What do you know about the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC?
It is right now the single most influential private organization in the nation.
This article, though three years old, gives a good overview of the ALEC education goals, mainly to privatize public funding for schools and to eliminate teachers’ unions. This is not surprising, because the DeVos Foundations and the Koch Foundation are among its most important funders.
ALEC opposes any regulation. It opposes gun control and regulation of the oil and gas industry. It opposes the public sector having any power over corporations.
ALEC is a rightwing “bill mill.” Its staff drafts model state legislation.
About 2,000 state legislators belong to ALEC.
They attend its posh meetings at elegant resorts and return home with fully developed bills that they can introduce in their own states, simply writing in the name of their state on an ALEC bill.
Then they can attend the next ALEC meeting and boast about their accomplishments.
If you want to know more, read Gordon Lafer’s fine book The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time, which nails the ALEC approach and shows that its purpose is to lower expectations.
As you read the article noted above, you will see a proliferation of voucher plans under many names. Each of them is a camel’s nose under the tent. Pass one and soon there will be demand for another and another. The rightwing oligarchs are not interested in poor children or in education; they are interested in power and in killing the public sector that belongs to all of us.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The camel’s nose under the tent is the perfect metaphor. Florida is a “model,” here, for the rest of the country:
Start with a voucher program sold as a way to provide funds to parents of kids with special needs so that they can seek out schools tailored to those needs.
Then, expand the eligibility with a second voucher program for poor kids.
Then, pass a bill providing vouchers to parents of ALL students, with provisions for increasing the amount of money available over time, until, eventually, all students are covered.
This is a sneaky way to circumvent the failure of voucher programs in referendums. And it’s the undemocratic, ALEC way of making all schools into private schools, over time.
That said, come on down to the K-Mart parkin’ lot this Saterday for are Race to the Top of Mount Zion Educashun Jubilee an sign yore childrun up for Bob Shepherd’s Real Good Florida School, whar you can no that theys not gonna be no Socialist teachers recruitin yore kids to be transgendered. Spend yore voucher on real, Bible-based educashun in a skool whar yore childrun will be safe cause all are teachers is locked and loaded! Make education great agin!
It is interesting that the title of the post is “Cashing in on Kids.” ALEC, more than any other group, is responsible for Christian libertarian legislation that has appeared in many states. ALEC writes the legislation that its members can take back to their states, It is shocking that ALEC bills have appeared in both red and blue states. ALEC has been fairly successful in getting many states to adopt a variety of schemes designed to move public money into private pockets. While a universal voucher is their goal, this objective remains unpopular in many states. Some states that have adopted many of ALEC’s horrible ideas are changing their course when they see the harmful effects of disinvestment in the common good in their schools and communities.
“Christian libertarian legislation..” Is this not a contradiction?
There seem to be two types of Christians:
One: Christians, like the Pastors for Children, that study what Jesus Christ actually taught without being selective and follow his example.
Two: Faux Christians that cherry-pick the Old and New Testaments to find passages that support their hate (for want of a better word). Sometimes, they have to go way out on a limb in their translation of passages to get an interpretation that supports their twisted thinking. Once these faux Christians are armed with a flawed and dangerous translation of a passage or two from the Bible, they go out like the KKK in their hoods to kill people or burn crosses in front of houses or even places of worship or like other white supremacists, they go on a killing spree shooting theaters full of people watching a film or shooting up a music festival or bullying people and even raming counter-protestors with their trucks crushing and killing some.
And Donald Trump’s rallies and Tweets motivates them. When Trump said, “I am the chosen one,” he handed the haters and racists more ammunition that will support their goals to destroy everything that is worth keeping.
Does anyone notice that the 100% privatization-thru-charterization end-game goals as well as the underhanded methods to achieve those goals of alt-right ALEC …
…. is virtually identical to…
…. the 100% privatization-thru-charterization end-game goals as well as the underhanded methods to achieve those goals of of CCSA and faux-progressives such as LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin and “proud Democrat” and LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner (not to mention the goals methods of Devos and Trump)?
ALEC should be labeled a domestic terrorist organization and every member arrested for treason and any other crimes they have committed while subverting our Constitutional Republic.
The NRA is definitely a domestic terrorist organization.
so is the GOP led by Moscow Mitch
A day ago, I heard on the radio that Texas was eliminating any restrictions on guns. Now it’s okay to bring guns to church.
The idiots in state government believe that “a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun.”
Today, a bad guy with a gun killed 5 or 7 people at random. Then a good guy with a gun killed him.
Why not take the damn guns away from everyone but cops?
In the military everyone has weapons and in a war zone firefight, we sometimes kill our own men, by accident and sometimes not by accident. It’s called “friendly fire” and is considered collateral damage. Or in simpler terms, “Shit happens. Get used to it.”
When everyone is armed and ready to fight, that means the entire state of Texas becomes a battlefield, a free-fire zone. It’s easy to imagine a six-year-old setting off some firecrackers and getting shot a dozen times before anyone took the time to figure out what happened.
This is why I now think the GOP under Moscow Mitch is a domestic terrorist organization.
“Why not take the damn guns away from everyone but cops?”
There are more guns in the USA than people. Do you really think it is possible or feasible, to confiscate all of the guns in private hands in the USA?
How could this be accomplished?
How about buying back every assault weapon (such as the AR-15) and after a certain time period, say Six months, making it a criminal offense to own one?
The Onion recently ran a headline that neatly encapsulates this issue:
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
There are, indeed, more guns in the US than there are people, but should our response be that nothing can be done? If that is going to be our response, then we shall continue to be the only country where mass shootings have become a way of life.
Clearly, we not only need to outlaw private ownership of semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, but we also need a mandatory buy-back program for these.
“How about buying back every assault weapon (such as the AR-15) and after a certain time period, say Six months, making it a criminal offense to own one?”
Sounds like an interesting plan. How could this be accomplished, consistent with the 2d amendment? Would it be possible to purchase such weapons? What would be the cost? How would the government be able to force compliance? (Since there is no registry of who owns such weapons)
Then, if it would be possible to make owning such weapons a criminal offense, how would enforcement be possible?
I applaud efforts to reduce the number of crimes committed by people using firearms. But the devil is in the details.
The founders were wise, but they didn’t have crystal balls. They didn’t foresee contemporary weapons, which are a different kind of thing altogether. The Second Amendment was written by people who had privately stockpiled arms and used those to carry out a revolution. They saw it as a way to ensure the ability of free men to arm local militias that could stand against the emergence of a tyrannical government. Today, those extremist right-wing groups that think that they can buy a few guns and so protect themselves from the “gubermint” are just fools. The government has OVERWHELMING firepower, so the rationale for the amendment no longer holds. And yes, we need such a registry, and we need for people to be required to keep their guns in safes that are subject to surprise inspection.
I’m okay with every citizen having a musket. Single shot, takes time to load. But also background checks and no musket shows or Internet sales of muskets.
Oh my Lord! Falling off my chair laughing!!!
Id disagree about letting every citizen have a musket. Gunpowder is too dangerous in the hands of idiots like Trump and the GOP of Moscow Mitch. I propose we go back to David and Goliath and allow people to have slingshots.
LMAO. All in favor of the slingshot idea?
I must be really old to remember from my k-12 school days that kids shot spit wads out of straws at each other and sometimes rubber bands instead of bullets out of automatic firearms.
It took the Dayton shooter just 32 seconds to kill 9 people and wound 27. No individual should have the firepower to do that.
My contribution to the gun debate is this: Individuals should be required to keep their guns in a “smart safe” that can be opened in one of two ways: a) by calling the local police department and getting a code after describing the use to which the gun is to be put (practice at a range, hunting) or b) in an emergency, using a private code, which would automatically notify the police that an emergency was occurring at that location. Enforcement would occur through random inspection to see that the registered arms and ammo were locked up.