It’s been a decade, but things have changed.
In a nutshell: ALEC is killing us.
ALEC has now gone way too far. Since a group of bloggers (mostly on Kos), progressive orgs and activists, launched a new campaign in 2011-12 against the American Legislative Exchange Council significant progress was made. However, during this deadly pandemic, ALEC has lifted, or lowered rather, itself along with the radical-religious right's Council for National Policy (CNP) and it's state-level think tanks and allies, into a direct coalition with the former Trump White House, and to a new all time low, from 'super evil,' as one of the original ALEC spelunkers used to say, to 'ludicrous evil' on multiple fronts.
They used to be chiefly greedy and power hungry, but now ALEC and the CNP are deadly, both to the American and the world’s population, and to the very survival of our Republic.
This coming March 8, 2021 on the 10th anniversary of our first comprehensive posting on ALEC here on DailyKos, and the March 15, 2011 blog entry of a University of Wisconsin professor, his first ever, and the explosion it sent across the blogasphere, we will begin a new SERIES on ALEC and the CNP, and its more recent conservative, right-wing allies during the Covid-19 pandemic. Together with organizations like FreedomWorks, the TeaParty Patriots, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, and a host of allied organizations, we will explore and provide the narratives on their role in developing, deploying and driving a full agenda to resist countermeasures to the Coronavirus, coordinate astroturf anti-lockdown protests, reopen the economy and schools (it was never about kids), recruit hundreds of “death doctors” to lie to about Covid, push mythical solutions to the virus like that of “herd immunity”, re-elect President Donald Trump, and their archangel, Vice President Mike Pence, to support the Trump mob with transportation to Washington DC to man the insurrection, all in order to maintain power, preserve their own organizations, and to push their ultra-conservative, radical-right agenda putting their politics in the middle of a national health crisis over the lives of their fellow Americans, the rest of us.
Here’s a sample:
Precisely at 9:02 EST on February 22, 2011, a friend of Solon Street sent a text from Wisconsin: “Did you guys see this?”
The Koch Brothers had inserted 10 lines of language into a WI budget bill using a local state-level think tank associated with the “American Legislative Exchange Council.”
A quick search of the organization on an old server on the conservative right lit up the screen like a Christmas tree. Most of the hits pointed at a 2006 project called “Government in a Box.”
Instantaneously, we knew there was a serious problem, and at 9:05 PM EST a new project on ALEC was launched.
That effort would go on for over a decade, but now things have changed. ALEC is killing us.
Here is the original Kos posting on February 23, 2011 the following day: “Is Wisconsin Style GOP Corruption in Michigan Budget Related Legislation?”.
And a clip:
“Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and the Snyder Budget Proposal are now under the spotlight, particularly as Snyder seeks to avoid protests like in Wisconsin, here in Michigan’s Capital Lansing.
The Michigan Republican legislature has been loaded with 39 bills they are shot gunning, Wisconsin-style through the Republican controlled Legislature.”
Welcome to the Republican Party National laboratory for US States, Newt Gingrich to the Republican Governor Association:
“The challenge for us is to turn rejection of the left into replacement of the left.
Washington is trapped in obsolete policies, regulations and ideologies.
However, in your states, you will have an opportunity to provide creative leadership and to organize innovative, creative citizens in new models of solutions appropriate to the age of the iPhone, iPad, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, Google and text messaging.”
“America will transform much faster in the 50 state laboratories of citizen-led government than in the centralized, bureaucratic, interest group dominated system of Washington.
We need your leadership in creating experiments of modernization and transformation.
As Governors, you have an opportunity to lead your states in transformational change while Washington is held captive by the reactionary interest groups, ideology and bureaucracies of the past.”
Michigan, as it turns out was the “laboratory of choice” for ALEC back then, and still is today, but that is the rest of the story…
Today, we commemorate the precise moment for us that the #ALEC #DumpALEC #ExposingALEC, #DestroyALEC, #SeeYouinCinn (first major protest in years, and where a major break-though occurred) and eventually the #ALECexposed movement in it’s latest iteration was sparked, building on a foundation laid by others, joined by some very good people, and how this all started.
This new SERIES on ALEC during the pandemic is dedicated in memorial to fellow Kossack and mentor Bob Sloan, and the thousands of of people that have unnecessarily lost their lives to the Coronavirus.
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to a friend George Logan in 1816
STAY TUNED… Updates and the first installment of this SERIES will be post here.