Update.
- Wal-Mart, Johnson & Johnson, Amazon.com, Coke, Pepsi, Kraft, McDonald's, Wendy's, Intuit, and 54 legislators have dumped the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC Exposed | SourceWatch
Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
StarmanSkye wrote:^^^
It CAN'T be! A gang of Loyalist Partisan Republicans craftily using a non-profit charity tax-dodge to legally (sic) deduct 1 to 2 million dollars of taxable income which is then spent on providing them with a wide range of lavish personal-benefit perks and priveleges -- essentially a tax-free 'gift' they give themselves through the 'charity' they makes these donations to -- which is also used to fund lobbying and the research & manufacture of legislative bills that typically enrich the private business members' own companies.
This sure doesn't look like they didn't know what a clever self-serving little gimmick they had going here ...
No prospective viably lucrative tax-dodge, gimmick, tactic, method or loophole with potential to be exploited for personal or business gain shall go untried. -- .
The unofficial neoliberal motto #2187
ALEC has attracted attention recently for its model “stand your ground” and voter ID laws which led major corporate backers like Coca Cola and Kraft Foods Inc. to drop their membership in the face of a threatened boycott by activists.
A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning
Michael Stravato for The New York Times
"You are here because now is the single best time we have to defund Obamacare. This is a fight we can win." SENATOR TED CRUZ, speaking in August to a Heritage Action gathering in Dallas
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MIKE McINTIRE
Published: October 5, 2013
WASHINGTON — Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
DRIVING FORCES David Koch of Americans for Prosperity, Michael A. Needham of Heritage Action and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III played roles in the health law fight.
Out of that session, held one morning in a location the members insist on keeping secret, came a little-noticed “blueprint to defunding Obamacare,” signed by Mr. Meese and leaders of more than three dozen conservative groups.
It articulated a take-no-prisoners legislative strategy that had long percolated in conservative circles: that Republicans could derail the health care overhaul if conservative lawmakers were willing to push fellow Republicans — including their cautious leaders — into cutting off financing for the entire federal government.
“We felt very strongly at the start of this year that the House needed to use the power of the purse,” said one coalition member, Michael A. Needham, who runs Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation. “At least at Heritage Action, we felt very strongly from the start that this was a fight that we were going to pick.”
Last week the country witnessed the fallout from that strategy: a standoff that has shuttered much of the federal bureaucracy and unsettled the nation.
To many Americans, the shutdown came out of nowhere. But interviews with a wide array of conservatives show that the confrontation that precipitated the crisis was the outgrowth of a long-running effort to undo the law, the Affordable Care Act, since its passage in 2010 — waged by a galaxy of conservative groups with more money, organized tactics and interconnections than is commonly known.
With polls showing Americans deeply divided over the law, conservatives believe that the public is behind them. Although the law’s opponents say that shutting down the government was not their objective, the activists anticipated that a shutdown could occur — and worked with members of the Tea Party caucus in Congress who were excited about drawing a red line against a law they despise.
A defunding “tool kit” created in early September included talking points for the question, “What happens when you shut down the government and you are blamed for it?” The suggested answer was the one House Republicans give today: “We are simply calling to fund the entire government except for the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare.”
The current budget brinkmanship is just the latest development in a well-financed, broad-based assault on the health law, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative initiative. Groups like Tea Party Patriots, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks are all immersed in the fight, as is Club for Growth, a business-backed nonprofit organization. Some, like Generation Opportunity and Young Americans for Liberty, both aimed at young adults, are upstarts. Heritage Action is new, too, founded in 2010 to advance the policy prescriptions of its sister group, the Heritage Foundation.
The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort. A group linked to the Kochs, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, disbursed more than $200 million last year to nonprofit organizations involved in the fight. Included was $5 million to Generation Opportunity, which created a buzz last month with an Internet advertisement showing a menacing Uncle Sam figure popping up between a woman’s legs during a gynecological exam.
The groups have also sought to pressure vulnerable Republican members of Congress with scorecards keeping track of their health care votes; have burned faux “Obamacare cards” on college campuses; and have distributed scripts for phone calls to Congressional offices, sample letters to editors and Twitter and Facebook offerings for followers to present as their own.
One sample Twitter offering — “Obamacare is a train wreck” — is a common refrain for Speaker John A. Boehner.
As the defunding movement picked up steam among outside advocates, Republicans who sounded tepid became targets. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a political action committee dedicated to “electing true conservatives,” ran radio advertisements against three Republican incumbents.
Heritage Action ran critical Internet advertisements in the districts of 100 Republican lawmakers who had failed to sign a letter by a North Carolina freshman, Representative Mark Meadows, urging Mr. Boehner to take up the defunding cause.
“They’ve been hugely influential,” said David Wasserman, who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “When else in our history has a freshman member of Congress from North Carolina been able to round up a gang of 80 that’s essentially ground the government to a halt?”
On Capitol Hill, the advocates found willing partners in Tea Party conservatives, who have repeatedly threatened to shut down the government if they do not get their way on spending issues. This time they said they were so alarmed by the health law that they were willing to risk a shutdown over it. (“This is exactly what the public wants,” Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, founder of the House Tea Party Caucus, said on the eve of the shutdown.)
Despite Mrs. Bachmann’s comments, not all of the groups have been on board with the defunding campaign. Some, like the Koch-financed Americans for Prosperity, which spent $5.5 million on health care television advertisements over the past three months, are more focused on sowing public doubts about the law. But all have a common goal, which is to cripple a measure that Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican and leader of the defunding effort, has likened to a horror movie.
Enlarge This Image
Americans for Prosperity
SOWING DOUBT A site by Americans for Prosperity, which has spent $5.5 million recently on television ads critical of the health care law.
“We view this as a long-term effort,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. He said his group expected to spend “tens of millions” of dollars on a “multifront effort” that includes working to prevent states from expanding Medicaid under the law. The group’s goal is not to defund the law.
“We want to see this law repealed,” Mr. Phillips said.
A Familiar Tactic
The crowd was raucous at the Hilton Anatole, just north of downtown Dallas, when Mr. Needham’s group, Heritage Action, arrived on a Tuesday in August for the second stop on a nine-city “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour.” Nearly 1,000 people turned out to hear two stars of the Tea Party movement: Mr. Cruz, and Jim DeMint, a former South Carolina senator who runs the Heritage Foundation.
“You’re here because now is the single best time we have to defund Obamacare,” declared Mr. Cruz, who would go on to rail against the law on the Senate floor in September with a monologue that ran for 21 hours. “This is a fight we can win.”
Although Mr. Cruz is new to the Senate, the tactic of defunding in Washington is not. For years, Congress has banned the use of certain federal money to pay for abortions, except in the case of incest and rape, by attaching the so-called Hyde Amendment to spending bills.
After the health law passed in 2010, Todd Tiahrt, then a Republican congressman from Kansas, proposed defunding bits and pieces of it. He said he spoke to Mr. Boehner’s staff about the idea while the Supreme Court, which upheld the central provision, was weighing the law’s constitutionality.
“There just wasn’t the appetite for it at the time,” Mr. Tiahrt said in an interview. “They thought, we don’t need to worry about it because the Supreme Court will strike it down.”
But the idea of using the appropriations process to defund an entire federal program, particularly one as far-reaching as the health care overhaul, raised the stakes considerably. In an interview, Mr. DeMint, who left the Senate to join the Heritage Foundation in January, said he had been thinking about it since the law’s passage, in part because Republican leaders were not more aggressive.
“They’ve been through a series of C.R.s and debt limits,” Mr. DeMint said, referring to continuing resolutions on spending, “and all the time there was discussion of ‘O.K., we’re not going to fight the Obamacare fight, we’ll do it next time.’ The conservatives who ran in 2010 promising to repeal it kept hearing, ‘This is not the right time to fight this battle.’ ”
Mr. DeMint is hardly alone in his distaste for the health law, or his willingness to do something about it. In the three years since Mr. Obama signed the health measure, Tea Party-inspired groups have mobilized, aided by a financing network that continues to grow, both in its complexity and the sheer amount of money that flows through it.
A review of tax records, campaign finance reports and corporate filings shows that hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised and spent since 2012 by organizations, many of them loosely connected, leading opposition to the measure.
One of the biggest sources of conservative money is Freedom Partners, a tax-exempt “business league” that claims more than 200 members, each of whom pays at least $100,000 in dues. The group’s board is headed by a longtime executive of Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by the Koch brothers, who were among the original financiers of the Tea Party movement. The Kochs declined to comment.
While Freedom Partners has financed organizations that are pushing to defund the law, like Heritage Action and Tea Party Patriots, Freedom Partners has not advocated that. A spokesman for the group, James Davis, said it was more focused on “educating Americans around the country on the negative impacts of Obamacare.”
The largest recipient of Freedom Partners cash — about $115 million — was the Center to Protect Patient Rights, according to the groups’ latest tax filings. Run by a political consultant with ties to the Kochs and listing an Arizona post office box for its address, the center appears to be little more than a clearinghouse for donations to still more groups, including American Commitment and the 60 Plus Association, both ardent foes of the health care law.
American Commitment and 60 Plus were among a handful of groups calling themselves the “Repeal Coalition” that sent a letter in August urging Republican leaders in the House and the Senate to insist “at a minimum” in a one-year delay of carrying out the health care law as part of any budget deal. Another group, the Conservative 50 Plus Alliance, delivered a defunding petition with 68,700 signatures to the Senate.
In the fight to shape public opinion, conservatives face well-organized liberal foes. Enroll America, a nonprofit group allied with the Obama White House, is waging a campaign to persuade millions of the uninsured to buy coverage. The law’s supporters are also getting huge assistance from the insurance industry, which is expected to spend $1 billion on advertising to help sell its plans on the exchanges.
“It is David versus Goliath,” said Mr. Phillips of Americans for Prosperity.
But conservatives are finding that with relatively small advertising buys, they can make a splash. Generation Opportunity, the youth-oriented outfit behind the “Creepy Uncle Sam” ads, is spending $750,000 on that effort, aimed at dissuading young people — a cohort critical to the success of the health care overhaul — from signing up for insurance under the new law.
The group receives substantial backing from Freedom Partners and appears ready to expand. Recently, Generation Opportunity moved into spacious new offices in Arlington, Va., where exposed ductwork, Ikea chairs and a Ping-Pong table give off the feel of a Silicon Valley start-up.
Its executive director, Evan Feinberg, a 29-year-old former Capitol Hill aide and onetime instructor for a leadership institute founded by Charles Koch, said there would be more Uncle Sam ads, coupled with college campus visits, this fall. Two other groups, FreedomWorks, with its “Burn Your Obamacare Card” protests, and Young Americans for Liberty, are also running campus events.
“A lot of folks have asked us, ‘Are we trying to sabotage the law?’ ” Mr. Feinberg said in an interview last week. His answer echoes the Freedom Partners philosophy: “Our goal is to educate and empower young people.”
Critical Timing
But many on the Republican right wanted to do more.
Mr. Meese’s low-profile coalition, the Conservative Action Project, which seeks to find common ground among leaders of an array of fiscally and socially conservative groups, was looking ahead to last Tuesday, when the new online health insurance marketplaces, called exchanges, were set to open. If the law took full effect as planned, many conservatives feared, it would be nearly impossible to repeal — even if a Republican president were elected in 2016.
“I think people realized that with the imminent beginning of Obamacare, that this was a critical time to make every effort to stop something,” Mr. Meese said in an interview. (He has since stepped down as the coalition’s chairman and has been succeeded by David McIntosh, a former congressman from Indiana.)
The defunding idea, Mr. Meese said, was “a logical strategy.” The idea drew broad support. Fiscal conservatives like Chris Chocola, the president of the Club for Growth, signed on to the blueprint. So did social and religious conservatives, like the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition.
The document set a target date: March 27, when a continuing resolution allowing the government to function was to expire. Its message was direct: “Conservatives should not approve a C.R. unless it defunds Obamacare.”
But the March date came and went without a defunding struggle. In the Senate, Mr. Cruz and Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, talked up the defunding idea, but it went nowhere in the Democratic-controlled chamber. In the House, Mr. Boehner wanted to concentrate instead on locking in the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration, and Tea Party lawmakers followed his lead. Outside advocates were unhappy but held their fire.
“We didn’t cause any trouble,” Mr. Chocola said.
Yet by summer, with an August recess looming and another temporary spending bill expiring at the end of September, the groups were done waiting.
“I remember talking to reporters at the end of July, and they said, ‘This didn’t go anywhere,’ ” Mr. Needham recalled. “What all of us felt at the time was, this was never going to be a strategy that was going to win inside the Beltway. It was going to be a strategy where, during August, people would go home and hear from their constituents, saying: ‘You pledged to do everything you could to stop Obamacare. Will you defund it?’ ”
Heritage Action, which has trained 6,000 people it calls sentinels around the country, sent them to open meetings and other events to confront their elected representatives. Its “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour,” which began in Fayetteville, Ark., on Aug. 19 and ended 10 days later in Wilmington, Del., drew hundreds at every stop.
The Senate Conservatives Fund, led by Mr. DeMint when he was in the Senate, put up a Web site in July called dontfundobamacare.com and ran television ads featuring Mr. Cruz and Mr. Lee urging people to tell their representatives not to fund the law.
When Senator Richard M. Burr, a North Carolina Republican, told a reporter that defunding the law was “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” the fund bought a radio ad to attack him. Two other Republican senators up for re-election in 2014, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, were also targeted. Both face Tea Party challengers.
In Washington, Tea Party Patriots, which created the defunding tool kit, set up a Web site, exemptamerica.com, to promote a rally last month showcasing many of the Republicans in Congress whom Democrats — and a number of fellow Republicans — say are most responsible for the shutdown.
While conservatives believe that the public will back them on defunding, a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority — 57 percent — disapproves of cutting off funding as a way to stop the law.
Last week, with the health care exchanges open for business and a number of prominent Republicans complaining that the “Defund Obamacare” strategy was politically damaging and pointless, Mr. Needham of Heritage Action said he felt good about what the groups had accomplished.
“It really was a groundswell,” he said, “that changed Washington from the outside in.”
Another ALEC trick at Federal Level EXPOSED
dailykos, Bob Sloan | Aug 20, 2011
By now many thought they had heard everything to be heard about ALEC and their un-democratic activities. This is simply not true. As I said to a fellow Exposing ALEC member earlier today..."we once thought ALEC was the complete picture of an 'Evil Empire', but after all this research we have to realize that in reality ALEC is merely a single frame of a huge panoramic picture." ALEC only represents one tool in the arsenal of a well organized, well thought out, well funded and well oiled cabal. Using ALEC's ability to advance legislation beneficial to the collective is ALEC's purpose for existence. It is why Koch, Scaife, Coors' and DeVos' money is invested in their activities.
How is this money and participation between all these "Family" foundations coordinated? Twice a year Charles and David Koch hold secret, by invitation only "meetings". Last year's July meeting, the agenda and the attendants were discovered by accident and published for all to see by ThinkProgress.org. As can be determined by the documents, representatives of the Scaife's, Coors' and DeVos' foundations were in attendance. The Corporations were also represented along with members of the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute and Koch funded universities such as George Mason University. The rest of those in attendance represent the upper echelon of conservative society. Through these meetings all are given their marching orders, the foundations told where to invest their considerable wealth and the elite and media representatives...? They're told to use key phrases developed by the cabal to describe in sarcastic terms, the Democratic efforts. They're told to use "socialism", "Obamacare" and "EPA Train Wreck" at every opportunity to reinforce the collective's pursuits against this leftist "ideology." ALEC quickly issues statements, "papers" on key issues and to the public, complaining that Obamacare is socialist medicine, the EPA Train Wreck is not working and each of these position papers is supported by statistics, graphs and professor-like documents provided to them by GMU, Heartland Institute, Reason Foundation or the Heritage Foundation.
The corporations dutifully attend meetings to provide an instructive voice - and purpose - to the legislators. Much of the money begins with the family money of those mentioned above, it is filtered through many of the below the fold listed organizations, foundations, institutes:
American Council of Trustees and Alumni
American Legislative Exchange Council
Atlas Economic Research Foundation
Bill of Rights Institute
Center for Excellence in Education
Fund for American Studies
Heritage Foundation
Institute for Energy Research
Institute for Humane Studies
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
National Center for Policy Analysis
National Federation of Independent Business Legal Foundation
National Taxpayers Union Foundation
Reason Foundation
Students for Liberty
PARTNERS BASED OUTSIDE OF DC
Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions
Foundation for Economic Education
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Illinois Policy Institute
Jack Miller Center
John W. Pope Civitas Institute
John William Pope Foundation
Lucy Burns Institute
Sam Adams Alliance
South Carolina Policy Council
Texas Public Policy Foundation
ADDITIONAL PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS
Partner organizations change from session to session; additional organizations the Foundation has worked with through the Koch Internship Program and/or Koch Associate Program include:
Acton Institute
American Enterprise Institute
American Spectator Foundation
Americans for Tax Reform Foundation
Boys and Girls Club of South Central Kansas
Cato Institute
Center for College Affordability and Productivity
Commonwealth Foundation
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Federalist Society
Free to Choose Network
Galen Institute
George C. Marshall Institute
George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center
Hudson Institute
Independent Women's Forum
John Locke Foundation
John William Pope Center for Higher Education
Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship
Philanthropy Roundtable
State Policy Network
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
Washington Legal Foundation
Youth Entrepreneurs Kansas
Our research has shown that all of the foregoing are interconnected and thus much of the Koch ideology and conservative rhetoric is carried along through the above entities with their money. Koch does not simply give their money out without keeping an eye on what those dollars are being used for. Every year Koch provides "interns" to serve in several of these key "organizations:"
American Ideas Institute, publisher of American Conservative Magazine
American Legislative Exchange Council
American Spectator Foundation
Atlas Economic Research Foundation
Bill of Rights Institute
Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation
The Fund for American Studies
George Washington Regulatory Studies Center
George Marshall Institute
Hudson Institute
Independent Women's Forum
Institute for Energy Research
Institute for Humane Studies
Leadership Institute
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship
Philanthropy Roundtable
Reason Foundation
Searle Civil Justice Institute at George Mason School of Law
State Policy Network
By doing this they accomplish two goals; first they provide workers for these organizations paid $10.00 per hour by Koch. This increases staffing for all of these organizations without costing them a cent in payroll (any doubts that this is all written off by Koch as charitable work for non-profits?). Secondly it gives Koch as many as ten sets of eyes and ears within each of those entities that can be used to ensure the messages and agenda are being met and followed.
Then we learned that Koch was involved in "Buying" the curricula and professorships at key public universities through the discovery of their 2008 $1.5 million "endowment" to Florida State University with strings attached:
The president of FSU, who defended the Koch deal, did not mention that such outside endowments are skewing the curriculum at state universities in unfortunate ways.
But here is the objectionable thing, which he admits, about the way the search for the positions was conducted:
‘These 50 applications were sent for input to an advisory board approved by the Koch Foundation. The advisory board, formed in 2008, consisted of two FSU faculty members, both Eminent Scholars in Economics, and a Ph.D. economist appointed by the Koch Foundation. (It is not unusual for a donor to have representation in an advisory capacity.)’
This allegation is simply untrue. It is not the case that academic institutions routinely insert an outside advisory board into the middle of the search process. In fact, this way of proceeding is absolutely outrageous, more particularly because one of the members of the advisory board was not even on the faculty! Moreover, it is invidious for the Kochs to give some FSU faculty more of a voice in hiring than others.
On top of this shock to FSU students, their families and alumni...we learn that it has been done over and over again, university by university and in each case involves gaining control over economic departments in public universities. Another one is Utah State University:
– Utah State University: The Charles Koch Foundation has given nearly $700,000 to Utah State University, mostly for the Huntsman School of Business. The money has been used to hire five new faculty members, and establish a program for undergraduates to enroll and learn about Charles Koch’s “Science of Liberty” management theory. Professor Randy Simmons, the “Charles G. Koch Professor of Political Economy” at the school, helps select students — who must provide information about their ideological interests in their application form — to the Koch program. Simmons also works for several Koch-funded front groups, and writes papers against environmental regulations. Charles Koch’s book, “The Science of Success,” a book Forbes mocked for proclaiming a “Marxist faith in ‘fixed laws’ that govern ‘human well-being,’” is part of the required reading list for the program. A representative for Utah State did not return ThinkProgress’ calls about conditional strings attached to the Koch grant.
So here's the pattern and methodology used by Koch; first they use ALEC's influence upon legislators to attack funding of public schools and universities. As the colleges lose public funding and are faced with cutting back educational programs...in steps Ol Chucky and Davy Boy with hands full of money ready to step in and "save" the collegiate programs. All they want in exchange is the ability to instill their bullshit economics theory, pick the professors and the students. In this way the find fodder from within that generation to cultivate for positions within government, interns and for other conservative needs in the years ahead.
If you think this is merely a coincidence and does not represent a well thought out agenda...let me now provide the tiny piece of our research that corroborates just how devious these folks are. Devious, well thought out and executed precisely as intended.
In 2003 ALEC drafted their Animal EnterpriseTerrorism Act and adopted it as model legislation. This was introduced in various states and the core of the bill was designed to allow for prosecuting those activist that protest on behalf of animal rights. If money is lost to businesses operating chicken farms, pig raising facilities or laboratories using animals for research are protested against, the activists can be labeled as terrorists and prosecuted under terrorism laws. Bad enough they introduced this in the states, but worse they found a way through their alumni and sympathetic Republican U.S. Congressmen to introduce and pass this model legislation at the federal level.
ALEC Alumni, Senator Inhofe (R-OK) co-sponsored this ALEC written legislation with Senator Feinstein (D-CA) in the U.S. Senate (S.3880) and Rep. Tom Petri (R-WI)(HR 4239). In both the House and Senate the bills were put on "Fast Track" which is normally used for “non-controversial bipartisan legislation,” these “fast track” rules limit debate to forty minutes, prohibit bill amendments, and require the approval of only two thirds of members present on the floor. First the bill was passed in the U.S. Senate by a voice vote then the House took it up and sponsors there found many objections to the legislation. Knowing passage was not assured but a vote was scheduled for 6:00 pm on November 13, 2006, the Republicans led by Representative Sensenbrenner R_WI) used the fast track provision three hours before the scheduled time for the vote when other members were unaware of the change in schedule. Once introduced Rep. Kucinich (D_OH) walked in and protested the way in which the fast tracking was being used and asked Sensenbrenner to withhold the vote until the 6:00 pm time originally scheduled so other members could take part in the discussion and vote.
Sensenbrenner refused and within 3 minutes he put it to a vote and with only 6 members present, 5 voted for it and it passed by a 2/3 majority. It was signed into law by President Bush within two weeks.
In this manner ALEC legislation was able to become law with only 5 of the 435 House members voting for this ALEC written legislation! During our research we discovered another scary fact: the Congressional records office has no record of who was present and voted, and thus the identities of those who voted for the Bill remain anonymous to researchers and the public. The official Congressional report for that day simply advises that the bill passed by a majority voice vote of 5 to 1 and no record of those participating in the vote were reported to the Congressional Records Office.
As I said above, well funded, strategically well thought out, organized and tactically executed - not at the state level, at the federal level, where ALEC claims over and over again they don't have or apply any influence. This is just one documented case of this. With the research incomplete, I have to wonder just how many other ALEC model legislation has been slipped into Congress and passed into federal law in this manner?
Kossacks who want to know the answer to this last question are challenged to join in the research and see if they can find other laws we live by that were passed in this manner - from ALEC.
I think it is pretty obvious and a well documented fact that today America is in the grip of not only a class war, but one that is being waged from within by a shadowy cabal who are working to take over and toss democracy out the window. One of their main goals is to reduce the wealth of the middle class and thus their ability to fight back. This is done in a manner similar to what is being done with the universities mentioned above. They remove our jobs and put them in the hands of prisoners, rendering more and more Americans jobless. They work to legislate reductions in funding for social networks and programs helping those displaced and jobless. They fight against universal health care to keep us spending more of what is left to us to maintain our health while they fight to abolish necessary government regulations to protect us from the carcinogenic and toxic emissions from their plants and factories...causing more of us to become adversely affected by the very air we breathe.
And of late they use more ALEC model legislation designed to further remove even the equity in our homes from us through their Reverse Mortgage Enabling Act - YES!, this is also an ALEC drafted and written legislation. In a report proposing the implementation of reverse mortgages, the purpose of this financing is to allow seniors to access the equity in their homes to use that money to pay for necessary healthcare insurance policies and long term care:
“Payments from a reverse mortgage can help reduce dependence on Medicaid by lowering the likelihood for spend-down. Increased use of this financial option for long-term care could result in savings to Medicaid ranging from about $3.3 to almost $5 billion annually in 2010, depending on market penetration rates increasing from 4 percent to 25 percent of older homeowners.
“As the population ages and the pressure on state Medicaid budgets rises, it becomes increasingly important to find effective ways to improve our long-term care financing system. Funding the growing demand for long-term care is a major national challenge that will require increased spending by both the public and private sectors. This study provides compelling evidence that reverse mortgages have the potential to significantly increase the funds available to pay for home and community-based long-term care. By liquidating a portion of their housing wealth, older homeowners could access a substantial amount of cash. With appropriate incentives, careful protections, and innovative products, greater use of reverse mortgages may offer additional options for seniors to manage assets to pay for long-term care at home.”
The way to capitalize off of this for Medicaid is for seniors to pay their own way on extended care, hospice or other needs. This includes those seniors buying long term healthcare policies with the money advanced through the reverse mortgage. There are also provisions allowing for high interest that is compounded resulting in the loan accruing interest upon interest, and a provision to avoid usury prohibitions:
Reverse mortgage loans may be made or acquired without regard to the following provisions for other types of mortgage transactions set out in the statutes specified below;
(D) Requirements that a maximum mortgage amount be stated in the mortgage;
(E) Limitations on loan-to-value ratios;
(F) Prohibitions on balloon payments;
(G) Prohibitions on compounded interest and interest on interest;
(H) Interest rate limits under the usury statutes; and
(I) Requirements that a percentage of the loan proceeds must be advanced prior to loan assignment.
Through the Reverse Mortgage Act analysts reported there was more than $2 Trillion available as untapped equity in the homes of seniors. The cabal want to lay their hands on this money to use it to reduce Medicaid costs and thus free up state money now used for that program to be available for other uses. The Reverse Mortgage Act is but one of over 800 initiatives or model bills written by ALEC over the past two decades. The ads in the mainstream media (another of their enablers) urging seniors to take advantage of a reverse mortgages, make no mention of the true intent of the legislation.
All of us have seen the slick ads on TV about reverse mortgages. Have any of you seen the real purpose of this legislation advertised? Are most of those who are attracted to this option even aware that it is intended to allow the banks to loan them money and that for as long as the loan is in effect (not paid off) that the high interest of the loan accrues and is compounded allowing for the financial institution to earn interest on the interest that is added to the principal? Do they realize that once they pass away, their families have to pay the principal and all of the accrued interest if they want to keep a home that has possibly been in the family for generations?"
In this way the frigging banks - that stole our pensions, 401k's and retirement investments and caused our property to decrease in value by as much as 50% over the past two or three years - now have a way to pay 60 to 80 cents on the dollar and acquire the title to and rights to our homes. This serves to further reduce the money available to our children and families. The homes that slick advertising has seniors calling to turn their homes over to these lenders, is being used to quietly remove the last vestiges of wealth to the middle class. When all of this is added to the attack upon public, civilian and Union workers, legislating to abolish the minimum wage and other machinations to reduce us to a society of 300 million living in poverty conditions, with even our rights to vote taken through their legislation...these corporations and their wealthy owners will have created a Utopian (to the corporations) nation with a working class to their liking.
They envision the next and subsequent generations living in rented homes (owned by them) buying the products they sell (made by us at wages lower than now paid in China) and our children being educated (indoctrinated) with altered history to their liking and a new economy based upon their failed "trickle down economics" formula.
It's really time for all of us to awaken and pick up our pitch forks and toss these insidious bastards from our land and our nation. They are nothing more than 21st Century "Carpetbaggers" looking to eliminate all form of government control, protection and assistance to the majority and replace that with corporatocracy....
10:02 AM PT: Update: Watch this short video of ALEC and Heritage Foundation co-founder, Paul Weyrich speaking about why they opposed Hillary Clinton in 2008. See how Weyrich worries that their activities would be redefined as terrorism:
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