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“An Expensive And Unnecessary Political Gambit”: Scott Walker’s Recall Hypocrisy

Last Friday night’s Wisconsin recall election debatebegan a series of bizarre exchanges between Republican Governor Scott Walker and his Democratic challenger, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, over Walker’s attitudes regarding direct democracy.

During this campaign, Walker and his supporters have been harshly critical of those who have sought to recall and remove the governor and his political allies. Though the Wisconsin Constitution is absolutely clear that the reasons for recall elections are to be defined by those who seek them—as opposed to the politicians who would like to restrict the scheduling of accountability votes—the Walker camp has claimed that the recall is an expensive and unnecessary political gambit.

Barrett challenged this spin with a suggestion that Walker is a recall hypocrite.

Referring to Walker during the debate, Barrett said: “He has signed recall petitions, it’s my understanding, against Senator Feingold, against Senator Kohl, not for criminal misbehavior, but because he disagreed with political decisions that were made.”

Walker did not respond immediately. But the next day the governor said, “I have no memory” of signing on for the recall of the Democratic senators when they were targeted in 1997 by anti-abortion groups.

Since organizers of the Feingold-Kohl recall effort say they’re unaware of whether Walker signed, and since the old petitions have been destroyed, this particular debate may remain unresolved.

But there is no question that Scott Walker has spoken enthusiastically about the use of the recall power. Indeed, he attained his previous position as Milwaukee County executive in large part because of a recall initiative. And that initiative clearly delighted him.

Back when he was a state legislator, Walker was an enthusiastic proponent of recall elections—especially in Milwaukee County.

Walker got even more enthusiastic about recalls in 2002, when he became the favored candidate of the group seeking to remove Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament. After Ament resigned, Walker was elected to replace him.

When he ran for governor in 2010, Walker talked up the 2002 recall drive as an exercise in democracy.

Speaking of the Milwaukee County fight, Walker said: “You know the folks that were angry about this started a recall and they were told they needed to collect 73,000 signatures in sixty days. Well, not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of ordinary people did an extraordinary thing. They stood up and took their government back. In less than thirty days they collected more than 150,000 signatures. It was at that moment I realized the real emotion on display in my county wasn’t just about anger. You see, if it had been about anger, it would have been about people checking out and moving out or giving up. But instead what happened was really amazing. You saw people standing up shoulder to shoulder, neighbor to neighbor and saying ‘we want our government back’ And in doing so the real emotion on display was about hope.”

Well, not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of ordinary people did an extraordinary thing last winter. They have gathered more than 900,000 signatures seeking the recall of Scott Walker, more than 800,000 seeking the recall of Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch and close to 100,000 more to recall four Republican state senators. Wisconsinites are again standing up, shoulder to shoulder, neighbor to neighbor, and they are saying “we want our government back.”

And, as the United Wisconsin activists who organized and advanced the recall drive will tell you, the real emotion on display across Wisconsin as the recall petitions were gathered last year, and as the recall fight has played out this year, has been about hope for Wisconsin’s future.

 

By: John Nichols, The Nation, May 29, 2012

May 30, 2012 Posted by | Wisconsin Recall | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Insurgent Outliers”: Today’s GOP Is The Worst Political Party Since The Civil War

Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein recently wrote a column for the Washington Post with a provocative headline: “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” Their thesis was that they had never, in 40 years of observing Congress, seen the institution behave in such a dysfunctional manner. They wrote that while they had long found reasons to be critical of both Democrats and Republicans, things have changed and our current crisis is solely the fault of a Republican Party that “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The article went on to present extensive evidence to back their case. Nothing has signified these extreme tendencies more clearly than last summer’s debt ceiling fiasco, where the Republicans acted so irresponsibly that Standard & Poor’s felt compelled to downgrade America’s hitherto gold-plated credit rating. In their press release, the ratings agency implicitly accused the Republicans of “brinksmanship” and said they had caused American governance and policymaking to become “less stable, less effective, and less predictable that we previously believed.” They were particularly alarmed that the statutory debt ceiling had become a bargaining chip over fiscal policy.

Looking back at that debacle, Steve Benen recently wrote, “It was, to my mind, the worst thing an American major party has done, at least in domestic politics, since the Civil War.”

When I first read that, it struck me as a preposterous statement. What about the Jim Crow laws, or the Palmer raids, or the Japanese internment camps, or McCarthyism, or the Vietnam and Iraq wars? But when I started to think about it, I realized that many of the big mistakes our country has made since the Civil War were not really the result of one political party’s actions. The Jim Crow laws are, of course, associated with the Democratic Party. But only the Southern half of the Democratic Party. Wartime measures, like the Palmer Raids during World War I, the internment camps of World War II, COINTELPRO during Vietnam, or illegal surveillance and detainee abuse during the current War on Terror, have been instigated less by political parties than by particular administrations, or they have had significant bipartisan support. The same can be said for our country’s decisions to fight in Vietnam and Iraq. In these cases, the blame is both too narrow in one sense, and too broad in another, to lay all the blame on a single party. Even McCarthyism can’t be laid squarely on the GOP, since much of the Republican establishment, including the Eisenhower administration, wasn’t too pleased with it. The debt ceiling fiasco was different. Here’s how Benen described it:

It was a move without parallel. The entirety of a party threatened to deliberately hurt the country unless their rivals paid a hefty ransom — in this case, debt reduction. It didn’t matter that Republicans were largely responsible for the debt in the first place, and it didn’t matter that Republicans routinelyraised the debt ceiling dozens of times over the last several decades.This wasn’t just another partisan dispute; it was a scandal for the ages. This one radical scheme helped lead to the first-ever downgrade of U.S. debt; it riled financial markets and generated widespread uncertainty about the stability of the American system; and it severely undermined American credibility on the global stage. Indeed, in many parts of the world, observers didn’t just lose respect for us, they were actually laughing at us.

It’s the kind of thing that should have scarred the Republican Party for a generation. Not only did that never happen, the Republican hostage-takers are already vowing to create this identical crisis all over again, on purpose.

Benen is right. It’s not easy to identify other examples where an American political party acted with such reckless disregard for the good of the country. But when I really think about it, the Debt Ceiling Fiasco isn’t a stand-alone thing. It’s part of a continuum. You can’t just cherry-pick the Debt Ceiling Fiasco and forget about the politicization of the Department of Justice, or putting an Arabian horse trader in charge of New Orleans’ safety, or blowing off any planning and just declaring, “Fuck Saddam, we’re taking him out.” What’s the worst thing the GOP has done in the 17 years since they first took control of Congress? The Gingrich shutdowns of the federal government? Impeaching President Clinton? Using their majority on the Supreme Court to steal the 2000 election? Standing around like mute apes while the housing bubble inflated?

It’s not that the Debt Ceiling Fiasco was the worst or stupidest thing that any political party has imposed on America in 150 years. It’s that the Republican Party is the worst party we’ve had in 150 years. You might argue that they don’t have much competition. “So, they’re worse than the Democrats, big deal.” But parties don’t remain the same over time. In one sense, they change every two years following each federal election cycle. It’s best to think of iterations of our political parties.

For the GOP, there’s the abolitionist Lincoln iteration, the Reconstruction iteration, the McKinley/Taft iteration, the Teddy Roosevelt Era, the Roaring ’20s iteration, the FDR oppositional phase, the Eisenhower era, the Nixon/Ford iteration, the Reagan Revolution, the Gingrich Revolution, the Bush era, and finally the post-Bush era. And there’s no need to box things into tight little categories. It makes sense to talk about the post-Bush Republican Party, but we can also talk about the post-Nixon party or consider the contemporary GOP on a timeline beginning with its 1994 takeover of Congress.

I think it’s fair to say that the GOP that exists today, as expressed by both its behavior in Congress and its recent display in the presidential primaries, is worse than it has ever been. The Republicans of the 113th Congress are worse than the Republicans of the 112th, who were worse than the 111th, and so on.

There’s a scene in the movie Office Space in which the main character is talking to a psychologist. He complains that every day seems worse than the last. The psychologist says, “That means that every day is the worst day of your life.” The protagonist agrees, which leads the psychologist to observe impassively, “That’s messed up.” That’s a great metaphor for the modern Republican Party. The Debt Ceiling Fiasco, which is now set to be repeated, was merely a temporary nadir on an otherwise constant 45º downward slope.

A blogger who goes by the nom de guerre driftglass recently wrote about New York Times columnist David Brooks’ tendency to “waddle into the threshing blades.” I like that imagery. That’s what the Republicans have been doing to the country for a while now. Under Gingrich, they shut down the government and impeached the president after hounding him for six years with specious investigations. Then they disgraced the Supreme Court and stole the election away from its rightful winners. Then they dropped the ball on al-Qaeda. Next we wound up in Iraq with no plan.

From there it was on to Terri Schiavo and a drowned New Orleans and a failed attempt to privatize Social Security and a wrecked Department of Justice, and the Abramoff scandal. There was Guantanamo and black prisons and torture and murder and disaster in Afghanistan. When the stock market collapsed in September 2008, it might have seemed like the final culmination of a disastrous path embarked upon…when, exactly? 1964? 1980? 1994?

But the nightmare wasn’t over. In many ways, it was only starting. Yet to come were the Birthers and the Tea Party and the Tenthers and climate deniers. The party would begin a new Great Purge, sending Arlen Specter scurrying to the Democrats and defeating long-serving politicians like Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (who survived on a write-in campaign), Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware, and a couple dozen “Establishment” picks. Those that have survived are now cowering in fear, completely unwilling to compromise with the Democrats or the president on anything, lest they become the next victim. They can’t address climate change because, despite the fact that John McCain and Sarah Palin campaigned on a cap-and-trade carbon plan, the party’s officeholders are now afraid to admit that climate change is even occurring.

And who could have predicted that the party would go after women’s access to contraception?

And what of the new crop of Republican governors. Grifters like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Rick Scott in Florida surely represent a new breed (and a new low) of radical state executives. Governors in Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona and elsewhere are competing with each other to craft the most radical and unprecedented legislation. We have not seen a party this dangerous in any of our lifetimes. Not in this country, anyway. The last time things got this bad was about 150 years ago. The last time things got this bad, we needed a Civil War to resolve it.

 

By: Martin Longman, AlterNet, May 21, 2012

May 28, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“We’re Just Educating Folks”: Koch’s Americans For Prosperity Say They’re Not Supporting Scott Walker In WI Recall

DC-based special interest group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is busing-in out-of-state Tea Partiers and spending millions on advertisements, rallies, and phone banks in the weeks before recall elections for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, and four state senate seats. But the group founded and funded by New York-based oil billionaire David Koch insists their activities have nothing to do with the campaigns or elections.

“We’re not dealing with any candidates, political parties or ongoing races,” said AFP-Wisconsin Director Scott Hilgemann about AFP’s four-day, ten-city bus tour taking place the week before Wisconsin’s June 5 election.

“We’re just educating folks on the importance of the reforms,” he said.

The “reforms” Hilgemann is referencing include Governor Walker’s contentious attack on public sector collective bargaining and his austerity budget, which AFP touts as having saved taxpayers money — but which Walker’s critics say have crippled public schools and led to Wisconsin being dead last among all 50 states for job growth. Those controversial reforms also compelled over 900,000 people to sign petitions for Walker’s recall.

Since at least November, AFP has staged an aggressive pro-Walker campaign while claiming to be focused merely on promoting Walker’s “reforms” rather than the candidate himself or the recall election. The group has been one of Walker’s top allies since he introduced his divide-and-conquer legislation in February of 2011.

Continuation of AFP “It’s Working!” Campaign

Just as Walker’s opponents started collecting recall signatures in November 2011, AFP began running a series of slick TV and web ads claiming “It’s Working!”, and alleging that Walker’s fiscal policies have been good for the state (while ignoring all the bad news). The campaign has reportedly cost at least $2.9 million so far — nearly three times as much as Walker’s opponent Tom Barrett has raised.

The ads come from the “charitable” side of AFP — the AFP Foundation — which as a charity organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code, has an absolute prohibition against intervening in political campaigns. The ads were produced in collaboration with another 501(c)(3), the Bradley Foundation-funded MacIver Institute, which has the same prohibition. As the Center for Media and Democracy has reported, the ads push the envelope on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rules about nonprofit participation in political campaigns, never mentioning Walker or the election but advancing a message consistent with Walker’s electoral strategy.

The AFP-Foundation and MacIver “It’s Working!” campaign has also included a series of townhall events across the state in November and December to have a “respectful discussion on why we must maintain the reforms that have saved hundreds of millions for Wisconsin taxpayers,” according to an AFP press release. The implication is clear — the election of a governor other than Walker would threaten the “reforms,” and his reelection would maintain them. And according to AFP, “we must maintain the reforms.”

But, AFP claims the campaign is not about the elections — indeed, if it were, the organization could lose its nonprofit status.

The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign believes the AFP / MacIver ads really are about the elections, and filed a complaint with the IRS accusing the groups of violating IRS rules.

“Stand With Walker”

In February and March of last year, hundreds of thousands of people occupied and marched on the capital in protest of Governor Walker’s policies, including his Act 10 proposal to limit public sector collective bargaining. At the start of the uprising’s second week, Walker accepted a phone call from a person he believed to be David Koch, who asked how the governor’s efforts to “crush that union” were going. The caller was actually Buffalo Beast blogger Ian Murphy, who recorded and publicized the conversation. Among other things, Walker asked that Koch have “his guy on the ground” – presumably an Americans for Prosperity leader – organize rallies and encourage people “to call lawmakers and tell them to hang firm with the governor.”

Regardless of how AFP received the request for help, the group seemed to have met Walker’s request. The same day that Walker chatted with the fake David Koch, Koch’s AFP began running “Stand With Walker” TV ads across the state, along with promoting a pro-Walker petition. As the anti-Walker protests heated up, AFP launched a “Stand With Walker” website and a “Stand With Walker Wisconsin Bus Tour,” and organized a “Stand With Walker” counter-rally at the state capitol.

Months later, Walker himself adopted the “Stand With Walker” slogan for his election campaign. (The slogan also appeared to inspire this face-melting rock video).

Not about the Election?

In 2012, AFP appears to be ramping-up its campaign to aid Walker as his recall election grows near. AFP kicks off the “A Better Wisconsin Bus Tour” in Waukesha on May 30, visiting ten Wisconsin cities before rendezvousing in Racine with out-of-state AFP members. As part of the tour, 70 staff members will be recruiting volunteers to call voters and canvass neighborhoods. In recent weeks, the group has also been organizing phone banks.

Although Governor Walker likes to complain that out-of-state union bosses are behind his recall, AFP has been recruiting plenty of support for Walker from outside Wisconsin. State AFP chapters around the country have been organizing organizing “Freedom Phone” phonebanks for “patriots throughout the nation” to make phone calls into Wisconsin to tell Wisconsin residents to “support[] the Wisconsin reforms.” The AFP chapter in Illinois is busing out-of-staters “to rally and canvass neighborhoods in [Racine] Wisconsin on June 2” (three days before the election) to “make our voices heard in support of the Wisconsin reforms.” The effort appears to be well-funded — attendees are charged cost only $5 for a round-trip bus ticket with lunch and dinner provided. By comparison, a round-trip commercial bus ticket from Racine to Chicago would cost $47, lunch and dinner not included.

AFP-Wisconsin’s director insists the effort has nothing to do “with any candidates, political parties or ongoing races,” despite photos from recent events prominently displaying pro-Walker campaign propaganda and one of AFP’s top field coordinators being a current Vice-Chair and Executive Board Member of the Winnebago County Republican Party. Additionally, many AFP staffers have long ties to the GOP, such as AFP Director Luke Hilgemann, who until recently worked as Assembly Majority Leader Scott Suder’s Chief of Staff.

It is not clear whether the bus tour, phone banks, and canvassing are operating via the 501(c)(3) AFP-Foundation, which is officially prohibited from any political campaign activity, or through AFP’s 501(c)(4) wing, which can participate in a limited amount of election work, but cannot act as a Political Action Committee.

Regardless of which AFP wing is advancing the campaign, it stretches the imagination to believe AFP’s claims that organizing bus tours, phone banks, TV ads and out-of-state canvassers — in the weeks and months before the election — has nothing to do with the election. Particularly when AFP chair David Koch, who has not given any money directly to Walker’s recall campaign fund, has recently said “we’re helping [Walker], as we should” and “we’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”

 

BY: Brendan Fischer, Center For Media and Democracy, May 27, 2012

May 27, 2012 Posted by | Wisconsin Recall | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Let’s Review The Transcript”: Did Scott Walker Lie Under Oath To Congress?

Members of Congress who questioned Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker when he testified before a US House committee last year are asking the chairman of that committee to help them determine whether the controversial anti-labor governor made deceptive statements while under oath.

The ranking Democratic member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings, joined Virginia Congressman Gerry Connolly and Connecticut Congressman Christopher Murphy in signing a letter to Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-California, which asks Issa to contact Walker and seek “an explanation for why his statements captured on videotape appear to contradict his testimony before the committee.”

The Congressmen began their letter: “We are writing to request that you ask Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to clarify his testimony before our Committee hearing on April 14, 2011, in light of a new videotape taken of Governor Walker three months earlier and an article published last week by The Nation entitled “Did Scott Walker Lie Under Oath to Congress?” Did Scott Walker Lie Under Oath to Congress?’”

Here’s the May 14 article that got members of Congress asking questions anew of Governor Walker:

Did Scott Walker Lie Under Oath to Congress?

When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker met with a billionaire campaign donor a month before he launched his attack on the collective-bargaining rights of public-sector workers and public-school teachers, he engaged in a detailed discussion about undermining unions as part of a broader strategy of strengthening the position of his Republican party.

After he initiated those attacks, Governor Walker testified under oath to a Congressional committee. He was asked during the April 2011 hearing to specifically address the question of whether he set out to weaken unions—which traditionally back Democrats and which are expected to play a major role in President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign—for political purposes. Walker replied: “It’s not about that for me.”

During the same hearing, Walker was asked whether he “ever had a conversation with respect to your actions in Wisconsin and using them to punish members of the opposition party and their [union] donor base?”

Walker replied, not once but twice, that the answer was “no.”

So, did the governor of Wisconsin lie, under oath, to Congress? The videotape of Walker talking with Diane Hendricks, the Beloit, Wisconsin, billionaire who would eventually give his campaign more than $500,000, surfaced late last week. Captured in January 2011 by a documentary filmmaker who was trailing Hendricks, the conversation provides rare insight into the governor’s long-term strategy for dividing Wisconsin. And the focus of the conversation and the strategy is by all evidence a political one.

In the video, Walker is shown meeting with Hendricks before an economic development session at the headquarters of a firm Hendricks owns, ABC Supply Inc., in Beloit. After Walker kisses Henricks, she asks: “Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions?”

“Oh, yeah!” says Walker.

Henricks then asks: “And become a right-to-work [state]?”

Walker replies: “Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”

After describing the strategy, Walker tells the woman who asked him about making Wisconsin a “completely red state”: “That opens the door once we do that.”

In a transcript of raw footage from the conversation, Hendricks asks Walker if he has a role model. Walker replies that he has high regard for Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, who early in his term used an executive order to strip collective-bargaining rights away from public employees and who, more recently, signed right-to-work legislation. Walker described the use of the executive order to undermine union rights as a “beautiful thing” and bemoaned the fact that he would have to enact legislation to achieve the same end in Wisconsin.

Within weeks, the woman who asked Walker about his strategy to make Wisconsin “a completely red state” wrote a $10,000 check to support his campaign. (She would eventually up the donation to $510,000, making Hendricks the single largest donor in the history of Wisconsin politics.) Within a month, Walker had launched the anti-union initiative that the two had discussed as a part of that “red-state” strategy, provoking mass protests that would draw the attention of Congress.

Testifying under oath to the US House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Walker said in his formal statement and in response to questions from committee members that his efforts to restrict the collective-bargaining rights of unions— including moves to prevent them from collecting dues, maintaining ongoing representation of members and engaging effectively in political campaigns—had nothing to do with politics.

Walker was asked specifically about a Fox News interview with Wisconsin state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald, in which Fitzgerald said of the anti-union push: “If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin.”

Congressman Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, asked Walker about Fitzgerald’s statement. “I understand you can’t speak for [Fitzgerald] but you can opine as to whether you agree with your state Senate leader when he says this is ultimately about trying to defeat President Obama in Wisconsin. Do you agree?”

“I can tell you what it is for me,” Walker answered. “It’s not about that. It’s ultimately about balancing the budget now and in the future.”

Under questioning from other members of the committee (especially Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich and Iowa Congressman Bruce Braley), however, Walker admitted that many of the moves he initiated had no real impact on the state budget.

They did have the impact of weakening unions in the workplace and in the politics of the state, however.

It was in that context that Congressman Gerry Connolly, D-Virginia, pressed Walker on the matter of political intentions.

“Have you ever had a conversation with respect to your actions in Wisconsin and using them to punish members of the opposition party and their [union] donor base?

“No,” replied Walker.

“Never had such a conversation?” Connolly pressed.

“No,” said Walker.

The videotape from several months earlier, in which Walker speaks at length with his most generous campaign donor, suggests a very different answer to the questions from Murphy and Connolly. Indeed, the videotape shows Walker having just such a conversation.

　

By: John Nichols, The Nation, May 22, 2012

May 23, 2012 Posted by | Collective Bargaining | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Masquerading As A Charity”: ALEC Exposed In Wisconsin, The Hijacking Of A State

Today, the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) released a new report that details the exclusive network of corporate lobbyists and special interest groups that influence the Wisconsin legislature through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

“This report reveals details of the extraordinary influence of ALEC and its agenda on the Wisconsin legislature and our laws over the past 16 months,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. “This corporate-backed agenda undermines the rights of Wisconsin families while advancing the agenda of huge corporations and special interest groups.”

Six weeks ago, corporate members of ALEC started jumping ship when it became known that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground Law” — linked to the Trayvon Martin shooting — spread to over two dozen states via ALEC. So far, 14 corporate members and 45 legislators from other states have quit the organization.

“We document how global corporations are buying influence with Wisconsin legislators through potentially illegal gifts called ALEC ‘scholarships,'” said CMD Law Fellow Brendan Fischer, the report’s author. “ALEC’s corporate members are not only giving Wisconsin legislators thousands of dollars of campaign contributions, they are also buying flights and hotel rooms. These gifts undermine Wisconsin’s reputation for clean government and the strict ethics rules designed to protect the voices of Wisconsin residents in our state’s democracy.”

CMD asked the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board in March to determine whether ALEC member legislators receiving gifts of flights and hotel rooms from ALEC’s corporate members violates state ethics and lobbying laws. Now, CMD and Common Cause in Wisconsin are asking Wisconsin’s Attorney General to look into ALEC’s lobbying activities.

“It is time for the Attorney General to determine that ALEC is primarily a corporate lobbying group masquerading as a charity,” said Common Cause in Wisconsin Executive Director Jay Heck. “ALEC’s corporate members fund the organization to access and influence state legislators, and it is unacceptable to get a tax deduction for doing so.”

Here are some of the key findings from the new report:

  • 32 bills or budget provisions reflecting ALEC model legislation were introduced in Wisconsin’s 2011-2012 legislative session;
  • 21 of these bills or budget provisions have passed, and two were vetoed;
  • More than $276,000 in campaign contributions were made to ALEC legislators in Wisconsin from ALEC corporations since 2008;
  • More than $406,000 in campaign contributions were made to ALEC alumnus Governor Walker from ALEC corporations over the same time period for his state campaign account;
  • At least 49 current Wisconsin legislators are known ALEC members, including the leaders of both the House and Senate as well as other legislators holding key posts in the state. Additionally, the Governor, the Secretary of the Department of Administration, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission are ALEC alumni; and
  • At least 17 current legislators have received thousands of dollars of gifts cumulatively from ALEC corporations in the past few years, in the form of flights and hotel rooms filtered through the ALEC “scholarship fund” (complete “scholarship” information is not available).

ALEC describes itself as the largest “independent member association of state legislators” in the country, but over 98 percent of its nearly $7 million in annual revenue comes from corporations and sources other than legislative dues, which are $50 a year. Representatives from America’s largest corporations, including Koch Industries, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Reynolds, and Altria/Phillip Morris fund ALEC and sit on its private sector governing board.

 

By: Sara Jerving, PR Watch, Center For Media and Democracy, May 17, 2012

May 19, 2012 Posted by | Lobbyists | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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