Pulling Back The Curtain

How has the neoconservative agenda been so successful at dismantling our government?

This was accomplished with immense corporate support from organizations like ALEC.
These corporations are, in effect, using our tax dollars and fed reserves to fund their agenda,and have infiltrated government positions with their people and influence. Not to mention spilling our blood and that of the people whose countries are invaded to further this agenda.

It is these corporations and their primary officers that should be the focus of public activism. Instead of working to the point of exhaustion to clean up the rivers of toxic debris that has been left in their wake which has been destroying our country, we need to go up river to the source of this pollution and battle it there.

About ALEC

Background about ALEC

More than a quarter century ago, a small group of state legislators and conservative policy advocates met in Chicago to implement a vision: A bipartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers who shared a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty. Their vision and initiative resulted in the creation of a voluntary membership association for people who believed that the government closest to the people was fundamentally more effective, more just, and a better guarantor of freedom than the distant, bloated federal government in Washington, D.C.

At that meeting in September 1973, state legislators, such as then Illinois State Representative Henry Hyde, and Lou Barnett, a veteran of then Governor Ronald Reagan's 1968 Presidential campaign, together with a handful of others, launched the American Legislative Exchange Council. Among those who were involved with ALEC in its formative years were: Robert Kasten and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin; John Engler of Michigan; Terry Branstad of Iowa, and John Kasich of Ohio, all of whom moved on to become Governors or Members of Congress. Congressional members who were active during this same period included Senators John Buckley of New York and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Congressmen Phil Crane of Illinois and Jack Kemp of New York.


Our Mission Statement

The mission of the American Legislative Exchange Council is to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism and individual liberty among America's state legislators... cont'd

http://www.alec.org/index.php?id=300


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Membership

ALEC's far-reaching national network of state legislators that crosses geographic and political boundaries, and affects all levels of government, is without equal. No other organization in America today can claim as many valuable assets - both people and ideas - that have influence on as many key decision-making centers.

Well over 100 ALEC members hold senior leadership positions in their state legislatures, while hundreds more hold important committee leadership positions. Five sitting Governors, including Robert Ehrlich (Md.), Bill Owens (Colo.), and George Pataki (N.Y.), and several former governors, including Tommy Thompson (Wisc.) and Frank Keating (Okla.), are alumni of ALEC.

Ninety-eight Members of Congress are former ALEC members. Included among this distinguished list in the House are Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.). At the top of the list in the U.S. Senate are Republican Policy Committee Chairman Jon Kyl (R-Ariz), Don Nickles (R-Okla.), Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), and George Allen (R-Va.).


http://www.alec.org/index.php?id=300

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An important read:

Bushco is NOT incompetent -

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=103&topic_id=252913&mesg_id=252913

...slave ownership. As for the rest of Jefferson's political views on government, he seemed to cherish the idea of government being central to the benefit of all people. As usual, a neoconservative group misquotes and removes only what they like to further theit own agenda:

<snip>
Published on Friday, March 12, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Democracy - Not "The Free Market" - Will Save America's Middle Class
by Thom Hartmann

Here are a couple of headlines for those who haven't had the time to study both economics and history:

1. There is no such thing as a "free market."

2. The "middle class" is the creation of government intervention in the marketplace, and won't exist without it (as millions of Americans and Europeans are discovering).

The conservative belief in "free markets" is a bit like the Catholic Church's insistence that the Earth was at the center of the Solar System in the Twelfth Century. It's widely believed by those in power, those who challenge it are branded heretics and ridiculed, and it is wrong.

In actual fact, there is no such thing as a "free market." Markets are the creation of government.

Governments provide a stable currency to make markets possible. They provide a legal infrastructure and court systems to enforce the contracts that make markets possible. They provide educated workforces through public education, and those workers show up at their places of business after traveling on public roads, rails, or airways provided by government. Businesses that use the "free market" are protected by police and fire departments provided by government, and send their communications - from phone to fax to internet - over lines that follow public rights-of-way maintained and protected by government.

And, most important, the rules of the game of business are defined by government. Any sports fan can tell you that football, baseball, or hockey without rules and referees would be a mess. Similarly, business without rules won't work.

Which explains why conservative economics wiped out the middle class during the period from 1880 to 1932, and why, when Reagan again began applying conservative economics, the middle class again began to vanish in America in the 1980s - a process that has dramatically picked up steam under George W. Bush.

The conservative mantra is "let the market decide." But there is no market independent of government, so what they're really saying is, "Stop corporations from defending workers and building a middle class, and let the corporations decide how much to pay for labor and how to trade." This is, at best, destructive to national and international economies, and, at worst, destructive to democracy itself.

Markets are a creation of government, just as corporations exist only by authorization of government. Governments set the rules of the market. And, since our government is of, by, and for We The People, those rules have historically been set to first maximize the public good resulting from people doing business.
<snip>

The fact that the "marketplace" was an artifact of government activity was well known to our Founders. As Thomas Jefferson said in an 1803 letter to David Williams, "The greatest evils of populous society have ever appeared to me to spring from the vicious distribution of its members among the occupations... But when, by a blind concourse, particular occupations are ruinously overcharged and others left in want of hands, the national authorities can do much towards restoring the equilibrium."

And the "national authorities," in Jefferson's mind, should be the Congress, as he wrote in a series of answers to the French politician de Meusnier in 1786: "The commerce of the States cannot be regulated to the best advantage but by a single body, and no body so proper as Congress."

Of course, there were conservatives (like Hamilton and Adams) in Jefferson's time, too, who took exception, thinking that the trickle-down theory that had dominated feudal Europe for ten centuries was a stable and healthy form of governance. Jefferson took exception, in an 1809 letter to members of his Democratic Republican Party (now called the Democratic Party): "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."

<MORE>

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0312-08.htm

of this government. To continue to behave as though these people are our representatives and that our government is functioning as a democracy is ABSURD...a desperate attempt to keep the illusion alive. Toto, we are NOT in Kansas anymore!

Want to give this another chance since it originally posted on Christmas Eve and might have been missed.