Protest outside the ALEC Headquarters in Washington DC March 29, 2012. Against ALEC, the NRA, and "Stand Your Ground" laws. Credit: LaDawna Howard/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
PORTLAND, Oregon, Jun 28 2016 (IPS)

For many years, as a reporter, including for IPS, I wrote about the dominance of a giant, corporate-funded lobbying organization called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), on public policy in the United States.

In recent years, public uproar about the influence of ALEC resulted in campaigns for major corporations to divest from ALEC.  Several major corporations did pull out, although the wealthy Koch brothers and many corporations still provide ALEC with millions of dollars every year.

ALEC takes some of the most regressive, harmful ideas and puts them into the form of draft laws, or model bills, for Republican-led State Legislatures to adopt – one after another, after another.

Whether laws to make it harder to vote, or to privatize education and privatize prisons, or require U.S. families receiving food assistance to take drug tests, ALEC has provided the templates for one U.S. state after another to replicate these ideas into law.

Well, in 2013, I began to study law at Gonzaga University, and in 2014, I wrote a Model Bill for something called Affordable Housing Impact Statements.

Specifically, the bill requires cities and counties to prepare an “Impact Statement” every time they consider any decision that would have an impact on the amount of affordable housing in that city or county.

This Model Ordinance took an idea that had been successful in two cities–San Diego, California; and Austin, Texas–and added some new features, including a Scorecard to keep track of how many housing units would be added or subtracted at each income level.

I worked with the City of Atlanta, Georgia, which adopted it in November 2015, and am now working with four other cities–New Orleans, Louisiana; Los Angeles, California; Albany, New York; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania–which are also considering it.

With the rapid success of the model bill in so many cities, it occurred to me that this was the work of a progressive alternative to ALEC – and wouldn’t it be funny if we called it SMART ALEC?

It is supposed to be a “smart” alternative to ALEC.  [In the U.S., the term “smart aleck” refers comically to someone who behaves as if they know everything – so the name SMART ALEC has a double meaning that amuses people.]

SMART ALEC stands for State and Municipal Action for Results Today / Agenda for Legislative Empowerment and Collaboration.

So, in March 2016, I created the new nonprofit organization, and am serving as CEO.  The Board of Directors now includes Dr. Dwanda Farmer, one of the nation’s few PhDs in Community Development; Barbara Payne, former director of the Fulton County Taxpayers Foundation; and Christian Seppa, an activist.

Not only do we intend to promote progressive policies around the environment and affordable housing–basically the opposite of what ALEC promotes–we intend to do it in a way that is completely transparent and participatory.

We want to take back “lobbying” as a positive word.

In the United States, where vast concentration of wealth and corporate power has caused the average citizen to feel disempowered, as if they cannot make a difference in democracy, the word “lobbyist” has become a synonym for “devil.”

But we cannot let them have this word!  Just because corporations have become so adept at pushing their regressive, conservative proposals using the democratic process, so must we citizens become adept as doing the same.

SMART ALEC’s goal is to empower low-income, homeless, and marginalized people to make a meaningful difference in shaping, and advocating for, policy solutions.

The urgency of our environmental crises and affordable housing crises require that we work quickly to take the best solutions at the local levels of cities and states, and quickly replicate them.

Every day we are looking at the solutions being produced by civil society from all regions of the country; and we are inspired also by the bold solutions being pursued by our fellow “smart alecks” on every continent.

There is great experimentation happening, but we cannot experiment forever – so, let’s copy; paste; repeat.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Representatives from a coalition of over 30 environmental and progressive groups delivered more than 800,000 messages to Democratic Senator Harry Reid and Republican Senator Mitch McConnell in 2012 urging them to block attempts to resurrect the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Credit: 350.org/cc by 2.0

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, Feb 12 2015 (IPS)

With battle lines sharpening over the stalled Keystone XL pipeline, a new analysis details the intense industry lobbying of both houses of the U.S. Congress since 2013 – to the tune of 58.8 million dollars by five refinery companies alone.

According to MapLight, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organisation that reveals money’s influence on politics, the oil and gas industry gave, on average, 13 times more money to members of the House of Representatives who voted “yes” (43,375 dollars) on the bill called H.R. 3 than those who voted against it (3,610 dollars)."Another climate denier-controlled House vote in favour of oil isn't a surprise, and the Democrats who voted with them of course are oil-funded politicians too." -- Kyle Ash of Greenpeace

The bill would allow TransCanada to build the highly controversial Keystone XL pipeline without a presidential permit or additional environmental review. It passed the House on Wednesday with a vote of 270-152.

The U.S. Senate approved a virtually identical measure last month.

“How can we truly trust legislators to vote in the public interest when they are dependent on industry campaign funding to get elected?” Pamela Behrsin of MapLight told IPS. “Our broken money and politics system forces lawmakers into a conflict of interest between lawmakers’ voters and their donors.”

She noted that Rep. Kevin Cramer, a Republican from North Dakota and the sponsor of the legislation, received 222,400 dollars from the oil and gas industry, the ninth most among members of the House voting on H.R. 3.

Figures for the Senate were comparable, with the oil and gas industry giving, on average, 10 times more money to senators who supported the measure (236,544 dollars). The Senate sponsor, John Hoeven – also a Republican from North Dakota – received 275,998 dollars.

“Big Oil thinks it can buy votes in DC, and unfortunately the Keystone vote shows that is still possible in the halls of Congress,” David Turnbull of Oil Change International, a nonprofit working to promote a shift away from fossil fuels, told IPS.

“But what’s more important is that Big Oil can’t buy the American people, who are standing up to the industry’s bullying in Washington and demanding the president reject the pipeline and take bold action to move us off fossil fuels and towards a safer climate future.”

President Barack Obama has 10 days to decide on a veto. Since the 1,179-mile pipeline crosses national borders, Obama needs to issue a permit declaring the pipeline serves the “national interest” in order for it to be approved. The new legislation would circumvent such approval.

The pipeline has united every prominent U.S. environmental group in opposition, and even prompted the venerable Sierra Club to suspend its 120-year ban on civil disobedience. The group’s executive director, Michael Brune, was arrested in front of the White House during a protest against Keystone in February 2013, and there have been massive rallies against it since then.

Studies have shown that burning the heavy oil the pipeline would carry would emit more than 181 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year – equal to the emissions of nearly 38 million cars or 51 coal-fired power plants.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has warned that two-thirds of proven fossil fuel reserves need to be kept in the ground in order to have a 50 percent chance of staying below the two-degree threshold of warming that could avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Kyle Ash of Greenpeace told IPS that since the House had already passed the companion of the Senate bill, normally each chamber would reconcile their respective bills in conference, especially since both chambers are now controlled by the Republicans.

Instead, the full House went ahead and voted on the Senate version without making any changes, “apparently because GOP leaders fear that House Republican conferees will be too crazy”.

“As the Senate votes on climate amendments like Hoeven and Schatz also demonstrated, that the House voted on S.1 (the Senate version of the bill) ironically may be a sign that at least the crassest of congressional fossil fuel love is no longer in vogue,” he said.

“Another climate denier-controlled House vote in favour of oil isn’t a surprise, and the Democrats who voted with them of course are oil-funded politicians too.”

Indeed, MapLight found that the oil and gas industry gave, on average, 3.2 times more money to Democratic Senators voting for S.1 (73,279 dollars) compared to Democratic and Independent Senators voting against it (22,882 dollars).

The industry gave, on average, five times more money to Democratic Representatives voting “yes” (18,199 dollars) on H.R. 3 compared to Democratic and Independent Representatives voting “no” (3,610 dollars).

“We’ve done quite a bit of work on the massive amount of money members of Congress receive from the industry,” Turnbull said. “Indeed, it’s unfortunately not a surprise.”

The pipeline would carry petroleum from Canada’s oil sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast, and MapLight notes that some of Keystone XL’s strongest supporters are the Gulf Coast refinery companies that have expanded their facilities and would benefit from Canadian oil that will flow through the pipeline.

Valero, ExxonMobil, Marathon Petroleum, Phillips 66, and Motiva Enterprises (a company owned by Shell and the Saudi Arabian state oil company Saudi Aramco) constitute the five companies with the most refinery capacity along the Gulf Coast, the group says.

Together, the five companies control 45 percent of the refining capacity in the U.S., and all have been reported as possible customers of the pipeline.

“The vote in Congress on Keystone XL is a desperate distraction by an oil-soaked Congress. The president has said numerous times that he will veto the bill, and he’s right to do so,” Turnbull said.

“As the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] recently laid out, the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline clearly fails the president’s own climate test, and should be rejected. The president has all the information he needs to reject the pipeline and we hope he does so as soon as possible, so we can all move on to building the clean energy economy rather than catering to the whims of Big Oil.”

A Washington Post/ABC News poll last month found 34 percent of respondents wanted the pipeline built now, while 61 percent said the environmental impact reviews – including by the State Department and the heads of eight other government agencies – should continue.

“The House is expediting this bill getting to the president so they can gloat about how Congress loves oil and he doesn’t – despite the Obama administration going out of its way to expand oil drilling on public lands,” Ash said.

“However, the KXL pipeline may have died when the president agreed with New York Times reporter Tom Friedman last June that growing fossil fuel supply is bad for the climate (‘we can’t burn it all’). I believe he will do as he said and veto this bill.”

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

Civil society actors and the some corporate groups here are reacting with excitement to indications that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates the country’s stock exchanges, is likely to take up discussion over new rules that would mandate the public disclosure of all political spending by U.S.-listed public corporations.

With the issue now on the SEC’s agenda, a formal announcement is slated for April, with a period of public input to follow. On Tuesday, a broad coalition of academics and activists urged the commission to move swiftly.

The move comes in the aftermath of a contentious U.S. Supreme Court decision that opened the possibility for nearly unlimited anonymous corporate spending on political causes. Many warn that the decision led to the most expensive election cycle in history, concluding in November after political spending amounted to some six billion dollars nationwide, much of it untraceable.

“We’ve seen a 400 percent increase since 2008 in political spending by outside organisations,” Rob McCord, treasurer for the state of Pennsylvania, said Tuesday in a conference call to discuss the new SEC moves.

“The creepy thing is that more than 60 percent of this money was from super PACs” – political action committees allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money – “funded by just over 100 individuals.”

The Supreme Court, in a 2010 decision known as Citizens United, ruled that corporations’ right to engage in political spending – seen as an extension of free speech – cannot be limited. Yet the justices were also adamant in their support for transparency of that spending.

While the case enraged activists and scholars, particularly on the political left, the recent election saw such an avalanche of spending – particularly noticeable in certain state-level campaigns – that many across the country are today feeling that something significant has changed.

“I hear from my constituents – people are really outraged with the effect that big money is having in politics, and the impact that this is making on how we govern and run elections,” John Sarbanes, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, told journalists Tuesday.

“There’s an absolute chorus out there among ordinary Americans who are fed up that their government and campaigns have been taken over by special interests, and they expect the Congress to do something.”

According to a survey taken in October, at the height of the recent presidential election, an overwhelming majority of U.S. citizens – 77 percent – said they would favour a requirement requiring public disclosure of all corporate spending on political activities; 45 percent were “strongly in favour” of such a measure.

Investor demand

While several pieces of legislation have been introduced in Congress that would require such disclosure, Sarbanes notes that there is much that can be done at the regulatory level, as well.

The SEC’s actions may have been motivated by a growing backlash by corporate investors. Since Citizens United, many shareholders have become increasingly worried about being cut off from any details about their company’s political spending – specifics on amounts given, to whom or, of particular importance, the strategies behind such policies.

“Political spending disclosure is necessary for the smooth functioning of markets, and fits comfortably within the securities laws and the SEC’s framework,” Alya Z. Kayal, director of policy and programmes at the U.S. Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, a Washington association, told IPS.

“It is an important tool that helps shareholders, investors, management and directors deal with significant risks that can threaten companies and shareholder value.”

The forum has highlighted disclosure as a central priority for its work this year. As highlighted in a trends report released in November, Kayal notes, the forum’s research “found that a leading concern for shareholders, especially since the Citizens United decision, is corporate political spending and lobbying; investors filed more than 100 resolutions annually in 2011 and 2012 seeking better review and disclosure by portfolio company management of these activities.”

A petition to the SEC requesting rules on this issue was filed in 2011 by a bipartisan committee of law professors. Since that time, the SEC has received some 323,000 public comments in support of the petition – the most significant public response the commission has ever experienced, garnering around 150,000 more comments than the next largest response.

“If you look at the responses to the petition, investors have been clamouring for this information for some time,” Robert Jackson, a professor at the Columbia Law School and one of the lead filers of the petition to the SEC, said Tuesday. “Shareholder proposals for spending on politics have become the most requested type at large public companies in the U.S.”

Unchecked authority

While the SEC’s next moves are not yet certain, supporters say that several signs suggest that it is very likely that the body will indeed take up the rulemaking discussion on corporate political spending. In anticipation of such actions, several major actors have begun to build resistance.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby group, has already stated its opposition to any new disclosure rule. According to Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, the Chamber was the single largest outside spender during the 2010 election, and distributed another 36 million dollars during the 2012 campaigns, while refusing to name donors.

In a Jan. 4 letter to the SEC obtained by IPS, the Chamber and two dozen other industry groups warned against the petition’s overly broad scope, the SEC’s own lack of expertise in regulating political activity, and the potential violation of corporations’ freedom of speech.

The letter also suggests that “there is no evidence whatever that shareholders generally are clamoring for this information” and that, anyway, a rulemaking initiative “cannot be justified on the theory that political activity harms shareholder value – the evidence plainly shows that corporate political activity enhances shareholder value.”

Yet Adam Kanzer, with Domini Social Investments, counters that there is “Lots of strong institutional support for this rule … (from those) looking to invest in companies with superior products, not with superior access to politicians.”

He continues, “Currently, CEOs across the country have unchecked authority to spend other people’s money on political campaigns. Companies repeatedly say their political spending is in our best interests, but we’d like to assess that for ourselves.”

Over a month has passed since the United Nations summit on sustainable development concluded in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but the world still appears to be unaware of one of the most important statements made during the conference that drew some 50,000 delegates from all over the world.

Louise Kantrow, permanent representative of the International Chamber of Commerce, received thunderous applause when she told her audience on Jun. 19 that “businesses are taking the lead” in global negotiations on climate change and sustainable development.

For many observers, Kantrow’s blunt words highlighted just how strong of a grip private multinational companies have upon supposedly democratic processes.

In a statement aptly titled ‘Reclaim the U.N. from corporate capture’, the environmental organisation Friends of the Earth (FoE) complained that, “There are … real concerns about the increasing influence of major corporations and business lobby groups within the U.N.”

The report went on to detail the extraordinary level of businesses’ influence over the positions of national governments in multilateral negotiations.

“Business representatives dominate certain U.N. discussion spaces and some U.N. bodies; business groups are given a privileged advisory role; U.N. officials move back and forth (from) the private sector; and – last but not least – U.N. agencies are increasingly financially dependent on the private sector.”

One blatant example of this “corporate capture” of the U.N. is the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, which, thanks to senior executive representatives in several corporate lobbying groups, was omnipresent during the Rio+20 negotiations.

Shell sent delegates to the discussions and round tables of the above-mentioned International Chamber of Commerce, the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association, the U.N. Global Compact, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the International Emissions Trading Association.

Yet, according to Paul de Clerck, campaign coordinator at FoE, “More than one year has passed since the U.N. presented its report on Shell’s pollution of Ogoniland (Nigeria). But we are still waiting for a comprehensive plan from Shell to clean up its mess.”

The first step recommended by the U.N. was the establishment of a one billion-dollar emergency fund to clean up the region.

“So far, Shell has committed to nothing, despite its participation in all kind of environmental and sustainable development debates,” Clerck told IPS.

“It is not acceptable that companies like Shell should be in the driving seat of processes for sustainable development,” Nnimmo Bassey, of FoE International, told IPS. “That is a recipe for disaster for our planet and peoples. Corporate polluters should not (be drafting) laws, they should face the laws.”

But the U.N. is not the only international institution threatened by the influence of multinational businesses.

Tightly woven groups of professional go-betweens and loyal supporters of multinationals who have passed through the revolving doors that link governments and private corporations are now facing growing scrutiny from civil society activists.

In Europe, the head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, is facing a formal inquiry by the European Union (EU) ombudsman because of his membership in a well-known international banking lobby group.

On Jul. 24, the ombudsman’s office announced that it was launching the investigation following allegations that Draghi’s membership in the so-called Group of 30 “is incompatible with the independence, reputation and integrity of the ECB”.

The EU has been the subject of multiple complaints, because, according to civil society groups, many of its agencies allow a revolving door to admit and dispatch senior executives who bring corporate agendas to democratic fora.

One of the leading critics of this policy, the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), a multinational and public policy watchdog group, claims that many “senior European decision-makers leave office and go straight into lobby jobs, or (alternately) lobbyists join the EU institutions.”

In such cases, Olivier Hoedeman of CEO told IPS, “The risk of significant conflicts of interest is great, undermining democratic, public-interest decision making.”

According to Hoedeman, CEO “is working with the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation to challenge the revolving door and to demand that it is effectively regulated”.

CEO was the first group to complain about Draghi’s membership in the Group of 30, whose members include heavy-hitters in the international banking sector like William C. Dudley, former managing director at Goldman Sachs and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

European activists and analysts have been growing more anxious about the influence of private investment banks on public financial policies, especially as the European sovereign debt continues to spiral out of control.

As CEO put it, “Given the euro crisis, the huge bailout operations of big banks, and the on-going debate on how to regulate banks in the light of the financial crisis, it should be obvious that safeguards are needed to ensure that the President of the European Central Bank remains independent.”

CEO argues that Draghi’s participation “in a closed, club-like structure with representatives from big international private banks could damage the integrity and reputation of the ECB.”

Indeed, Goldman Sachs’ links to numerous present officials at ministries of finance and other state agencies in Europe are extraordinary and worrisome. In a recent debate in Berlin, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, director of the prestigious Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, denounced what he called “the diarchy in financial capitalism.”

Streeck said that European democratic states are presently suffering under the dictatorship of the deregulated financial markets, controlled by corporations like Goldman Sachs, while at the same time, most of their institutions are led by former executives of those very same corporations.

A salient example of Streeck’s thesis is the current, non-elected Italian head of government Mario Monti, who was the international adviser to Goldman Sachs from 2005 until 2011. In Goldman Sachs’ own words, Monti’s mission was to provide advice “on European business and major public policy initiatives worldwide.”

Given that Goldman Sachs and similar investment banks are pivotal in managing the sovereign debt of numerous European countries, it seems almost absurd that they are simultaneously preparing speculation schemes against the solvency of those very same states.

Following the announcement that the EU ombudsman had launched an official investigation into Draghi’s professional past, CEO has urged him to step down as president of the ECB.

In a letter addressed to Draghi, the group wrote, “Any president of the ECB has to make it absolutely clear that he or she is not under the influence of the financial lobby at any time. In particular at this dramatic point in the history of the EU, with the euro crisis and an ailing banking sector – recipient of trillions of euros in aid – it is completely unacceptable if doubt can be cast on the independence of the Bank’s president from the financial lobby.”

(END)