blogalink - Andrew Miller steps forward for gay rights

Bumper Sticker Wisdom has profiled Andrew Miller here before, taking notes from a comprehensive article in Willamette Week.  Miller is an activist Oregon Republican who is not shy about spending money to defeat unions or showcase his conservative agenda.  For reasons you can study at this new link, Miller has just announced unequivocally that he supports gay marriage.  By any perspective this is a progressive stance and, at this moment in time, the announcement is a risky political move. 

There is no doubt that this is a game changer in Oregon politics.  Whether or not it plays out the way Miller wants it to remains to be seen.  His views on unions and the perquisites of money are well known.  His views on gays were less well known and his revealing them constitutes news.  Progressives can rightly applaud his initiative.

Please check out this link to the blog, The Governed| NWPolitics.

Supreme Court and Right to Work

Soon the Supreme Court may be able to achieve in one opinion what it has taken 67 years for anti-union forces to do in 24 states.  The United States itself may become the next and final ‘Right to Work’ state.

The case is Harris v. Quinn and it was argued before the court on January 21. Nobody  expected the hearing to explode into a case of landscape-shifting potential but it did. Pamela Harris is a home-based personal care worker in Illinois.  She sued Governor Quinn and claimed  that the compelled payment of union dues was a form of forced speech prohibited by the First Amendment.  That is the kernel deeply embedded in judicial procedure by now and that unresolved issue is enough to pose a grievous threat to public sector unionism.  Upholding the claim could impose the ‘Right to Work’ formula - instead of a state-by-state choice - as the law of the land.

‘Right to Work’ is a phrase that follows a tradition of naming laws in a way to telegraph how you are meant to think of them, especially when their meaning and intent is fiercely contested.  The Defense of Marriage Act and the PATRIOT Act are examples.  Both are fiercely opposed by different constituencies and the names are considered to be cruel, ironic and farcical parodies of the laws’ actual intent.  Right to Work has been contemptuously renamed “right to work for less” by many who see it as a device to rob union workers of their voice and their leverage.

Anything that supports the Right to Work formula as a guide to public policy is a serious issue to workers in particular and the middle class by extension.  The union ripple effect in favor of middle class living standards is well understood.  A good introduction to this discussion is in a study by Darrell Minor.  He concludes:

To sum up, this study has found that worker-friendly states are significantly healthier, are more productive, have less poverty, and with citizens who enjoy longer life spans. In four of the seven measures (GDP per capita, poverty, insurance and life expectancy rates) so-called “right-to-work” states come out significantly (and statistically) worse.

These findings have broad policy implications in those states where lawmakers are wrongly considering RTW measures, and should inform the good efforts of union members and allies to quell those efforts. Instead of pursuing laws that actually lower the standard of living in their states, policy makers should look for ways to elevate everyone’s standard of living.

Enacting RTW laws is not only misguided, but in fact counterproductive to achieving such ends. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as ‘right to work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works’. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining.” The evidence suggests that Dr. King was correct in this belief, and that those who would advocate for a state to enact RTW laws would also be lowering the standard of living for that state’s residents.

On the other hand, if one would rather struggle with the twists and turns of the legal questions involved in Harris v. Quinn, good luck with that.  As an oracle, I would as soon divine meaning from the strangulated entrails of a goat.  No, I consider that whole question moot: it will be delivered whole, perhaps some time in May.  

I leave the tortured divinations of the inscrutable to the justices.  But how they wear their hearts on their sleeves is a more accessible source of suspense to me:

"I'm just going to use the word here, it is a radical argument," Justice Elena Kagan told the attorney for the non-union employees. "It would radically restructure the way workplaces across this country are run."

Scalia’s view is the surprising hinge of the so-far speculative outcome.  There is a 4-to-4 split between conservatives and liberals on the bench, leaning one way or the other.  Scalia is not a usual tie-breaker.  He is stridently conservative and not a declared friend of labor.  He does, however, have some very particular and well-developed views on free speech as it relates to the 35 years of precedent that this case represents.  Scalia’s conclusion is the nail-biter.

“The rest is commentary.”  We’ll just have to wait and see.  Expect a ruling in May or June.

A hearty 'screw you' to the voice of entitlement

It’s a great story and it’s great to see it making the rounds.  Rachel Maddow is a commentator on her own show on MSNBC.  She is engaging, energetic, beautiful, funny, brilliant and, apparently, when push comes to shove, she  shoves back.  Rachel must have said something that characterized the Koch brothers in an unflattering light.  A Koch lawyer in a letter accused Rachel of a false allegation, demanded a retraction and provided a scripted reply for Rachel to read on air, repudiating her own story.  Rachel provided full context of the exchange, and summed up, as reported by Huffington Post:

“I’m not going to read their script," the MSNBC host said during her show. "I’m not going to renounce my own reporting on this story, because the reporting on this story stands. It is true."

Maddow added that she thought the Koch brothers were not used to being talked about in ways they did not like, by people who do not listen to their instructions.

"We will not stop reporting on the political actions and the consequences of the political actions of rich and powerful men, even if they send angry letters every time we do it," Maddow said. "I will not read scripts provided to me by anyone else. I do not play requests."

Be sure and see the full broadcast (9:04 minutes) - right through to the parting shot in the last four seconds.  It is high entertainment.

Fortunately for Rachel, she is operating well within her job description when she says she will not “play requests” for Charles and David Koch.  Not so for the Koch brothers' employees.  During the 2012 election the Kochs sent 45000 mailers to all of their employees at their subsidiary, Georgia Pacific.  This was a repeat of a similar campaign during the 2010 midterm elections. With not-so-subtle innuendo the mailers are used to intimidate their employees with reference to “consequences” for voting the wrong way.  Georgia Pacific corporate social media policies are equally threatening about how employees may express themselves at or away from work.  These threats are taken seriously - there have been personal repercussions - and the threats have had the desired chilling effect on free speech.  The effect on voting can only be surmised.

What is being described here is not just a managerial expectation that subordinates will not be insubordinate.  It is something more and it comes with time and lots of money.  This is not about labor and management, it is about lord and vassal.  It is an expectation born of entitlement. It’s also about hypocrisy.  In the Middle Ages, social castes were a concrete reality, lived and accepted by everybody. Fast forward to today, the prevailing lip-service from those protecting their privilege is about the value of the individual. Marginally less insincere are the urgent protestations about how Big Government is undermining democratic values.  Gimme a break.

There’s nothing new here.  It’s not shocking.  It’s not scandalous.  It’s grindingly commonplace.  And like every other commoner down here, I don’t like having my nose rubbed in it.

ALEC and the banality of evil

This blog post is about ALEC.  It is not an expose.  It is not original research.  It is not dogged, hard-hitting investigative journalism.  It’s not blowing the lid off a conspiracy.  As a reader of my blog pointed out these particular “conspirators are so shameless they work their machinations right out in the open feeling secure their deceit and scheming has stomped the opposition down to the point where nothing can stop them.”  Talking about “the banality of evil” sounds like hyperbole as well as a cliche - evil is such a loaded word.  But if you evaluate intent, identify negative effects, and scale it by the multitudes of those effected, the words start to take on some objective reality.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a bonafide 501c3 (registered non-profit, although its non-profit status is being challenged). In its own words ALEC  "works to advance the fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism...” It’s been around for about 41 years.  It writes “model bills” which can be introduced verbatim into the legislative stream (mostly for states) for easy passage to nail down the agendas of corporations or conservative interest groups.  Wikipedia’s characterization is helpful and concise:

ALEC provides a forum for state legislators and private sector members to collaborate on model bills—draft legislation that members can customize and introduce for debate in their own state legislatures. Approximately 200 such bills become law each year. ALEC has produced model bills on issues such as reducing corporate regulation and taxation, tightening voter identification rules, and promoting gun rights ALEC also serves as a networking tool among state legislators, allowing them to research conservative policies implemented in other states. Many ALEC legislators laud the organization for converting campaign rhetoric and nascent policy ideas into legislative language.

ALEC is effective at channeling funds away from public schools as reported by Brendan Fischer of Common Dreams:

In 1990, Milwaukee was the first city in the nation to implement a school voucher program, under then-governor (and ALEC alum) Tommy Thompson. ALEC quickly embraced the legislation, and that same year offered model bills based on the Wisconsin plan. For-profit schools in Wisconsin now receive up to $6,442 per voucher student, and by the end of the next school year taxpayers in the state will have transferred an estimated $1.8 billion to for-profit, religious, and online schools. The "pricetag" for students in other states is even higher.

In the years since, programs to divert taxpayer money from public to private schools have spread across the country. In the 2012-2013 school year, it is estimated that nearly 246,000 students will participate in various iterations of so-called "choice" programs in 16 states and the District of Columbia -- draining the public school system of critically-needed funds, and in some cases covering private school tuition for students whose parents are able and willing to pay.

It’s been known for some time that ALEC has written and co-ordinated much of the Right to Work (anti union) legislation that has successfully passed in many states in the last three years.  ALEC has been instrumental in increasing the prison population in the US by writing the now-well-established “three stikes” laws and “truth in sentencing” laws. But the entrepreneurial zeal of capitalizing on that by making prison labor available to the private sector is truly breath-taking. 

This is now standard because of ALEC’s Prison Industries Act and the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program.  A casual search on ALEC will reveal in-progress and established ALEC initiatives assaulting food stamps, unemployment insurance, gun control (heard of ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws?), immigrant rights, voting rights, teaching climate change,  clean energy,  minimum wage,  ad nauseum.  You don’t have to turn over too many rocks to find colonies of nasty, nasty vermin.

ALECexposed.org reports on ALEC funding:

More than 98% of ALEC's revenues come from sources other than legislative dues, such as corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations. Each corporate member pays an annual fee of between $7,000 and $25,000 a year, and if a corporation participates in any of the nine task forces, additional fees apply, from $2,500 to $10,000 each year. ALEC also receives direct grants from corporations, such as $1.4 million from ExxonMobil from 1998-2009. It has also received grants from some of the biggest foundations funded by corporate CEOs in the country, such as: the Koch family Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Koch-managed Claude R. Lambe Foundation, the Scaife family Allegheny Foundation, the Coors family Castle Rock Foundation, to name a few. Less than 2% of ALEC’s funding comes from “Membership Dues” of $50 per year paid by state legislators, a steeply discounted price that may run afoul of state gift bans.

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Google funds ALEC.  Facebook funds ALEC.  For a list of corporate sponsors and “task force” participants of ALEC go here.

New Years List of Hidden Agendas or Confessions of a Conspiracy Theorist

It’s that time of the year so here’s my list.

Reducing the deficit is not about fiscal responsibility; it’s about starving the public sector and lowering the bill for government.

Lowering taxes is absolutely about not spending your money on anybody but yourself.

De-funding public schools is not about choice, accountability, a business model, global competitiveness or reform; it’s about starving the public sector and lowering the bill for government.

De-funding public schools is about silencing the critics.

De-funding public schools is about pulling up the ladder once you’re there.

Privatizing the schools is not about choice; it’s about controlling the agenda.

Corporate tax-breaks are not about entrepreneurial incentives; it’s about keeping more money and paying less in taxes.

Reduced tax rates for investment and carried interest have nothing to do with incentives for capital formation; it’s about keeping more money and paying less in taxes.

Complaints about Big Government have nothing to do with civil rights or stifling entrepreneurial spirit; it has to do with getting rid of the cops.

Complaints about Big Government have nothing to do with waste or inefficiency;  it’s about starving the public sector and lowering the bill for government.

Voter ID is not about voter fraud; it’s about disenfranchising the opposition.

“Right to Work” is not about civil rights, or choice; it’s about disenfranchising the opposition and exploiting the workers.

Rejecting “A path to citizenship” is not about coddling illegal immigrants; it’s about voter suppression and disenfranchising the opposition.

Reducing entitlements has nothing to do with slackers, takers, welfare queens or incentives to work; it’s absolutely about not spending your money on anybody but yourself.

Got your own list?  By all means, send it in.