bipartisan rubber-stamp for business-friendly education laws.

Contrary to popular wisdom, elements within the Democratic Party are playing a key role in this state-level privatization campaign. These state initiatives dovetail with the federal agenda promoted to some extent by both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, as recently covered in an in-depth three-part series on The Real News Network.

Exhibit A: Democrats for Education Reform is one of the key groups pushing for charter school expansion, standardized testing and school closings.

“The bipartisan Council of State Governments is pushing bills to promote these policies at the state level,” Russom added. “So while the Democrats will continue to get millions in funding for their election campaigns from teachers’ unions, they are carrying out the education agenda of the 1 percent that’s destroying our schools.”

This is why Russom thinks the CTU struggle is so important. This labor showdown is unfolding in Chicago, a hot bed for Democratic Party education “reformers” like Barack Obama and his former Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, now the city’s mayor. CTU’s strike vote may undermine the effect of spreading bills like SB 7 to other states.

“If the CTU can win most of their demands through this kind of powerful organizing, it will set back the neoliberal agenda in Chicago and will also send a message to unions and communities that we can fight back and get broad community support for a different kind of agenda,” said Russom.

Russom is not alone in the inspiration she takes from the CTU strike. Teachers and indeed many unionists in general are beginning to wake up, look to CTU’s lead and ask, what can we do to fight back?

“I think what they are doing in Chicago has the potential to revive the labor movement in this era of Occupy when so many people see the problem in society as the 99 percent of us versus the one percent who have gotten incredibly wealthy at our expense,” Hagopian said.

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(Photo: Victor1558; Edited: JR / TO)

Will the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) launch an investigation into the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate-backed “nonpartisan” “stealth business lobbyist” group that has been accused of flouting civil and criminal tax laws?

That’s the obvious question to ask after a prominent Washington, DC-based tax attorney, acting at the behest of one of his clients, sent the IRS a 30-page complaint two weeks ago, following a months-long exhaustive study of ALEC’s tax filings, expenditures and public reports about its political activities. The study contained dozens of new examples of how ALEC, whose board is made up entirely of Republican lawmakers, has violated its tax-exempt status.

ALEC has claimed on its annual tax filings with the IRS that it has not engaged in lobbying activities, but publicly boasts that it has helped write and enact at least 1,000 pieces of legislation, such as the controversial “Stand Your Ground” law, used as a defense in the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin. ALEC’s assertion is undercut by the fact that the organization’s attorneys, Mark Behrens and Corey Schaecher, registered as lobbyists to represent ALEC in 2008 and 2009, according to North Dakota state records.

ALEC was founded in 1973 in Chicago by state lawmakers and a conservative activist. It is listed as a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization and, under the IRS code governing 501(c)3′s, it is prohibited from influencing legislation “as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.”

“The fact that ALEC provides significant benefits to its corporate donors and Legislative Members is incontrovertible,” says the June 18 complaint sent to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman on behalf of Clergy VOICE, a group of Christian clergy based in Ohio. “The benefits conferred on either group would alone be sufficient to jeopardize ALEC’s tax-exempt status. Moreover, based on the political orientation of the organization’s corporate members and its Legislative Members’ strong ties to the Republican Party, ALEC’s operations appear to benefit one particular segment of the political spectrum. In light of this, it is appropriate – indeed, necessary – for the IRS to investigate ALEC’s activities.”

An IRS spokeswoman told Truthout earlier this week that the agency does not comment on any investigative actions it may or may not take against an organization or an individual for alleged tax-code violations.

But Marcus Owens, the lawyer who represents Clergy VOICE and wrote the letter to the IRS, detailing what he says is confirmation that “ALEC has deliberately and repeatedly failed to comply with some of the most fundamental federal tax requirements applicable to public charities,” expects the IRS to take Clergy VOICE’s demands for an investigation into ALEC seriously.

“This letter, along with other information the IRS might not know about, will be forwarded to the director of Exempt Organizations, Examinations Office in Dallas,” a division of the agency Owens once directed during his more than two-decade long stint working for the IRS, he said in an interview. Owens was director of the Exempt Organizations Division from 1990 and 2000.

“That office evaluates the information in the complaint and a decision is made to either schedule an examination, that is, an audit or not. That decision is made in Dallas by a group of experienced career IRS employees.”

Owens said the IRS is not required to act on his letter, but if it does decide to probe ALEC based on his complaint and one filed in April under the Tax Whistleblower Act by the government watchdog group CommonCause, which made similar charges, it could be years before the IRS completes an investigation and audit, and the only way the public would learn about it – barring a leak from ALEC – is if ALEC’s tax-exempt status is revoked.

Owens said the career IRS employees based in Dallas would be responsible for analyzing the “nature and quality of the information” the IRS received about ALEC’s alleged violations and they would then decide whether an audit into ALEC to determine if the organization is in violation of its tax-exempt status is warranted.

“The decision about investigations and audits will be made without regard to the politics of it,” Owens said, adding that the only two political appointees at the IRS are Commissioner Douglas Shulman and Chief Counsel William J. Wilkins. “The group of career employees will have to document their findings in order to preserve the nature of their decision and why it was made.”

An ALEC spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment.

“Cover-Up”

ALEC’s most recently filed Form 990, the type of tax filing charities are required to file annually with the IRS, identifies $7.1 million in total revenue raised in 2010. On that filing, ALEC says its mission is to “assist state legislators, Congress & the public by sharing research and educational info.” Its 2010 Form 990 and others from previous years show ALEC has spent millions of dollars on conferences and legislative task forces, which “provide a forum for legislators and the private sector to discuss issues, develop policy and draft model legislation.”

But it’s what ALEC omitted from its Form 990 that led Owens to believe ALEC was engaging is some sort of “cover-up.”

“There wasn’t any reporting of lobbying activity,” Owens said. “The organization has consistently said zero and yet they boast about changing laws. That’s just unbelievable. How can you enact legislation without engaging in lobbying activity? You just can’t. They registered two of their lawyers as lobbyists. Why isn’t that in their filings? I think they are trying to cover something up. I think that their lobbying goes well beyond what’s permitted.”

If ALEC’s tax-exempt status is revoked, for example, because the organization failed to file accurate Form 990s, the organization could be liable for millions of dollars in taxes and penalties going back many years, Owens said, in view of the fact that an incomplete and materially inaccurate Form 990 does not start the normal statute of limitations running, which is about three years.

In his letter to the IRS, which was sent to the attention of Commissioner Shulman, Owens noted that ALEC defended itself against earlier charges raised by CommonCause that its work primarily consisted of lobbying in violation of its tax-exempt status. ALEC had said its work fell “within the exception from lobbying for ‘nonpartisan analysis, study, or research’” because ALEC “provides background on the issues involved, for example, by including a link to ‘substantive studies’ when it sends e-mail communications to legislators.”

While Owens admits that he and Clergy VOICE “have not reviewed all of ALEC’s model legislation and related communication” because many have never been made available publicly, the “legislative proposals and related communications we have reviewed do not satisfy any of the requirements for the exception for nonpartisan analysis, study or research.”

Owens compared ALEC’s work on public policy issues to that of disgraced pay-for-play lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who had close ties to top lawmakers and officials in the Bush White House, and used his clout and his clients’ cash to win them special favors from lawmakers.

“Abramoff would probably feel right at home at an ALEC meeting,” Owens said. “Abramoff used charities to cover travel expenses of legislators and staff to resorts in much the same way that ALEC covers the travel and entertainment expenses of legislators, their spouses and children to [conferences that have been held in] San Diego, Scottsdale and similar locations.”

Indeed, under the guise of “scholarships,” ALEC funds state legislators’ and their families’ travel to ALEC-sponsored conferences at luxury hotels where lawmakers meet with corporate executives to discuss and draft policy pertaining to issues that often benefit the corporate entity represented.

“Who knows what goes on at their conferences in San Diego and Scottsdale?” Owens said. ALEC makes “very few of their studies public.”

Owens said the fact that ALEC has not disclosed on its Form 990 that it makes financial payments to lawmakers in the form of scholarships and that the individual lawmakers do not disclose receiving the “scholarships,” even for their spouses and children, on their state ethics disclosure forms is yet another example of the organization’s “laundry list of civil and criminal violations and is difficult to explain.”

Owens added that the IRS consistently treats the travel and entertainment expenses of family members as taxable income.

“One has to wonder,” he said, “whether the legislators are reporting and paying income tax on such amounts, which collectively total more than $1 million each year.”

While ALEC does not disclose what takes place behind closed doors in the meetings the organization arranges between corporate officials and state legislators, it is well documented that the legislative proposal that emerge are designed to specifically benefit ALEC’s corporate members, which, for example, was the case by the limits placed on asbestos-related liability claims that turned out to be a huge benefit to Philadelphia-based Crown Holdings and apparently to no other company.

“That’s not what a charity does,” Owens said. “They are promoting legislation that is not in the public interest but rather in the interest of organizations like [Crown Holdings]. I have never seen anything like this under the guise of a charity.”

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The Rhode Island State Legislature finally adjourned its 2012 session around 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning. It had been a brutal last few days.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a “stealth business lobbyist” that helps corporations write state and federal legislation supporting their interests, has taken major heat for backing controversial laws.

More than a dozen companies — including Coca Cola and Procter & Gamble — have pulled out of the organization over the last month due to ALEC’s support of voter ID requirements and the Stand-Your-Ground law blamed by many for the death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.

While the controversy around these laws has been widely reported, ALEC’s efforts to help corporate interests cut down climate legislation, renewable energy, and environmental protections are only now being heavily scrutinized. Funded by coal and oil companies, ALEC has made it a priority to stop any changes to the fossil-fueled status quo.

Below, we document the five of the worst anti-environmental initiatives being pushed by ALEC.

Stopping a Price on Carbon
While calling into question anthropogenic climate change, ALEC has been trying to block carbon pricing for many years.  In 2010, while receiving tens of thousands of dollars from Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil and other large energy companies, the organization adopted a model resolution stating that “a tremendous amount of economic growth would be sacrificed for a reduction in carbon emissions.” The resolution was introduced by lawmakers in at least six state legislatures around the country virtually untouched from its original form.

Stripping Targets for Renewable Energy
ALEC has already written a resolution that would discourage states from participating in a nation-wide renewable energy target. With the possibility of getting such a target passed in Washington so slim, ALEC officials now indicate they will move their battle to states with existing targets. These laws have helped spur tens of billions of dollars in economic activity and have put the coal industry on the defensive. Not surprisingly, Peabody Energy — the largest private coal company in the world — sits on ALEC’s Enterprise Board and served as chairman of ALEC’s 2011 annual conference, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.

Turning Over Public Lands to the States
Some state legislatures are considering laws that would require Congress to turn over millions of acres of public lands to the states — a move that could eventually open these lands up to extraction industries. The Republican governors of Utah and Arizona are currently considering such bills. The Associated Press reported that “lawmakers in Utah and Arizona have said the legislation is endorsed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that advocates conservative ideals, and they expect it to eventually be introduced in other Western states.” A similar bill was considered in Colorado, and there are rumors that the legislation will also come up in Montana, Idaho, and New Mexico.

Watering Down Public Disclosure of Fracking Chemicals
A number of states are considering new regulations to deal with the rush of natural gas drilling, particularly for hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.”  Many lawmakers and residents believe natural gas companies should be required to let the public know what chemicals are being pumped underground to help extract the gas. Some of the chemicals in facking mixtures are known or suspected carcinogens. In order to protect the industry from disclosure, ALEC has crafted legislation that would provide large loopholes for companies wanting to protect “trade secrets.” A disclosure bill currently being considered in the Illinois legislature uses ALEC’s language. According to the New York Times, the legislation was sponsored by Exxon Mobil.

Preventing Regulation of Toxic Coal Ash
In 2008, a storage pond filled with more than a billion gallons of coal ash spilled into a Tennessee community — decimating homes, polluting local water resources, and causing around $1 billion in damage. The incident sparked renewed calls for federal regulation of coal ash, a bi-product of burning coal that can contain high levels of arsenic and heavy metals. According to one investigation, coal ash can be more radioactive than waste from a nuclear power plant. But ALEC has crafted model legislation opposing any federal regulation of coal ash waste. And these efforts are reaching national politicians. Earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment that would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing new rules on storage of this toxic waste product.

ALEC is a strong force working behind the scenes to stop any meaningful action on climate and clean energy. This is just a small snapshot of the pro-polluter bills the organization has crafted over the years. With the largest, dirtiest energy companies funding ALEC, it’s clear who these “model” laws are designed to help.