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Related: About this forumALEC - The American Legislative Exchange Council - Explained in 5 Minutes
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ALEC - The American Legislative Exchange Council - Explained in 5 Minutes (Original Post)
hue
Apr 2013
OP
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)1. The 1% Buying Democracy One Law At A Time
eom
rurallib
(62,387 posts)2. Some friends and I are working like hell to make ALEC an issue
I have sent this video on. Thank you.
midnight
(26,624 posts)3. The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor-three strikes law
"The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the states forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDEs website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.
Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US governmentlicense plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildingsprison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.
Somewhat more familiar is ALECs instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, three strikes laws, and truth in sentencing laws. In 1995 alone, ALECs Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative solutions to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through the proven success of the private bail bond industry, as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALECs Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizonas state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizonas notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the countrys massive prison population.
That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peakand at a time when the concept of rehabilitation was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities, according to PRIDEs website. The benefits to big corporations were cleara readily available workforce for the private sector and a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population for prison officialsyet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program."
http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor#
DhhD
(4,695 posts)4. One thing we can we do about it - stop voter suppression.
A Movement, could be a camping chair call to arms for voters standing in lines.
Sometimes people camp out in tents so they can register their child at a unique school or to be near a door at a grand opening or for the sale of a new electronic device.
It could be that a count could be made of chairs expected and taken to the city for a permit. The city, county and state may decide to allow much better and longer early voting times and places.
We need a Movement. Camping Chairs are nonthreatening.