New Bill Would Force Congress To Stay In Washington Until It Passes A Budget

Posted: 11/20/2013 1:26 pm EST  |  Updated: 11/20/2013 1:51 pm EST

WASHINGTON -- New York Rep. Louise Slaughter, the senior Democrat on the House Rules Committee, introduced legislation Wednesday that would prevent Congress from skipping town for the holidays if the House fails to pass a budget agreement by mid-December.
The "No Budget, No Vacation" bill would hold lawmakers accountable for their pledge to reconcile the vastly different House and Senate budgets by Dec. 13, which was one of the key components of last month's deal to end the 16-day shutdown of the federal government. Since then, members of the Budget Conference Committee, led by the House and Senate budget chairs, have twice convened publicly, but there's been little indication that they're headed for a breakthrough.
Democrats will thus attach a vote on Slaughter's resolution to a procedural motion known as "the previous question" on Wednesday. The maneuver is one of the few ways in which the minority in the House can attempt to take control of the floor briefly away from the majority, but it's unlikely to succeed because it would need Republican votes.
Democrats are hopeful, however, that the vote will be tricky for Republicans amid reports that House GOP leaders are done legislating for the remainder of the year and have distributed a blank agenda for 2014 to their members. In a press release, Slaughter cites such articles and points out that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) reportedly joked in a private meeting with Republicans that the House shouldn’t even remain in session in December.
"This Republican House has redefined the term unproductive by setting records for futility with its glacial legislative pace and then shutting down the government when they don’t get their way," Slaughter said. "Now, after this dismal record, the Majority is planning to go on a vacation before fulfilling our most basic role to fund the government. It is time to stop governing crisis–to-crisis and finally give the American people and American businesses the certainty that comes with passing a federal budget. No budget, no vacation."
Slaughter voiced similar frustration over the lack of legislative action in the House on Tuesday when a second vote series was canceled. "Oh did we work too hard today?" she quipped, according to BuzzFeed's Kate Nocera.
As The Huffington Post reported earlier this year, the 113th Congress is on track to be the least productive in modern history, a tough record to beat given the 112th Congress was already the least productive since the 1940s. Boehner has called such reports "total nonsense," and said the American public would like to see Congress repeal laws rather than simply pass them.
But the House GOP has been scrutinized for stalling on comprehensive immigration reform and failing to pass spending bills at the levels set by Republican appropriators.
In terms of a budget agreement, Boehner and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the House Budget Chair, have ruled out any budget deal that includes new tax increases. Democrats have maintained that the federal budget cuts known as sequestration must be replaced with a combination of tax revenues and targeted spending cuts, setting up a possible stalemate ahead of the mid-December deadline.
Boehner nonetheless expressed optimism Tuesday that both sides could agree on a spending level for 2014, a day after top Republican appropriators warned against keeping sequestration in place in a letter to Ryan and Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
"It’s important that we do appropriations bills here to fund the government," he said at a press conference. "The idea that we should operate under what are called continuing resolutions is a poor way to do business."
Read the 'No Budget, No Vacation' bill below:
Resolution: No Budget, No Vacation

 

  ..................................................................... (Original Signature of Member)
113TH
CONGRESS 1ST
SESSION

H. RES. ll

Prohibiting the consideration of a concurrent resolution providing for adjourn-ment unless the House has adopted a conference report on the budget resolution.
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Ms. S
LAUGHTER
submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on
lllllllllllllll

RESOLUTION

Prohibiting the consideration of a concurrent resolution pro-viding for adjournment unless the House has adopted a conference report on the budget resolution.
Resolved,
That it shall not be in order to consider a
1
concurrent resolution providing for adjournment unless
2
the House has adopted a conference report on S. Con. Res.
3
8, establishing a budget for the United States Govern-
4
ment, by December 13th, 2013.
5
VerDate 0ct 09 2002 14:34 Nov 19, 2013Jkt 000000PO 00000Frm 00001Fmt 6652Sfmt 6201C:\DOCUME~1\NLWOFSY\APPLIC~1\SOFTQUAD\XMETAL\5.5\GEN\C\RULES2~1.XMLH
November 19, 2013 (2:34 p.m.)
F:\NLW\DEM\RULES2013.XML
f:\VHLC\111913\111913.131.xml           (564885|1) 

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Wal-Mart's Employee Food Drive

As the greedy underclass continues to demand a living wage, Wal-Mart generously hosts a food drive for its own employees.  (02:40)

The Colbert Report
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Wal-Mart Asks Workers To Donate Food To Its Needy Employees

Wal-Mart Asks Workers To Donate Food To Its Needy Employees

Ashley Lutz 58 minutes ago 4,056 14

walmart checkout

Walmart Media Relations


A Cleveland Wal-Mart store is holding a food drive — for its own employees.

"Please donate food items so associates in need can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner," reads a sign accompanied by several plastic bins.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer first reported on the food drive, which has sparked outrage in the area.

"That Wal-Mart would have the audacity to ask low-wage workers to donate food to other low-wage workers — to me, it is a moral outrage," Norma Mills, a customer at the store, told the Plain Dealer.

A company spokesman defended the food drive, telling the Plain Dealer that it is evidence that employees care about each other.

"This store has been doing this for several years and is for associates that have faced an extreme hardship recently," spokesman Kory Lundberg told us.

Lundberg says an example of this would be a recent layoff in the family or some other financial hardship.

Wal-Mart has been criticized for paying low wages to its 2.2 million employees.

Last week, 50 people were arrested after protesting the retailer's pay at a store in Los Angeles.

Wal-Mart turned a profit of $15.7 billion last year.

SEE ALSO:  Facts About Wal-Mart That Will Blow Your Mind

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-asks-customers-to-donate-food-2013-11#ixzz2l1IUPjsq

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The Gospel of Selfishness in American Christianity

The Gospel of Selfishness in American Christianity

How the philosophers of selfishness came to use Christianity as their cover story.

AlterNet / By Amanda Marcotte

November 14, 2013  |  

  Anyone who has worked in the restaurant business will be happy to tell you that waiters always fight each other to avoid working Sunday lunch shift. Not because they want to sleep in, but because it’s a widespread belief that the post-church crowd is loud, demanding and unwilling to tip appropriately. In the food service industry, “Christian” is synonymous with “selfish.”
Unfair stereotype? Probably. Big groups, regardless of affiliation, tend to tip poorly. More to the point, waiters probably remember the bad Christian tippers more because the hypocrisy is so stunning. The image of a man piously preening about what a good Christian he is in church only to turn around and refuse the basic act of decency that is paying someone what you owe them perfectly symbolizes a lurking suspicion in American culture that the harder someone thumps the Bible, the more selfish and downright sadistic a person he is. And that perception—that showy piety generally goes hand in hand with very un-Christ-like behavior—is not an urban myth at all. On the contrary, it’s the daily reality of American culture and politics.
Bill Maher recently had a rant on his show that went viral addressing this very issue, bad tippers who leave sermons or notes scolding waiters instead of paying them what they’re owed. His larger point is a much more important one: It’s absolutely disgusting how the politicians who make the biggest show of how much they love Jesus would be the first in line to bash him if he returned with a message of clothing the naked and feeding the poor. The Jesus of the Bible multiplied the loaves and fishes. His loudest followers these day gripe about feeding people, claiming it creates a “culture of dependency.” They may even comb through the Bible to take quotes out of context to justify their selfishness toward the poor, as Rep. Steven Fincher did when he claimed the Bible says, “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” The fact that those jobs are unavailable didn’t give him a moment’s pause when suggesting this very un-Christ-like plan to his fellow Americans.
There are plenty of progressive Christians who genuinely try to live out Jesus’ command to love your neighbor as yourself, described in the Bible as the root of Jesus’ entire philosophy. That said, statistics bear out the sense that people who are more invested in being perceived as pious also embrace the most selfish policies. Self-identified conservatives and Republicans claim go to church regularly at twice the rate of self-identified liberals. People who go to church more than once a week are far more conservative than the rest of the population. Indeed, the research suggests how often you report being in the pews is the most reliable indicator of how you’re going to vote. (Though it may not be a reliable indicator of how often you actually go to church. In the grand tradition of showy piety, people who claim to be avid church-goers often lie about it to pollsters.)
The attempts to reconcile the correlation between displays of piety and support for selfish policies get complex on the right, with conservatives often arguing that hating your neighbor at the voting booth doesn’t count because church charities supposedly make up for it. (They don’t.) In reality, the relationship between Christian piety and support for selfish policies is fairly straightforward. It’s not that being Christian makes you conservative. It’s that being conservative makes being a loud and pious Christian extremely attractive.

Without Christianity, the underlying mean-spiritedness of conservative policies is simply easier to spot. Without religion, you’re stuck making libertarian-style arguments that sound like things cackling movie villains would say, like Ayn Rand saying civilization should reject “the morality of altruism.” Since Christianity teaches altruism and generosity, it provides excellent cover for people who want to be selfish, a sheep’s clothing made of Jesus to cover up the child-starving wolf beneath. Since Christians are “supposed” to be good people, people who really aren’t good are lining up to borrow that reputation to advance their agenda.

The fact that conservatism causes obnoxious Christian piety in American culture is most obvious when looking at some of the theological developments that have accrued since the philosophers of selfishness decided to use Christianity as their cover story. The “prosperity gospel” that has developed in recent years is a classic example.
The prosperity gospel teaches, to be blunt, that you can tell how much God favors you by how rich you are. While some on the Christian right reject this idea as a tad crude, it’s still wildly popular and its adherents, like Oral Roberts, are some of the major architects and organizers for the Christian right. It’s a perfect example of how conservative ideology leads to pious Christianity. People want to believe that the rich are better than everyone else and the poor don’t deserve squat, so they find a way to blame God for it rather than own their own greed and selfishness.
Pope Francis may be entirely sincere when he says he wants Catholic clergy to deemphasize the right-wing political pandering in favor of highlighting values that are more in line with liberalism, such as compassion and generosity to the poor, but the odds are slim of this message making inroads with church leaders in the United States. The church needs conservatives who need to believe they’re good and holy people despite their selfish beliefs. Without them, who will show up and tithe? Liberals? Most of them are sleeping in on Sundays, secure that their commitment to social justice makes them good people regardless of how visibly pious they are.
The fact of the matter is that the purposes religion serves in America are shrinking in number. Our cultural identity is increasingly shaped by pop culture, not faith or ethnic identity. Our holidays are more about shopping and having a chance to catch up with far-flung family these days, not showing devotion to a deity. Spiritual needs are often addressed through modern means like psychotherapy and self-help. People build communities through hobbies and interests more than through faith communities bound by geography, ethnicity and family.
Increasingly, the only thing religion has left to justify itself is that it provides cover for people who want to have bigoted, selfish beliefs but want to believe they are good people anyway. As these social trends continue, we can expect the alignment between public piety and grotesquely selfish political beliefs to get worse, not better.

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Parker: Can the Republicans handle prosperity?

Parker: Can the Republicans handle prosperity?

By Kathleen Parker

| The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — In spite of everything — the GOP’s internal scrimmages, the government shutdown, the party’s transparent attempts to derail Obamacare — Republicans keep getting second chances.

The question is, can they handle prosperity? Do they even know what to do with it?

With the myriad problems besieging Obamacare, from the non-rollout to the minuscule number of enrollees in the health insurance exchanges, this is no time for gloating. Rather, it is time for Republicans to get very, very busy with their own ideas for across-the-board reforms.

The party of "no" must become the party of "we can, too!" This doesn’t mean sacrificing core principles, though some could use a little shelf time. It does mean picking battles Republicans can win and avoiding skirmishes that further alienate centrists and minorities.

Forget building a larger tent, which increasingly looks like a pup for two white guys and a flashlight. Ditch the tent and build a coliseum. Install Doric columns, if you like, and grab an obelisk on your way to redemption. At no extra cost, here’s an inscription for the keystone: Waste not, want less. Waste not this moment; want less than perfection and aim for the possible.

This was always House Speaker John Boehner’s battle plan, but he finally concluded that leading his conference where it wanted to go was preferable to inciting a civil war. In a recent interview, Boehner told me he thinks at least some of the better-death-than-compromise caucus had come around to understanding that attaching Obamacare to the continuing resolution, resulting in the government shutdown, was the wrong tactic.

Even so, "at least some" may not be enough. And who knows what Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has up his sleeve as new deadlines loom for budget and debt-ceiling negotiations early next year?

In the meantime, House and Senate Republicans have a small window, while Obamacare is hugging the shoals, to show why their ideas are best. Americans frustrated with Congress and disappointed by the president are primed for someone to pick up the bullhorn and say, "We hear you."

It’s too bad "compassionate conservatism" has become tarnished because compassion is what is needed in today’s GOP playbook: Compassion for the hungry whose food stamps House Republicans excised from the farm bill; compassion for 11 million immigrants who are prisoners in illegal limbo; compassion for gays, lesbians and others seeking protection against workplace discrimination.

These are not such difficult choices in the scheme of things. How to guarantee that Iran can’t weaponize its nuclear capability? That’s tough. Not so tough: Helping the poor feed their families, finding a path for citizenship along with other immigration reforms, extending equal protections to individuals whose sexual orientation should not be a firing offense.

The Senate also has passed a comprehensive immigration bill with the help of 14 Republicans that contains a relatively strenuous path to citizenship that includes paying back taxes and fines, and getting in line behind others seeking citizenship. Hardly a giveaway. Even so, some Republicans aren’t on board with the path to citizenship. Although Boehner told me he hopes to get an immigration bill to the House floor next year, others say 2014’s midterm elections make this unlikely.

Phooey.

What’s really not likely to happen is a Republican White House — ever — without Latino voters. There’s only so much Republicans can accomplish when they control only half of one-third of government. Consider that the biggest states with the largest concentrations of Hispanics — Florida, California, Texas and New York — also convey 151 of the 270 electoral votes needed to be elected president.

Appealing to Latinos doesn’t mean Republicans have to pander or bow to President Obama’s wishes. It means doing the right thing. Even though a slim majority of Americans (53 percent) think most immigrants here illegally should be deported, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online survey last February, a more recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 65 percent favor a path to citizenship if it requires essentially what the Senate bill proposes.

The draconian option of deportation would be an unlovely sight. Not only would families be torn asunder, but America’s crops would wither on the vine, as they did in Alabama after that state’s crackdown prompted a sudden, mass exodus. Yet again, unyielding principle prevailed over common sense and survival.

Time is of the essence if Republicans hope to refresh their image in the public square. Picking battles wisely, acting compassionately, creating rather than negating is the only way forward. Jar the hardwoods, campers, there’s daylight in the swamp.

Kathleen Parker’s email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.

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The Next Time a Republican Says They Oppose a Hike to the Minimum Wage, Just Show Them This

November 10, 2013 By Allen Clifton  

“The minimum wage kills jobs!”  

I’m sure you’ve heard this rallying cry from many conservatives.  It’s a line that might sound like it makes sense to gullible Republican voters—except it doesn’t.

Make no mistake about it, our minimum wage and the amount of people on welfare at deeply intertwined.  Welfare, of course, being another issue Republicans endlessly attack, while opposing an increase in the minimum wage.
Let’s just think about that for a moment.  We have a minimum wage that’s so low, many people working full-time at the wage still qualify (and often require) assistance from the government to survive.  Therefore, our minimum wage being at such low levels is forcing millions of Americans to rely on help from the government just to get by.
Now enter the Republican nonsense that the minimum wage kills jobs and that we must make cuts to our welfare programs because there are too many people relying on the government instead of “taking personal responsibility for themselves.”
So basically Republicans oppose any hike in the minimum wage — a hike which would help millions of people no longer require help (or at least as much help) from the government — all while claiming that there are far too many Americans relying on help from the government.
What next?  Are they going to oppose sex education in our schools and access to contraceptives, then complain about the rate of abortions due to unplanned pregnancies?  Oh wait, never mind.
Their ignorant stance on the minimum wage just baffles me.  Sure, a hike would have a negative impact on some areas of our economy.  But here’s a news flash — nothing we ever pass will completely please everyone.  If we cured cancer, think of all the jobs that would be eliminated.  Does that mean curing cancer is a bad thing?
I just love their premise that if we eliminated the minimum wage, suddenly job growth would skyrocket.  How exactly?  By creating a bunch of jobs that pay even less than our current minimum wage?  How exactly is that going to help our economy or the American worker?  Do these conservatives really believe that by paying some lower skilled workers less, that businesses are going to pass these savings on to other workers?

Please.  They’ll do what they always do — keep it for themselves.
So how exactly does it make any sense to oppose a hike in minimum wage all while complaining about the amount of people relying on government assistance?  It’s our ridiculously low minimum wage that’s causing many Americans to rely on government assistance.
This is honestly one of the most ignorant arguments I deal with when talking to Republicans.  They literally will complain about people being on welfare while opposing a plan that would help millions of people get off welfare.
It makes absolutely no sense.
If we raised the minimum wage to a more respectable level, millions of people would make a decent enough living to where not only would they not require government assistance, they wouldn’t even qualify for it.
And don’t give me this nonsense that a raise in our minimum wage would be a “job killer.”  I’m so sick and tired of that damn phrase I could scream.  Everything is a “job killer” according to Republicans.
Tax hikes, “Obamacare,” raising our minimum wage—whenever Republicans need a “go to” talking point, they just throw out the term “job killer.”
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, demand creates jobs—period.  If there’s consumer demand for a product or service, there will be businesses fighting among themselves to provide it.  These businesses will then hire according to what demand dictates.
Sure, many businesses will initially fight against a hike in the minimum wage.  Heck, it might even temporarily cost our economy jobs.  But in the long run, demand will always win out.  These businesses might let go of a few people in a knee-jerk reaction to a raise in the minimum wage, but if they can’t keep up with demand, they’ll be forced to hire more employees.
“Oh, but then prices will go up!”  Excuse me, are prices going down?  Demand often dictates prices as well.  Nobody wants VHS tapes because it’s a dead technology, while Blu-ray and streaming services are the bigger ticket items right now.  How much are VHS tapes compared to Blu-ray or streaming?  Because demand for VHS tapes are next to nothing, prices for these items as a whole are next to nothing.  However, for Blu-ray or streaming services you’ll pay more considering demand for these products is greater.
Well, as long as their prices remain at a price point that consumers find acceptable.  This is just basic economics.  But it’s something Republicans simply seem unable to grasp.
Take a hypothetical VHS vendor.  Then let’s exempt them from “Obamacare,” give them a tax rate of zero and allow them to pay workers $1.00 an hour.  Know how much money they’re going to make?  Probably next to nothing.  Know how many jobs they’ll create?  Most likely zero. And if they did, it would be one job paying $1.00 an hour.
Consumer demand is the driving force behind our economy.  Consumer demand would also increase if we raised the minimum wage as more Americans would have more spending money.  Consumers with more money to spend create more demand, which then creates more profits for businesses which then creates more jobs.
Or we can do it the Republican way — cut taxes, cut benefits, reduce regulations and see all that savings go into the pockets of the rich executives (as they have for the last 30+ years).  Then as consumer spending falls due to the greed of these corporations trying to squeeze every last drop of revenue from every last worker, they’ll continue to eliminate jobs as consumer demand plummets due to low wages and fewer Americans having jobs.
Then, to “create jobs,” these businesses will lobby Washington for more tax cuts with the promise that this time, they’ll actually create jobs.  But what happens when their tax rates are reduced to zero?  How will they create jobs then?  That’s a question Republicans will never answer.
As this all goes on, and millions of Americans continue to rely on our government for help due to a minimum wage that’s simply too low for Americans to get by on, these same Republicans will stand there and push for cuts to those programs as well.
And that’s just how asinine many conservatives truly are.  They claim there are too many Americans overburdening our welfare system, costing taxpayers billions, yet they oppose a hike in the minimum wage which would help millions of Americans get off government programs and become fully self sufficient.
But then again, these are the people who claim their party represents “freedom” while trying to ban homosexuals from having the right to marry whomever they love.
So common sense obviously isn’t a quality most conservatives value.
Image via AP

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Libertarians are pushing us over a cliff

Thom Hartmann: Libertarians are pushing us over a cliff

The author says we'll get sensible financial regulation, but not until conservative "predators" destroy the economy

Alex Halperin

Thom Hartmann (Credit: Ian Sbalcio)

Brace yourself. Thom Hartmann has bad news. His new book “The Crash of 2016” is self-explanatory but understated. The great recession? As he sees it that that that was a tremor before the big one. It’s coming and just one of the causes might be the unregulated derivatives market measured in hundreds of trillions of dollars, several times as much as the conventional global economy.
Thom Hartmann talked to Salon about how conservative “predators” got out of control, Enron’s ugly legacy and why he’s optimistic. Gluttons for punishment can find an excerpt from the book here.
This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
What is the plot to destroy America? There have been lots of them.

From the beginning of our republic there has been this debate. There have been these dueling visions of what America should be. In some ways it’s an analogue of what ended up being the Whig Federalist vs. the Democratic Republican debates, which is should we have a country that is governed by a wise few, because the masses can’t really be trusted or should we have a country that is governed from the bottom up. This debate has taken a lot of different forms and morphed into a variety of political positions, but that’s the essential battle.
That’s the plot, as it were, on the one hand a group of ideologues concerned that you can’t trust the masses and on the other hand you have the kind of Rooseveltian notion that society should be for all the people and all the people should be able to participate in the society whether it’s through a union or with the democratic process.
There’s two groups that are driving this thing that I describe as the plot. First is the [conservative] ideologues but then there’s also a group of predators who use that rhetoric and that ideology to set up a situation where they can enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. So the rhetoric has been used to deconstruct the protections for our economy and our middle class that kept our nation stable from the 40s through the 80s.

Then the predators stepped in and said lets take that a step further and blow up Glass – Steagall
and put in the Futures Modernization Act so we can have unregulated derivatives, create a 800 trillion dollar market when the whole world’s GDP is only 65 trillion dollars. It’s really the predators that have always brought down our country, but they’ve hid behind ideology that is actually a legitimate ideology.
You’re talking about conservative ideology?
One might call it conservative ideology but I’m not even sure Barry Goldwater would recognize it. Maybe libertarian ideology is a better word for it.
What enabled this ideology to reach what you’re arguing is a dangerous point? There have always been predators.
That’s the second major point of the book. You have to go back to a quote that has been attributed to various people, “When the last man that remembers the horrors of the last great war dies, the next great war becomes inevitable.” When we forget the history to paraphrase Sir Edmund Burke, we are doomed to repeat it. And it takes about 80 years for that to happen. Roughly 90 years ago we saw the election of Warren Harding on a platform, his slogan was “More business in government, less government in business.” He dropped the tax rate, deregulated banks, deregulated pretty much everything. It was this huge bubble in the 20s that crashed in 1929.
If you go back 80 years before that you see the big battles over regulation and deregulation of the 1840s and 1850s that led to the crash of 1857 that arguably led to the Civil War. And if you go back 80 years before that, you see there were somewhat similar economic debates.
Roughly every 80 years we kind of forget about economic bubbles, make the same mistakes, and those mistakes lead to economic disaster, which typically leads to a war. And I’m saying we’re 80 years out from the last one and we’re making the same mistakes.
We’ve just had a severely bad recession as well as quite a few wars, why aren’t those having any the effect you say crises have – a corrective effect?
Because we’ve been insulated from them. Because they haven’t been real for the average American. World War II, the Civil War, The Revolutionary War –everybody participated. There was no getting out of it. This war – the Afghan and Iraqi wars, which I would argue are not so much a result of this economic crisis, they were more strategic and oil wars – those wars were basically volunteer wars. We have a pauper army to an extent.
So the war hasn’t really affected America the way the Vietnam War did or World War II, the Civil War, the Revolution. And the recession – the stock market is back where it was, the recession the really bad part, the hemorrhaging jobs, that lasted for just six or seven months. Obama got his stimulus bill passed and kind of put a stop to it. What I’m suggesting in the book, and what I think I’m making a pretty strong argument for is that we’re still in that crash. The crash really started in 2006/2007 when the housing started to collapse, and arguably it started in 99/2000 when all the banking supports were pulled apart. That was the analogue of 1920 and the analogue of 1840.
Because we haven’t repaired the fundamentals, we haven’t regulated investment banks, we haven’t regulated derivatives and commodities trading; we haven’t protected the middle class and now they’re being eviscerated. The predators are like bandits and the economic fundamentals are not different in any meaningful way than they were in 2006. The crash was going to happen, and they had a whole bunch of bubble gum and wire holding it together.
That’s why I’m saying the [crash will come in] 2016. The crash really started in 2006, and the Bush administration saw it coming and did everything they could to hold it off until after November 2008. And they just were not able to. And now I think the Obama administration thinks they can old it off until after November 2016. But they can’t. I’m skeptical.
From the George Washington administration until the Franklin Roosevelt administration, we never went more than 15 years with out a major National bank panic, or stock crash. Never. It was just constantly happening. When things got so Roosevelt created the SEC, put in Glass – Steagall, put in really serious banking regulations, made unions legal, which is a mass stabilizer. He also raised the top income tax rates, another mass stabilizer since it keeps hot money out of the market place. He put all these protections into place and we went from 1935 until 2008 without a major bank panic and without a major stock market crash that lasted more than a day or two.
They had finally figured out how to build stabilizers into the economy. Well we’ve been deconstructing that aggressively9. Without all of the traditional stabilizers in our economy we’re not just vulnerable to a collapse, but I think a collapse is inevitable.
Consensus is that the crash in 2008 was due to the housing bubble and the mortgage bubble. What are some of the indicators that you’re looking at now that make you nervous?
I would say that the crash of 2008 wasn’t the housing bubble and the mortgage bubble, but it was the housing bubble and the mortgage bubble, which crashed the derivatives bubble, which is really what caused the crash of 2008. You had banks that had multi-trillion dollar liabilities, which we’d never seen before. In the late 90s we had a derivatives market that was less than $80 billion to in 2008 having an unregulated derivatives market was over $800 trillion, according to the bank of international settlements. The entire GDP of the planet is $65 trillion and the entire GDP of our entire country is $15 trillion dollars per year.
This is all funny money, and it dropped down to $400 trillion after the crash, but it’s back up to $700 or $800 trillion now. Nobody knows for sure because it’s unregulated. So I’d say that the crash really begins back in 99/2000 when Phil Gramm pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that allowed all that to happen. Of course he did that because [former Enron CEO] Ken Lay wanted it done.
There was an attempt to change [the law] with Dodd-Frank, but more than half of Dodd-Frank has not even been implemented. And I don’t think Dodd-Frank, even if it was fully implemented, would be strong enough to rein this stuff in. We need to go back to simple stuff like Glass – Steagall. Am I making sense?
You’re making sense. To most people, a derivatives bubble is invisible. Is there anything more tangible to look for?
We are starting to re-inflate the housing bubble. We’re starting to re-inflate the stock market bubble. I mean we’ve been doing it over the last couple of years. But the most tangible thing is that since roughly the beginning of the Reagan presidency, wages have been flat even as productivity has continued to increase. Productivity is what creates corporate profits.
Back in the 60s Time magazine did a thing on the coming leisure society and they predicted that by 2000 people would be working you know 20 – 30 hours a week and making the equivalent in today’s dollars of $80,000 a year. And if productivity and wages had tracked each other over the last 32 years that would be the case right now.
But instead wages have flattened out for the average working person and productivity has increased. All that wage money has gone to basically the ownership class, the CEOs and stockholders.
The consequence of that is that for the middle class to maintain their standard of living more women [went to work]. And then when women entering the [work place] wasn’t enough to maintain middle class stability, people started converting their homes in to ATMs.
Then when they ran out of equity on their house, they began to put stuff on their credit card, and when they ran out of that, they went back to school or sent their kids to school and now we have a trillion dollar debt bubble in student loans. So there’s this massive debt bubble and when that thing bursts it’s going to take everything down with it. People know this instinctively: people don’t buy cars anymore. They rent them, they lease them. People don’t buy houses, they borrow them from the bank. I’m old enough to have seen this cycle. I remember actually buying cars and owning houses back in the 70s 80s.
What can be done?
There are three things we need to do in a very straightforward fashion: Number one: We need to restore fundamental regulators to the game of economics. You wouldn’t play a game of football without referees, and rules and goal posts. And if you said, “Whichever team has the most money can just determine where the goal posts are,” everybody would think you’re crazy. And yet that’s what we’ve done to our economy. We need to change the fundamentals and go back to a set of rules that are good for everybody.
Number two: we need to unwind the debt bubble. I think frankly we need to deal with student loans. Abraham Lincoln gave us great schools. Thomas Jefferson started the first free school. That ended with the Reagan presidency. We should seriously consider debt [forgiveness] for student debt. We have an entire generation that is saddled with decades of paying off debt that none of their predecessors had.
Number three is to put policies into place that will cause wages to track productivity like they did from the George Washington administration to the Ronald Reagan administration. And that principally has to do with taxation at the high end, so that it’s just not worth it anymore to make a thousand times more than your workers. Go back to that 30 to one ratio that we historically had in America.
Are you optimistic?
I’m very optimistic because every time we’ve had one of these four generation, 80 year crashes, what has come out of it has been a very rapid and very substantial positive and forward motion for this country. The first time we went from being a colony of England to forming our own nation. The second time we ended slavery and moved into the Industrial Revolution. The third time in the 1930s we came out of the Great Depression and built the strongest middle class the world had ever seen. We became the world superpower.
Our country tends to move forward but the biggest motions always come after these crashes. We are sort of like in AA: We have to hit bottom before we seriously start talking about looking up and seeing what the possibilities are.
That’s an answer to why didn’t the crash of 2008 do it? Why didn’t the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan do it? The average American didn’t have the experience of hitting bottom. And when we do, then there will be a serious discussion, serious conversation that goes beyond dueling sound bites between political parties, and partisan positions, about what kind of country this is, and what kind of country we want it to be.
You’re saying it is going to have to get really bad, but then you’re optimistic.
Absolutely. That’s what rebooting is, like rebooting your computer.

Alex Halperin is news editor at Salon. You can follow him on Twitter @alexhalperin.

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"You didn't build that!"

"You didn't build that!" It was correct when he said it and its always going to be correct. pic.twitter.com/SpXeQFG8ts
— NO! GOP! NO! (@NoGOPNo) November 7, 2013

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How the Super-Rich Are Abandoning America

 How the Super-Rich Are Abandoning America

How the Super-Rich Are Abandoning America

The wealthiest Americans who hate "takers" enjoy $2 trillion in special tax carve outs, more than double the entire annual budget of Social Security.

Paul Buchheit for The Contributor

November 4, 2013 - 8:35am

 

Paul Buchheit
The Contributor

Paul Buchheit
The Contributor

Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, thinks Americans who object to greed are "imbeciles."
As they accumulate more and more wealth, the very rich have less need for society. At the same time, they've convinced themselves that they made it on their own, and that contributing to societal needs is unfair to them. There is ample evidence that this small group of takers is giving up on the country that made it possible for them to build huge fortunes.

They've Taken $25 Trillion of New Wealth While Paying Less Taxes

The 2013 Global Wealth Databook shows that U.S. wealth has increased from $47 trillion in 2008 to $72 trillion in mid-2013. But according to U.S. Government Revenue figures, federal income taxes have gone DOWN from 2008 to 2012. Even worse, corporations cut their tax rate in half.

American society has gained nothing from its massive wealth expansion. There's no wealth tax, no financial transaction tax, no way to ensure that infrastructure and public education are supported.

Just how much have the super-rich taken over the past five years? Each of the elite 5 percent -- the richest 12 million Americans -- gained, on average, nearly a million dollars in financial wealth between 2008 and 2013.

2. For the First Time in History, They Believe They Don't Need the Rest of Us

The rich have always needed the middle class to work in their factories and buy their products. With globalization this is no longer true. Their factories can be in China, producing goods for people in India or Europe or anywhere else in the world.

They don't need our infrastructure for their yachts and helicopters and submarines. They pay for private schools for their kids, private security for their homes. They have private emergency rooms to avoid the health care hassle. All they need is an assortment of servants, who might be guest workers coming to America on H2B visas, willing to work for less than a middle-class American can afford.

The sentiment is spreading from the super-rich to the merely rich. In 2005 Sandy Springs, a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, stopped paying for most public services, deciding instead to avoid subsidizing poorer residents of Fulton County by hiring a "city outsourcer" called CH2M to manage everything except the police and fire departments. That includes paving the roads, running the courts, issuing tickets, handling waste, and various other public services. Several other towns followed suit.

Results have been mixed, with some of CH2M's clients backing out or renegotiating. But privatization keeps coming at us. Selective decisions about public services threaten to worsen already destitute conditions for many communities. Detroit, of course, is at the forefront. According to an Urban Land Institute report, "more municipalities may follow Detroit's example and abandon services in certain districts."

3. They Soaked the Middle Class, and Now Demand Cuts in the Middle-Class Retirement Fund

The richest Americans take the greatest share of over $2 trillion in Tax Expenditures, Tax Underpayments, Tax Haven holdings, and unpaid Corporate Taxes.

The Social Security budget is less than half of that. Yet much of Congress and many other wealthy Americans think it should be cut. These are the same people who deprive the American public of $300 billion a year by not paying their full share of the payroll tax.

4. They Continue to Insist that They "Made It on Their Own"

They didn't. Their fortunes derived in varying degrees - usually big degrees - from public funding, which provided almost half of basic research funds into the 1980s, and even today supports about 60 percent of the research performed at universities.

Businesses rely on roads and seaports and airports to ship their products, the FAA and TSA and Coast Guard and Department of Transportation to safeguard them, a nationwide energy grid to power their factories, communications towers and satellites to conduct online business, the Department of Commerce to promote and safeguard global markets, the U.S. Navy to monitor shipping lanes, and FEMA to clean up after them.

Apple, the tax haven specialist, still does most of its product and research development in the United States, with US-educated engineers and computer scientists. Google's business is based on the Internet, which started as ARPANET, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency computer network from the 1960s. The National Science Foundation funded the Digital Library Initiative research at Stanford University that was adopted as the Google model. Microsoft was started by our richest American, Bill Gates, whose success derived at least in part by taking the work of competitors and adapting it as his own. Same with Steve Jobs, who admitted: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

Companies like Pfizer and Merck have relied on basic research performed at the National Institute of Health. A Congressional Budget Office study reminds us that The primary rationale for the government to play a role in basic research is that private companies perform too little such research themselves (relative to what is best for society).

5. As a Final Insult, Many of Them Desert the Country that Made Them Rich

Many of the beneficiaries of American research and technology have abandoned their country because of taxes. Like multinational companies that rationalize the move by claiming to be citizens of the world, almost 2,000 Americans, and perhaps up to 8,000, have left their responsibilities behind for more favorable tax climates.

The most egregious example is Eduardo Saverin, who found safe refuge in the U.S. after his family was threatened in Brazil, landed Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate at Harvard, benefited from American technology to make billions from his 4 percent share in Facebook, and then skipped out on his tax bill.

An Apt Summary?

Bernard Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot and member of the Forbes 400, had this to say about any American who might object to all the greed: "Who gives a crap about some imbecile?"

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

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ALEC "Is a Corporate Lobby Masquerading as a Charity"

ALEC "Is a Corporate Lobby Masquerading as a Charity"

Friday, 01 November 2013 09:42 By Lisa Graves, PR Watch | News Analysis 

The Center for Media and Democracy is submitting the testimony below to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Human Rights for the hearing today on "'Stand Your Ground' Laws: Civil Rights and Public Safety Implications of the Expanded Use of Deadly Force." The hearing, where the mother of Trayvon Martin has been asked to testify about the devastating effects of radical changes to gun laws that were backed by the American Legislative Exchange Council in partnership with the NRA, will be webcast live on Tuesday, October 29 at 10am eastern/9am central at this link. Also, here is a letter thanking the Senate Judiciary Committee for shedding light on "Stand Your Ground" laws and ALEC's role in pushing for such laws, from organizations that cumulatively represent more than 10 million Americans.

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Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Committee, my name is Lisa Graves, and I am the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, the publisher of PRWatch.org, ALECexposed.org, SourceWatch.org, and BanksterUSA.org. The organization I lead is a national investigative watchdog group based in Madison, Wisconsin, that has more than 150,000 supporters.
I previously served as the Chief Counsel for Nominations for the Chairman and then Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy. I also served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Policy/Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Justice and as the Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, in addition to other posts in the non-profit sector on national security issues.
I commend the Committee, and its Chairman, for holding this hearing to examine the deadly consequences of so-called “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) laws that have proliferated in the states since 2005, at the urging of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
SYG laws were peddled by the NRA and ALEC alongside bills to expand the number of people carrying concealed firearms, creating a volatile combination that puts more and more American children and adults at risk of being shot and killed. This Committee has held countless hearings over the years on both federal and state crime policies that affect the rights of Americans, and it is fitting that the Senate examine SYG and the organizations that have urged that SYG become binding law.
I am especially concerned about the activities of ALEC to push the NRA’s agenda into law because ALEC has routinely filed tax returns with the IRS claiming it engages in no lobbying, zero. Yet, ALEC and its agents have routinely bragged about getting SYG introduced and passed – the very definition of lobbying – while claiming to the IRS and the public that it spends not a single dollar on lobbying. Today, I will describe the evidence that shows that ALEC is no ordinary non-profit and the ways in which it has misled the public about the true nature of its activities.
I will also detail the role of the NRA in ALEC and ALEC’s role in pushing for SYG laws. I will also discuss the effect of the three main parts of that law, and how that law affected the initial treatment of George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin; how it affected the trial; and how it may affect a civil suit.
In an accompanying appendix to the statement I am submitting for the record, I also describe the role of corporations, such as Koch Industries, and numerous other grantees of the Koch family fortune in advancing the ALEC corporate agenda, along with other aspects of ALEC’s legacy, such as efforts to make it harder for American citizens to vote, as well as its current legislative agenda.
ALEC “Is a Corporate Lobby Masquerading as a Charity”
ALEC describes itself as the largest voluntary group of state legislators in the country, but it is really a corporate-financed lobby that facilitates getting special interest legislation into the hands of lawmakers from every state in the country. In the words of Bill Moyers, ALEC is “the most influential corporate-funded political force most of America has never heard of” as noted in the “United States of ALEC.”
At the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), we launched ALECexposed.org in July 2013 after a whistleblower provided me with nearly 1,000 “model” bills secretly voted on by corporate lobbyists through ALEC. We analyzed ALEC’s operations in detail and broke the initial story with The Nation magazine.
Among other things, CMD examined more than a decade of federal tax filings by ALEC, and we discovered that while ALEC likes to tell the press it is an association of lawmakers, more 98% of its revenue is from corporations and sources other an legislative dues. Lawmakers pay nominal “dues” of $50 a year -- largely window-dressing -- while corporations pay thousands of dollars a year to be part of ALEC and gain special access to legislators at resorts, up to three times a year. ALEC claims it is just like the National Conference of State Legislators, but we found striking differences: NCSL does not hide corporate-funded trips for lawmakers; in NCSL, the parties alternate leadership, and corporations are not equals to lawmakers in NCSL and do not vote as equals as legislators.
ALEC is the epitome of a pay-to-play operation that gives special interests special access, but the way it conducts its operations is very unusual and troubling. That is why ALEC is subject to no fewer than three separate tax fraud complaints to the IRS, with supporting evidence provided by four groups: Common Cause, Clergy Voice, the Voters Legislative Transparency Project, and my organization, CMD.
ALEC Is Subject to Three Complaints Alleging Tax Fraud

1. ALEC is registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, which means that corporations can theoretically deduct the thousands of dollars they pay ALEC to get their legislative wish lists in the hands of lawmakers. ALEC has routinely told the IRS that it engages in zero lobbying, even though numerous communications have been obtained through open records requests and other sources that show ALEC asking for legislation to be introduced, urging that specific legislation be adopted, and taking credit when its legislation becomes law. ALEC is no “charity” – it is a lobby that has routinely boasted to its corporate members that each year nearly 1,000 ALEC bills are introduced in state legislatures and nearly 20% become law.
   
2. A review of ALEC task forces by CMD revealed that almost all of the for-profit corporations that participate in ALEC task forces are represented by their registered lobbyists or are described by their employers as their “government affairs” staffer within the corporation’s internal lobbying shop. CMD and Common Cause have also obtained documents showing that corporations have secretly and routinely sponsored bills at ALEC Task Force meetings and then voted on those bills with legislators at ALEC meetings. Under ALEC’s published bylaws, its state legislative leaders are tasked with a “duty” to get ALEC bills “introduced,” and they do. Some ALEC corporations then lobby for them without disclosing they pre-voted on them.
   That is, as Common Cause pleaded to the IRS, the for-profit corporations that are part of ALEC may also be liable under federal tax laws for taking charitable deductions for activity that is at its root lobbying for legislation through ALEC. CMD agrees with the words of the late former Congressman Bob Edgar, “ALEC is a corporate lobby masquerading as a charity.” The potential liability for the tax fraud alleged could subject ALEC, and possibly those bankrolling it, to criminal and civil liability according to Marcus Owens, the former chief of the IRS’ non-profit division.
   
3. ALEC has repeatedly claimed to the IRS that it spends no money on travel for federal or state officials, but CMD has extensively documented that these claims are also contrary to the evidence. DBA Press and CMD obtaineda three-year spreadsheet of corporate funding for trips by lawmakers along with the names of every corporation that funded the trips and all of the lawmakers who took them.
   
   The amounts spent on lawmaker travel totaled about $500,000 per year for lawmakers’ hotel, airfare, and other expenses, yet each year ALEC claimed it spent nothing for travel. As CMD wrote in its joint report with DBA Press and Common Cause, ALEC’s “scholarships” warrant a thorough IRS investigation of its operations.
   
   CMD also documented that lawmakers routinely solicit funds for these trips from corporations with business before the state and that corporations were told that they could take a charitable deduction for such gifts. ALEC has taken in millions of dollars cumulatively for this travel including one check from PhRMA for $356,000.
   
   Some states have barred legislators from accepting such gifts, while other states have considered or are considering whether ALEC has violated state ethics laws. We know ALEC told the IRS that state lawmakers control the travel fund while ALEC also told state ethics boards the opposite: that state lawmakers do not control it, ALEC does.
   
   VLTP’s Bob Sloan has filed an IRS whistleblower complaint against ALEC based primarily on its scholarship program. Clergy Voice also complained about ALEC’s non-disclosed lobbying and how donations bringlawmakers to meet with corporate lobbyists and ALEC meetings while giving the corporations a tax write-off.
   
   Additionally, CMD and Common Cause recently submitted supplemental evidence to the IRS in support of the initial complaint filed by Common Cause’s Mr. Edgar after CMD launched ALECexposed in July 2013. The supplemental filing last month provided the IRS with numerous documents obtained by DBA Press, CMD, and Common Cause in a number of states that show that ALEC has spent a projected $2 million for lawmaker travel in recent years on the state “scholarship” travel alone – in addition to more sums for lawmaker travel via the ALEC task forces. CMD and Common Cause have also asked each state Attorney General to examine whether ALEC is operating in violation of state law.
   

ALEC’s Corporate Funders Were Known Well before this Hearing
Accordingly, it is astonishing ALEC and a small number of its legislators – many of whom get their trips to ALEC resort meetings paid for by corporations, whose identities are well known to them – are taking umbrage at this Committee for inquiring about ALEC’s legislative agenda and which corporations have bankrolled it. The lawmakers know who funds ALEC’s bill machine and their trips, but until we launched ALECexposed two years ago, the public was largely in the dark about these special interests and the one-stop shopping ALEC provides for corporations and trade groups to secretly advance the same cookie-cutter bills in nearly every state.
Despite the hoopla trumped up over Senator Durbin’s letter, quite frankly, every single for-profit and non-profit corporation this Committee asked about its support for ALEC and its long-standing gun agenda is a corporation that is publicly known to have funded ALEC or participated in its meetings about bills, based on the investigative research of CMD, along with others like Common Cause, DBA Press, VLTP, CAP, Greenpeace, bloggers at Daily Kos, and many, many ordinary citizen sleuths.
Indeed, for more than two years, many thousands of citizens and customers have been conducting a corporate responsibility campaign to ask corporations to stop supporting ALEC’s extreme agenda. CMD launched that initiative in July 2013 with a postcard campaign to Coca Cola asking what Coke was doing behind closed doors with ALEC and Koch Industries, and why Coke was supporting a group that was working to thwart efforts to address climate change (and pushing “denialist” legislation), working to make it harder for college students and other Americans to vote through restrictive Voter ID bills, and, among other things, trying to privatize social security which has long been part of the agenda of David and Charles Koch.
These and other CMD reports highlighting the damaging ALEC agenda being funded by corporations were aided by public outreach by Common Cause, People for the American Way, Progress Now, VLTP, and Greenpeace, to name a few, plus numerous bloggers and concerned citizens. Countless workers and their unions, like AFT, NEA, AFL-CIO, AFSCME, SEIU, and others, have also publicly spoken out about ALEC’s extreme agenda. The civil rights group Color of Change also began an effort in late 2011 to contact community engagement representatives of public corporations about their concerns about ALEC’s voter restriction agenda and also spearheaded a corporate accountability campaign on ALEC's gun agenda in 2013.
In the aftermath of public outrage over the way Florida’s SYG law was cited to prevent the arrest and prosecution of George Zimmerman’s pursuit and killing of unarmed African American teen Trayvon Martin, at least 49 for-profit corporations and six non-profit corporations publicly said they stopped funding ALEC. More than 70 lawmakers sought to break from ALEC, too, and, in addition, more than 100 ALEC members lost or left their seats last year.
CMD has documented which corporations that have left ALEC and those that have continued to fund its meetings, as well as state and national reports on ALEC’s operations, through CMD’s publications–PRWatch.org, ALECexposed.org, and SourceWatch.org. We have also launched a clearinghouse for information about the “State Policy Network” (SPN) groups that amplify ALEC’s legislative agenda, and which is funded by some of the same corporations and foundations. (We have also exposed the funding of Fix the Debt, NFIB, and other fronts.)
Here is a link to CMD's op-ed about the PR campaign waged by ALEC in response to the Senate letter about ALEC corporations.
Lobbying Can’t Escape Scrutiny by Calling It “Freedom of Association”
I find it especially absurd for the Wall Street Journal -- whose editorial board members have close ties to ALEC that they have failed to disclose in all but one of its numerous editorials and op-eds backing ALEC or the ALEC legislative agenda -- to claim that this Committee is engaged in any kind of McCarthyism, by asserting that corporations have been asked “are you now or have you ever been a member.” As far as I can tell, every corporation asked about SYG has been publicly documented to have funded or supported ALEC long before now. For more than two years, CMD has been documenting the for-profit and non-profit corporations that have been working behind closed doors with ALEC lawmakers. That list is fully accessible to the public, including Senators and the press, along with the sources.
The Wall Street Journal’s hyperbole, echoed by some of the SPN “think tanks,” like the Goldwater Institute, that work closely on ALEC’s agenda, is reckless and wrong. The Journal owes the Chairman an apology for its slurs. It also owes its readers an apology for failing to acknowledge its own conflict of interest and that of its editorial board member Steven Moore regarding ALEC in all except one editorial, which was penned after CMD called out the Journal for its failure to acknowledge Moore’s close ties to ALEC. To date, it has still refused to detail how much money, if any, its editorial board member receives from outside for-profit or non-profit groups that he works closely with and then promotes on the editorial page.
Moreover, it is extremely dangerous, in my view, to validate the notion that corporations have an unlimited “right” to keep their identities secret when they are involved in lobbying. Indeed, the Republican Texas Attorney General rejected just such a claim last month in response to an ALEC legislator’s efforts to shield ALEC from her compliance with state open records laws under the spurious claim that complying with state transparency laws about groups contacting legislators about changing the law would violate ALEC’s supposed freedom of association for itself and its corporate bankrollers.
Although ALEC denies that it lobbies, hundreds of documents have been provided to the IRS that show ALEC’s staff asking for specific bills to be introduced, voted on, and approved, satisfying the IRS definition of lobbying and related definitions in numerous states. ALEC and its representatives have repeated those denials to the press despite literally pounds of physical evidence to the contrary. Whether the IRS will take action on these claims -- in the face of political pressure by some to claim that its examination of a flurry of groups seeking non-profit status focused only on right-leaning groups, even though documents released after the scandal broke reveal the both progressives and “conservatives” were examined – remains to be seen. In my view, it would be a scandal if the IRS did not find ALEC to have engaged in a multi-year pattern of deception in its IRS filings regarding lobbying and trips to resorts for lawmakers, funded by corporations.
ALEC is using corporations with legislative interests before the state to fund its operations, but corporate lobbyists also use ALEC to obtain access to, and funnel gifts of travel to, lawmakers whom they want to change state laws. Recognizing such a putative “right” to hide lobbying activity would limit the actual rights of the people those legislators were elected to represent and limit the ability of citizens to protect against the corruption of our lawmakers. Such a claim of “associational” rights, if accepted, could be used to thwart not only the enforcement of state ethics laws but also federal lobbying and disclosure laws.
Such claims also fly in the face of long-standing clean government laws, even though such laws – as we have seen and documented in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision – remain inadequate to obtain all the disclosure needed to protect the integrity of the democratic process. (Unsurprisingly, ALEC opposed the addition of new disclosure rules in response to that case and its former long-standing member the Center for Competitive Politics in its press release about Senator Durbin’s letter uses that as a vehicle to complain about the Senate’s DISCLOSE Act as a purported abuse of transparency and disclosure rules.)
In a healthy democracy, the powerful cannot just create a secretive “club” made of legislators and lobbyists where legislation is discussed and pushed, and then claim it is a violation of “freedom of association” if a legislative body or a citizen asks who is funding such operations and what legislation has been advanced with such funds. The American people have a fundamental right to know which corporations or special interests are seeking to influence their elected lawmakers, and which corporation’s lobbyists are wining and dining their representatives in our republic. The People have a fundamental right to regulate or bar such corrupting activities.
ALEC Opposes Transparency and Threatens State Sunshine Laws
In many states citizens have a right to see the letters or emails of for-profit or non-profit corporations that contact lawmakers, in order to help citizens protect against corruption of their representatives. Yet ALEC and its allies have recently started claiming that ALEC has an unlimited right to associate and communicate secretly with legislators that trumps citizens’ rights under state open records laws.
In the aftermath of open records disclosures that have become the basis of complaints to the IRS alleging ALEC is defrauding taxpayers, ALEC has started claiming that its communications with lawmakers -- who are part of ALEC because they are lawmakers and who are often put on ALEC Task Forces that coincide with their state legislature’s substantive committee assignment – are no longer subject to, or responsive to, government transparency laws in some states.
ALEC has literally stamped communications about bills it wants lawmakers to introduce with a disclaimer that such documents and emails are not subject to open records laws. It has also demanded that lawmakers give it special treatment and notify it of every open records request and consult with it before providing any documents to the public. This constitutes a real obstruction of the law, in my view.
One of ALEC’s primary objections, its reason for being, is to get state laws changed. As noted above, under ALEC’s published bylaws, the state legislative leaders that aid ALEC have been tasked for years with a “duty” to get ALEC legislation introduced into law, as they have for SYG bills and in numerous other areas of the law. ALEC legislative leaders are also tasked with helping to raise funds for ALEC, and as CMD has documented some lawmakers have used their office and official letterhead to solicit money from corporations for ALEC, for their trips.
CMD is in the midst of a fight to preserve open government in Wisconsin, where an ALEC politician is trying to void the state’s tradition of transparency by claiming that legislators are now immune from enforcement of open records laws.
That claim by Wisconsin state Senator Leah Vukmir has been condemned by the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, which noted that “no lawmaker has ever before tried to defeat the state's open records law by employing this ruse.” Papers across the state are editorializing against this effort to thwart transparency.
Another state freedom of information foundation has also condemned a related ALEC attempt to claim a “freedom of association” right against lawmakers complying with traditional open records laws, noting that “ALEC's arguments reflect a dangerous trend of claiming a constitutional right to close the public off from governmental body deliberations,” including who is communicating to lawmakers.
The truth is that ALEC successfully moved its legislative agenda in the states in secret for decades with little public scrutiny or sustained attention, before CMD launched ALECexposed.org. Now that the public and press can connect the dots between ALEC corporate funders, the legislation those special interests want adopted, and the lawmakers introducing ALEC bills, ALEC is throwing up all kinds of claims, such as having a right to associate with lawmakers in secret, in spite of laws requiring lobbying and gifts to be disclosed, which ALEC has defied, in my opinion.
ALEC and its allies among some right-wing outlets have also sought to demonize those who dare to speak up about ALEC’s agenda and its dubious operations, through the Orwellian claim that when citizens speak out about ALEC and what companies are funding the American people are supposedly suppressing the speech of powerful corporations. But corporations have enormous treasuries to advance their legislative agendas, and people have a right to hold them accountable.
ALEC also seeks to wrap itself in the First Amendment even as its agenda includes legislation to criminalize journalism, as with its bill to impose onerous restrictions on investigations of factory farms (through its “Ag-Gag” bill), for example. ALEC has recently entertained the idea that it might support anti-SLAPP legislation sought by Yelp, but it remains to be seen if its legislators will put any real effort behind that bill or whether this overture will be just a talking point for PR purposes that does not get any momentum from ALEC lawmakers in the states.
ALEC has also claimed to unwitting reporters that its meetings are open to the press, while denying credentials to reporters, denying press with credentials from seeing the task force meetings where corporations vote alongside legislators, and hiring security and police officers who have interrogated reporters for speaking to un-credentialed reporters or activists.
It has even circulated “face sheets” containing the photos of those who have written stories critical of ALEC (including me). Its PR operations have also helped deploy opposition research against journalists whose investigations have revealed unfavorable facts about it and then touted such stories in emails to lawmakers.
ALEC has recently decided to use the slogan “Protect Free Speech: Be Heard. Speak Up,” but its record indicates contempt for investigative reporters as well as citizens who speak up and ask to be heard on their objections to ALEC’s special interest legislation and to elected representatives voting on ALEC model bills with lobbyists of out-of-state or even foreign companies, behind closed doors. The fact that such legislation still has to be voted on in a legislature before it becomes law does not negate what it means for corporations to vote first. Plus, we have seen in recent years that ALEC legislation has been rammed through legislatures by ALEC legislators, often without hearings and allowing no amendments to bills pre-approved by ALEC corporations.
For these and other reasons, the Committee’s inquiry into ALEC is just and modest, under the circumstances. If this Senate cannot make inquiries into a non-profit or for-profit corporation which has enormous influence on lawmaking and which has been accused of federal tax fraud by numerous citizens, then the Senate needs to be reformed and its investigative powers must be made much stronger.
We commend the Chairman’s courage in holding this hearing and for asking tough questions about the shady operation known as ALEC and its role in remaking U.S. gun laws, as well as many other areas of law affecting people’s human rights and civil rights under our federal Constitution and our state constitutions.
The ALEC/NRA SYG Laws: Their Roots and Their Fruit
By most accounts, the SYG laws that have spread across the country had their genesis in 2005, when the first SYG law passed in Florida, but that ignores the legal and political landscape that preceded that event.
By all accounts, the National Rifle Association is one of the richest non-profit groups in the country. Unlike ALEC, the NRA discloses the costs of its extensive lobbying activities ($2.9 million federally in 2012, an additional sums in the states, through its “Institute for Legislative Action,” the NRA-ILA). The various arms of the NRA had revenues and expenses of nearly 250 million in 2011, the most recent year for which its tax filings are available.
The NRA receives untold sums from global gun sellers, and it also charges $35 per year for people to become subscribers. The NRA and its related organizations paid its Executive Director, Wayne LaPierre, a corporate-style salary of just under $1 million in total compensation in 2011, along with hundreds of thousands in compensation it paid to other NRA executives, according to tax forms.
The NRA is a formidable power in American politics, though it counts only a fraction of American gun owners among its members. It had 3.1 million subscribers to its magazines in 2012, out of an estimated 70 million gun owners in the U.S. In addition to lobbying spending, the NRA’s PAC spent nearly $2 million on direct contributions to political candidates (predominantly Republicans) in 2012, and the NRA spent an additional $19 million on “outside spending” in political advertising, most of which were for negative ads against Democrats and a smaller portion of advertising that favored Republicans. In 2010, the NRA spent an estimated $28 million on political contributions, outside spending, and federal and state lobbying.
To understand the push for the SYG laws, it is important to understand the election cycles that preceded it. In the 2000 presidential race, the NRA – which is one of the richest non-profit trade and membership groups in the country -- ran heavy ads in West Virginia and in Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore’s home state of Tennessee. Gore lost both states. In West Virginia, where I volunteered for ‘Get Out the Vote” activities, the NRA also bought an hour-length ad to abut “60 Minutes” the Sunday before the election that featured hunters and union men in tears, stoked by the NRA that Gore would take away their guns.
In spite of the unprecedented intervention of a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the recount of votes in Florida counties and the flawed butterfly ballot and ballot punches, part of the political lore of that election has become that Gore lost due to the spending power of the NRA, which worked hard to defeat him in his home region. There was no evidence that Gore had any intent or desire to take away the guns of law-abiding citizens, but that was irrelevant to NRA attack ad campaigns.
After President George W. Bush was sworn in, dozens of new political appointees, such as Ted Cruz who would later be elected Senator from Texas, entered the Justice Department and began working on changing federal laws, including the interpretation and application of gun laws. In the Office of Policy Development, I was the deputy tasked near the end of the Clinton Administration, and after the tragic gun massacre at Columbine, with working with the Deputy Attorney General’s office on gun policy, among other issues. I became the managing editor of the National Integrated Firearms Violence Reduction Strategy, which included inter- and intra-agency recommendations for strengthening U.S. gun laws.
I continued to meet as part of the firearms working group during the transition to the new administration after Bush was sworn in and that is how I came to work briefly with Ted Cruz, who now represents Texas in the Senate. He had been tasked with working on gun issues at the Justice Department as a new Bush appointee who had spent time on the presidential campaign as part of the “Bush-Cheney Florida Recount Team”
In the midst of the transition while I continued to participate in the firearms working group meetings on substantive issues as a career staff member at DOJ, I learned that one of the first activities of the political appointees on the Justice Department’s gun working group was to go on an outing with NRA reps to a shooting range nearby. I was also told that the Attorney General and some of the Schedule C appointees down the hall in the Deputy AG’s office were meeting regularly with NRA reps and critics of Clinton gun policies, like John Lott and others.
Subsequently, newly sworn in Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a letter to the NRA effectively changing decades of Justice Department policy regarding the interpretation of the Second Amendment, to state that it protected a fundamental individual right, suggesting that any regulation of that right is subject to strict scrutiny. That position was contrary to assurances he made in his Senate confirmation hearings, but it signaled a sea change for the Justice Department on gun policies. Seven years later, a split Supreme Court – with the addition of two Bush appointees – would rule 5-4 in favor of the position of Ashcroft and the NRA on that point.
As many recall, in the mid-term elections of 2002, the Republicans took back the Senate, and with one-party control of the political branches, Congress lacked the political will and the numbers to stop the Clinton Administration’s “assault weapons” ban from expiring in late 2004, a presidential election year. Bush was declared the winner of that race, and the Republicans also increased their margin in the Senate.
Following that election, the NRA had no major Democratic bogeyman at the federal level to fundraise against or to stoke fears that Democrats were coming for people’s guns. A majority of state legislatures and state governorships were also under Republican control, which made it easier for the NRA to get its legislation adopted. I believe the NRA was in search of another wedge issue that would suggest that people’s rights were at risk and that would allow the NRA to push through legislation that might aid gun sales while also providing another means to politically punish anyone who dared to vote against its legislative agenda.
How the “Castle Doctrine”/SYG Bill Became the Law
It is against this backdrop that in late 2004, the NRA’s lobbyist and former president, Marion Hammer, invented what became known as SYG legislation.
The bill she “conceived” was dubbed the “Castle Doctrine,” a name that evokes the phrase “your home is your castle.” The name is misleading because in Florida and in every other state, Americans’ rights to defend themselves in their homes from an intruder is well-protected under long-standing laws of self-defense. However, the bill name masked the fact that it was designed to dramatically change the effect of invoking a self-defense claim and to change the substantive law of what counts as justifiable homicide, as described in more detail below.
Ms. Hammer approached two Florida lawmakers who were members of ALEC -- Florida state Sen. Durell Peaden (R-Crestview) and Rep. Dennis Baxley (R-Ocala) -- to get her idea introduced as a bill. In 2005, Sen. Peaden was an ALEC leader, serving on the Executive Committee of ALEC’s “Health and Human Services Task Force.” Baxley, a former head of the Christian Coalition in Florida, is also a member of ALEC. His legislative résumé includes sponsoring bills creating license plates honoring the Confederacy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The NRA’s bill was converted to legislative language with the help of other lawmakers, and it was adopted by both houses of the Florida legislature in the spring of 2005. During the votes, Ms. Hammer was reportedly observed staring down lawmakers. The bill was signed into law on April 26, 2005, by Governor Jeb Bush, with Ms. Hammer, looking over his shoulder.
However, because the new law would require that Florida’s jury instructions be changed its implementation was delayed until the fall of the 2005. New jury instructions were to be written over the summer to apply to claims of justifiable homicide before the new law could take effect.
How the Florida SYG Law Became an ALEC “Model” for the Nation
In the summer of 2005, at ALEC’s annual meeting in Grapevine, Texas, the the NRA’s Hammer asked legislators and lobbyists at a closed-door meeting of ALEC’s ‘Criminal Justice Task Force” to adopt the Florida Castle Doctrine/SYG bill as an ALEC model bill. Notably, it was the NRA that brought the bill to ALEC, not the ALEC legislators who sponsored it. That’s because, like many ALEC bills, it was really the special interest’s legislative agenda, not the brainchild of the legislators.
The NRA-ILA posted at the time that Hammer’s pitch “was well received,” and the bill was approved “unanimously” at the ALEC Task Force meeting.
That ALEC Task Force was co-chaired by Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer of ammunition and it is nation’s largest seller of guns and ammunition. Also, ALEC Task Force director was Chris Oswald, former “State Liaison” for the NRA.
As noted above, corporate lobbyists and state legislators on ALEC Task Forces have equal votes on proposed model legislation, so the Florida law was ratified by Wal-Mart and its 2005 public sector co-chair, Texas Rep. Ray Allen, along with other state legislators and corporate lobbyists. It was also endorsed by a representative of the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation, according to minutes of the secret meeting. The full list of lawmakers, corporate lobbyists, and special interest groups at that meeting has not been disclosed.
In September 2005, that bill was adopted by ALEC's National Board of Directors, which has a procedure to allow model bills to be approved if there is no objection. At the time, the public sector portion of ALEC’s board was chaired by Georgia state Rep. Earl Ehrhart; the corporate board included Koch Industries, Altria (parent of Philip Morris), Coors, Bell South, and Verizon. (ALEC has said its corporate board does not vote. Corporations and elected officials have an equal vote in the task forces, and the board usually defers and ratifies the model bills adopted.)
At the next ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force meeting, in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, in 2006, the NRA’s rep reported on the “continued success” in securing passage of the ALEC/NRA Castle Doctrine/SYG bill in other states.
Similarly, in 2007, an ALEC “Legislative Report Card” boasted that the ALEC/NRA Castle Doctrine/SYG bill was introduced or passed in numerous states. ALEC also highlighted legislators who introduced versions of its model bill, including Texas state Sen. Jeff Wentworth and Rep. Joe Driver.
Then, in 2008, ALEC filed an amicus brief in a U.S. Supreme Court case on the same side as the NRA to adopt the Ashcroft view of the Second Amendment. Later, at the American Conservative Union's CPAC meeting, the NRA's Cam Edwards interviewed Michael Hough, who was then ALEC's “Public Safety and Elections Task Force” director/staffer, to discuss “ALEC's strong relationship with the NRA and explain the support of gun rights and ownership.” Hough told listeners that ALEC worked “with our partners, the National Rifle Association” on the brief.
ALEC’s Hough also praised the relationship between ALEC and the NRA on issues like the Castle Doctrine/SYG legislation, stating: “Some of the things that we were pushing in states was the ‘Castle Doctrine,’ we worked with the NRA on that. That's one of our model bills we have states introduce . . . .”
To be clear, this is just one of many instances in which ALEC has talked about what any reasonable person understands to be lobbying, and yet ALEC has repeatedly filed IRS reports claiming to the agency that it does no lobbying at all.
Notably, the NRA was a long-time member and long-time funder of ALEC. An NRA representative was an active part of ALEC’s renamed Public Safety and Elections Task Force, and its predecessor task forces, for at least two decades.
Tara Mica, the NRA-Institute for Legislative Action State Liaison, was also the co-chair of ALEC's Public Safety and Elections Task Force in 2008, 2009, and 2010 and into 2011. While the NRA was co-chair, that ALEC Task Force approved legislation to make it harder for Americans to vote through its controversial "voter ID" bill and also the Arizona anti-immigrant legislation, SB 1070, before it was introduced in the state legislature, in addition to other bills that benefit the private prison industry.
To date, the ALEC/NRA Castle Doctrine/SYG bills have been passed in whole or in part in more than two dozen states. Only in the past year or so has the bill become known as the SYG bill as opposed to the Castle Doctrine, which is the name it bears in almost every state in which it was introduced to become law.
In 2012, ALEC announced it was abandoning its Public Safety and Elections Task Force in the wake of the outcry over Trayvon Martin’s killer walking free. Despite efforts to distance themselves from the Castle Doctrine/SYG legislation, neither ALEC nor the corporations that are funding it have done anything to undo the damage done by this law or other aspects of ALEC’s extreme gun agenda. Despite its efforts to get the bill adopted, it has done nothing to get them repealed.
How the ALEC/NRA SYG Law Changed the Law
The SYG law passed in Florida and adopted as an ALEC model in 2005 makes three main changes to the law.

1. It attempts to create immunity from criminal prosecution, which it defines broadly to include “arresting, detaining in custody, charging or prosecuting,” for the use of deadly force if a person who claims self-defense, under certain circumstances.
   Under traditional criminal law, when a person is killed the state can arrest and charge a person who uses deadly force with a crime and the defendant can assert a defense to the crime, but pre-SYG a state could not be blocked from arresting a suspect in a killing and letting a jury decide if the use of force was justified. The state has the burden of proof of establishing the elements of intentional murder or unintentional manslaughter, beyond a reasonable doubt, and the defense may seek to argue an excuse for the killing, such as self-defense or, in other words, to claim that the killing was justified and so the defendant should not be convicted. While traditionally prosecutors have discretion not to charge in cases of deadly force where self-defense is claimed, what the SYG law does is attempt to tie the hands of police and prosecutors.
   It also changes the burden of proof by creating a legal “presumption” that a person had a reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm if that person kills someone believed to be unlawfully entering a home or vehicle, for example. That is, the person who kills another in those circumstances may not actually have had a reasonable fear of death or serious harm, but the SYG law changes the rules to make the law presume that such fear was reasonable and thus killing was justified. It also provides that someone who “attempts to enter a person’s dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle is presumed to be doing so with the intent to commit an unlawful act involving force or violence,” even if that was not their actual intent.
   These presumptions can have the effect of barring the arrest and prosecution of someone who kills another attempting to enter their home. What this means is that the SYG law is designed to prevent a jury from considering whether someone who used deadly force was justified, acted reasonably, and used reasonable force.
   
2. Regardless of whether someone who shoots another to death seeks to invoke these presumptions and obtain criminal immunity, the SYG bill also changes the underlying substantive law of the state regarding justifiable homicide.
   The ALEC/NRA SYG bill provides that: “A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another, or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
   By its terms, the NRA/ALEC model bill transports the traditional rules for self-defense in one’s home to any place a person has a right to be, including any public place, such as a bar or a sporting event. This is significant because under traditional criminal law a person outside his home has a duty to retreat and avoid using deadly force if possible.
   As a result of the SYG law, Florida’s model jury instructions had to be re-written. Here are the instructions that would have been given, prior to 2005:
   "The defendant cannot justify the use of force likely to cause death or great bodily harm unless he used every reasonable means within his power and consistent with his own safety to avoid the danger before resorting to that force.
   “The fact that the defendant was wrongfully attacked cannot justify his use of force likely to cause death or great bodily harm if by retreating he could have avoided the need to use that force."
   Here is the jury instruction as a result of the SYG law passing in Florida:
   “If [the defendant] was not engaged in an unlawful activity and was attacked in any place where he had a right to be, he had no duty to retreat and had the right to stand his ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he reasonably believed that it was necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”
   This jury instruction contains the exact language used in the SYG law.
   
3. SYG also changes the law to grant immunity from civil suit for a defendant claiming deadly force was justified under the circumstances provided. It does not, however, specify a time-frame for making such a motion.
   It also provides that if a judge grants immunity then the plaintiff – the family of the shooting victim – would have to pay the killer’s attorney’s fees and lost wages.
   What this part of the law does is make it harder for the family of a shooting victim to sue the killer of their child, spouse, or parent.
   It can be difficult to obtain a criminal conviction when self-defense is claimed. A civil trial, however, has many advantages over a criminal trial when someone has died at the hands of another. The first advantage is that the burden of proof is more easily met. Rather proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the plaintiff would have to prove what more likely happened.
   The second advantage of a civil case is that, unlike a criminal trial where a defendant cannot be compelled to testify against himself in risk of criminal jeopardy, the victim's family can put the killer under oath. That is, the killer would not be able to invoke Fifth Amendment protections and he or she would be subject to cross-examination by an adversary. If a civil case were not barred by the SYG grant of immunity from suit, a killer who used deadly force causing the death of another would have to justify himself before a jury, which could consider his claims about what happened without any SYG-imposed presumption that deadly force was reasonable or presumption that a victim had any intent to use force or violence. Additionally, upon cross-examination, adefendant’s history of violence could potentially impeach him.
   However, the SYG law is designed to try to prevent a jury from considering the facts on the merits, without the thumb of the NRA on the scale of justice.
   

CMD has assembled an appendix to this statement that provides more details about the evidence in the ZImmerman case and how the law affected the Zimmerman case. That appendix, which is attached below, also discusses the role of the Koch family fortune in funding ALEC and related groups.
CONCLUSION
For all of these reasons, I applaud the Committee’s consideration of the damaging effects of the SYG laws, the effect of these laws, and who is behind them.
Thank you for considering my views.
Lisa Graves

Lisa Graves

Lisa is Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief. She previously served as the Chief Counsel for Nominations on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice, among other roles.

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