New Orleans The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has glowingly taken credit for many of the bills sweeping newly elected Republican state houses. ALEC and its 2000 legislative members has long been the driver of the far right agenda. Finally, they have been forced to retreat from published reports because of the withdrawal of foundation and corporate funds in the wake of the Trayon Martin slaying in Florida that was fully enabled by the passage in that state of ALEC’s “Stand Your Ground” gun laws and the license for vigilantism and racism those laws allowed.
ALEC is the latest nonprofit to find itself forced by corporations and foundations into retreat for huge – and fatal – errors in forcing the overreaching rightwing agenda on the American public. The Susan Komen for the Cure Foundation faced similar problems in becoming a tool for conservative programs that were anti-women. ALEC voted unanimously to “disband” its committee that handled noneconomic issues like public safety and elections.
According to the Times the outfits that jumped the ALEC ship were not the Koch Brothers or some of the other ultra right financiers, but McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, and the Gates Foundation. What in the world were outfits like that doing funding ALEC and its hater agenda in the first place.
In the executive suites of the Gates Foundation, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Kraft foods and the like were they OK with the racism and elitism inherent in disenfranchising millions of lower income, largely minority voters through ALEC’s voter ID and voter suppression programs? It seems they were at least until the racism inherent in the Trayon Martin killing was revealed from the ALEC and NRA “Stand Your Ground” and kill laws.
I hate to think how many McDonald burgers, Cokes, and Kraft chips and snacks those same lower income families (often to their peril!) consume on a daily basis. No worries about Gates, since so many of them are prevented still from using computers and the Internet by the unwillingness to lower the digital divide. The poor can’t boycott what they can’t access, though they certainly could have laid off the McDonalds, Cokes, and Kraft products.
When corporations and foundations are committed to anti-people, anti-poor, and anti-minority policies, do we have to have a front page killing to rally us to take our business in another direction? These outfits should be ashamed, and they should be shunned!
******
Wild and crazy quote of the day has to go to Congressman Peter T. King (R –NY) on the Secret Service’s women problems in Cartagena, Columbia: “Even if they weren’t prostitutes, it’s not right to bring foreigners back to their rooms. It would probably be safer if they were prostitutes because they we would know who they were working for.” Looks like it’s also time for Representative King to declare the Cold War over and come in from the 1950’s.