ALEC’s Influence over Lawmaking in State Legislatures

ALEC and State Legislatures

Saturday, 07 December 2013

ALEC’s Influence over Lawmaking in State Legislatures

The goal of this article is to begin to fill the gap in our knowledge. Given the pervasive gridlock in Congress, key legislative change is occurring predominantly in the states.  It is, then, all the more important to know who is affecting which bills are introduced in the state legislatures, and which bills pass.  Using text analysis, I find where bills based on ALEC model legislation are introduced in the statehouses during the 2011-2012 session and track their progress in the legislative process.
My findings are threefold.  First, ALEC model bills are, word-for-word, introduced in our state legislatures at a non-trivial rate.  Second, they have a good chance – better than most legislation – of being enacted into law.  Finally, the bills that pass are most often linked to controversial social and economic issues.  In the end, I argue that this is not good for ALEC, its corporate partners, or for the democratic process.

About ALEC

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a national policy organization that “provides a constructive forum for state legislators and private sector leaders to discuss and exchange practical, state-level public policy issues.” (ALEC website). ALEC members, including state legislators and corporate representatives, meet in task forces on specific issue areas (i.e., environment and energy, worker’s rights, etc.) and collaborate to write model legislation. Once the task force completes a model bill it is approved by the ALEC membership and governing board.  Once bills clear those hurdles, they become official ALEC “model policies,” which are disseminated to state legislators.
ALEC is notoriously secretive about the process by which members draft and approve model legislation. A recent Washington Post article by Dana Milbank detailed the closed-door policy at ALEC’s annual policy summit.  My own attempts to contact ALEC staff in order to understand the model bill drafting process were unsuccessful.
ALEC does list on its website all official ALEC policies (though it does not say – and representatives claim not to have collected – information on where those policies have been introduced in the states).  However, there is reason to believe that the list is incomplete. The ALEC board reviews the status of every piece of model legislation every five years, and adds and removes model bills from the website periodically.  It is not surprising, then, that the Castle Doctrine (a.k.a. Stand Your Ground) was removed from the ALEC website following the public scrutiny that arose during the Trayvon Martin trial.
Thus, obtaining a complete list of ALEC model bills and their rates of introduction and success in the U.S. statehouses requires a nuanced data collection strategy.

Methodology:

As discussed in the previous section, ALEC’s public list of model bills is not complete – and may include some of their most controversial and influential bills.  Rather than relying on the organization’s own list, I turned to a third party website: ALEC Exposed.  ALEC Exposed, a subsidiary of PR Watch, tracks all ALEC activity and keeps a list of the most significant ALEC model legislation approved between 2010 and 2013.  From the ALEC Exposed database, I collected information on the 169 model bills that they tag as most significant, covering each of the nine ALEC task force areas.
Using the text from those169 model bills, I used Boolean string searches in LEXIS to find bills with the same language that were introduced in the 2011-2012 legislative session. In total, I recovered 132 bills.  I then coded a variety of features of those bills including their state and chamber of origin, sponsors’ party identification and connections to ALEC, and legislative history.

ALEC Bills Introduced

During the 2011-2012 legislative session, 132 bills based on ALEC models were introduced in the states.  Democrats sponsored nearly 18% of those bills, while Republicans sponsored more than 81% (one bill was introduced by a joint committee, and, thus, does not have a single sponsor).  Nearly two-thirds of those bills were introduced in state lower chambers, while only 34% were introduced in upper chambers.  Of those legislators who sponsored ALEC model legislation, 57% can be explicitly connected to ALEC.  However, that does not necessarily preclude the other legislators from having ALEC ties; ALEC does not disclose the names of their legislative members, so this figure is based primarily on information from leaked documents.
ALEC model language appeared in bills in 34 states (see Figure 1).  Those bills were most common in West Virginia, where legislators introduced 10 bills based on ALEC model legislation.  Both the Oklahoma and Mississippi legislatures considered nine ALEC bills, Arizona eight, and Kansas and Montana saw seven apiece.

One feature that separates ALEC from other lobbying ventures is that it partners with corporations whose interests span the space of conservative issues.  This is reflected in the fact that legislation introduced based on ALEC models covers a variety of seemingly-unrelated subjects (see Figure 2).

Most common were bills pertaining to immigration and the environment, followed by those relating to guns and crime.  The now-infamous Castle Doctrine Act was introduced in nine chambers and was, thus, one of the more common pieces of ALEC legislation to appear in the statehouses.  The five most common ALEC model bills introduced in the state legislatures include:

Table 1: Top 5 ALEC Model Bills Introduced in the States
ALEC Model Bill	# of States Introduced	Description
No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act	23	Closely resembles Arizona’s SB1070 law in that it mandates local law enforcement of federal immigration law, and allows private citizens to sue their local government if they feel the law is not being fully enforced. In addition, it further criminalizes the employment of illegal immigrants, and creates a crime of “trespassing” on state land without immigration status, and a crime of having an illegal immigrant in one’s vehicle, among other provisions.
The Disclosure of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Composition Act	10	Requires the disclosure of fluid used in the production of natural gas through hydraulic fracturing. It would also allow operators not to disclose any materials that are considered a “trade secret” or present incidentally in the hydraulic fluid, and would limit the ability of individuals to challenge a the operator’s claim to trade secret protection.
Castle Doctrine Act	9	Also commonly referred to as “Stand Your Ground” legislation, this act authorizes the deadly use of force against an intruder in a residence or vehicle. It declares that a person has a right to stand his or her ground under reasonable fear of great bodily harm. It also reduces the grounds under which law enforcement may investigate the use of deadly force under these circumstances.
ALEC State Withdrawal from Regional Climate Change Initiative	9	Declares the lack of benefit to reducing carbon emissions in the state that would adopt it, and would provide that state reasonable cover to withdraw from a regional climate initiative.
Consistency of Firearm Regulation	9	Prohibits local jurisdictions from independently enacting restrictions on the possession of firearms. This bill would also preempt the right of local jurisdictions to bring certain civil actions against firearms or ammunition manufacturers, trade associations, and dealers.

ALEC Bills Enacted
Of the 132 ALEC model bills introduced, 12 were enacted.  One additional bill passed the New Hampshire legislature only to be vetoed by the governor.  Now, a success rate of 9% may not seem high upon first glance.  However, consider the fact that, in the 112^th session of the U.S. Congress, less than 2% of introduced bills passed.  That means that bills based on ALEC policies have a survival rate nearly 5 times that of the average bill in Congress.
Table 2 summarizes the ALEC policies that were passed in the 2011-2012 session.  Republicans sponsored all of the enacted bills, and 7 of those sponsors have explicit ties to ALEC.  Two states – Pennsylvania and Oklahoma – passed the Castle Doctrine.  Though the modal ALEC bill introduced in the states was the No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act, only Alabama passed it.

Table 2: ALEC Bills Enacted
Enacting State		ALEC bill	Sponsor	Known ALEC Tie?	Description
|Alabama	2011 H.B. 56	No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act	Rep. Micky Hammon (R)	-	See Table 1.
Arizona	2011 S.B. 1546	Eminent Domain Authority for Federal Lands Act	Senator Al Melvin (R)	Yes	Increases the state government’s ability to appropriate federal lands (such as wilderness areas or national parks)
Arizona	2012 H.B. 2503	Regulary Compliance Congruity with Liability Act	Rep, Kimberly Yee (R)	Yes	Increases protection for corporations in product liability suits, and adopts a presumption in favor of the corporate defendant when it can show compliance with governmental standards.
Kansas	2011 S.B. 9	Discovery of Electronically Stored Information and Limitations on Waiver of Attorney-Client Privilege	Judiciary Committee	-	Limits the ability to produce electronically-stored information during discovery.
North Carolina	2011 H.B. 542	Regulatory Compliance Congruity With Liability Act	Rep. Johnathan Rhyne (R)	Yes	Increases protection for corporations in product liability suits, and adopts a presumption  in favor of the corporate defendant when it can show compliance with governmental standards.
North Carolina	2011 H.B. 650	Consistency of Firearms Regulation Act	Rep. Mark Hilton (R)	-	See Table 1.
Oklahoma	2011 S.B. 704	Class Actions Improvement Act	Senator Constance Johnson (R)	Yes	Limits individual’s ability to bring class action suits against large companies by specifying that class action suits cannot seek any monetary relief, and restrict the ability to bring a class action suit with plaintiffs from multiple states.
Oklahoma	2011 H.B. 1439	Castle Doctrine Act	Rep. Steve Vaughan (R)	Yes:Yes	See Table 1.
Pennsylvania	2011 H.B. 40	Castle Doctrine Act	Rep. Scott Perry (R)	-	See Table 1.
Tennessee	2011 H.B. 1030	Virtual Public Schools Act	Rep. Harry Brooks H (R)	Yes	Requires “virtual” or online schools be recognized as public schools and given equal resources as other public schools in the state.
Texas	2011 H.B. 3328	The Disclosure of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Composition Act	Rep. James Keffer (R)	Yes	See Table 1.

Conclusion
This research shows that the American Legislative Exchange Council wields considerable influence in state legislatures.  The bills that it writes find their way into the majority of state legislatures.  Moreover, the percentage of those bills that pass is strikingly high compared to the dismal rate at which all other bills are enacted into law.
In the midst of this success, recent controversy over particular ALEC-inspired bills – such as  the Castle Doctrine Act (a.k.a. Stand your Ground) – has caused the organization to come under increased scrutiny from journalists, transparency groups, and voters. As a result, almost 400 legislators and 60 corporations have cut ties with ALEC in the last two years, with some now publicly repudiating the organization’s methods.
Many of ALEC’s prominent (former) corporate partners, such as Wal-Mart, General Electric, and McDonald’s, were almost certainly displeased with the negative publicity and media criticism sparked by ALEC’s foray into hot-button issues like gun control.  That involvement damages ALEC’s reputation, hindering their typical (corporate-friendly) efforts surrounding manufacturing regulations, court procedures, and environmental laws.  ALEC’s corporate partners are paying to influence legislators over those issues, which they want introduced and passed quickly and quietly.  Dirtying its hands with social issues undermines ALEC’s ability to exercise influence over fiscal ones.
This has broader implications for how we think about lobbying.  Consolidation of lobbying groups into broader organizations of legislators and corporations increases their reach but also creates significant hazards. Attempting to tie together such a wide range of interests undermines the ability of the umbrella organization to achieve any of its objectives.  The bigger you get, the more likely it all is to fall apart.  ALEC’s Napoleonic reach may turn out to be its undoing.
This article was researched and written by The Brookings Institute.  Both CMD’s Sourcewatch and Firedoglake identify Brookings as a once-liberal now-conservative think tank, with FDL stating “it has become the Alan Colmes of think-tanks, fake liberals who meekly accept conservative mythology on every major point, but says we should at least think of the misery we are causing.”
The author credits ALECexposed for a lot of the information used in the article.  I want to note that ALECexposed is still the source I use regularly to verify and cross-check information that I have researched.  Its Sourcewatch articles are, IMHO, the best.
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This article is written by Molly Jackman with research assistance from Grace Wallack and Brian Boessenecker.  It is posted by the Brookings Institute at http://tinyurl.com/mw5bog6

Revealed: Conservative think tank SPN coordinating right-wing assault on education, healthcare and the environment in 34 states

By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
Friday, December 6, 2013 2:57 EST

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers’ compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.
The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as “free-market thinktanks”, includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.
The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN’s summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.
Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Last week the Obama administration announced a new clampdown on those groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.
Most of the “thinktanks” involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose the launch of “media campaigns” aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to “advancing model legislation” and “candidate briefings”, in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.
The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.
SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.
The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer – which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself.
SPN’s link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a “top 20″ and “bottom 20″. It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.
Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle’s sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman’s “commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights”.
The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:
• “reforms” to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;
• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;
• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;
• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;
• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.
SPN’s president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that “as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society.”
In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $35,000 to support a “research and demonstration project” that would “release residents from extreme government dependency”. It would turn the state’s poorest area into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its report from Washington County as “a gigantic tax-free zone”.
Dubbed “FreeME”, the initiative would eliminate state income tax and sale taxes from residents and businesses until the economic conditions in the county rise to the statewide average. The hole in the county’s income from lost tax revenues – estimated at $35m a year by the think tank – would be filled through budget cuts.
Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.
“[S]topping Medicaid expansion is just the first step,” the proposal says, adding that the “missing piece to complete our message is an economic forecast” showing how block-granting Medicaid would “bring significant savings” to the state. That information would then be used to garner attention from the media.
The Observer describes TPPF as “one of the most influential state-level thinktanks in the nation”. One of its former executives was Ted Cruz, now US senator for Texas, who today is the keynote speaker at the national conference in Washington of SPN’s sister organisation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).
Several hundred miles to the north east in Massachusetts, the Beacon Hill Institute requested $38,825 from Searle to weaken or roll back a five-year effort by states in the region to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The institute said it would carry out research into the economic impact of the cap-and-trade system operating in nine states known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
BHI appeared to have already arrived at its conclusions in advance, admitting from the outset that the aim of the research was to arm opponents of cap-and-trade with data for their arguments, and to weaken or destroy the initiative. “Success will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity that will pare back or repeal RGGI,” the funding proposal says.
The Beacon Hill Institute, technically an affiliate rather than a full member of the SPN, operates out of the economics department of Suffolk University in Boston. David Tuerck, its executive director, denied the group had engaged in lobbying. “There is never any lobbying,” he told the Guardian. “Maybe I need to look up the definition again, but lobbying consists of buttonholing legislators and other policymakers to get a particular result on a particular issue, and we never do that.”
But Suffolk University, which hosts the Beacon Hill Institute as a research arm of its economics department, sharply criticised the research proposal to the Searle Foundation. In a statement to the Guardian, the university said the grant bid had not been submitted to the university, as required, and that the university would never have approved the proposal. “The stated research goals, as written, were inconsistent with Suffolk University’s mission.”
Watchdogs that monitor the work of SPN and other conservative networks in the US said that the centralised coordination of state-level campaigns showed a significant attempt to build local activism into a nationwide movement. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which issued a recent report on SPN, said that the local identity of the network’s members belied a larger purpose. “They appear to be advocating purely local interests but what they are promoting is part of a larger national template to radically remake our government in a way that undermines public institutions and the rights of workers,” she said.
The SPN said that its co-ordinating role was justified because local and state issues were increasingly impinging on national politics. “There’s no mystery here,” Sharp said. “The whole idea of a state policy network is that individual thinktanks can be in communication, share best practices and analysis, and combine their efforts when they see a benefit from doing so.”
Some of the grant bids to Searle focus specifically on prominent local politicians the thinktanks hope to influence. The grant bid that emanated from New Jersey, from the Common Sense Institute (CISNJ), another tax-exempt “research and education organization”, floats the idea of a campaign to support the efforts of the Republican governor Chris Christie in ending the ability of public employees to claim untaken sick days and vacation leave in their retirement packages.
“Governor Chris Christie has been waging a war to eliminate this practice; and CSINJ would like to provide ammunition,” the proposal says. The thinktank plans to produce a “research study” which it would call “Busting the Boat Checks” – an allusion to the phrase Christie uses to denote the watercraft retirees are claimed to buy on the back of sick and holiday leave payments.
The institute conceives a “media campaign” with its aim being the “full elimination of unused sick and vacation leave payouts”.
“We believe our study can be used to sway public sentiment further and be used as a brandisher for reform in Trenton,” it says.
CSINJ’s president, Jerry Cantrell, denied that the grant bid involved any element of lobbying, insisting instead that his group was providing a service that in the past might have been done by the decimated local media.
“CSINJ is an education organization focused on providing the public with facts and the truth. We don’t represent any interest besides the folks who are burdened by this practice – the taxpayers,” he said.
He said the proposal was focused on the “abusive practice of accumulating sick or vacation day payments over an entire career and using them as retirement bonus. We’ve seen too many instances of high level individuals working out the door with $500,000-$750,000 claiming to have never missed a day in 30 years of employment.”
The proposal from the Illinois Policy Institute for a campaign to deal with Chicago’s government worker pensions crisis by switching to 401(k)-style retirement plans similarly focuses on a politician – in this case Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposal says that “Mayor Emanuel has privately expressed the need for 401(k)-style changes to truly achieve reform.”
The institute plans to “leverage the leadership potential of Mayor Emanuel … as the spark for wider pension changes in Illinois.” It adds that “friendly legislators would be welcome to draft legislation modelled on our policy work and work in tandem with Mayor Emanuel to move it forward in the legislative process.”
John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Guardian that Emanuel had been “an outspoken proponent of pension reform that includes moving to a 401(k)-style, defined contribution system.” He saw no problem with the lobbying that the think tank undertakes.
“We are not allowed to do any campaigning or electioneering, and we don’t. We are allowed to spend a significant percentage of our expenditures on lobbying and we are very proactive in lobbying for liberty-based policy, including the urgently needed pension reform. We report our activities accordingly.”
© Guardian News and Media 2013

ALEC spokesperson retreats after Ted Cruz advises, ‘Stand your ground’

ALEC spokesperson retreats after Ted Cruz advises, ‘Stand your ground’ (via Raw Story )

The reeling right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) backpedaled quickly after remarks by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) seemingly linking it more explicitly to Florida’s heavily-criticized “Stand your ground” law. CNN reported on Thursday…

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Here's ALEC's Plan To Bring Right Wing Policies To States Near You

Here's ALEC's Plan To Bring Right Wing Policies To States Near You

By karoli  

December 06, 2013 06:00 AM

Back in 2011, I put my tin foil hat on and suggested that perhaps ALEC was promoting coordinated attacks on unions, schools, and health care across the nation. At the time, there was certainly a sense that they were, but no hard evidence.
Hard evidence has now arrived in the form of a revealing and rage-inducing set of documents published in The Guardian on Thursday.

Conservative groups across the US are planning a coordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment,documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.
The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market think tanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.
The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN's summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.

The documents not only show these organizations' plans for how to serve their oligarchs at the expense of ordinary people, they also reveal a player most people don't hear much about: Searle Freedom Trust. Searle Freedom Trust is closely tied to Donor's Trust, the donor-advised slush fund for conservative causes.
The grant requests made by the state policy think tanks targeted public pensions, unions, teachers, and health care policy. All are framed as long-held right wing policy goals. Furthermore, that Searle Freedom Trust link leads straight back to the Wall Street Journal, via Stephen Moore, who somehow always fails to disclose his relationship to Searle when he writes op-eds in furtherance of the same goals.

The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer – which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself.
SPN's link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a "top 20" and "bottom 20". It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.
Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle's sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman's "commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights".

That whole claim that he's unpaid is supposed to tell us he has no bias as a result of his activities. Never mind that his op-eds bolster, echo, or justify the case these policy shops churn out.
If the metaphor is a Kochtopus, think of the State Policy Network as one tentacle. It hands off its "policy research" to lawmakers and bill mills like ALEC, who are also tentacles. The dark money organizations are yet another tentacle, as are the "grassroots" organizations like Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity.
PRWatch has a great table of the relationships between these "stink tanks", ALEC, and state legislation introduced or passed as a result of their activity. I highly recommend it.
I don't think we've seen all of the tentacles yet. But we are definitely getting a better picture.

Tags: ALEC, Searle Freedom Trust, SPN, Stink Tanks

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ALEC Boots Mother Jones From Its Annual Conference

—By Andy Kroll

| Fri Dec. 6, 2013 3:00 AM GMT

 

Starting Wednesday, hundreds of state lawmakers descended on downtown Washington, DC, for a big three-day confab hosted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative advocacy group that that brings together lawmakers and representatives of major corporations to draft model legislation on issues such as taxes, energy, workers' rights, education, and agriculture. These bills are then introduced in state legislatures around the country—in some cases, lawmakers pass ALEC-inspired bills without changing a word.
There were dozens of press credentials laid out on ALEC conference's check-in table when I arrived Thursday morning. Mother Jones' was not among them. ALEC's board of directors had refused my request for credentials, according to spokesman Bill Meierling.

More MoJo reporting on the American Legislative Exchange Council.

• ALEC's Campaign Against Renewable Energy
• Study: ALEC Is Bad for the Economy
• Forced to Work Sick? That's Fine With ALEC
• ALEC in 1985: S&M Accidents Cause 10 Percent of San Francisco's Homicides

When asked why I'd been turned away, Meierling pointed to our previous coverage of ALEC and said it's clear that Mother Jones "fundamentally hates" ALEC. We've covered ALEC for more than a decade—a 2002 exposé titled "Ghostwriting the Law," coverage of the group's proposals regarding voting rights and workers' rights, and more recently the departures of big-name corporate members.
At the same time he was explaining why I couldn't attend, Meierling stressed to me that ALEC is "moving toward transparency." To his credit, he acknowledged the irony.
If ALEC had given me a press credential, the only events I would've been allowed to cover were keynote speeches by Republican luminaries Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, and Grover Norquist. But the real action at ALEC conferences, the meat-and-potatoes work, happens at the meetings of the group's many task forces—the environment and energy task force led by American Electric Power, the tax and fiscal policy task force led by tobacco giant Altria, and the international relations task force run by yet another tobacco conglomerate, Philip Morris. Meierling says that even credentialed reporters can't cover those meetings. Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank learned this firsthand on Wednesday, when DC police and ALEC staff stopped him from attending the group's private task force meetings.
It's been a tough week for ALEC. On Tuesday, the Guardian reported that the group faced a "funding crisis" after 40 of its corporate members and hundreds of state lawmakers ditched ALEC in the wake of Trayvon Martin's killing last year. Those members fled after it was revealed that ALEC's model legislation included the same Stand Your Ground law invoked by George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed Martin. ALEC has since eliminated its gun-related advocacy and, with a narrower fiscal focus, is trying to woo its erstwhile members to back into the fold.
Given the organization's recent struggles, I can understand why ALEC would be feeling defensive. Meierling, the ALEC spokesman, was polite throughout our conversation. We traded business cards before I left and promised to get a drink to talk more about Mother Jones. Fingers crossed for next year.

We Are no Longer a Nation of People but of Corporations (via LiberalBeef)

We Are no Longer a Nation of People but of Corporations (via LiberalBeef)

The reason for the collapse of democratic choice is the foundation for so many American’s growing disenchantment with politics, is the unbridled growth in the power of American corporations. J have wondered in print before if American corporations…

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Newly Uncovered Documents Expose ALEC's Anti-Gay Past

Newly Uncovered Documents Expose ALEC's Anti-Gay Past

Submitted by Calvin Sloan on Wednesday, 12/4/2013 10:45 am

Throughout the 1980s, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) -- now infamous for its work on behalf of “stand your ground” laws and restrictions on voting rights -- was instrumental in pushing anti-gay policies throughout the country, according to documents recently uncovered by People For the American Way and the Center For Media and Democracy.

A 1985 policy memo entitled “Homosexuals: Just Another Minority Group” [PDF] sums up ALEC’s anti-gay policy positions and the false claims and outrageous stereotypes on which they were based. ALEC disseminated the memo to its public sector members, arguing that the “homosexual movement has had an impact too great and far reaching for Americans to ignore.”

Through the policy memo and its monthly newsletters, ALEC tracked local, state and federal legislation and provided its members with “research” to help them prevent advances in gay rights.  However ALEC of course did not view these rights as rights; instead, ALEC asserted that the gay community was organizing “to achieve the privileges it thinks it deserves.”

So what “privileges” exactly were gay people demanding that infuriated ALEC so much?  To name a few, the “privilege” to not be physically assaulted for being gay; the “privilege” of not being incarcerated for being gay; the “privilege” of not being barred from employment opportunities, housing and public accommodations for being gay; the “privilege” to dress as they liked; or the “privilege” of not being compiled into state directories to be blacklisted and discriminated against.

In order to counter the gay rights movement, ALEC argued in “Homosexuals: Just Another Minority Group,” one had to understand first that gay people were corrupted beings, since “the homosexual makes the conscious choice to pursue members of his or her own sex.”  The answer therefore did not lie with treating gay people fairly, but instead with providing them psychotherapy or by having them join the Christian faith. “The evidence is too great to deny it,” the memo stated. 

ALEC classified all gay people into six categories: “the blatant, the secret lifer, the desperate, the adjusted, the bisexual and the situational.” The “blatant” gay person was "obvious and ‘limp-wristed’”; the “adjusted” would “try to conduct a ‘conventional’ gay marriage”; and so on.  Yet no matter what category a gay person fell into, ALEC argued, the most dominant practice within “the homosexual world is pedophilia, the fetish for young children.” This tendency, the group claimed, was the product of the fact that “the homosexual cannot reproduce themselves biologically, so they must recruit the young.”

ALEC lamented that the federal government funded AIDS research and allocated tax money to counter the AIDS epidemic.  The group discouraged states from passing anti-discrimination laws because, according to one ALEC newsletter from April 1984, such legislation “might jeopardize public health in restaurants, dental offices, and other areas because of the communicable disease AIDS.” ALEC claimed that under the Carter administration, in addition to funding AIDS research, “the federal government had been active in directly funding the homosexual movement” by approving federal grants to organizations that served gay communities.

When lawmakers led efforts against gay rights legislation, ALEC celebrated their acts in newsletters.  For vetoing a gay rights bill, California Governor George Deukmejian was deemed “a political leader with courage.” Likewise, the group lauded ALEC State Senator H.L. Richardson for claiming the bill “would take away the liberty of an employer to refuse to hire homosexuals, even if the employer strongly believes that homosexuality is an abomination.”

Today, decades later, ALEC has stopped referring to homosexuality as “an abomination” in its literature, yet the organization continues to push legislation and policy ideas founded on the notion of exclusion – policies that protect the “liberties” of corporations rather than those of individual Americans. 

The organization is currently in Washington, DC for its 2013 States & Nation Policy Summit.  A protest against ALEC will be held tomorrow, Thursday December 5th, at Franklin Square (13th and I St NW) at 11:30 AM.

New Guardian Docs Show ALEC Misled Press, Public

Posted by Brendan Fischer on December 04, 2013

New Guardian Docs Show ALEC Misled Press, Public

Internal documents from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) published by The Guardian provide stunning insight into the inner workings of the "corporate bill mill" -- and offer new evidence about how the group has continually misled reporters, the public, and even its own members.
The notoriously secretive ALEC has been thrust into the sunlight in the two years since the Center for Media and Democracy launched ALECexposed.org, analyzed over 800 of ALEC's previously-secret model bills, and documented the corporations and legislators pushing ALEC's legislative agenda. It now appears that ALEC has been scorched by the sunshine.
According to the new Guardian documents , which were apparently prepared for ALEC's board in August, over the past two years ALEC has been losing corporate members, suffering from major funding shortfalls, and anticipates legal trouble with ethics rules and its charitable tax status.
ALEC is still supported by tobacco, oil, and pharmaceutical interests, but has lost around 60 corporate members in the fallout over ALEC's role in promoting Stand Your Ground legislation, voter ID, climate change denial, and an array of other controversial, corporate-friendly bills, the documents show. The leaked documents outline a "prodigal son" project (misspelled as "prodical son") aimed at luring "lapsed" corporations back into the fold, and describe a $1.4 million budget shortfall that accrued as a result of ALEC's shrinking roster of corporate backers.

ALEC forms 501(c)(4), but previously claimed: "We have no current plans to operate a 501(c)(4) in the near future”

The Guardian documents show that ALEC has formed a new 501(c)(4) entity, the "Jeffersonian Project," apparently in anticipation of the IRS investigating ALEC's current 501(c)(3) charitable status. This revelation could be seen as an admission from ALEC that its critics were correct about its violations of the tax code (although ALEC insists it does not lobby, despite documentary evidence to the contrary).
ALEC had previously misled reporters about its plans for a 501(c)(4).
In December of last year, ALEC spokesperson Kaitlyn Buss told Bloomberg News "we have no current plans to operate a 501(c)(4) in the near future.”
When Buss said "the near future" and "current plans," she apparently meant "next week."
Just eight days after the Bloomberg story ran, ALEC formed the 501(c)(4) "Jeffersonian Project," according to a certificate of incorporation obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy. (ALEC also failed to mention to Bloomberg that it had incorporated another 501(c)(4), "ALEC NOW" in July of 2012; that entity was dissolved earlier this year.)
“The only charity work ALEC does is on behalf of needy corporations and lonely legislators,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), who as a state legislator attended some ALEC meetings and wrote about it for The Progressive magazine. “It is past time that ALEC is exposed for what it is—a corporate lobbying firm doing the bidding of corporations."

ALEC forms 501(c)(4) to "provide greater legal protection," "lessen ethics concerns"

ALEC's 501(c)(3) charitable status has been challenged in IRS complaints from Common Cause, Clergy VOICE, and the Voters Legislative Transparency Project, all of which allege that ALEC engages in far more lobbying than is permissible for a "charity," and which were supported with research from CMD. When Common Cause's late president Bob Edgar filed a whistleblower complaint challenging ALEC's tax status in April of 2012, ALEC fought back hard. Its lawyer Alan Dye publicly dismissed the complaint a "harassment tactic" that "ignores applicable law."
"The attacks on the American Legislative Exchange Council are based on patently false claims," he told reporters at the time.
But behind the scenes, Dye took a more measured tone, according to The Guardian documents. Forming a 501(c)(4) -- which is allowed to lobby without limit -- would “provide greater legal protection or lessen ethics concerns,” Dye wrote in an August 2013 memo to ALEC's board of directors. Forming the Jeffersonian Project would remove "questions of ethical violations made by our critics and state ethics boards and provides further legal protection."
"ALEC certified to the IRS for years that it didn't spend a penny on lobbying, thereby preserving its absurd status as a charity," Steve Spaulding, Staff Counsel at Common Cause, told CMD.
ALEC's charitable status had allowed its corporate members to write-off their ALEC membership dues -- which are essentially lobbying expenses -- as tax-deductible charitable contributions.
"In forming a 501(c)(4) arm, it appears that ALEC is on notice that it's not going to get away with abusing our nation's charitable tax laws much longer," Spaulding said.

ALEC Bleeding Corporate Members, But Told Legislators "Our Numbers Are Actually Up"

The Guardian documents also reveal the rapid drop in ALEC's corporate and legislative members, and the corresponding impact on ALEC's budget. Many of the departures are attributable to public awareness campaigns by Color of Change, Progress Now, Common Cause, Greenpeace, People for the American Way, CMD and other public interest organizations.
"By ALEC’s own reckoning the network has lost almost 400 state legislators from its membership over the past two years, as well as more than 60 corporations that form the core of its funding. In the first six months of this year it suffered a hole in its budget of more than a third of its projected income," The Guardian reports.
But ALEC tried to suggest otherwise in communications with its legislative members.
In June of 2012, in the wake of intense criticism for its multi-year drive to get "Stand Your Ground" bills introduced and passed and following an exodus of its corporate members, ALEC sent an email to legislative members to boost morale.
"We’ve done some tremendous work over the years," ALEC wrote, claiming it was "correct[ing] the record" about the "outrageous claims about ALEC" and its dwindling membership.
“You may be interested in knowing that, since CMD and others began their efforts, our private sector membership has increased by 20 percent in the last 12 months,” ALEC wrote in the June 2012 email. "In fact, despite the prevailing narrative of late, our numbers are actually up from where they were just 12 months ago."
But ALEC's internal documents indicate that the organization was misleading its legislative members.
According to The Guardian documents, ALEC's "private sector" members dropped from 280 in 2011, to 241 in 2012, to the new low of 214 in 2013, as of this summer. Legislative membership dropped from 2,200 in 2011, to 2,010 in 2012, to 1,810 in 2013 (although ALEC still boasts of 2,000 members on its website).
When confronted with these facts by The Guardian, ALEC gave a statement markedly different than what it previously told its legislative members.
"No one disputes that ALEC lost public and private members during the past several years," said ALEC spokesperson Bill Meierling.

ALEC as Pay-to-Play

Other documents, such as those describing potential ALEC task forces that could help attract new funders, undermine the notion that ALEC is a legislator-driven organization. The materials indicate that ALEC operates as a genuine pay-to-play.
Despite ALEC describing itself as being "run by and for state legislators,” the factors ALEC considered when deciding whether to enact task forces like "Gaming" or "Tribal Affairs" had little to do with the interests of state legislators. A "pro" for a Gaming task force is that the industry generated $37 billion in revenue last year; a "con" for a potential Tribal Affairs task force is that "there may be little to no private sector funding," even while acknowledging that the issue would be relevant to many ALEC legislators.

Pledging Allegiance to ALEC

One of the more bizarre revelations in the documents is a plan to have the legislators who serve as ALEC State Chairs sign a pledge of "loyalty" and agree to "put the interests of [ALEC] first." This proposal underscored concerns that some ALEC politicians have been putting the interests of ALEC (and its corporate backers) ahead of their constituents, and ahead of their commitment to upholding their state constitution.
Another element of the pledge is an agreement that State Chairs will "inform ALEC of any public records/FOIA requests that include ALEC documents." This fits into a larger pattern of ALEC trying to keep its communications with lawmakers secret. This year, ALEC began stamping the materials it gives to legislators with a “disclaimer” asserting that the documents are not subject to any state’s open records/freedom of information laws, and has been sending communications to legislators via an online dropbox, which it admitted was an effort to try to evade disclosure under open records laws. CMD has fought ALEC legislators' efforts to keep ALEC records secret in Texas and Wisconsin.
The cover page for the State Chair pledge states that ALEC recommends that "The Board should approve the following job descriptions for State Chairs," but ALEC told The Guardian that the pledge was not adopted. Still, it reflects a very troubling mindset to even propose that elected officials who lead ALEC’s legislative agenda in the states owe ALEC a duty to put the organization first and to report to it.

 http://www.prwatch.org/files/june_2012_alec_email.pdf

 http://www.prwatch.org/files/jeffersonian_project.pdf

http://www.prwatch.org/files/alec_now.pdf

Why Do Douche Waffles Get Elected?

Why Do Douche Waffles Get Elected?  

The full campaign spoofing the Direct TV commercials, produced by Acronym TV for Move To Amend. All six spots, each about 30 seconds, are included here in this single video.

Written by Lee Camp and Dennis Trainor, Jr, and Directed by Trainor, these spots aim to hijack a popular meme to shine a seriously unserious light on the issues of corporate person-hood and money as free speech.

Move to Amend is a coalition of hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of individuals committed to social and economic justice, ending corporate rule, and building a vibrant democracy that is genuinely accountable to the people, not corporate interests.

We are calling for an amendment to the US Constitution to unequivocally state that inalienable rights belong to human beings only, and that money is not a form of protected free speech under the First Amendment and can be regulated in political campaigns.

Over 300,00 people have signed the Move To Amend statement that states:
We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling and other related cases, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.  

Move To Amend’s Direct TV Parody Compilation
Written by Lee Camp and Dennis Trainor, Jr
Produced and Directed by Dennis Trainor, Jr.
Editing, graphics, keying and color correction by AJ Russo
Associate Producer Christopher Webb
Costumes Lara de Bruijn

Why Americans Are So Ignorant

Why Americans Are So Ignorant -- It's Not Only Fox News, There Are Some Understandable Reasons for it

Sure propaganda, government secrecy and Fox News have a lot to do with it. But there are broader societal pressures as well. 

Tea Party and the Right  

Consortium News / By Lawrence Davidson

 

April 8, 2013  |  

 

In 2008, Rick Shenkman, the Editor-in-Chief of the History News Network, published a book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the American Voter. In it he demonstrated, among other things, that most Americans were: (1) ignorant about major international events, (2) knew little about how their own government runs and who runs it, (3) were nonetheless willing to accept government positions and policies even though a moderate amount of critical thought suggested they were bad for the country, and (4) were readily swayed by stereotyping, simplistic solutions, irrational fears and public relations babble.
Shenkman spent 256 pages documenting these claims, using a great number of polls and surveys from very reputable sources. Indeed, in the end it is hard to argue with his data. So, what can we say about this?
One thing that can be said is that this is not an abnormal state of affairs. As has been suggested in prior analyses, ignorance of non-local affairs (often leading to inaccurate assumptions, passive acceptance of authority, and illogical actions) is, in fact, a default position for any population.
To put it another way, the majority of any population will pay little or no attention to news stories or government actions that do not appear to impact their lives or the lives of close associates. If something non-local happens that is brought to their attention by the media, they will passively accept government explanations and simplistic solutions.
The primary issue is “does it impact my life?” If it does, people will pay attention. If it appears not to, they won’t pay attention. For instance, in Shenkman’s book unfavorable comparisons are sometimes made between Americans and Europeans. Americans often are said to be much more ignorant about world geography than are Europeans.
This might be, but it is, ironically, due to an accident of geography. Americans occupy a large subcontinent isolated by two oceans. Europeans are crowded into small contiguous countries that, until recently, repeatedly invaded each other as well as possessed overseas colonies.
Under these circumstances, a knowledge of geography, as well as paying attention to what is happening on the other side of the border, has more immediate relevance to the lives of those in Toulouse or Amsterdam than is the case for someone in Pittsburgh or Topeka. If conditions were reversed, Europeans would know less geography and Americans more.
Ideology and Bureaucracy
The localism referenced above is not the only reason for widespread ignorance. The strong adherence to ideology and work within a bureaucratic setting can also greatly narrow one’s worldview and cripple one’s critical abilities.
In effect, a closely adhered to ideology becomes a mental locality with limits and borders just as real as those of geography. In fact, if we consider nationalism a pervasive modern ideology, there is a direct connection between the boundaries induced in the mind and those on the ground.
Furthermore, it does not matter if the ideology is politically left or right, or for that matter, whether it is secular or religious. One’s critical abilities will be suppressed in favor of standardized, formulaic answers provided by the ideology. Just so work done within a bureaucratic setting.
Bureaucracies position the worker within closely supervised departments where success equates with doing a specific job according to specific rules. Within this limited world, one learns not to think outside the box, and so, except as applied to one’s task, critical thinking is discouraged and one’s worldview comes to conform to that of the bureaucracy. That is why bureaucrats are so often referred to as cogs in a machine.

That American ignorance is explainable does not make it any less distressing. At the very least it often leads to embarrassment for the minority who are not ignorant. Take for example the facts that polls show over half of American adults don’t know which country dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or that 30 percent don’t know what the Holocaust was.

We might explain this as the result of faulty education; however, there are other, just as embarrassing, moments involving the well educated. Take, for instance, the employees of Fox News. Lou Dobbs (who graduated from Harvard University) is host of the Fox Business Network talk show Lou Dobbs Tonight. Speaking on March 23 about gun control, he and Fox political analyst Angela McGlowan (a graduate of the University of Mississippi) had the following exchange:
McGlowan: “What scares the hell out of me is that we have a president . . . that wants to take our guns, but yet he wants to attack Iran and Syria. So if they come and attack us here, we don’t have the right to bear arms under this Obama administration.”
Dobbs: “We’re told by Homeland Security that there are already agents of Al Qaeda here working in this country. Why in the world would you not want to make certain that all American citizens were armed and prepared?”
Despite education, ignorance plus ideology leading to stupidity doesn’t come in any starker form than this. Suffice it to say that nothing the President has proposed in the way of gun control takes away the vast majority of weapons owned by Americans, that the President’s actions point to the fact that he does not want to attack Syria or Iran, and that neither country has the capacity to “come and attack us here.”
Finally, while there may be a handful of Americans who sympathize with Al Qaeda, they cannot accurately be described as “agents” of some central organization that dictates their actions.
Did the fact that Dobbs and McGlowan were speaking nonsense make any difference to the majority of those listening to them? Probably not. Their regular listeners may well be too ignorant to know that this surreal episode has no basis in reality. Their ignorance will cause them not to fact-check Dobbs’s and McGlowan’s remarks. They might very well rationalize away countervailing facts if they happen to come across them. And, by doing so, keep everything comfortably simple, which counts for more than the messy, often complicated truth.
Unfortunately, one can multiply this scenario many times. There are millions of Americans, most of whom are quite literate, who believe the United Nations is an evil organization bent on destroying U.S. sovereignty. Indeed, in 2005, George W. Bush actually appointed one of them, John Bolton (a graduate of Yale University), as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Likewise, so paranoid are gun enthusiasts (whose level of education varies widely) that any really effective government supervision of the U.S. gun trade would be seen as a giant step toward dictatorship. Therefore, the National Rifle Association, working its influence on Congress, has for years successfully restricted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from using computers to create a central database of gun transactions.
And, last but certainly not least, there is the unending war against teaching evolution in U.S. schools. This Christian fundamentalist effort often enjoys temporary success in large sections of the country and is ultimately held at bay only by court decisions reflecting (to date) a solid sense of reality on this subject. By the way, evolution is a scientific theory that has as much evidence to back it up as does gravity.
Teaching Critical Thinking?
As troubling as this apparently perennial problem of ignorance is, it is equally frustrating to listen to repeated schemes to teach critical thinking through the public schools. Of course, the habit of asking critical questions can be taught. However, if you do not have a knowledge base from which to consider a situation, it is hard think critically about it.
So ignorance often precludes effective critical thinking even if the technique is acquired. In any case, public school systems have always had two primary purposes and critical thinking is not one of them. The schools are designed to prepare students for the marketplace and to make them loyal citizens.
The marketplace is most often a top-down, authoritarian world and loyalty comes from myth-making and emotional bonds. In both cases, really effective critical thinking might well be incompatible with the desired end.
Recently, a suggestion has been made to forget about the schools as a place to learn critical thinking. According to Dennis Bartels’s article “Critical Thinking Is Best Taught Outside the Classroom” appearing in Scientific Americanonline, schools can’t teach critical thinking because they are too busy teaching to standardized tests.
Of course, there was a time when schools were not so strongly mandated to teach this way and there is no evidence that at that time they taught critical thinking. In any case, Bartels believes that people learn critical thinking in informal settings such as museums and by watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. 
He concludes that “people must acquire this skill somewhere. Our society depends on them being able to make critical decisions.” If that were only true it would make this an easier problem to solve.
It may very well be that (consciously or unconsciously) societies organize themselves to hold critical thinking to a minimum. That means to tolerate it to the point needed to get through day-to-day existence and to tackle those aspects of one’s profession that might require narrowly focused critical thought.
But beyond that, we get into dangerous, de-stabilizing waters. Societies, be they democratic or not, are not going to encourage critical thinking about prevailing ideologies or government policies. And, if it is the case that most people don’t think of anything critically unless it falls into that local arena in which their lives are lived out, all the better.
Under such conditions people can be relied upon to stay passive about events outside their local venue until the government decides it is time to rouse them up in some propagandistic manner.
The truth is that people who are consistently active as critical thinkers are not going to be popular, either with the government or their neighbors. They are called gadflies. You know, people like Socrates, who is probably the best-known critical thinker in Western history. And, at least the well educated among us know what happened to him.