ALEC Corporate Members

View ALEC’s 447 present corporate members, 14 corporate members that are leaving or that have left and 2 non-profit Members who have left here:

http://www.strangebrew4.com/ALEC_Corporate_Members.pdf Adobe users

http://www.strangebrew4.com/ALEC_Corporate_Members.xps Office 2007 & up users

Too many to list in a blog so on separate pages and sorted by type of business they are in. Copy the pages and call, write or boycott any and all you can…

Pass the web address above to all like minded family and friends…

ALEC State Legislator Members

View ALEC’s 1271 present state legislator members, 37 state legislator members that are leaving or that have left here all searchable by State:

http://www.strangebrew4.com/ALEC_State_Legislators.pdf Adobe users

http://www.strangebrew4.com/ALEC_State_Legislators.xps Office 2007 and up users

Too many to list in a blog so on separate pages and sorted by what state represent. Copy the pages and call, write or boycott any and all you can…

Pass the web address above to all like minded family and friends…

BOYCOTT KOCH INDUSTRIES PRODUCTS

KOCH INDUSTRIES PRODUCTS

Household:

Angel Soft toilet paper

Dixie plates, bowls, napkins & cups

Quilted Northern toilet paper

Soft ‘n Gentle toilet paper

Brawny paper towels

Mardi Gras napkins and towels

Sparkle napkins

Vanity fair napkins

Zee napkins

All Georgia-Pacific paper products & envelopes

Georgia-Pacific building products:

Dense Armor Drywall and Decking

ToughArmor Gypsum board

Plytanium Plywood

Flexrock

Densglass sheathing

Industrial plasters

Arts & Crafts Plaster

Dental Plaster

Glass-reinforced Gypsum (GRG)

Industrial Tooling Plaster

Investment Casting Plaster

Medical Plaster

Metal Casting Plaster

Pottery Plaster

FibreStrong Rim board

Lam board

Blue Ribbon OSB Rated Sheathing

Blue Ribbon Sub-floor

DryGuard Enhanced OSB

Nautilus Wall Sheathing

Thermostat OSB Radiant Barrier Sheathing

Broadspan Engineered Wood Products

XJ 85 I-Joists

FireDefender Banded Cores

FireDefender FS

FireDefender Mineral Core

Hardboard, Auto Hardboard, Perforated Hardboard

Wood Fiberboard -

Commercial Roof Fiberboard

Hushboard Sound Deadening Board

Regular & Structual Fiberboard Sheathing

Fibers and Carpeting:

COMFOREL® fiberfill

COOLMAX® fabric

CORDURA® fabric

DACRON® fiber

POLYSHIELD® resin

SOLARMAX® fabric

SOMERELLE® bed products

STAINMASTER® carpet

SUPPLEX® fabric

TACTEL® fiber

TACTESSE® carpet fiber

TERATE® polyols

TERATHANE® polyether glycol

THERMOLITE® fabric

PHENREZ® resin

POLARGUARD® fiber

LYCRA® fiber

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is Not Anti-Capitalism

The Occupy Wall Street movement is not about capitalism, it is about the greed of some capitalists. No one is saying that there is no right to make money. It is when greed kicks in to the extent that those overcome by greed do things that are harmful not only to the population at large but to OUR nation and democracy. The Fed should not be set up as an ATM machine for these vultures to strip the Treasury clean after every time they wreck our economy. They should not get bail-out money just to turn around and hand it out in obscene bonuses to the very ones who wrecked our economy. No one has been indicted for causing the worst economic down-turn since the Great Depression, in fact they have been allowed to go right back to the course of business that collapsed our economy so that it is not a question of “if” there will be another crash but just a question of “when”.

The OWS does not want “things for free” but there has to be some kind of relief given to the students who have been laden with debt to get an education, an education that, throughout the American experience, has made the chances of getting meaningful employment after graduation a reality that helped pay those student loans. Now, with the American economy still on the rocks from Bush’s economic disaster and from the Right in Congress doing everything it can to keep the economy on the rocks just to get political points in the next election, that reality that has always been there for our youth as they graduated is no more. There also has to be some kind of relief for homeowners who have lost their jobs due to Wall St crashing the economy, something that is still an ongoing process as the weak recovery sputters along because of not enough demand in the market to stimulate a real, self-sustaining recovery. There also has to be relief for the millions of homeowners who now owe more on their houses than the houses are worth because the housing bubble, that had been artificially created by Wall St bankers gambling with other people’s money, burst causing the value of properties to plummet

Speaking of wanting things for free, why does the 1% want to use our infrastructure (military, ports, airports, interstate highways and bridges etc etc etc ) without paying anything for that use? Why does the 1% want free bail-outs every time they FUBAR our economy? Why does the 1% want free government hand-outs in the form of loopholes and other industry handouts? Why does the 1% want tax free holidays to bring money back into our system that should have remained here while being earned here. Why do the mouth pieces for the 1% not realize corporate welfare costs our country 20 times what individual welfare and assistance costs America without including the fact that it is the 1% that brought on the collapse of our economy that caused 8 million jobs to be lost that has put more people in need of assistance since the Great Depression? Why does the 1% feel so privileged they think they should not be made to pay for the damage they have caused to our macro- and micro- economies?

This is What Fascism Brings…

Total foreclosure filings since the housing bubble burst in 2007 15,032,158 [1]. These were not just sub-prime mortgages that were written to fail but were also people who had lost their jobs since 2007 and had the prinicple of their mortgages exceed the market value of their homes when housing prices dropped, due to the market being saturated,, so they could not sell them to get out from under the mortgages. At the height of the housing bubble, in June 2007, employment was at 138,779,000, employment bottomed out in January 2010 at 127,309,000 for a net total loss of 11,470,000 [2] due to the housing bubble bursting and the subprime market collapsing and the economy crashing. That is 11.5 million jobs lost due to the same type of governance that caused the Great Depression, Laissez-Faire or hands off governance has never worked. When the Clinton administration ended, the number of people living under the poverty level was abour 31 million people the Bush administration saw an ever increasing number of people living below the poverty level with a little plateau during the housing bubble but when that burst and the economy crashed the number of people living under the poverty level sky rocketed with about 12 million people sliding down during the 8 Bush fiscal years. Because the Republicans have done nothing to help the economy grow jobs and have done everything they could to tank the economy again for purely partisan reasons the poverty level, 46.2 million people, is now the highest it has been in over 70 years, with one in four children living under the poverty level. [3]

This is what fascism brings when the Government is basically merged with and doing the bidding of the Corporations. This is what fascism brings after two unfunded wars and two very expensive but pitifully run attempts at nation building. This is what fascism brings when it cannot outright ban unions so it disbands a large federal employees union to give corporations the green light to break union contracts and close union shops. This is what fascism brings when it pays corporations to ship whole plants overseas in the vain attempt to stifle all unions, the main strength of their political rivals. This is what fascism brings when giving tax breaks to those who do not need them while ignoring the needs of the people. This is what fascism brings when the government does not ask the people who benefit the most from those unfunded wars to help pay for them, instead putting the burden on the already overburdened lower 99% (the first time during times of War in American history that the wealthy have not been asked to pay in more). Bush doubled the debt of all administrations before him and lost a net 1.8 million jobs. America does not have a debt problem, it has a lack of jobs that pay living wages problem, you know that problem the Republican’ts ran on in 2010 saying they knew how to fix but have done nothing to that effect at all…

When you have all the Congress people of one political persuasion swearing fealty to a policy that never was, before swearing loyalty to our Constitution, these people should never have been seated in Congress. Grover Norquist claimed Reagan gave many tax cuts to the 1%, never raised taxes on the 1% and still created jobs which is a outright lie. Governor Reagan of California, after messing up the budget there, signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then. President Reagan, in his first year, gave a mammoth tax cut to the 1% for their help in getting him elected. It blew a hole in the federal budget so big that Reagan spent 7 years and 9 tax hikes to try to repair the budget. Reagan tripled the debt of all the admministrations before him. Grover Norquist is an idiot who should be made to diet until he is small enough to be drowned in a bathtub and anyone who believes selfishness is a virture (a la Ayn Rand) should be made to follow Norquist.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_United_States_housing_bubble

[2] ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.compaeu.txt

[3] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2010/figure4.pdf

The Cult of the Randites

Thanks to the writings of Ayn Rand being used as a political “bible” by those on the right, the United States is now one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Our American politicians and the religious leaders of the Right have all fallen prey to a cult-like movement that worships at the altar of Ayn Rand. Thanks to Rand the United States is now one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Rand said “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible”

The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces. Altruism is a concern for the welfare of others. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, and a core aspect of various religious traditions. Altruism is the opposite of selfishness. This absurdity that selfishness is a virtue and that there is no place for altruism in our society has been proven both false by the Wall St Banks who did and do not care who they hurt as they raked in billions, aided and abetted by our politicians who look upon these people as gods as they collapsed our economy, turned around and bailed out their gods while they allowed the 99% to drown as the ripples of the economic collapse of 2008 still washes over our society in everlasting waves.

Rand heroes are creative individualists, with the characteristics of intelligence and aptitude, self-control, moral resolution, radical individualism and emotional restraint (seeming cold or lacking empathy). These characteristics are now prevalent in our politicians, who do not care about anything but serving the needs of the 1%. These Randites think they are on the path to economic and political salvation. They are blind to the problems caused by the 1% and by their own misguided economic proposals. We can’t tax their gods- the job “Creators” while the facts prove what a disaster that policy has been. They seek to tear down 245 years of advancements for the people in order to afford more tax cuts for their gods. We have to purge our political populations of those who think selfishness is a virtue, who take medical coverage from those who need it just to give tax breaks to those who do not, who would let someone die if they do not have health insurance, who think that anyone who lost their job and/or their houses did so as a result of their own actions when the economic collapse was from their gods’ meddling with our economy. We have to purge those religious leaders who preach not the teachings of Christ but who instead preach the virtue of selfishness and the evils of altruism, a complete reversal of everything that Christ taught. Until we do this, the great ship of state that is America will be doomed to the fate of the other “unsinkable” ship.

ENOUGH!!!

Fred Koch was the Joe McCarthy of the American Business world, became paranoid, when he worked in the Soviet Union, after his handler told him how the Communists were infiltrating the U.S.A. in the schools, universities, churches, labor unions, government, armed forces and everywhere else. This little, mid-level bureaucrat of the Soviet Politburo had rattled Koch so bad with his political ranting that it sent Koch on a life-long crusade against the “hidden communist agenda” here in the states. Koch helped to found the John Birch Society which, besides its anti-anything that even smelled like communism/socialism agenda, also tasked itself to make sure the races (meaning white race) stayed pure and they have used violence to ensure that end. Koch said he abhorred communism because while in the Soviet Union, he was able to get a first hand view of the machinations of the politically oppressive Soviet system, and he quickly developed a hatred and disdain for the Soviets. He saw widespread misery, hunger and terror while in the Soviet Union.

I say Bull Shitsky to all that, what the Koch family and the John Birch Society have been covertly and are now overtly pushing for America is a system where, like Soviet Russia, power is all at the top but instead of a Politburo ruling, you have Corporate America at the top controlling everything in everyones’ lives. You have workers being stripped of their rights, work places stripped of their safety measures, the government stripped of any oversight powers, civic entities being stripped of their political rights which are replaced by an overseer appointed by the Koch supported governor, who has the autocratic power to do as he sees fit with whatever entity he is overseeing. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in public holdings of land, buildings and especially utilities that Corporate America has wanted to privatize for years and the Koch appointed overseer can dispose of any and all such property as he sees fit. Schools will be privatized and the academic agenda will have to be approved by the overseer not by parents or community members so they can instill their thought processes into our youth including the “purification” of the races. Already in South Carolina, Koch backed governments are re-segregating the school districts. In state after state and anywhere else these policies and agendas are already in place it is taking America back one hundred years in education, workplaces and in the small governments that were promised becoming big government for the masses while the top tier has the small government, if any, involved in their lives.

It is already getting harder to stop this demolishing of America’s democracy. Tea Party members who have been used by the likes of the Koch, Walker and Armey will end up with the same fate as everyone else once power is solidified. Their government run Medicare, the one they clung to as they railed against government run health care, will be replaced by a voucher system for health insurance that does not cover the costs of the premiums and if you cannot afford the difference then it is tough luck for you if you get sick. Try getting health insurance when you are elderly, with some health problems, it can’t be done or you have to pay exorbitant premiums that pay for little or no coverage and from which you can be expelled from coverage at the whim of the Insurance companies. Social Security will be privatized into individual stock market accounts where unscrupulous agents eat away your savings with any and every fee they can think of, that is if you have any savings left after another downturn in the market caused by inept politicians and/or unbridled greed in the financial sector. Forget about getting help from the state, Social Services and Medicaid were done away with so that the top 2% could pay no taxes, so they can get massive “subsidies”, so they can pollute our environment at will, strip mine our protected forests and National parks and pollute out rivers and shores with uncontrolled and unmonitored energy drilling. Most of the country’s water tables have long been toxic cesspools from untethered hydro-fracturing and our lakes and rivers routinely catch fire after the hydro fracturing waste has been dumped into them.

All the above are not some far-fetched scenarios but are starting to happen all over our land, allowed to happen by politicians who have sold their souls and our childrens’ and grandchildrens’ futures to the highest bidder. Again I say we have to come together in numbers that cannot be ignored and tell those who work for us at every level “ENOUGH!!!”

Koch brothers and ALEC are the new John Birch Society

The biggest threat to America and the democracy we all cherish is the insidious infestation of all aspects of American politics by the John Birch Society and all its front groups and all the politicians on every level who have all been funded or bought and paid for by the likes of the Koch brothers and other members of the JBS front group ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), the front group responsible for writing anti-worker legislation for state governments that are now taking away rights that workers have fought decades for. The end game for these groups is to tear down the very fabric of American democracy to replace years of growth and progress with a state run by corporations who have control over who works and who does not, control over who gets life-saving medical care and who does not, control over what religion is the “right one for America”, control over who gets housing and who does not, control over who gets food and who does not, control over who you can marry, in other words complete control over everyone’s life by a state run by corporations, for corporations and of corporations

The Koch brothers are members of the John Birch Society which their father, Fred Koch, was one of the original organizers. You need to know the John Birch Society intimately, because they have been trying to run US government policy on numerous issues for a very long time. Its mission statement is not unlike tea party dogma. “Less Government, More Responsibility, and (With God’s Help) a Better World” The John Birch Society’s objective was to fight communism using communism’s own techniques; the organization of front groups[1], infiltration of other groups and letter-writing campaigns. The John Birch Society, which has made an unabashed assertion of itself into US politics and drastically changing US society by infiltrating and subverting the tea party, is championed by the Koch Brothers and other corporatists.

The John Birch Society was named in honor of John Morrison Birch, a Fundamentalist Baptist missionary from Georgia, who had served as an intelligence officer in China during World War II and was killed by Chinese communists in 1945 and dubbed “the first American victim of the Cold War” by the Society. JBS founder Robert Welch worked as a researcher for the anti-collectivist NAM before setting up the JBS. The anti-collectivist doctrine is defined as the individual reaction to the totalitarian collective of the Soviet communist state of the twentieth century. Welch saw “collectivism” as the main threat to western civilization, and liberals as secret communist traitors who provide the cover for the gradual process of collectivism, with the ultimate goal of replacing the nations of western civilization with one-world socialist government. “There are many stages of welfarism, socialism, and collectivism in general” he wrote, “but communism is the ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that direction”. These are the very same accusations made by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and all the other rightwing pundits. The John Birch Society has “infiltrated” the right, straight into the chambers of the SCOTUS whose Justices have ruled in favor of corporate personhood.

The JBS is organized into cells, imitating Communist organizing techniques as visualized by Welch. The society is very paranoid so the cell segregation is aimed at preventing infiltration by the “Communists” or other outsiders seeking information about the society, Its activities included distribution of segregationist literature, attacks on race “mongrelization”, agitation against the United Nations, and petitions to impeach liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren. To spread their message, Birchers held Sunday showings of right-wing documentary films and operated such as “Let Freedom Ring”, a nationwide network of recorded telephone messages. They also helped to organize the “Minutemen”, a paramilitary group training to lead guerrilla warfare once the Communists took over (think Timothy McVeigh).

Few have ever heard of it, but the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is the ultimate smoke filled back room clandestine organization.

On the surface, ALEC’s membership is mostly comprised of thousands of state legislators. Each pays a nominal membership fee in order to attend ALEC retreats and receive model legislation. ALEC’s corporate contributors, on the other hand, pay a king’s ransom to gain access to legislators and distribute their corporate-crafted legislation. So, while the membership appears to be public sector, the bankroll is almost entirely private sector. In fact, public sector membership dues account for only around one percent of ALEC’s annual revenues. ALEC claims to be nonpartisan, but in fact its free-market, pro-business mission is clear. The result has been a consistent pipeline of special interest legislation being funneled into state capitols. Thanks to ALEC, 826 bills were introduced in the states in 2009 and 115 were enacted into law. Behind the scenes at ALEC, the nuts and bolts of lobbying and crafting legislation is done by large corporate defense firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon. A law firm with strong ties to the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries, it has long used ALEC’s ability to get a wide swath of state laws enacted to further the interests of its corporate clients.

ALEC’s campaigns and model legislation have run the gamut of issues, but all have either protected or promoted a corporate revenue stream, often at the expense of consumers. For example, ALEC has worked on behalf of:

 

  • Oil companies to undermine climate change proponents;
  • Pharmaceutical manufacturers, arguing that states should be banned from importing prescription drugs;
  • Telecom firms to block local authorities from offering cheap or free municipally-owned broadband;
  • Insurance companies to prevent state insurance commissioners from requiring insurers to meet strengthened accounting and auditing rules;
  • Big banks, recommending that seniors be forced to give up their homes via reverse mortgages in order to receive Medicaid;
  • The asbestos industry, trying to shut the courthouse door to Americans suffering from mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases; and,
  • Enron to deregulate the utility industries, which eventually caused the U.S. to lose what the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) estimated as $5 trillion in market value.

The most intensive scrutiny of ALEC can be found here: href=http://alecwatch.org/report.html

[1] John Birch Society’s front groups: Americans for Prosperity, Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, American Legislative Exchange Council, Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, Institute for Justice, Kansas Policy Institute, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Reason Foundation & Reason Magazine

The History of the John Birch Society & the Tea Party

In 1929 to 1932, Fred Koch was in the USSR building oil “cracking” units for Joseph Stalin. His “handler”, a low level member of the politburo, repeatedly told Koch that the Revolution was coming to America with Communists infiltrating the US schools, universities, churches, labor unions, government and the armed forces. Koch believed the handler was one of the original architects of the Communist plan of subversion of the U.S.A. This so rattled Koch that he led a life-long campaign to expose the communists in those institution. In 1958, Koch co-founded the John Birch Society with a group of like minded plutocrats who saw Communists as the cause of the loss of their power over workers, disregarding the fact that it was the horrendous conditions they had kept those workers in for so long that precipitated the loss of said power. It makes it a lot easier to attract followers when you have a straw man to put up as the common enemy and foist the mantle of that straw man on anyone you deem as a threat to your goals. JBS is also an overt racist organization that publically promotes the separation of the races by force if necessary. So they have multiple “boogey men” to scare the easily fooled segments of the public into joining their cause. But that was not enough to wrest a win for their candidate in the 1964 election and Barry Goldwater was resoundly defeated. Fred Koch passed away in 1967 before he was able to build an anti-Communist plutocracy here in America that would have rivaled the USSR in it’s worst days for repression. JBS was ostracized by the Conservative movement in the mid-70s, not for its communist under every bed paranoia or its overt racial tenets, but for saying Eisenhower was a Communist tool.

The Kochs helped groom Reagan for the presidency and get elected and Reagan reciprocated by starting the war on the middle class/unions by breaking the Air Traffic Controllers Union and giving the green light to Corporate America to break contracts in their unionized workplaces. Reagan’s crash of the S & Ls was supposed to cause a crash big enough to bring down the economy enough to wipe out the middle class/unions but the Democrats in Congress were too strong. A new organization had formed, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which had the same values (or lack thereof) of the JBS but worked in a more covert manner than the Society. That is why the Right fought tooth and nail to steal the 2000 election. Bush was Reagan on steroids and aided the war on the middle class/unions by giving tax breaks to corporations to pack up and offshore their facilities. The Right knew if the Banks were allowed to operate unsupervised it would lead to another collapse of our economy only much bigger than the S & L collapse. They had not planned for a Democratic win in the 2008 election and only bailed out the banks and let middle class slide towards extinction.

Enter Obama and his stimulus funds that kept the economy completely collapsing thus helping the middle class to live another day. It was then that the Corporate members of ALEC, the Republicans in Congress and the Tea Party movement (which had been now commandeered by the Koch Brothers with the John Birch Society as its militant wing) started an all out war to ensure Obama could not govern as a Democrat thus making him a one term president. The Republicans in Congress, by political bickering and partisan politics no matter what the issue was, laid cover for the Republican governors and legislators as they started carrying out the agenda set forth by ALEC in bill guidelines drawn up by ALEC lawyers, which those governors and legislators tried to rush through while America was fixated on the circus that Washington had become. State after state pushed through bills that stripped union rights from teachers, municipal and state workers in a blatant attempt to usurp the election process in the US by taking away financial allies from political foes. The aim is to set up an oligarchy where the government is run by plutocrats through their bought and paid for politicians, protected by private security forces and police departments who have been militarized since 9/11 was allowed to happen.