Inside the conservative plan to take over city politics (ACCE)
Two years ago, ALEC started a municipal division called the American City and County Exchange to duplicate this conservative juggernaut’s success at the municipal level. They now claim to have over 300 members, although only a couple dozen showed up for last month’s meeting. Some of the members are business representatives, referred to as “private sector partners.” Business members have voting rights and hold one of ACCE’s co-chair positions, and no policy positions are taken without both groups approving, along with ALEC’s board.
This was the second ACCE meeting that I — a Seattle City Council member until last week — have attended. They certainly knew my progressive politics from my extensive blogging about the first visit that I posted on the Center for Media and Democracy’s PR Watch. I returned, in part, to see if, as their founder and director Jon Russell had told me, that some day his group will be bigger than ALEC.
. . .
The federalist playbook —ALEC likes to emphasize the power of states and the limits, as it sees it, that should be placed on the federal government — was on display when two private sector partners spoke on an ACCE panel. Their pitch, warmly received by the audience, was that their members had to protect the free market from municipal governments arbitrarily passing environmental protection laws. They said local environmental measures should only be allowed where cities and counties had received authority to act on an issue, such as the use of plastic shopping bags, from their state government. It’s an approach we’ve seen in the Northwest, where, for instance, the Washington Legislature considered (but didn’t pass) measures that would have prohibited Seattle and other cities from implementing their bans on the giveaway of plastic shopping bags by most retailers.
Jacki Pick, executive vice president of the National Center for Policy Analysis, zeroed in on stopping cities from banning fracking. As the host of The Jacki Daily Show, she is a national figure promoting oil drilling, oil pipelines and fracking. She made no mention of the corporations benefiting from fracking. Instead, her point was how liberals were destroying job opportunities while they were increasing government payrolls. Her paranoia is in line with Republican Presidential Candidate Ted Cruz’s message that man-made climate change is a liberal plot to increase government power at the expense of working people.
A spokesman for the plastic industry on the panel attacked municipal plastic bag bans as harmful to local businesses. He said studies showed that communities lose up to 10 percent of their retail trade and the jobs that went with them. No data was shown to back up that claim.
THE REST:
http://crosscut.com/2016/01/a-seattle-liberal-ventures-into-a-den-of-conservative-activism/
