Catching up on my reading
Great read for novices as well as well-read ALEC researchers.
On Alternet:
The ultimate
return sought by ALEC is nothing less than the rollback of the state and the
establishment of unfettered corporate rule.
August 20, 2012
|
SALT LAKE CITY -- You won't see signs for the country's
sweetest travel-club deal in the window of your local travel store. To join the
American Legislative Exchange Council, your peers must first elect you to
statewide office. If you win as a Republican or conservative Democrat, your
ALEC state chair will approach with terms of membership you'll find generous,
if not impossible to resist. A token $100 buys the opportunity to attend
all-inclusive events on ALEC's busy calendar of summits, conferences, and
academies, where you and your family can enjoy some of the country's finest
resorts and destination hotels. Joints like Utah's Grand America, site of
ALEC's just concluded national conference and proud bearer of AAA's "Five
Diamond" rating.
SNIP
Jefferson's vision was not ALEC's. He spoke for many of
his Revolutionary peers when he hoped that "we shall crush... in its birth
the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge
our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our
country." Jefferson always held a dim and anxious view of the development
of powerful commercial interests. Gordon S. Wood, our greatest living historian
of the Revolution and early America, writes in The Radicalism of the American Revolution,
"To his dying day Jefferson believed that the state legislatures should
grant [corporate charters] only sparingly and should be able to interfere with
them or take them back anytime they wished."
If ALEC has one purpose, it is to make sure their members
never dream of doing any such thing.
Read the whole thing >>>>HERE<<<<
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