ALEC Has a New Tactic it’s Using to Take Down the EPA Legislators from Utah and Oklahoma bragged about slowing the development of solar energy in their states. Oklahoma Senator A.J. Griffin passed a bill to tax individuals using distributed generation from solar panels or wind turbines to “protect our most vulnerable utilities.” ALEC wants to tax people who use small scale solar or wind or who drive electric cars. According to ALEC, property owners should have a right to kill a person on their property, but not use solar or wind energies on their property without paying a tax. ALEC’s guiding principle — supporting big business — turns the small-c conservative ideal of individual liberty and local control on its head. As Utah Sen. Howard Stephenson stated to an Education subcommittee, “We need to stomp out local control.” School boards and city councils take away liberties quicker than the federal government, he insisted. Local governing entities can be a roadblock to the ALEC agenda, so their power needs to be preempted and removed. And as ALEC convenes a new working group on public school financing, the model bill that is in the works is a funding formula based on school performance with criteria set by state legislators. One ALEC legislator stated that school boards should be taken out of the equation all together, as they merely use children as “human shields.” These policies hurt actual people. And it is, after all, the people who elect state representatives, not multinational corporations pushing their profit agenda. Finally, there are the economics of the ALEC otherworld. I chuckled at the scorn directed at Minnesota, where, Rep. Garafalo remarked, “the inmates are running the asylum.” Minnesota raised taxes on the rich and invested the resulting revenue in public schools, including all-day kindergarten. In “Rich States, Poor States” — an ALEC publication that ranks states in terms of a 2013 State Economic Outlook — Minnesota ranks 46th, Wisconsin 15th and Mississippi 10th. Yet in 2012 Minnesota had one of the fastest growing economies in the nation, and currently has higher median incomes and lower unemployment and poverty rates than both Wisconsin and Mississippi (where a whopping 17.5 percent of families have incomes below the poverty level). The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts Minnesota near the top of private sector job growth in the Midwest, while Wisconsin lags near the bottom. In the ALEC other-world , actual economics do not count. It’s all about a business-friendly environment. Hello, Third World. Unfortunately, under Governor Scott Walker and the Republican majority in the Wisconsin legislature, ALEC model bills of today become the Wisconsin laws of tomorrow. At the last conference I attended, ALEC kicked off an initiative to amend the federal constitution to shut down the federal government. Several months later, AB 750, a resolution that came from that workshop and calls for a federal balanced budget amendment, passed the Wisconsin state Assembly. There have been many other ALEC bills that have become Wisconsin law, including one that makes it more difficult for sick and injured patients to access the courts, several that reduce citizens’ access to the ballot box, including voter ID, and a spate of efforts to privatize public education. Other ALEC model bills, such as preempting local living wage ordinances, have passed the state Assembly but did not get through the Senate. Not yet. These policies hurt actual people. And it is, after all, the people who elect state representatives, not multinational corporations pushing their profit agenda. By the end of the conference, one Texas attendee asked me “Are you that Wisconsin blogger?” He was the only person at the conference to acknowledge that I was not of the ALEC ilk. When I saw him again at the airport, he waved “See you next time.” Indeed he will.
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 21:59:59 +0000
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