Will the billionaires and corporations behind ALEC and other groups fighting racial, gender, income, and educational equality in America succeed?
Tennessee, Montana and Oklahoma are the latest states to pass anti-protest laws. Other bills in Iowa, Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have progressed in the last two months.
Industry-designed bills to silence climate protests are under consideration in Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota and Montana. More are likely to come.
Anyone who imagined, after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that the Republican right had maxxed out the possibilities for suppressing the votes of people unlikely to vote for its candidates was sorely mistaken.
The Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME is poised to decimate public-sector unions—and it’s been made possible by a network of right-wing billionaires, think tanks and corporations.
After six months, Betsy DeVos has taken some major steps to change education policy, and her very presence at the head of the U.S. Education Department signals something important about the past, present and future of public education in the United States. She faces protests at many public appearances, which is why she receives special protection from the U.S. Marshals Service, at an average cost so far this year of $1 million a month.
“Taking away local control over wages (and a range of other
pro-worker, pro-environment, and pro-civil rights policies) has become
a major priority of ALEC, a corporate-backed group with extensive
lobbying resources and influence in our state legislatures,” according
to an National Employment Law Project statement. “ALEC drafts “model” minimum wage preemption
bills for conservative legislatures to simply copy and paste.”
After compiling a five-year, 50-state, 30-issue database of corporate-backed legislation, political scientist Gordon Lafer has come to believe that business groups are waging a coordinated campaign in state legislatures to impose a deeply unpopular agenda on America.
Trump’s three executive orders on policing, the large number of state legislatures dominated by Republicans, the pro-policing and pro-business attitude of the current administration, and the constant and growing spontaneous demonstrations protesting Trump all combine to produce an atmosphere in which many powerful interests have a stake in suppressing mass dissent.
A massive portion of the planet's seed stock could soon be in the hands of a single company. Bayer announced last month that it plans to purchase Monsanto, the controversial chemical corporation that has been sued around the world over its products. Nowadays, Bayer has a more consumer-friendly corporate reputation, but has a checkered past too.
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