The NCSL in contrast provides very open meetings on issues and legislation, so what has been tried and proven effective solutions can be selectively adapted in other states on a non-partisan or bi-partisan basis. There is no financial incentive offered and no inducement to enact special interest legislation at the NCSL, unlike ALEC.
The World Bank, in describing corruption in politics and government, uses the single clear, concise definition. They use it worldwide, and they use it to define corruption in a variety of circumstances. It has a very simple criteria, which is elaborated on here at some length, and in greater detail than this excerpt, but this is the basis, the core definition:
How do we define corruption?
The term corruption covers a broad range of human actions. To understand its effect on an economy or a political system, it helps to unbundle the term by identifying specific types of activities or transactions that might fall within it. In considering its strategy the Bank sought a usable definition of corruption and then developed a taxonomy of the different forms corruption could take consistent with that definition. We settled on a straightforward definition—the abuse of public office for private gain.1 Public office is abused for private gain when an official accepts, solicits, or extorts a bribe. It is also abused when private agents actively offer bribes to circumvent public policies and processes for competitive advantage and profit.I would argue that ALEC is effectively an entity that rewards politicians for an abuse of public office for gain, a form of corruption, a form of . ALEC is comprised of corporations that draft government legislation that benefits them unfairly and preferentially, either directly or indirectly, and which rewards the conservative politicians who enact that legislation for those corporations by political support directly to their campaigns, to their parties, and indirectly through PACs and Super PACs. Where ALEC corporations do not reward the conservative politicians who enact the corporate drafted legislation with financial incentives relating to election, they reward conservative politicians by subsidizing and financing the advancement of the causes, largely the culture war causes, of those politicians instead of and in place of donating huge amounts of money to influence elections. The domination of the media through ads, often misleading and misrepresentative and factually inaccurate ads, in the 2010 and 2012 elections is unprecedented. These are the corporations and few wealthiest individuals that are funding those media blitzes with unprecedented millions upon millions of dollars. In either case, an action occurs that is outside the appropriate public political process, the legislation is written so as to benefit the corporations rather than being in the interest of the constituents, and there is some form of compensation offered for doing so, and often very large amounts of money are involved. That is the bribery, the financial reward, for writing legislation which INCREASES their profits and which DECREASES either the financial well being of citizens, or services, safeguards and protections for those citizens.
If it were so innocent, it would be done in the open. Politicians wouldn't lie about it. People wouldn't be thrown out of ALEC meetings - not just any ordinary curious people have been thrown out, but politicians who had paid to attend, and who had been INVITED to attend as well as the press have been barred or removed from attendance.
I call that corruption, where there is an action that is sought for gain, and a payoff for performing that action. If it were not being done by conservatives, and involving conservative culture war causes, the conservatives who condone ALEC legislation would call it corrupt too. But instead they apply a double standard to what is corrupt and what is not corrupt in our political process. They have, simply, been seduced. It is hardly the first time we have seen double standards applied by conservatives, with one lower standard used to assess their own conduct, and a higher standard applied to others.
What is so insidious about ALEC is that their 'model legislation', that they write for their tame pet legislators to pass for them, is that they arrange for that same exact legislation to be passed over and over, state after state, with only minor variations, where they can contrive a conservative majority of politicians to do their corporate business rather than the tax payers 'business.
The Center for Democracy's PR Watch noted this about the Florida legislation which is so very similar to the recently vetoed Minnesota Shoot First legislation:
ALEC Ratified NRA-Conceived Law That May Protect Trayvon Martin's Killer
As Media Matters reported earlier, Florida's "stand your ground" law is nearly identical to the ALEC Castle Doctrine Act.
From the Florida law:
(3) A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.And from the ALEC model:
(3) A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another, or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.
Florida Senator Durell Peadon, an ALEC member, introduced the law in his state and it passed in early 2005; the NRA was behind the bill and its lobbyist Marion Hammer reportedly "stared down legislators as they voted." After Governor Jeb Bush signed it into law, Hammer presented the bill to ALEC's Criminal Justice Task Force (now known as the Public Safety and Elections Task Force) months later.
As the Center for Media and Democracy has uncovered, the NRA boasted that "[h]er talk was well-received," and the corporations and state legislators on the Task Force voted unanimously to approve the bill as an ALEC model. As CMD and Common Cause have noted, ALEC Task Force meetings are closed to the press and public, but corporations and ideological special interests or trade groups like the NRA vote as equals with elected officials. At the time, as CMD has documented, Wal-Mart was the corporate co-chair of the Task Force. Since becoming an ALEC model, 16 states have passed laws that contain provisions identical or similar to the ALEC "Castle Doctrine Act." In 2007 it was passed in four states and highlighted by ALEC on their "legislative scorecard," as discovered by Common Cause.
As the Center for Media and Democracy has uncovered, the NRA boasted that "[h]er talk was well-received," and the corporations and state legislators on the Task Force voted unanimously to approve the bill as an ALEC model. As CMD and Common Cause have noted, ALEC Task Force meetings are closed to the press and public, but corporations and ideological special interests or trade groups like the NRA vote as equals with elected officials. At the time, as CMD has documented, Wal-Mart was the corporate co-chair of the Task Force. Since becoming an ALEC model, 16 states have passed laws that contain provisions identical or similar to the ALEC "Castle Doctrine Act." In 2007 it was passed in four states and highlighted by ALEC on their "legislative scorecard," as discovered by Common Cause.
In 2011, controversial governor and ALEC alum Scott Walker signed into law in Wisconsin a Castle Doctrine bill that echoes the ALEC bill in key elements. On March 3 of this year, 20-year-old college student Bo Morrison was shot and killed by a homeowner in Slinger, Wisconsin as the young man hid from police after attending an underage drinking party. Because of the Castle Doctrine, no charges will be filed in the shooting. Like Trayvon Martin, Bo Morrison was black.
Codifying Racial Bias
“The 'Stand Your Ground' law is a license to kill,’’ former U.S. attorney Kendall Coffey told NBC News, noting that the number of "justifiable homicides" in Florida has tripled since the law was passed in 2005.
The Castle Doctrine and its "stand your ground" provisions give license for people to engage in vigilantism without liability. As such, the ALEC bill can put the decision to take a life in the hands of a person whose fears are motivated by prejudice and racial bias. The law establishes a presumption that a person acted in self-defense if a killer claims they had a reasonable fear of bodily harm, but in situations like the killing of Trayvon Martin, where there were few eyewitnesses other than the alleged killer and the person who is killed, the presumption of immunity can be very difficult to rebut. In those circumstances, unfounded fear based on racial prejudice that leads to murder could end up being protected under the law.
If the ALEC "Castle Doctrine Act" opens the door for racial bias to be protected under the criminal justice system, the ALEC model "Voter ID Act" may sanction racial prejudice in the electoral system.
The ALEC "Voter ID Act" would require voters show only certain kinds of photo IDs at the polls, which could potentially disenfranchise millions of people who do not have the required photo ID but who have proof of identity and residency -- primarily people of color, the poor, and the elderly. A study from the Brennan Center found approximately 5 million people nationally do not have the state-issued IDs that the new laws require to vote. In Wisconsin, around 220,000 eligible voters lack ID, including around half of all African-Americans and Latinos and a quarter of all elderly citizens."The heart of the modern block the vote campaign is a wave of restrictive government-issued photo identification requirements," states a December report from the NAACP. "In a coordinated effort, legislators in thirty-four states introduced bills imposing such requirements. Many of these bills were modeled on legislation," the report notes, approved by corporations and politicians through the "American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a conservative advocacy group whose founder explained: 'our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.'"
ALEC Meetings Not Representative
While some ALEC bills disproportionately affect communities of color, it may be little surprise that African-Americans and Latinos are mostly absent at ALEC meetings. The 2011 ALEC meeting in New Orleans was overwhelmingly white based on the observations of those attending. But the lack of representation is striking for an organization purportedly concerned with giving a voice to those affected by government action.After the Center for Media and Democracy analyzed and made available over 800 previously-secret ALEC "model bills" in July, ALEC's National Chair, Louisiana Rep. Noble Ellington, spoke with NPR's Terry Gross about the organization. Gross asked Ellington, "Why give corporations such a big say in drafting legislation?" Ellington replied, "Well, partly because they're one of the ones who will be affected by it."
While corporations may have had a say in drafting legislation, people representing populations most affected by ALEC model bills -- like communities of color -- were not in the closed-door meetings where politicians vote as equals with lobbyists. But some are raising their voices -- Color of Change has launched a campaign encouraging corporations that rely on business from African-Americans to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) through corporate membership dues.
The Color of Change ALEC petition is available here. The group's petition demanding justice for Trayvon Martin is available here."
No one should be surprised at the Trayvon Martin shooting; it is part of a consistent larger pattern in these states with the Shoot First laws. In these states there has been a huge increase in the number of shootings of people where self defence is claimed, where little if any investigation is performed, where no one is arrested or prosecuted, where too much benefit of the doubt is given the shooter. Many of the victims are unarmed, as Trayvon Martin was; many of the incidents were conflicts initiated by the shooter, as Trayvon Martin's was. And in many of the shootings, so long as the shooter asserted self-defence, there was little if any investigation, and no prosecution because the bar for doing so was made unfairly difficult for police. Subjective fear, rather than objective threat, became the yardstick. These are exactly the results predicted by law enforcement and the prosecutors organizations when they originally opposed this legislation.
There is nothing inherent in having a gun which should give a person a greater benefit of the doubt than a person who is shot.
But right wing lawmakers get a lot of money either donated to them or their party, or spent on their behalf for passing these laws for special interests instead of representing OUR interests, and that is wrong, that is corrupt.
Look at the laws in the states with this legislation. They were all passed on overwhelmingly partisan votes by conservative legislatures, and the laws are all so similar they are as identical as cookies from the same cookie cutter on a plate. And the same special interests benefit, every time.
A perfect example of this is described in this Media Matters piece:
NRA's Campaign For "Stand Your Ground Laws" Continues After Trayvon Martin's Killing
March 21, 2012 7:00 am ET by Matt Gertz
The National Rifle Association's effort to pass Florida-style "Stand Your Ground" laws in other states has continued unabated in the wake of the February 26, Florida teenager Trayvon Martin was confronted, shot, and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman.
Since Martin's tragic death, media outlets have noted the role of the state's laws in providing Zimmerman with a legal self-defense claim that may prevent him from ever being successfully prosecuted. According to Mother Jones, Florida courts have found that under that statute, a "defendant's only burden is to offer facts from which his resort to force could have been reasonable" while "the State has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self-defense."
16 states have reportedly passed similar legislation since Florida's 2005 adoption of the statute, often with the strong support of the NRA. This is no coincidence; the NRA has been affiliated for years with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has pushed model legislation expanding when it is legally permissible to use deadly force through its network of conservative state legislators.
The controversial circumstances of Martin's death have not slowed the NRA's effort to push for the passage of such laws: The organization's lobbying arm spent the weeks following his death promoting similar statutes in Iowa, Alaska, and Minnesota.
Since Martin's tragic death, media outlets have noted the role of the state's laws in providing Zimmerman with a legal self-defense claim that may prevent him from ever being successfully prosecuted. According to Mother Jones, Florida courts have found that under that statute, a "defendant's only burden is to offer facts from which his resort to force could have been reasonable" while "the State has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not act in self-defense."
16 states have reportedly passed similar legislation since Florida's 2005 adoption of the statute, often with the strong support of the NRA. This is no coincidence; the NRA has been affiliated for years with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has pushed model legislation expanding when it is legally permissible to use deadly force through its network of conservative state legislators.
The controversial circumstances of Martin's death have not slowed the NRA's effort to push for the passage of such laws: The organization's lobbying arm spent the weeks following his death promoting similar statutes in Iowa, Alaska, and Minnesota.
- On March 16, the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) criticized the Judiciary Committee chairman of Iowa's state Senate for failing to hold hearings on "NRA-initiated HF 2215, the Stand Your Ground/Castle Doctrine Enhancement." According to NRA-ILA, the bill would "remove a person's 'duty to retreat' from an attacker, allowing law-abiding citizens to stand their ground and protect themselves or their family anywhere they are lawfully present." The group urged supporters to contact state Senators and tell them to support the bill. NRA-ILA previously told supporters to contact Democratic members of the Iowa House after they "left the Capitol building in an attempt to block consideration of these pro-gun bills" on February 29.
- On March 14, NRA-ILA urged Alaskan supporters to contact their state Senators and tell them to support House Bill 80, which it termed "important self-defense legislation that would provide that a law-abiding person, who is justified in using deadly force in self-defense, has 'no duty-to-retreat' from an attack if the person is in any place that that person has a legal right to be." NRA-ILA also promoted the bill on March 5, March 8, and February 29.
- On March 5, NRA-ILA executive director Chris W. Cox criticized Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton for vetoing House File 1467, which Cox said "would have removed the duty to retreat for crime victims currently mandated under Minnesota state law and precluded victims from facing prosecution for lawfully defending their lives." NRA-ILA also urged supporters to contact Dayton and urge him not to veto the bill on March 1 and February 29.
The NRA has referred to Florida's statute as "good law, casting a common-sense light onto the debate over the right of self-defense." The organization is unlikely to be satisfied until that "common-sense light" has been spread across the country, regardless of what tragedies occur in the meantime.
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