The right wing's legislative laboratory

Published at Socialistworker.org.

THE GROUNDSWELL of anger and protest following the murder of Trayvon Martin has forced the discussion of racism onto the center stage of national politics after years when it was consigned to the margins.

One part of that discussion has been the spread--and the consequences--of supposed self-defense laws like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which was the excuse used by police and prosecutors for not charging George Zimmerman with Trayvon's murder for a month and a half.
The questioning of the "Stand Your Ground" law has, in turn, cast a spotlight on the legislative laboratory that produced it--a shadowy, conservative non-profit organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Think of a right-wing legislative initiative at any level of government, and there's a chance ALEC had a hand in it. In spite of its innocuous-sounding name, ALEC represents a fusion of corporate money, super-rich reactionaries and right-wing politicians behind the spread of not only "Stand Your Ground"-style laws, but a whole host of other issues.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, the more than 800 model bills and resolutions promoted by ALEC:

reach into almost every area of American life: worker and consumer rights, education, the rights of Americans injured or killed by corporations, taxes, health care, immigration, and the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. Only by seeing the depth and breadth and language of the bills can one fully understand the power and sweep of corporate influence behind the scenes on bills affecting the rights and future of every American in every single state.

According to the Center, ALEC's membership includes approximately 2,000 legislators, almost all Republicans, as well as over 300 corporations. The organization is dedicated to promoting model pieces of legislation to serve as templates for bills introduced at the local, state and federal level.

Almost all of the organization's funding comes from corporate sources, but the most notorious funders of all are the billionaire Koch brothers. With their help, ALEC was essential in developing the strategy behind the attack on public-sector unions following the Republicans' 2010 election victory, with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker leading the charge.

But as ALEC faces growing scrutiny, we're learning that all this was the tip of the iceberg.

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ALEC WAS instrumental in pushing for Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, which authorizes the use of deadly force by those who "reasonably [believe] that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm." Those who use deadly force in these circumstances don't have a "duty to retreat."

"Stand Your Ground" laws are a particularly extreme version of the "Castle doctrine," which is on the books in various forms in most U.S. states. These laws authorize deadly force when confronted with a threat in one's home. But the "Stand Your Ground" law in Florida and other states applies "in any other place where he or she has a right to be."

Since the law went into effect in Florida in 2005, there has been a spike in killings labeled "justifiable homicides." According to an analysis of law enforcement data by the Sun Sentinel newspaper, between 2007 and 2010, "388 killings in Florida were ruled justifiable homicides. Over the previous seven years, there had been only 237 such cases."

According to Sun Sentinel, half of the victims of "justifiable homicides" committed by civilians were Black, though African Americans are only about 17 percent of the state's population. Florida police committed 60 percent of the "justifiable homicides" during this time.

These facts, as well as similar experiences in other states--like Wisconsin, where an unarmed Black 20-year-old was killed by a white homeowner who won't be charged because of the state's Castle doctrine--have caused many people to wonder whether such laws mean that, in the words of one writer, it's "open season on Black youths."

The racist character of these supposedly "colorblind" laws is highlighted by the case of Marissa Alexander, a 31-year-old Black mother of three who faces up to 20 years in prison in Florida for firing a warning shot into the ceiling of her home in an attempt to ward off her abusive husband. A judge dismissed the "Stand Your Ground" defense in her case.

But not-so-veiled racism is familiar territory for ALEC. The group was a major force behind "voter ID" legislation introduced in a majority of states last year. Sponsored by ALEC's Republican lackeys, the bills would require a photo ID to vote, disproportionately denying the franchise to people of color, the poor and college students, groups more likely to vote for Democrats.

A Democratic Party-backed effort from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Color of Change and Credo Action is using public outrage about the Voter ID and Stand Your Ground bills to pressure major corporations and foundations to stop funding ALEC.

As of April 19, a dozen corporations, including Coca-Cola, McDonald's, PepsiCo and Blue Cross Blue Shield, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have pulled funding for ALEC.

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ALEC--WHOSE website banner proclaims "Limited Government, Free Markets, Federalism"--came into being in 1973 as a part of the corporate-backed effort to challenge the gains of civil rights movement, and of the struggles it inspired for economic justice, rights for other oppressed groups, a clean environment and more.

ALEC's founders included Illinois Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, sponsor of the amendment bearing his name that since 1976 has banned federal funding for abortion--the first of many efforts to restrict working class and poor women's access to abortion.

Since then, ALEC has had a hand in some of the most atrocious policy initiatives imaginable, benefitting its super-rich sponsors at the expense of almost everyone and everything else--working people, their unions, people of color, women, the poor and the environment, to name a few.

Before the "Stand Your Ground" push, ALEC played a role in promoting "tough on crime" legislation central to the rise of the modern system of mass incarceration--what author Michelle Alexander has dubbed the "New Jim Crow." This system, with its labeling of Black men as "criminals," provided the context for George Zimmerman to view Trayvon Martin as a threat.
According to Mike Elk and Bob Sloan, writing in the Nation, "ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders, "three strikes" laws and "truth in sentencing" laws."

As Elk and Sloan point out, having helped engineer the unprecedented growth in the prison population, ALEC helpfully came up with legislation to legalize the use of prison labor in the private sector--at wages as low as 20 cents an hour:

ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona's state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona's notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country's massive prison population.

ALEC's latest proposal for the mass incarceration industry? Privatize the parole system. As Mike Elk told Democracy Now! last August:

[W]hat ALEC wants to do now is reform the parole system in this country, privatize it. So now prisoners have to put up bond, with private bail bond companies that are owned by big Wall Street firms, where they have to pay outrageous fees in order to get out of prison.

Before the latest scandals, ALEC got unwanted public attention last year during the uprising in Wisconsin against Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting legislation targeting public-sector workers. Walker's candidacy for governor was backed to the hilt by ALEC funders David and Charles Koch, the ultra-right wing billionaires who wanted Walker's Wisconsin used as a laboratory for anti-labor legislation.

As for the environment, ALEC--which has received immense sums from energy companies like ExxonMobil, BP, Texaco and Chevron, and other notorious polluters like Monsanto and Dow Chemical--has pushed a litany of policies to allow corporations to destroy the planet unimpeded by any constraints on profits.

According to the Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC's anti-environmental measures include: blocking limits on pesticide use, making it easier to build nuclear power plants, preventing opposition to genetically modified crops, eliminating zoning regulations, "privatizing water and sewer systems" and "protecting polluting corporations from civil and criminal liability."

And those are just some of the lowlights. ALEC has written and lobbied for a staggering variety of legislation--from cutting taxes on the wealthy, to undermining the government's Medicare and Medicaid health programs, to limiting corporate liability from consumer lawsuits, to busting unions through "right-to-work" legislation, to eliminating minimum wage guarantees, to privatizing anything and everything in the hands of the state.

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THE EFFORT to expose ALEC for its many crimes is backed by the Democratic Party, for obvious reasons. As its "Voter ID" initiative shows, ALEC is part of a network of corporate-backed entities that promote the Republican Party at the expense of the Democrats.

But anyone who thinks the Democrats are wholly on the right side about ALEC should look more closely at the link between the two when it comes to the attack on public education. The truth is that the Obama administration's education policy is in line with "reforms" pioneered by ALEC.

Take the Obama administration's Race To The Top funding scheme, which dangles the possibility of additional educational funding in front of state governments, but only if they pass laws allowing the wholesale expansion of charter schools and imposing merit-pay schemes on teachers.

This takes several pages out of the ALEC playbook. As early as 1983, the right-wing group was pushing for policies such as school vouchers, merit pay and "higher standards"--all key components of the now bipartisan attack on public education and teachers' unions.

This likewise explains why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was, until very recently, an ALEC funder. Though Bill Gates likes to drape his efforts to deform public education with the language of the civil rights movement, he, like the Democrats, is a proponent of the same anti-union education "reforms" that ALEC has long supported.

The same areas of agreement between ALEC and the Democrats exist on other issues.

The Democrats opposed efforts by Scott Walker and other Republicans to completely gut public-sector unions, whose get-out-the-vote efforts are critical for Democrats at election time. But leading Democrats--from mayors like Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, to governors like Andrew Cuomo in New York and Jerry Brown in California, to Barack Obama in the White House--are carrying out similar attacks on public-sector workers' jobs, wages and benefits.

Likewise, ALEC and the Republicans weren't alone in causing the growth of the racist system of mass incarceration. The U.S. prison population increased more under Democratic President Bill Clinton than under any other administration--and Barack Obama has continued a war on drugs that has swept millions of Black and Brown men into a lifetime of second-class citizenship.

These areas of overlap shouldn't be that surprising. After all, the same corporations that bankroll ALEC and the Republican Party also fund the Democrats.

For example, AT&T, which sits on ALEC's board, has given millions to both parties in recent election cycles. As for contributions to individual candidates for the 2012 election, only Republican House Speaker John Boehner ($99,200) has gotten more from the telecommunications giant than President Obama ($37,069).

To take another of many examples, Comcast, the corporate co-chair of ALEC in four states, is the 12th-largest overall donor for the 2012 election cycle to this point. Of the $2.35 million it has spent so far, nearly two-thirds has gone to Democrats. The breakdown for ALEC member Microsoft is similar. And the list goes on and on.

ALEC is repellant, but it is not the source of the disease. It is best understood as one component in big business' multi-pronged approach to ensuring its interests are served, no matter which of the two parties, Republican or Democratic, hold office at the local, state or federal levels.

It's a good thing that ALEC's sleazy record is being exposed to the light of day. But no one who wants to see political and social change in this country should rely on the Democrats to counter the right-wing, pro-corporate, anti-worker agenda that ALEC stands for.

The "Buffett Rule" charade

Published in Socialist Worker.

WITH TAX Day approaching and the Republican Party seemingly settled on nominating a super-rich parasite as its presidential candidate, Barack Obama gave us a taste of the coming general election campaign this month with a lot of talk about making the tax system fairer so the rich "pay their share."
Specifically, Obama and the Democrats are pushing the so-called "Buffett Rule." Named after multi-billionaire speculator Warren Buffett, the Buffett Rule would set a goal of getting those earning more than $1 million a year to pay at least 30 percent of their income in federal taxes--something closer to the rate at which middle-income households pay.

But don't expect the IRS to start sticking it to the super-rich any time soon. The Buffett Rule doesn't stand a chance of becoming law before the 2012 election--not with a Republican-controlled House and GOP senators willing to block any such measure in their chamber, as they did on April 16. So this is really a campaign maneuver, not anything that's expected to become law.

Moreover, even if the Buffett Rule became law--and its fairly vague "guidelines" translated into real enforcement--the U.S. tax system would remain overwhelmingly favorable to corporations and the rich, and tilted against working people. That's no surprise, since the politicians who oversee the tax system--Republican and Democrats alike--are committed to serving the interests of the 1 percent, at our expense.

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WARREN BUFFETT, one of the wealthiest people in the world with a net worth of $44 billion, has famously pointed out that he pays taxes at a much lower rate than his secretary and other employees. Buffett says he supports modest increases in taxes on the wealthy to end this disparity--or at least make it less grotesque.

The government's own statistics back up Buffett's point--even when looking just at the federal income tax, and leaving aside the range of other regressive taxes, like the sales tax, that by definition take a bigger bite out of the earnings of lower-income people than higher-income people. According to the Internal Revenue Service, in 2007, the wealthiest 400 households in the U.S. made an average of $345 million for the year and paid federal income taxes at an average rate of 16.62 percent. That's the same rate paid in 2007 by a single person earning $42,676 for the year.

So the super wealthy can make more than 8,000 times what you do and still pay the same federal income tax rate. How? One of the main reasons is that taxes on capital gains--income from investments in stocks, bonds, real estate and the like--are set at 15 percent, whereas income from wages and salaries is taxed as high as 35 percent for the highest bracket of income. Rich people make disproportionately more from capital gains than salaries, so the tax code has a huge built-in advantage for them.

The Buffett Rule to raise the overall tax rate on millionaires to 30 percent was introduced as legislation in February as the "Paying a Fair Share Act." However, everyone in Washington knew the Republicans in the Senate would block the measure when it came up for discussion--and the House Republican leaders wouldn't even let it come up.

Rather than signaling a shift towards a "fair" economic policy, as Obama has claimed in recent speeches, the proposal is best understood as a campaign move. Thus, on BarackObama.com, the Obama campaign's website, there is a "Pass the Buffett Rule" calculator that invites users to see their tax rate in comparison to Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney--and then see what how much Romney would supposedly pay if the Buffett Rule were passed.

Romney, of course, has taken full advantage of the tax system over the years. In 2010, he reported income of $21.6 million and paid less than 14 percent in taxes. His "success" in business comes from founding Bain Capital, a financial firm that specializes in corporate buyouts, so he's always gotten most of his income from capital gains. Naturally, he firmly opposes any proposal to raise the tax rate on capital gains.

Romney is a parasite, and any tax increase on him and his ilk would be more than welcomed by the vast majority of the population.

But anyone who thinks Obama and the Democrats are serious about the Buffett Rule should remember that this is an election year, when Democrats always shift to the left rhetorically and pay lip service to the interests of working people and unions in order to win votes.

Those who would take Obama at his word that he intends to make the rich pay their fair share and use the revenues to fund jobs programs and education should remember the promises that Obama made--and broke--in 2008.

On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama pledged to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to join unions. Once elected, with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, the legislation was left to die. Obama also promised to "put on comfortable shoes" and walk the picket line if workers' collective bargaining rights were under attack. Yet when public-sector workers stood up to Republican Gov. Scott Walker's attack last February in Wisconsin, Obama was nowhere to be seen.

Most relevant of all is Obama's capitulation on his promise to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire when they came up for renewal at the end of 2010. This was hardly a radical proposal--taxes on income over $250,000 a year would have gone up slightly, to where the rates that existed during the Clinton years.

But the Democrats put off a vote on letting the tax cuts expire--until after the Republicans won a sweeping victory in the 2010 congressional elections. Obama said he would negotiate with the Republican leaders--and the "compromise" he made extended all of the Bush tax cuts for two years. The cost for maintaining lower tax rates for the top 2 percent of highest-earning Americans was around $120 billion over two years.

Even if the Buffett Rule were implemented, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to this ongoing giveaway to the super-rich.

According to Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation, the Buffett Rule would bring in around $47 billion in revenues over the next 10 years. That's about one-third of what the wealthy are saving this year and next as a result of the extention of the Bush tax cuts.

And according to some analysts, the Democrats' proposal to implement the Buffett Rule as a replacement for the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is expected to net over $1 trillion over the next decade, could reduce tax revenues overall.

To call this "fair" is laughable. It brings to mind Malcolm X's point that "you can't drive a knife into a man's back nine inches, pull it out six inches and call it progress"--although in this case, it's more like pulling it out a half an inch, if that.

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ANY DISCUSSION about a fairer tax policy today ought to take into account how we got here.
Over the past several decades, income and wealth inequality has increased dramatically. The top 1 percent now own over 40 percent of the nation's wealth, and their share of national income increased from 9 percent in 1976 to 24 percent in 2007.

Meanwhile, the tax burden has shifted in exactly the opposite direction--first, from corporations onto individuals, and second, from the wealthiest individuals onto everyone else.

As left-wing economist Richard Wolff points out, in 1943, U.S. corporations paid nearly $1.50 in taxes for every $1 paid by individuals. By 1960, this amount had already fallen to just over 50 cents in corporate taxes for every $1 from individuals. But the trend continued over the following decades. By 2010, corporations were taxed about 22 cents for every dollar paid by individuals, about one-seventh the relative proportion they paid in 1943.

These figures contradict the deceptive claims of pro-business commentators who love to complain about how U.S. corporate tax rates--nominally 35 percent of income--are "the highest in the world."
In reality, the biggest corporations pay a fraction of that rate, if they pay any taxes at all. In a joint report, Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy examined the tax records of 280 profitable Fortune 500 companies from 2008 to 2010. The average tax rate for all of these corporations was 18.5 percent, and 30 profitable corporations paid no taxes at all over the three-year period--they actually received a refund. A total of 78 companies paid no taxes during at least one of the three years.

There's an old saying that "nothing is certain except death and taxes"--but that applies to everyone except major U.S. corporations, which are saved from death by insolvency with taxpayer-funded bailouts and freed from the burden of paying taxes despite massive profits.

For example, General Electric, whose CEO Jeffrey Immelt was chosen by Obama to chair the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, made $10.5 billion in profits from 2008 to 2010, yet reaped $4.7 billion in tax benefits, for a tax rate of -47.8 percent. Verizon, whose workers went on strike last year after the company demanded cuts in wages, health and retirement benefits, made more than $32 billion over the same three-year period, and received tax benefits of nearly $1 billion.

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IN ADDITION to the tax burden shift from corporations to individuals, wealthy individuals are paying relatively less, and middle-income and lower-income individuals more.

Long before the Bush tax cuts, tax rates for the wealthiest U.S. households had already declined dramatically. According to a report by Wealth for the Common Good, "Over the last half-century, America's wealthiest taxpayers have seen their tax outlays, as a share of income, drop by as much as two-thirds. During the same period, the tax outlay for middle-class Americans has not decreased."

As recently as the early 1960s, the tax rate on income at the highest levels--known in tax terminology as the top income bracket--exceeded 90 percent. By the end of Ronald Reagan's eight years in the White House in the 1980s, the rate had dropped below 30 percent. George H.W. Bush increased the top tax rate to 31 percent, and Clinton hiked it to 39.6 percent. The Bush tax cuts reduced the rate to 35 percent, where they remain today.

Meanwhile, the tax rate on capital gains, which was raised in the late 1960s and mid-1970s to a maximum of close to 40 percent, has been cut over the past few decades to the current rate of 15 percent. These reductions have almost exclusively benefited the top 1 percent. According to Citizens for Tax Justice, were the capital gains tax rate restored to its high point, 80 percent of the tax increase would be borne by the richest 1 percent of taxpayers, and 90 percent by the richest 5 percent.

Right-wing commentators often seek to confuse the tax issue by pointing to the fact that only half of U.S. residents paid federal income taxes in 2009. Low-income households who don't make enough money to pay the federal income tax are viewed as "freeloaders."

This turns reality on its head. The real "freeloaders" are the giant corporations raking in record profits while paying little to nothing--or less than nothing--in taxes, and the banks who receive giant government bailouts and then pay billions in bonuses to executives while throwing working people out of their homes.

In reality, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) points out, the statistic about 2009 is misleading because that was the low point of the recession and a number of temporary tax breaks were in place. Two years earlier, 40 percent of households didn't owe federal taxes.

More importantly, the right-wing complaints about income tax freeloaders on the bottom of the income ladder conveniently ignores the many other taxes, most of them highly regressive, that working people do pay--like the federal payroll tax that funds Social Security and Medicare, and state and local sales taxes.

According to the CBPP, "When all federal, state, and local taxes are taken into account, the bottom fifth of households pays about 16 percent of their incomes in taxes, on average" (emphasis in original)--a major burden on households on the lower end of the income ladder, and still higher than Mitt Romney paid on his income taxes.

The Buffett Rule wouldn't even come close to making the rich "pay a fair share." For that to happen would require a fundamental overhaul of a tax code that is currently designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of those who produce the wealth.