Since the City of Denton Banned Fracking, Texas GOP Moves to Pre-empt Local Control

Sunday, 08 March 2015By Candice Bernd, Truthout | Report 

Carol Soph, a board member of the Denton Drilling Awareness Group, the driving force behind Denton's fracking ban, speaks with Rep. Phil King about her concerns regarding a bill he introduced in response to the Denton ban that would gut cities' ability to introduce similar measures or regulations. King is this year's national chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council.
"I do feel very strongly that air-quality measures and the engineering and scientific issues of oil and gas should be regulated at the state level, where the expertise is," Texas Rep. Phil King (R-Weatherford) told a group of North Texans Monday, March 2, during a meeting in his Capitol office about a bill he introduced that would create barriers to a city's ability to regulate the oil and gas industry.

The room was largely filled with people from Denton, which passed Texas' first ban on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) within city limits. Since the ban passed last fall in a landslide victory, state lawmakers connected to the oil and gas industry and to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have introduced a number of bills aimed at undermining local democracy, ostensibly to prevent other cities from following Denton's lead.

Activists, however, says these bills would effectively kill local democracy so that citizens would lose the ability to introduce ballot referendums, and local governments would be unable to regulate industry to protect the health and safety of residents.

"The reason that we're here is because the state did a terrible job. That's why the opposition [to oil and gas drilling] is growing," said Sharon Wilson, a Gulf coast organizer with Earthworks, in response to King's assessment.

King continued to assert his confidence in state oil and gas regulators and told the group he plans to move forward with his bills. One of the bills would allow the state to reject a municipal ordinance and the other would require a city to assess the tax revenue cost of any attempt to regulate oil and gas.

At the March 2 meeting, about 40 residents from Denton, Dallas, Arlington, Mansfield, Grand Prairie and Pantego expressed concerns about the state-level regulatory lapses that brought Denton to the point of banning fracking. These lapses are driving many other cities across the state to make their local oil and gas regulations stronger.

As a resident of Denton myself, I watched the city struggle for more than five years to regulate the oil and gas industry's activities within city limits. Yet oil and gas companies refused to follow many of the rules the city adopted when it revised its gas drilling ordinance in 2013, claiming instead that their drilling activities were grandfathered under old rules. Finally, Denton was left with no other option but to ban fracking entirely in 2014, delivering a blow to the industry in a city on the same shale where the drilling technique was pioneered in the '90s.

Years earlier, Denton City Council members had instructed residents to take their concerns about gas drilling to Austin, telling many of my neighbors that their hands were simply tied at the local level. Residents took their advice and traveled to Austin multiple times, but rather than finding the help they were seeking, Austin lawmakers at the time sent representatives of the Denton Drilling Awareness Group (DAG) back to Denton, telling them explicitly that it was a local issue. Now, as it turns out, they seem to be changing their minds.

"We did work on [regulating drilling] at the state level, and Phil King and Myra Crownover and Tan Parker did everything they could to undermine getting anything passed at the state level," said former Fort Worth Rep. Lon Burnam, who now works for Public Citizen, referring to Denton County representatives. "So they've kind of reaped what they sowed."

King's bills are part of a wider strategy emerging in Republican-dominated state legislatures this year to curtail municipalities' regulatory authority, including their ability to pass local ordinances and citizen-led ballot referendums. The legislation often comes at the behest of industries that stand to lose money because of regulations initiated in the municipalities where they operate.

According to The New York Times, eight states led by Republicans have prohibited municipalities from passing paid sick day legislation in just the past two years. Other such pre-emption laws have barred cities from raising the minimum wage and regulating the activities of landlords. This year, Arkansas passed a law that blocks a city's ability to pass anti-discrimination laws that would protect LGBT people, and bills introduced in six states this session would follow Arkansas' lead.

Many industries, including, most prominently, the restaurant industry and oil and gas interests, are working together this year through ALEC, which generates "model" legislation that advances the interests of its corporate members throughout state legislatures. Rep. King is serving as ALEC's national chair this year and introduced his two pre-emption bills with Denton's fracking ban in mind.

King denied that his role in ALEC had anything to do with the introduction of his pre-emption bills and said the bills were not model legislation created by ALEC. The organization's corporate funders have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to King over the years.

Two other bills filed in Austin this session would go even further than King's in gutting local regulatory power: One would prevent any city or county in Texas from banning fracking, and another would effectively kill home rule authority (a city's ability to pass laws to govern itself) so that cities cannot pass local ordinances.

State lawmakers and the oil and gas industry isn't just responding to the blow delivered to fracking interests in Texas, but also hoping to beat back frack bans nationally. Bans on hydraulic fracturing passed in local municipalities across the nation during midterms elections. Those bans, and in particular, Denton's ban - have created a backlash from the oil and gas industry and conservative statehouses in the United States.

Last month, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that only the state - not cities or counties - has the authority to regulate oil and gas drilling, effectively killing a municipality's ability to ban the drilling practice. But in other states, judges have ruled exactly the opposite, such as in New York's Supreme Court, which in July decided that local governments did have the authority to ban fracking. In another case in Pennsylvania, a court ruled that cities have the authority to regulate fracking, but not to outlaw it.

"The reason all these [pre-emption] bills are being filed is [state legislators are] in a state of shock, because the people of Denton conducted an electoral revolution and passed this [fracking ban], and now they are reeling from it," Burnam said.

Dentonites and other North Texans living on top of the Barnett Shale formation are fighting a state and industry attack on their right to determine what's best for their communities. They point out the hypocrisy of conservative lawmakers in Austin who rail against so-called "Big Government" at the federal level while simultaneously attempting to strip small municipal governments of their power.

The grassroots activists have also been quick to point out conservative lawmakers' duplicity when it comes to property rights. They have largely framed their arguments at the state Capitol in those terms because state representatives often ignore other valuable environmental and health concerns.

"The whole ALEC team, led by Phil King, is more considerate of the property rights of corporations than they are the property rights of homeowners and individuals, and this is what this battle is really about, because in Texas, the overriding law is deferential treatment to the subsurface mineral right owners over the surface homeowners," Burnam said.

This contradiction was front-and-center during anti-fracking activists' meeting with Sen. Craig Estes about the bill he introduced, which mandates that cities compensate mineral owners if they pass regulations that cut into potential mineral profits.

The activist group argued that mineral owners' rights to extract minerals and earn profits from them conflicts with the property rights of homeowners, because the industrial process of fracking can create property damage and decrease property values, as well as prevent homeowners from enjoying their property due to light, noise and air pollution created by fracking.

Dentonites are also continuing efforts to defend their city's fracking ban at the local level. DAG members, with the help of Earthworks, are intervening in two court cases brought against the city by the Texas Oil and Gas Association and Texas' General Land Office, which argue the city's ban violates the Texas Constitution. The Denton groups asked that the cases be moved to Denton County from Travis County, and the court agreed.

Meanwhile, Dentonites continue to testify at City Council meetings as council members once again work to revise the city's drilling ordinance, which will become the last word on drilling regulations if the city's ban is overturned in court.

ALEC's Latest "Transparency" Move: Asserting Immunity From Freedom of Information Laws

Tuesday, May 7, 2013 by PRWatch.org

by Brendan Fischer 

 

Shortly after the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) told the press "we really believe in transparency," new documents show the organization directing legislators to hide ALEC meeting agendas and model legislation from the public. This effort to circumvent state freedom of information laws is being called "shocking" and "disturbing" by transparency advocates.

A disclaimer published at the bottom of meeting agendas and model bills from ALEC's most recent meeting in Oklahoma City, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, reads: "Because this is an internal ALEC document, ALEC believes it is not subject to disclosure under any state Freedom of Information or Public Records Act."

"If you receive a request for disclosure of this or any other ALEC document under your state's Freedom of Information or Public Records Act, please contact Michael Bowman, Senior Director, Policy and Strategic Initiatives," it says.

For a private organization to assert that its interactions with state legislators are not subject to public records laws is "shocking," says Mark Caramanica, Freedom of Information Director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

"Private individuals or organizations cannot simply label a document private and say it is private on their own. It is not their decision to make."

Legislators attend ALEC meetings in their official capacity, and ALEC has claimed that they do so "on behalf of and for the benefit of the state." Under almost every state’s public records law, all documents related to official business are considered public unless there is a specific exemption, defined and passed by the legislature, and embodied in the statutes. "ALEC cannot create exemptions of [its] own imagination," Caramanica told the Center for Media and Democracy.

The disclaimer is "disturbing," says Christa Westerberg, Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council Vice President, particularly because it "suggests legislators will contact ALEC first when they get a request for records and may be advised by ALEC on what to do."

"Courts and other entities with authority to interpret state sunshine laws, and not ALEC, should determine whether ALEC documents are subject to disclosure under any state’s public records law," she told CMD.

ALEC boasts that over 1,000 of its model bills are introduced each year and at least 1 in 5 become law. But despite its significant influence over state law and policy, ALEC conferences are closed to the press and public, and the only way Americans have had any notion of what happens in those meetings is through public records requests for the agendas and model bills.

Even before the "disclaimer" was discovered ALEC and its member legislators had been taking pains to avoid public records requests. Last year, CMD prevailed in a lawsuit against Wisconsin legislators who had tried evading the public records law by shifting their ALEC correspondence to a personal email account (like Gmail or Yahoo), which they erroneously asserted meant the emails were not subject to public records requests. And ALEC has begun sending legislators advance agendas and model bills via a link, which expires within 72 hours, to an Internet drop box where they can access the relevant documents; in many cases, when legislators respond to a request for ALEC records, they only release a scanned copy of the email invitation, rather than the contents of the folder available via the link. It is not known whether legislators refused to release these documents because ALEC asserted its immunity from public records law.

In March, ALEC published some of its model bills online in a move the organization claimed showed its commitment to transparency. "We really believe in transparency," alleged ALEC spokesperson Bill Meierling. But its public records "disclaimer" and other actions indicate the organization is far more interested in maintaining secrecy.

"This certainly raises the question," asks Caramanica, “what are their motives for trying to keep their documents secret?”

ALEC legislators cannot have it both ways. They cannot use public money to attend ALEC meetings -- as the Republican-led South Dakota legislature recently approved -- or claim that accepting corporate-funded flights and hotel rooms for ALEC travel are part of their legitimate work responsibilities, then conspire with ALEC to hide documents and information from their constituents that should be accessible under freedom of information laws.

Efforts to Deliver "Kill Shot" to Paid Sick Leave Tied to ALEC

Wednesday, April 3, 2013 by PRWatch.org
by Brendan Fischer and Mary Bottari

In a victory for working families, New York is poised to become the largest U.S. city to require businesses offer paid sick days to workers. Community activists and labor leaders struck a deal with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to allow a vote on a paid sick leave ordinance that would cover almost 1 million people. But workers in more than 700 other large American cities must choose between spreading their illness and getting paid.

Advocates have helped pass paid sick days laws in cities like San Francisco, Washington DC, Seattle and Portland, but big business has been pushing back. Corporate-backed bills have passed at the state level in Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Mississippi that would preempt (or as one GOP operative put it, "deliver the kill shot" to) local laws requiring paid sick days. Similar bills are on the legislative docket in Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Washington. This paid sick days preemption effort can be traced back to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Paid Sick Days Help Keep America Healthy

Workers who do not have access to paid sick days are one-and-a-half times more likely to go to work sick with a contagious illness, putting their co-workers and customers at risk, and costing an estimated $160 billion each year in lost productivity. Children are more likely to go to school sick when their parents can't get off work to care for them, causing illness to spread. Delaying treatment for illness can cause conditions to worsen, leading to more emergency room visits and increased costs for public health insurance programs.

An estimated 40 million workers, or forty percent of the workforce, cannot take sick days without losing wages or possibly their jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) only provides for unpaid leave, and only applies to employers with more than 50 employees. Approximately forty percent of workers do not qualify for the FMLA, and those who do often don't take sick days for financial reasons.

Seventy-nine percent of food industry workers -- who are especially likely to spread illness if they go to work sick -- don't get paid sick days, according to a Food Chain Workers Alliance study. A recent Centers for Disease Control study found that more than half of all norovirus outbreaks can be traced back to sick food service workers.

In response to this public health and economic issue, cities and counties have proposed ordinances that require employers allow workers to call-in sick without losing their jobs or wages. And corporate interests are pushing back. In New York City, business lobbyists managed to get City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn to block the legislation for three years, before a long-term campaign by worker's advocates put her in the hot seat and made it politically untenable to continue blocking the bill.

Big business has also lobbied the statehouses, in many cases successfully, to disregard "local control" and nullify and permanently preempt paid sick leave ordinances passed at the local level. And the legislation appears to have spread thanks to a bill promoted and passed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and shared at an ALEC meeting in 2011.

Walker's Anti-Paid Sick Day Law in Wisconsin Brought to ALEC

In May of 2011, Governor Walker pushed Senate Bill 23 to override a Milwaukee ordinance providing for paid sick days. It appeared to be the first paid sick days preemption bill passed in the country.

Milwaukee's ordinance specified that paid sick days could be used if a worker is ill or needs to care for a sick child, and passed via referendum with over 70 percent of the popular vote in 2008. The 2011 state law not only steamrolled local democratic will by overriding a law passed overwhelmingly in a popular vote, but also repealed the rights of working people to get medical treatment they need, care for their children, and help safeguard the health of their families, coworkers and customers.

A few months later, at ALEC's August 2011 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, the bill was brought to the Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee of the ALEC Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force.
Meeting attendees were given complete copies of Wisconsin's 2011 Senate Bill 23 (now Wisconsin Act 16) as a model for state override. ALEC's Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee at the time was co-chaired by YUM! Brands, Inc., which owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.
Legislators attending the Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee meeting were also handed a target list and map of state and local paid sick leave policies prepared by ALEC member the National Restaurant Association.

In Wisconsin, the state chapter of the National Restaurant Association lobbied for Senate Bill 23 to repeal Milwaukee's sick days ordinance, as did the local branch of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an ALEC member.

And a similar pattern of opposition has emerged across the country: as cities like Seattle, Portland, and Philadelphia have taken up paid sick days, the state and local chapters of ALEC members the National Restaurant Association and U.S. Chamber of Commerce have lined up against it. Other consistent paid sick leave opponents include the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), an ALEC member that presents itself as "the voice of small business" but lobbies primarily for big corporate interests, as the Center for Media and Democracy has described at NFIBexposed.org. Restaurant giant Darden (parent company of Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Capital Grille and others) has also emerged as a major paid sick leave foe. Darden is an ALEC member and has had a representative on ALEC's corporate board.

Opponents of paid sick days also regularly cite a "study" from a corporate front group called the Employment Policies Institute purporting to show that employers in Connecticut cut jobs and benefits after a mandatory paid sick leave law took effect. The front group is one of many formed by super-lobbyist Rick Berman -- who has also formed groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom, a front for the fast food, alcohol and tobacco industries -- and has received $2.8 million between 2009 and 2011 from the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which is also a major ALEC funder.

These same big business interests have backed proposed state laws to thwart local sick leave ordinances that reflect the Milwaukee legislation. Sick leave preemption bills have spread across the country since the August 2011 ALEC meeting where Wisconsin's bill was shared. In 2012, a sick days preemption bill was introduced in Tennessee and became law in Louisiana, and in 2013, similar bills have been introduced in Florida, Washington, Mississippi, Michigan, Arizona, Indiana, and Oklahoma.

ALEC Politician Works to "Deliver the Kill Shot" in Florida

Orange County is following in Milwaukee's footsteps, with advocates gathering more than 50,000 signatures last year to place a sick-time measure on the ballot. The referendum was kept off the November 2012 ballot because of a delaying campaign coordinated by Orange County commissioners working with big business, including ALEC member Darden Restaurants, the Florida Chamber of Commerce, Disney and others. In February, a court found the County had violated "the plain meaning of its charter" by refusing to put paid sick days in front of voters.

Text messages released through open records requests indicate the delaying tactics were part of a strategy to kill the initiative entirely.

In early September, Orange County GOP Chair Lew Oliver texted Commissioner Ted Edwards saying he wants "at least one good faith straight face test reason to at least delay it long enough to keep it off the ballot in November. After that, the Legislature can deliver the kill shot."

The "kill shot" would come from Florida legislators duplicating the anti-democratic tactics of Wisconsin's governor.

House Majority Leader Steve Precourt (R), an ALEC member, recently introduced a sweeping paid sick days preemption bill that tracks Wisconsin's Senate Bill 23 and would thwart the Orange County effort. The bill would effectively keep Orange County residents from voting on the county's first citizen-led ballot initiative.

Precourt's proposal actually goes further than Wisconsin's bill by incorporating ALEC model legislation that would preempt local living wage requirements as well. (ALEC's slate of bills promoting a race to the bottom in wages and working conditions for America's workforce was recently detailed in a report by the National Employment Law Project.)

Precourt attended the 2011 ALEC meeting where legislators were handed complete copies of Wisconsin's 2011 Senate Bill 23. He reported receiving $487.38 from the corporate-funded "scholarship fund" to attend the 2011 ALEC meeting. According to documents released from the ALEC State Chair for Florida, Rep. Jimmy Patronis, Florida lawmakers' attendance at ALEC's 2011 annual conference in New Orleans was "one of the strongest delegations in years."

Also at that 2011 ALEC meeting, Precourt and sixteen other Florida legislators attended a "State Night" dinner at Antoine's Restaurant, where lawmakers sat down with corporate lobbyists for meals that averaged around $120. But Florida legislators were not asked to pay a dime for their expensive night out: their tab was picked up by the corporate-funded ALEC "scholarship fund."

ALEC Legislator Has Ethics Concerns

Under current Florida law those ALEC "scholarships" are banned. In 2006, Florida enacted some of the strictest ethics laws in the country, and legislators are now prohibited from accepting most gifts from lobbyists or their employers. But, legislators can still use ALEC "scholarship" funds collected prior to the law taking effect. "The organization has significant funds that were collected prior to the effective date of the law and which, when collected, even those from lobbyists and principals were entirely lawful," reads a House legal opinion sanctioning the use of already-raised scholarship funds. Despite these "scholarships" being grandfathered-in, the appearance of impropriety remains the same.

And ethical concerns about Precourt don't end there. In 2008, he formed a consulting firm whose founding documents indicate it intends to provide "engineering and lobbying services" -- with lobbying being a questionable activity for a sitting legislator. In 2011, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Rep. Precourt was gunning for an appointment to direct Central Florida's toll-road agency, despite a significant conflict of interest: his engineering firm, Dyer, Riddle Mills and Precourt (DRMP), had received $10.5 million in contracts in recent years and stood to make millions more from new contracts. Precourt had worked at the firm for twenty years, and though he said he resigned as a principal a few years after becoming an elected official, he retained a financial relationship with the company.

DRMP also has a financial relationship with some of the major opponents of Orange County's proposed Earned Sick Time ordinance. It has major contracts with Disney, for example, which lobbied against the sick days initiative in Orange County.

Precourt's bill passed out of committee and is up for a final vote in the House on April 4.

Proposed State, Federal Bills to Require Paid Sick Days

Legislation has also been proposed on the federal and state levels to require paid sick days.

In Congress, the Healthy Families Act has been introduced several times since 2004, and would allow workers to earn up to seven days of paid sick leave (or one hour for every 30 hours worked) for use when an individual is ill or needs to care for a sick family member. States like Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Washington State are also considering bills to guarantee state-wide paid sick days.

But the campaign against paid sick days is growing increasingly intense and coordinated, particularly as local governments take matters into their own hands. Keep an eye out for an ALEC legislator introducing a killshot preemption bill in your state legislature.

The Koch Bros., ALEC and the Power of the State

"We Don't Have the Power to Coerce Anybody"...That's Why They Need Government
by KEVIN CARSON


Were there an awards show for unintentional howlers, Charles Koch’s statement in a Forbes interview last December (“Inside the Koch Empire: How the Brothers Plan to Reshape America,” December 5, 2012) would surely be a nominee. “Most power is power to coerce somebody,” he said. “We don’t have the power to coerce anybody.”

No, but the government sure does. Maybe that’s why the Koch Brothers put so much money into lobbying groups and think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Heritage Foundation whose main purpose is to influence government policy.

“Oh,” but you say. “They’re not looking to make money through increased government coercion. Far from it! They’re just lobbying government to get out of the economy so they can take their chances competing on their merits in an unfettered market economy.”

Well … not quite.

Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center’s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory.

The legislative agenda pursued by groups like ALEC, Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute isn’t exactly libertarian. At least not if, by “libertarian,” you mean anything more principled than “whatever big business wants from government to make it profitable.”

As an example, consider so-called “Ag-Gag” bills – written by ALEC — that prohibit undercover journalists from exposing animal abuse within corporate agribusiness. This past year such bills were introduced in nine states and signed into law in three.

The Koch Brothers are also enthusiastic advocates (to say the least) of the Keystone XL pipeline, standing to make billions from the project if it’s completed. Needless to say, Keystone’s route depends heavily on the use of eminent domain to steal land from family farmers, and Keystone’s government backers have run roughshod over Indian lands (including sacred burial grounds) guaranteed by treaty. Last I heard, eminent domain is only possible through coercion — you know, that thing David Koch said he lacks the ability to do.

The Keystone project is also heavily dependent on regulatory state preemption of ordinary common law standards of civil liability for the air and groundwater pollution and health damage fracking causes to surrounding communities. And the Koch brothers are also prominent cheerleaders for “tort reform” — i.e., making it more difficult to hold corporations liable for their wrongdoing and make them pay for the harm they’ve caused.

So the actual pattern we see is the Koch brothers and their pet think tanks actively encouraging a near-totalitarian level of state intervention to suppress all the mechanisms of civil society — investigative journalism by a free and independent press, a vigorous system of civil liability, etc. — that would help keep business honest and hold it accountable. Hardly surprising, when you consider Koch Industries got its start building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. Say, now — he had the power to coerce, didn’t he?

While we’re at it, ALEC has actively lobbied for the draconian drug laws and for detention of “illegal aliens” [sic] that are so profitable to its sponsors like CCOA, Wackenhut and other private prison corporations. That doesn’t sound too libertarian, does it?

And how about David Addington’s new No. 3 role at Heritage? Addington was Dick Cheney’s go-to guy for writing legal memos on stuff like indefinite detention, torture, and warrantless surveillance. You can see why a guy like that would be a perfect fit for a think tank that’s all about “limited government” and “restoring the Constitution.” All sarcasm aside, I think you can see that people like this have a very, um, skewed idea of what “freedom” means.

The role of people like Charles and David Koch, and of think tanks like ALEC, AEI and Heritage, in the larger free market libertarian movement is a lot like that of the Pharisees in the Judaism of Jesus’s time. “Whited sepulchres” and “generation of vipers” are some of the terms he used, I think.

The Pharisees, Jesus said, would cavil and split hairs for years on the finer points of the law, while utterly disregarding its spirit; they would tithe their very herbs, while putting their money into their day’s equivalent of tax-free nonprofit foundations to avoid taking care of their aged parents.

The corporate Pharisees of our day strain at a gnat using “free market” rhetoric to attack welfare for the poor, but swallow a camel when it comes to welfare for corporations. They claim to favor “economic freedom” and “free trade,” while putting the entire world under the totalitarian lockdown of draconian “intellectual property” law to guarantee their enormous monopoly rents. They complain that “taxation is theft,” while their mining and agribusiness corporations act in collusion with governments to kick the peoples of world off their land.

It’s time to scourge the money-changers from the temple.

Florida Legislature Pushing Fracking Disclosure Bill

Nothing to Sneeze At
by STEVE HORN


Florida may soon become the fourth state with a law on the books enforcing hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) chemical disclosure. The Florida House of Representatives’ Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee voted unanimously (11-0) on March 7 to require chemical disclosure from the fracking industry. For many, that is cause for celebration and applause.

Fracking for oil and gas embedded in shale rock basins across the country and world involves the injection of a 99.5-percent cocktail of water and fine-grained sillica sand into a well that drops under the groundwater table 6,000-10,000 feet and then another 6,000-10,000 feet horizontally. The other .5 percent consists of a mixture of chemicals injected into the well, proprietary information and a “trade secret” under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which current President Barack Obama voted “yes” on as a Senator.

That loophole is referred to by many as the “Halliburton Loophole” because Dick Cheney had left his position as CEO of Halliburton – one of the largest oil and gas services corporations in the world – to become Vice President and convene the Energy Task Force. That Task Force consisted of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Transportation and Energy. One of its key actions was opening the floodgates for unfettered fracking nationwide.
Between 2001 and the bill’s passage in 2005, the Task Force held over 300 meetings with oil and gas industry lobbyists and upper-level executives. The result was a slew of give-aways to the industry in this omnibus piece of legislation. On top of the “Halliburton Loophole,” the bill also contains an exemption for fracking from Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforcement of the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act.
The federal-level response to closing the ”Halliburton Loophole” is the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act, a bill that never garnered more than a handful of co-sponsors.

The state-level response, the story goes, is versions of the bill that recently passed onan 11-0 bipartisan basis in a Florida state house subcommittee.

Introduced as the “Fracturing Chemical Usage Disclosure Act” on Feb. 13, bill sponsor Rep. Ray Rodrigues (R-76) told The Palm Beach Post the day the bill passed in Subcommittee that there is ”every indication…at some point in the future” that fracking will proceed in the Sunniland Shale basin and that being “proactive” is the way to go. A senate companion bill was also introduced as SB 1028 by Sen. Jeff Clemons (D-27) and if the bill passes in both chambers, it will be labeled SB 1776.

What Rodrigues didn’t mention: the law was written by what investigative journalist Steve Coll referred to as a “private empire,” ExxonMobil.

Like its federal-level predecessor, it still contains the “trade secrets” loophole. It’s also a model bill distributed both by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), as first revealed by The New York Times in April 2012, and the Council of State Governments (CSG), as first revealed here on DeSmogBlog.
FracFocus Façade: Sunshine State’s Copy-Paste and Disaster-in-the-Make

It’s “Sunshine Week” for open government groups and in the Sunshine State we’ve just witnessed a “copy-paste” job that happened out in broad daylight with no one noticing – until now.

A review of the bill’s verbiage reveals it is essentially a mirror image of ALEC’s “Disclosure of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Composition Act” and CSG’s “Act relating to the disclosure of the composition of hydraulic fracturing fluids.”

Most telling is the section of Florida’s bill calling for an “online hydraulic fracturing chemical registry.” That registry, like the Texas model the bill is based off of, would be run by FracFocus. An August investigation by Bloomberg News revealed that FracFocus merely offers the façade of disclosure, or a “fig leaf” of it, as U.S. Rep. Diane DiGette (D-CO), co-sponsor of the FRAC Act put it.

“Energy companies failed to list more than two out of every five fracked wells in eight U.S. states from April 11, 2011, when FracFocus began operating, through the end of last year,” wrote Bloomberg. “The gaps reveal shortcomings in the voluntary approach to transparency on the site, which has received funding from oil and gas trade groups and $1.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy.”

In reality, FracFocus is a public relations front for the oil and gas industry, as we reported here in Dec. 2012, explaining,

FracFocus’ domain is registered by Brothers & Company, a public relations firm whose clients include America’s Natural Gas Alliance, Chesapeake Energy, and American Clean Skies Foundation – a front group for Chesapeake Energy.

In short, the bill offers “sunshine” to the public in name only.

“This disclosure bill has a hole big enough to drive a Mack truck through,” Texas Rep. Lon Burnam (D-90) told Bloomberg.

How the Bill Became a “Model”

In May 2011, the Obama Administration Department of Energy (DOE) fracking subcommittee - consisting almost entirely of officials with ties to the oil and gas industry - convened to produce “best practices” for state-level regulations and disclosure standards for fracking.

Out of the subcommittee came the standards written into a Texas bill, HB 3328, passed one month later in June 2011 in a 137-8 roll call vote, while its Senate companion bill passed on a 31-0 unanimous roll call vote. $1.5 million in FracFocus funding stems from the DOE fracking subcommittee.

A Dec. 2012 Bloomberg probe revealed that the industry utilized the “trade secrets” exemption 19,000 times its first year as law of the land in Texas. For perspective, there are only 6,000 fracking wells in the state at-large.

In Oct. 2011 and Dec. 2011, the Texas bill became a “model bill” both at the CSG and ALEC annual meetings, respectively. ExxonMobil was one of the biggest corporate patrons for CSG’s annual meeting that year, serving as a Gold Level Sponsor.

CSG is a partially corporate-funded and taxpayer-subsidized (via portions of state-level budgets) “trade association” which, like ALEC, passes model legislation often written by and voted upon by corporate lobbyists sitting alongside state-level legislators at its annual meetings. It refers to these bills as “Suggested State Legislation” (SSL). Unlike ALEC, its maintains bipartisan membership.

ALEC is 98 percent funded by corporations, corporate-funded foundations and trade associations. Like CSG, ALEC also passes “model bills” at its annual meetings in similar fashion: behind closed doors, with corporate lobbyists sitting alongside state-level legislators voting “up-down” on proposals. Unlike CSG, it’s predominantly a Republican-centric operation.
The New York Times revealed in an April 2012 investigation that ExxonMobil authored the disclosure standards in the Texas bill that came from the DOE fracking subcommittee. ExxonMobil is the number one producer of shale oil and gas in the United States and a corporation which scored $44.9 billion in profits in 2012, $300 million dollars short of the world record for highest ever annual profit (which Exxon set in 2008).

The model bill has passed in Colorado and Pennsylvania and was proposed but failed in Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, Indiana, California, and Arkansas. Section 77 of Illinois’ proposed Hydraulic Fracturing Regulation Act - as revealed here on DeSmogBlog - also contains the “trade secret” exemption.

Seven of the 15 members of the Florida Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee are ALEC members.

Industry’s Florida Plans Include Fracking the Everglades

A portion of the Sunniland Trend Shale, based in southwestern and southern Florida, overlaps the Everglades National Park. Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a climate change denier, has gone on the record stating fracking in the pristine park is fair game.

Department of Environmental Protection enforcement fell to record-low levels in 2011 in Florida, Scott’s first year in office.

“The total number of enforcement cases fell by more than a fourth (28%) and the DEP Office of General Counsel received the third lowest number of case reports in agency history,” wrote The Bradenton Times. “Pollution penalty assessments dipped by a similar proportion (29%) while penalties actually collected dropped by more than half (57%). The number of big fine cases (more than $100,000) also was cut by half.”

While some speculate as to whether fracking will ever actually happen in Florida, the oil and gas industry has shown it’s serious about developing this shale basin and will host the “Emerging Shale Plays USA” conference in Houston, TX from April 24-25. One of the sessions being led by Brandt Temple, the CEO of Sunrise Exploration & Production is titled, “Mapping The Geological Variance Of The Lower Sunniland To Pinpoint Sweet Spots And Identify Where To Place Wells.”

ALEC’s track-record in the “United States of ALEC” is nothing to sneeze at.

“Each year, close to 1,000 bills, based at least in part on ALEC Model Legislation, are introduced in the states. Of these, an average of 20 percent become law,” ALEC boasts on its website.

One would be remiss given this track record, then, to write off the threat of fracking in the Florida swamplands.

Corporate Political Influence a la Schoolhouse Rock

ALEC and ExxonMobil Push Loopholes in Fracking Chemical Disclosure Rules

Wednesday, April 25, 2012 by ProPublicaby Cora Currier, ProPublica


One of the key controversies about fracking is the chemical makeup of the fluid that is pumped deep into the ground to break apart rock and release natural gas. Some companies have been reluctant to disclose what's in their fracking fluid. Scientists and environmental advocates argue that, without knowing its precise composition, they can't thoroughly investigate complaints of contamination.

Disclosure requirements vary considerably from state to state, as ProPublica recently charted. In many cases, the rules have been limited by a "trade secrets" provision under which companies can claim that a proprietary chemical doesn't have to be disclosed to regulators or the public.

One apparent proponent of the trade secrets caveat? The American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC, a nonprofit group that brings together politicians and corporations to draft and promote conservative, business-friendly legislation. ALEC has been in the spotlight recently because of its support of controversial laws like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" provision.

This weekend, as part of a story on ALEC's political activity, The New York Times noted that the group recently adopted "model legislation" on fracking chemical disclosure, based on a bill passed in Texas last year. According to The Times, the model bill was "sponsored within ALEC" by ExxonMobil, which runs a major oil and gas operation through its subsidiary, XTO Energy. The advocacy group Common Cause, which provided the documents on ALEC's lobbying efforts to The Times, describes model legislation, in many cases identifying by namethe company that proposed it to ALEC's task forces.

ALEC has recently removed its list of model bills from its main website, and did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for XTO Energy confirmed that the company is a member of ALEC, but he did not provide details on the company's involvement with the disclosure bill.

The spokesman said ExxonMobil supports "full disclosure of the ingredients and additives in hydraulic fracturing fluids," but added that when vendors request it, ExxonMobil has "respected the trade secret status of their products." Last year, the company beganvoluntarily uploading chemical disclosures to FracFocus, a clearinghouse website run by the Groundwater Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission.

In a recent blog post, ALEC claimed that legislators in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, New York and Ohio have introduced versions of its model bill, but many of those states vary in the level of disclosure required and how they handle the trade secrets provision. Laws in 11 states require at least partial disclosure, and the Bureau of Land Management recentlydrafted disclosure guidelines for drilling on federal land.

These laws have been relatively well-received by environmental advocates, though the trade secrets issue remains a concern for some. In Ohio, for example, proprietary chemicals don't have to be disclosed to regulators or the public. In Pennsylvania, they are disclosed to regulators, and the public can request information on them from the state Department of Environmental Protection on a case-by-case basis.

The Texas law, which ALEC cites in the post as its template, codifies the trade secrets exemption, and who can challenge it:

Otherwise, Texas' law requires that companies post disclosure forms for each completed well on the FracFocus site. They must disclose all chemicals but only report the concentrations of those that are hazardous. The law also requires that the companies give the total volume of water used in fracking.

The Environmental Protection Agency cannot regulate fracking in order to protect groundwater, because in 2005 Congress exempted fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, which controls how industries inject substances underground.

According to ALEC's blog, the model disclosure legislation is designed to promote "responsible resource production" and "aims to preempt the promulgation of duplicative, burdensome federal regulations" from the EPA, in particular. ALEC has consistently opposed any federal control over fracking. In 2009, the group adopted a "Resolution to Retain State Authority Over Hydraulic Fracturing."

ALEC Disbands Task Force Responsible for Voter ID, 'Stand Your Ground' Laws

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 by The Nation
by John Nichols


Pressured by watchdog groups, civil rights organizations and a growing national movement for accountable lawmaking, the American Legislative Exchange Council announced Tuesday that it was disbanding the task force that has been responsible for advancing controversial Voter ID and “Stand Your Ground” laws.

ALEC, the shadowy corporate-funded proponent of so-called “model legislation” for passage by pliant state legislatures, announced that it would disband its “Public Safety and Elections” task force. The task force has been the prime vehicle for proposing and advancing what critics describe as voter-suppression and anti-democratic initiatives—not just restrictive Voter ID laws but also plans to limit the ability of citizens to petition for referendums and constitutional changes that favor workers and communities. The task force has also been the source of so-called “Castle Doctrine” and “Stand Your Ground” laws that limit the ability of police and prosecutors to pursue inquiries into shootings of unarmed individuals such as Florida teenager Trayvon Martin.

The decision to disband the task force appears to get ALEC out of the business of promoting Voter ID and “Stand Your Ground” laws. That’s a dramatic turn of events, with significant implications for state-based struggles over voting rights an elections, as well as criminal justice policy. But it does not mean that ALEC will stop promoting one-size-fits-all “model legislation” at the state level.

Pressure by CMD, civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the Urban League and ColorOfChange and good government organizations such as Common Cause and People for the American Way—which have expressed concern with ALEC’s meddling in public safety and democracy debates at the state level—has in recent weeks led to decisions by Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonald’s and other corporations to drop their affiliations with ALEC.

Indeed, the disbanding of the “Public Safety and Elections” task force looks in every sense to be a desperate attempt to slow an exodus of high-profile corporations from the group’s membership roll.

Anger over initial failure of Florida police and prosecutors to address Martin’s shooting led to an intense focus on the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law, and on the role of ALEC and the National Rifle Association in passing similar laws in states across the country.

That expanded interest in ALEC, a conservative “bill mill” that has been under scrutiny since the Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation launched the “ALEC Exposed” project last summer.

Pressure by CMD, civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the Urban League and ColorOfChange and good government organizations such as Common Cause and People for the American Way—which have expressed concern with ALEC’s meddling in public safety and democracy debates at the state level—has in recent weeks led to decisions byCoca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonald’s and other corporations to drop their affiliations with ALEC.

In many cases, the corporations that have quit ALEC have suggested that—while they were comfortable working with the right-wing group in order to advocate on behalf of tax and regulatory policies that are favorable to their business interests—they are ill at ease being drawn into debates about issues such as voting rights and gun control.

ALEC’s decision to disband the Public Safety and Elections task force—which worked on those issues—cannot be seen as anything other than a response to the pressure the group has felt as high-profile corporate members have been quitting it on an almost daily basis.

While the group is not acknowledging as much, its statement on the disbanding of the task force speaks volumes.

“We are refocusing our commitment to free-market, limited government and pro-growth principles, and have made changes internally to reflect this renewed focus,” announced Indiana State Representative David Frizzell, ALEC’s national chairman. “We are eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues, and reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy.”

While this is a dramatic development in the struggle to expose and challenge ALEC’s one-size-fits all assault on local and state democracy, it should be remembered that ALEC remains a prime proponent—via task forces working in other areas—of state-based assaults on labor rights, environmental protections and public education.

“Dozens of corporations are investing millions of dollars a year to write business-friendly legislation that is being made into law in statehouses coast to coast, with no regard for the public interest,” explains Bob Edgar of Common Cause. “This is proof positive of the depth and scope of the corporate reach into our democratic processes.”

ColorOfChange Executive Director Rashad Robinson promised that the group's advocacy would continue.

"ALEC has spent years promoting voter suppression laws, Kill at Will bills, and other policies that hurt Black and other marginalized communities. They have have done this with the support of some of America's biggest corporations, including AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and State Farm," said Robinson. "ALEC's latest statement is nothing more than a PR stunt aimed at diverting attention from its agenda, which has done serious damage to our communities. To simply say they are stopping non-economic work does not provide justice to the millions of Americas whose lives are impacted by these dangerous and discriminatory laws courtesy of ALEC and its corporate backers. It's clear that major corporations were in bed with an institution that has worked against basic American values such as the right to vote. Now that these companies are aware of what they've supported, what will they do about it? If ALEC's corporate supporters will not hold the institution accountable for the damage it has caused nationwide, then the ColorOfChanng community will hold them accountable."

“Social Security is Broke”—and Other Corporate Scare Tactics

Tuesday, March 20, 2012 by YES! MagazineFor years, corporations have been peddling myths to rally us behind their interests. Here are three things everyone “knows,” and why they're wrong.
by Lisa Graves
Winston Churchill reportedly said, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.” 

That was before corporations had perfected the art of public relations, investing millions of dollars in PR campaigns to advance their commercial and political interests.The fact is, there are a number of things most people know are true—except they’re not. That’s the result of well-planned, well-funded, long-term propaganda campaigns designed to make people believe things that are against their own best interests.

One relatively new example is the climate denial industry, which is funded by some of the richest corporations and CEOs on the planet to protect their profits from regulations that would address climate change. Although it’s one of the biggest threats we have ever faced, an increasing number of Americans believe there is widespread disagreement in the scientific community about climate change.

But that’s not true—there is actually widespread scientific agreement on climate, and a few dissenters, most paid in some way by the oil industry. Millions of dollars have been spent to create the appearance of disagreement, including deployment of so-called experts and even TV meteorologists to repeat talking points favored by big oil.

In the past year, the Internet and social media have brought together social movements across the globe, and there are signs that, in this new information age, people are breaking through the fog of corporate disinformation. But some of the “facts” have been repeated for so many years that a lot of people still think they are true.


“Social Security is Broke”
—The Cass City Chronicle (Jan. 22, 1976)

For more than 30 years, opponents of Social Security have peddled this lie.

The roots of the efforts to attack Social Security run deep in the far right. They include CEOs such as Fred Koch, who promoted the John Birch Society’s red-scare-era smears that such New Deal reforms were “socialist” or “communist.” In the 1970s, Fred’s sons, Charles and David, inherited his billions—and his ideas. Charles began funding think tanks to develop arguments for dismantling Social Security.
David ran for vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket with a platform that included privatizing Social Security. Since then he’s spent millions on groups to push disinformation about Social Security and promote an array of sophisticated corporate propaganda. The donations of Koch Industries and others to groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that promote claims that Social Security is going broke have paid off. Also, as detailed in SourceWatch, billionaire Peter Peterson has pledged a billion dollars to attacking Social Security. And, guess what? Almost all the current crop of GOP presidential candidates have called Social Security a scam.

The truth is that Social Security wasn’t broke in 1976, and it’s not broke today. According to trusted actuaries, in about 25 years Social Security could face a shortfall—a gap that would allow it to pay most but not all of the earned benefits—unless it’s fixed.

One easy solution is to apply Social Security taxes to all earned income. Under the current system, any wages over the first $106,800 are exempt from Social Security withholding. If we close this loophole soon, the potential shortfall would be solved. Only about 6 percent of Americans earn that much, and removing this exemption would help ensure that the other 94 percent have the protection of this basic social safety net for decades to come.



Tort Reform “Creates Jobs” 
—Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, ALEC alum

The first controversial bill Gov. Walker signed into law last year wasn’t his union-busting effort but a “tort reform” package he claimed would “create jobs.” This omnibus bill, which included numerous items that echo “model” bills from the ALEC bill factory, was rushed through so fast most folks barely had time to read it. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce immediately applauded the bill and so did ALEC. Such legislation is on the wish list of the global corporations funding these groups and many politicians.

Tort reform is a made-up phrase that really means changing the rules for Americans killed or injured by corporations or other defendants. It’s been making its way through states across the country based on claims that it will create jobs, protect access to medical care, and bring down insurance rates.

But legal changes like those in Wisconsin make it harder for Americans to hold a company or careless physician responsible for all the damages caused by their negligence. Such changes make it harder for juries to punish companies to help deter egregious and deadly corporate acts.

Such bills are often pushed based on claims that corporations fear getting “unfairly” sued. But changes like those in Wisconsin have nothing to do with frivolous lawsuits. Caps on damages, for example, apply only after a jury of American citizens has heard the facts and found the company was responsible for the harm.

Plus, there is no conclusive evidence that these changes to the law create jobs. In Wisconsin, for example, Walker claimed his tort reforms and other changes would create 250,000 new private-sector jobs, but the state ended last year with five months in a row of job losses.

The reality is that surveys of local businesses about what would lead them to hire more people reveal that the answer is more sales, not less litigation. In Wisconsin, for example, in a survey of state businesses about what would improve business, tort reform was dead last.

Tort reform is just more of the race to the bottom, pitting state against state to protect their citizens the least. The reality is that ALEC and the U.S. Chamber are bankrolled by global corporations trying to pay American workers the least, provide workers the fewest rights and benefits, and compensate as little as possible for consumers who are injured.

Lives and livelihoods are the real costs of tort reform, which is being sold through calculated corporate disinformation.


We Need the Keystone XL Pipeline for Our “Jobs and National Security”—Jack Gerard, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute

The richest industry on the planet is putting money behind claims that controversial energy projects, from natural gas fracking to the Keystone XL pipeline, are essential to our national security. Americans are vulnerable to such claims as gas prices rise in response to another round of saber-rattling in the Middle East.

People have been bombarded with corporate-backed claims that national security demands immediate approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline connecting the Alberta, Canada, tar sands to the Gulf Coast in Texas. But the claims are misleading.

First, the crude oil from the dirty tar sands extraction process comes from Canada, not the United States, so the oil does not belong to the American people. The oil is not Canada’s either. Rights to it have been sold to multinational companies whose interest is the highest price.

Second, take a look at the map of the proposed pipeline. Its target is the refinery world of Port Arthur, Texas, which is focused on exporting oil via the Gulf of Mexico. Refiners in Texas on board to process tar sands crude include Royal Dutch Shell, the Saudi government, and the French oil company Total. A Texas company, Valero, which operates in a “Foreign Trade Zone” in Port Arthur, which limits customs duties, has pitched investors on exporting the diesel from tar sands crude while importing gas to America.

Don’t believe the corporate propaganda on jobs either. In an earlier phase of the pipeline in South Dakota, almost 90 percent of the 2,500 jobs were filled by workers not from that state, and most of the jobs were low-wage and temporary, according to testimony from TransCanada, the pipeline’s developer.


To Tell the Truth …
These are just a few examples. If you want to find out more on these issues and corporate PR techniques, check out our research and resources at PRWatch.org, SourceWatch.org, and ALECexposed.org.

Despite the gloomy picture of the success of some of these propaganda campaigns, there is hope. The Keystone XL pipeline looked like a done deal. But demonstrations at the White House led by 350.org that resulted in 1,253 arrests, combined with citizen outcry in the heartland states the pipeline would cross, resulted in denial of the permit to build. The day after the Obama administration announced that decision, a group of politicians held a press conference. You guessed it: They said that stopping the pipeline threatened jobs and national security.

And, as economist Dean Baker points out, for all the hostile rhetoric over the years, Social Security is undamaged so far, although this guaranteed pension is difficult to live on alone, since it has not been fully funded by including all wages in withholding over the years.

We’re up against big, rich opponents. But at least if you know the truth, the next time you hear someone say, “Social Security is broke,” you can say, “No it’s not.” And even explain why.

Five Million Voters May Lose Rights in the 2012 Elections

Tuesday, March 6, 2012 by Color Lines
by Brentin Mock


Today’s Super Tuesday primary involves 10 states and 437 delegates at stake for the Republican Party’s presidential prospects. There are two states among that crop that are worth taking a look at: Georgia and Tennessee. Both are emblems for a growing, and troubling, legislative trend in which new election laws mandate citizens to produce photo identification to vote, ask people to prove their citizenship to vote, or outright curtail voter registration efforts.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as five million eligible voters could meet difficulties this Election Day due to these new, imposing voter laws.

There are currently eight states with photo voter ID laws containing specific criteria for what qualifies as “identification”for voting purposes. Some states require that identification be state-issued and only for the state a person is voting in; some prohibit college IDs; some demand that the full name and address on the card be current; while some require that an ID card has an expiration date.

Looking at those stipulations, it’s not hard to imagine how low-income citizens, African Americans, Latino Americans, college students, and elderly voters—groups the Brennan Center has identified as the most burdened by new voter laws—might get tangled up on voter day. The Center estimates that as many as 11 percent of eligible voters lack proper identification right now. For African Americans, it’s 25 percent—that’s 5.5 million voting-age black Americans who could get turned away at the polls for being undocumented and unphotographed.

Other groups like Native Americans, transgendered people, newly divorced, newly married couples or people who’ve recently lost their homes could all have information on their drivers licenses that reflect names, addresses and faces that aren’t current. The costs for these groups will be more than an inconvenience: fees for new birth and marriage certificates, hours lost waiting in lines for updated materials and transportation costs to handle it all.


How did we get to this point? Let’s just say the emergence of these laws are no coincidence. Thousands of Republicans from dozens of states didn’t all just wake up one day and decide we need an ID card to vote. And yet almost every voter ID law now in play or pending happened in the last four years—since Barack Obama ran for and became the nation’s first black president.

Republicans in state legislatures around the country have tried to pass these laws for years. Their efforts had been repeatedly voted down or vetoed out, mostly because the U.S. Constitution prevents meddling with voters’ rights. But in 2010, Republicans not only took over Congress, they became majorities in state legislatures across the country. Numerous states that previously had Democratically controlled general assemblies turned Tea Party-red, and one of the chief items on their agendas was changing the rules of the voting game.

An example of this is Tennessee, which for the first time since the Civil War ended saw its House of Representatives, Senate and governor’s office all controlled by Republicans in 2010. Swiftly, Tennessee passed new voter ID laws, and last year made headlines when a 96-year-old African American woman named Dorothy Cooper was denied an ID to vote.

Georgia was one of the first states with a voter ID law, first passed there in 2005, and today hosts one of the Super Tuesday primaries. Today’s vote in Georgia, and fellow photo voter ID state Tennessee, will probably reveal little about how the new restrictions impact minorities and other at-risk voting groups because they mostly vote Democrat—a fact that voter ID critics stress is not lost on the Republicans who push it. Nonetheless, election officials in Tennessee and Wisconsin, which have already hosted local elections using their new voter ID laws, have bragged about how there have been no problems.

In Wisconsin, the chief elections officer Kevin J. Kennedy noted only a few voter ID glitches where people showed up with the wrong kind of ID to vote.

The story, however, is not as much what happens at the polls when the wrong ID is used as it is what happens when people don’t bother showing up at the polls at all because they think they don’t qualify due to lack of identification. The U.S. has a long history of voting shenanigans, from Jim Crow era poll taxes to current era rumors circulated, often exclusively in black communities, about who can and can’t vote.

Come this November, during the general election, the impacts of the new laws will begin to surface. Besides the eight states already holding strict voter ID laws, there are 31 more states lurking hoping to do the same. At least eight of those states could pass voter ID laws before Election Day. And of the eight that already have strict voter ID laws, five want to pass legislation this year that would make them even stricter.

Who are the movers, shakers and shapers of these potentially disenfranchising laws? A great deal of funding comes from the Koch Brothers, who’ve vowed to remove President Obama from the White House by any means, and by any billions of dollars necessary. Another player is ALEC—or, the American Legislative Exchange Council—a body that includes banks and corporations working alongside Republican legislators to craft laws that would dismantle not only voter rights, but also environmental and labor protections.

ALEC, which has Koch funding, has drafted the model legislation that many states with strict voter ID laws have followed.

This is at least true for Tennessee, but is also true for many other states. In Nebraska, where a voter ID law is being mulled, a state senator flat-out lied when a news reporter asked him about his ties to ALEC. Sen. Charlie Janssen said he wasn’t a member of ALEC and had never been to their functions, but then was confronted with the evidence that his name was listed on their site as a committee member.

Other states share similar connections. ALEC’s Minnesota state chairman, state Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, is also the author and pusher of a voter ID proposal that the governor has already vetoed once.

In Iowa, a voter ID law co-sponsor, state Sen. Linda Upmeyer, is ALEC’s treasurer. And in Tennessee, the state’s GOP Caucus Chairman, Sen. Bill Ketron, is an ALEC member.

All of this has set up a massive and high-stakes battle for civil rights organizations in 2012. The NAACP, the League of Young Voters, AARP, black church groups and college student organizations are all rallying to preserve voter protections by scrapping photo ID laws.

In Wisconsin, lawyers from The Advancement Project, League of Women Voters, ACLU and Voces de la Frontera, are in the courts battling to have Wisconsin’s law repealed on the grounds that it discriminates against people of color.

This week, Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network is leading a march from Montgomery to Selma, in commemoration of the historic Civil Rights march and to protest stifling voter ID and immigration state laws. In the federal government, the Department of Justice has intervened, blocking voter ID laws in South Carolina and redistricting laws in Texas (where there are also voter ID laws), by saying they both violate the Voting Rights Act. Attorney General Eric Holder has denounced the laws across the board and the department is side-eyeing other states that have passed them.

The irony, though, is that voter ID law proponents are using the same civil rights arguments made to secure voting rights protections to now upend them. In Texas, the state initially failed to provide data on the number of African Americans that would be impacted by new voting laws as requested by the Department of Justice. As an excuse, they said they didn’t collect data on race because the Voting Rights Act told them to be colorblind.

In South Carolina and Georgia, election officials argue that they should be released from federal oversight—put in place because of the South’s violent history with stopping African Americans from voting—because civil rights legislation has worked, and no discrimination exists now.

The states are perverting and exploiting civil rights laws in order to pretend that racial discrimination has been completely eradicated. Some even point to the election of the first black president and the record turnout of voters of color in 2008 as evidence that no traces of discrimination are left in the system. Instead, they claim to trace voter fraud—people voting with the names of other displaced, deceased or fictionalized voters—and argue this is why voter IDs are needed.

All the data shows that instances of voter fraud are negligible at best. The voter fraud argument is in many cases a ploy to disguise the racial animus that fuels the voter ID push, especially as it pertains to Latino voters. Many state legislators will state emphatically that the need for voter IDs is driven by the need to keep “illegal immigrants” from voting. Former Maryland governor and congressman Robert Ehrlich Jr., now an attorney, wrote in defense of a Maryland voter ID law that, “This ‘welcome wagon’ for illegal immigrants may reflect a majoritarian view in progressive Maryland; nevertheless, it makes the realization of free and fair elections far more difficult. … Every illegal vote cast and counted degrades our democracy. Lax immigration enforcement only magnifies the problem.”

Many voter ID proponents might argue that voter ID are made possible by the success stories of the civil rights movement, but they also want to place barriers to voting because civil rights legislation may have been too successful, as evidenced by a U.S. president who’s not only a Democrat but is black. Those working to put voter restrictions in place don’t want that kind of election to happen again.

Occupy Groups Target ALEC

Shut Down the Corporations!
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 by Common Dreams

Over 70 cities are participating today in a national day of action called by Occupy Portland to "Shut Down the Corporations." The group calls for non-violent direct action to "target corporations that are part of the American Legislative Exchange Council which is a prime example of the way corporations buy off legislators and craft legislation that serves the interests of corporations and not people."

The group explains the action on its website:

Occupy Portland calls for a national day of non-violent direct action to reclaim our voices and challenge our society’s obsession with profit and greed by shutting down the corporations. We are rejecting a society that does not allow us control of our future. We will reclaim our ability to shape our world in a democratic, cooperative, just and sustainable direction.

We call on the Occupy Movement and everyone seeking freedom and justice to join us in this day of action.

There has been a theft by the 1% of our democratic ability to shape and form the society in which we live and our society is steered toward the destructive pursuit of consumption, profit and greed at the expense of all else.

We call on people to target corporations that are part of the American Legislative Exchange Council which is a prime example of the way corporations buy off legislators and craft legislation that serves the interests of corporations and not people. They used it to create the anti-labor legislation in Wisconsin and the racist bill SB 1070 in Arizona among so many others. They use ALEC to spread these corporate laws around the country.

In doing this we begin to recreate our democracy. In doing this we begin to create a society that is organized to meet human needs and sustain life.

On February 29th, we will reclaim our future from the 1%. We will shut down the corporations and recreate our democracy.

Sara Jerving further explains ALEC on the Center for Media & Democracy:

ALEC is best described as a “bill mill” for corporate special interest legislation. Through ALEC, corporations vote behind closed doors with state legislators on changes to the law they desire that often directly benefit their bottom line. Along with right-wing legislators from across the country, corporations are given “a voice and a vote” on “model” bills to change the law in almost every area affecting people’s rights. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces. They fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. They have their own corporate governing board. They vote as equals with legislators to pre-approve legislation. Participating politicians then bring these bills home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing their origins in ALEC. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door. This is not what democracy is supposed to look like.

David Moberg looks at Occupy Portland's plan to target Verizon in In These Times:

In Portland, as part of the day of actions, Jobs With Justice (JWJ) is targeting Verizon, which is an ALEC board member. The company currently is demanding concessions from its unionized land-line employees in the eastern half of the country and is fighting the organization of mobile telephone workers, including those in Portland.
Meanwhile, it pushes for government subsidies and tax breaks and promotes legislation harmful to workers and consumers, says Madelyn Elder, a Communications Workers of America local president and board member of JWJ. ALEC has slowly been building a presence, but Democratic control of the Senate has constrained its influence, says Common Cause Oregon executive director Janice Thompson.
Their planned protest "is about the 1 percent being greedier than ever while the 99 percent suffer unemployment, underemployment and cutbacks," Elder says. "It's all of the same piece. Labor sees that. And Occupy is the best thing that ever happened to labor."