ALEC Long-term Policies are Destructive

ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals:

downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account.

The data tell us that the time has come to refocus on the battle to loosen the grip of corporate America and renew democracy in the states.

This is what the policies like those pushed by  the American Legislative Exchange Council lead to:  West , TX.

abcnews.go.com

downsizing government,
removing regulations on corporations and
making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account

The data tell us that the time has come to refocus on the battle to loosen the grip of corporate America and renew democracy in the states.

And lo and behold - I found one person who agress with me on Atlernet - even though they never, ever mention ALEC

'Free Market' Ayn Rand Ideology Was a Root Cause of the Horrific Explosion in Texas

April 23, 2013  | 

On Thursday, I wrote about the central role that absolute free market libertarianism, as personified by the fictional John Galt, played in the horrific explosion in West, Texas that took the lives of fourteen people, most of whom were volunteer firefighters fighting a fire at an unregulated fertilizer facility. We have now learned that the facility had a checkered history of ignoring regulations and had 1350 times more ammonium nitrate on hand than the amount that triggers a legal requirement to report the facility to Department of Homeland Security. Of course, the facility’s owner chose to ignore that regulation along with the many other regulations he chose to ignore. Sadly, some press accounts of the owner chose to focus more on his role as a church elder (Update: he was even at Bible study when the fire broke out!) than on how his choice to flout regulations and good sense led directly to this tragedy. Whatever the cause of the original fire that eventually triggered the explosion, the plant owner’s decision to maintain such a large and unreported amount of highly explosive ammonium nitrate so close to so many people played a huge role in how this tragedy played out.

Those deaths, and their roots in blatant disregard for government regulation in the belief that it harms business, are sadly just a small part of the larger picture of how free marketeers have corrupted the public marketplace of ideas to sow widespread death and destruction so that the “job creators” can go about their usual business of pocketing massive profits while refusing to make microscopic investments in small steps that would save many lives.