I'm looking at this effort from ColorOfChange...
Today, ColorOfChange members are making calls to Coca-Cola to demand that the company stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC has pushed voter ID laws that disenfranchise large numbers of Black voters. Along with the NRA, ALEC also pushed a bill based on Florida's "Shoot First" law -- which has shielded Trayvon Martin's killer from justice -- into two dozen states across the country....
... and I'm impressed that it's borne fruit:
UPDATE: (04/04/12) Coke tells the Washington Examiner it's chosen to end its membership in ALEC....
But I find it fascinating that it's come to this. I understand that big corporations are going to fund groups that will help get pro-big-corporation legislation passed. And you'd think the deal would be that those organizations would do what's in the best interests of their funders, and only what's in their best interest. But I'm struck by this, which I was reminded of this morning on NPR (emphasis added):
In 2005, lawmakers and lobbyists took Florida's brand new stand your ground statute and turned it into model legislation, which produced a surge of similar laws in other states.
Later, ALEC did the same thing with immigration laws. Its model was the unusually tough bill from Arizona.
Hunh? Big corporations supported a draconian crackdown on illegal immigrants (and people who may just look like illegal immigrants)? I thought big corporations actually liked illegal immigration. I thought they appreciated the fact that it keeps their labor costs down, and the labor costs of their suppliers down. Isn't this ALEC going a bit rogue? I know what the thinking is, on the Arizona law and on "stand your ground": Laws that fire up right-wingers keep the rubes voting Republican. More Republican votes mean more pro-corporate laws. But when the rabble-rousing bills would actually hurt your corporate patrons, aren't you stepping a bit over the line?
This could get crazier, and more embarrassing for right-leaning establishmentarians. ALEC teams with the NRA not only on "stand your ground" laws but on laws requiring that authorities not disarm citizens during a Katrina-like emergency. But the NRA is a wee bit crazier than you realize. I noticed yesterday that the NRA has invited Jerry Boykin to speak at a prayer breakfast during its upcoming annual meeting, which will be attended by Mitt Romney and other GOP pols:
The National Rifle Association is planning to host retired Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, who has a long record of hateful comments about Muslims and Islam, as keynote speaker of the prayer breakfast at their annual meeting later this month....
The prayer breakfast comes on the final day of the four-day convention, which will be held in St. Louis, Missouri and feature speeches from Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and a variety of Republican officeholders....
Boykin received international attention in 2003 after the Los Angeles Times and NBC News reported on speeches he had given in full military dress at religious events suggesting that the United States was fighting a "spiritual battle" in the Middle East against "a guy called Satan" who "wants to destroy us as a Christian army." Boykin also said of a Somali fighter who said that Allah would protect him from Americans, "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."
...[Since then,] Boykin has claimed that "A mosque is an embassy for Islam and they recognize only a global caliphate, not the sanctity or sovereignty of the United States," and called for "no mosques in America." ...
In February, Boykin said:
We love the Muslim people but we have to be very careful to understand that Islam, in a pure sense, in an authoritative sense, Islam is evil....
I don't want to turn into a left-wing Glenn Beck, but you've got some of the best-known companies in America giving to ALEC, which throws in its lot with the NRA, which could limit its focus to guns but throws in its lot with this Islamophobe. What the hell is Boykin going to say just after Romney shows up at the convention -- about Islam, about whether this is a Christian nation, or possibly about Obama being a secret Muslim? Is he going to offend not only Muslims but (in an increasingly multi-ethnic country) Hindus? Jews? Mormons? Who knows what the hell he's going to say?
(Did I mention that a current NRA board member was the founder of a Michigan pro-gun organization whose newsletter once told its readers, "Consider for a moment that the largest and most hysterical anti-gun groups include disproportionately large numbers of women, African- Americans and Jews"?)
All 57 varieties of craziness are bleeding into one another, and everyone on the right who always thought the tiger could be ridden is just along for the ride. It's going to get crazier
5 comments:
You can also think of ALEC as a sort of extortion ring: if you want your anti-regulatory pro-corporate afenda passed through their network of contacts, you also have to fund their bugfsck-crazy anti-Other work.
set engines to warp. must get over event horizon in time.
This is exactly what I and many others thought might happen when in '09 the GOP big dogs decided to go full speed on stirring up the lumpenright. It paid off for them short-term in '10, all right, but the problem they have is that they can't seem to dial the psychosis level back down nearly as easily as they dialed it up; and the polls seem to indicate that the truly crazy segment of the electorate didn't significantly expand. It's still in that 25-35% range, where it's been probably since Aaron Burr.
IIRC, one of ALEC's biggest members is Corrections Corporation of America. Immigration crackdowns mean more detainees and more detention centers. They also mean lots of potential free labor to replace the low-cost labor swept up by immigration enforcement. More profit for CCA.
Waiting for a wingnut blog to link to this in 3,2,1.......
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