[Formerly titled: Wherein I Reluctantly Bash Obama][UPDATE: OBAMA DUMPS ALEC!!!!]
I love Barack Obama. [Update: Now more than ever!]
The bright, passionate, hopeful leader is potentially America's greatest voice for engaging voters, especially young voters for the critical years ahead.
That's why the letter I got today was so disappointing. [Update: and the one I got afterwards was such welcome news!]
It seems that the good Senator will NOT be addressing an extremist, right-wing, corporate, front group that channels money from big business into a nationwide effort to rewrite legislation at the state level, even though they earlier tried to promote his possible address. ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is possibly one of the most destructive forces in America today. Nearly 1/3 of all state legislators are members. George Allen is among their highest ranking alums [PDF].
Rather than a general indictment of Senator Obama's outstanding judgement and character, I hope that the following will serve as a teaching moment for Democrats who may not know about the invidious front group called ALEC.
21 January, 2004
"Like Mark Twain, the reports of Kyoto's death in this country have been greatly exaggerated...Carbon dioxide, the inescapable by-product of burning fossil fuels, is beneficial to plant and human life alike. The effort to regulate it as a greenhouse gas is an attempt to tax energy. Losing fuel diversity can only be harmful to our economy and ultimately the environment itself." "States should reject every form of Kyoto legislation for the very same reasons as our leaders in Washington, D.C...The Kyoto Protocol is just another highly regressive energy tax on America's working families, with no measurable benefit to environmental or human health."
Source: ALEC website - Sons of Kyoto
Yeah!C'mon Senator Obama... being the voice of bipartisanship doesn't mean selling the country to the Global Warming Deniers and the Oil lobby. The far right already has the Supreme Court and the Authoritarian Bush Administration, we can't afford to give them our brightest and best hopes for the future as well. it's great to know they're not going to get their dirty mitts on you.
ALEC rewards its members for taking stands against patients rights, net neutrality, global warming legislation, and public health. [Much more below the fold]
Obama Pressed to Reject Invitation From Extremist GroupIL Senator advertised as key speaker at right-wing corporate front group's upcoming conference
The Progressive States Network called on Presidential candidates, including Barack Obama, to refuse invitations to speak at the summer conference of the extremist, corporate front group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The pictures of Obama, along with Presidential candidates Rudolph Guiliani, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee, are featured on the front page of ALEC's website (www.alec.org) as "Invited and/or Confirmed Speakers" to help recruit state legislators to ALEC's conference. It is not clear from the website whether Obama has accepted ALEC's invitation.
"Speaking at the ALEC conference would only lend legitimacy to an extremist agenda that Obama has spent his career and political capital working against," said Progressive States' Executive Director Joel Barkin. "However intended, Obama's participation in the conference would serve as the equivalent of an endorsement of their activities. Furthermore, given the Senator's positions advocating expanded health care, he should especially object to his picture being placed on the ALEC website right above an announcement of ALEC's campaign against expanded federal SCHIP child health care funding for the states."
As a former state legislator, Barack Obama is in a particularly good position to denounce ALEC's pernicious role in lobbying at the state level on behalf of extreme right-wing interests that openly seek to despoil the environment, crush unions and drive down wages.
ALEC was created in the 1970s by New Right leader Paul Weyrich and allied right-wing supporters in order to advance their agenda in statehouses across the country. In a report last year, Progressive States detailed ALEC's history of being funded by the oil industry to deny that global warming is a problem, by the telecommunications industry to fight local municipal wireless systems, by the pharmaceutical industry to fight prescription drug regulation, and by low-wage employers like Wal-Mart to oppose minimum wage and other labor protections. The report can be found at http://www.progressi...
For its part, ALEC has acknowledged its role as a front group for corporate interests seeking to manipulate public policy, telling the Center for Responsive Politics in 1997 that right-wing legislators and corporate lobbyists "join for the purpose of having a seat at the table."
"The organization is supported by money from the corporate sector," said Dennis Bartlett of ALEC's Office of Policy and Legislation at the time. "By paying to be members, corporations are allowed the opportunity to sit down at the table and discuss the issues that they have an interest in."
"The rigors of presidential fundraising may be extreme today, but that is no excuse for any presidential candidate to engage a fringe group whose stated mission is to buy access to politicians and manipulate public policy," Barkin said. "Barack Obama must emphatically reject this group's efforts to use his notoreity for its own extremist agenda."
Fact Sheet on ALEC
Roughly one-third of all state legislators are claimed as members of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
- Roughly three hundred "private sector members" ? corporate sponsors paying tens of thousands of dollars each year ? run the show at ALEC. They finance the organization and select the key issues it pushes. Dues by state legislators are nominal and amount to less than 1% of ALEC's funding each year.
- As examples of corporate influence at ALEC, Julie Corcoran of the prescription drug lobby PhRMA is the Private Sector Chair of ALEC's Health and Human Services Task Force, Randy Thompson of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company is the Private Sector Chair of their Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force, Kelly Mader of Peabody Energy is Private Sector Chair of the Natural Resources Task Force, and Tara Mica of the National Rifle Association is Private Sector Chair of the Criminal Justice and Homeland Security Task Force.
- No special interest has invested more in ALEC than the oil industry; ExxonMobil alone contributed a whopping $712,000 to ALEC in recent years,40 with similar amounts going to allied organizations. In exchange, ALEC has helped lineup legislators to fight for lower taxes on gasoline and, even more critically, beat back state regulations aimed at curbing the carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming.
- At the height of the tobacco litigation, the major tobacco companies were directly giving ALEC $200,000 per year, sponsoring golf tournaments and paying the organization's legal bills, all as part of their efforts to lower excise taxes on tobacco and limit lawsuits by consumers and state governments.
- In August 2005, ALEC honored Wisconsin State Representative Phil Montgomery with its "Legislator of the Year" award for his Wisconsin legislative efforts against local government plans for municipally-owned broadband networks and his role in ALEC in taking the campaign national, reflecting the role of large telecom companies in funding that program at ALEC.
- A key to ALEC's success is that it coordinates the introduction of legislation with national experts, politically-wired local political operations, state-based think tanks, national issue-based lobbying networks and direct corporate lobbying in the statehouses. ALEC has remained a key part of the sprawling empire of rightwing organizations that serve to create an "echo chamber" around any issue ALEC promotes.
For those not familiar with ALEC..check out their website- here is a link to their "model" legislation proposals, which according to their website "dozens were enacted" across the country.