When ALEC was exposed we found out that giant corporate entities and their affliated charitable foundations won’t be seen with conservatives in public. Turns out, no corporation wants to be publicly associated with voter suppression and extraordinary legal protections for irresponsible and/or crazed gun owners, although promoting those things was (apparently) fine as long as no one knew about it.
This very public rejection by the business interests they love was humiliating for the conservative movement, so they lashed out and issued some threats:
“We’re putting the left on notice: you take out a conservative program operating in one area, we’ll kick it up a notch somewhere else,” Amy Ridenour, chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research, said in a statement. “You will not win. We outnumber you and we outthink you, and when you kick up a fuss you inspire us to victory.”
Corporate CEOs who “cower in the face of liberal boycott threats need to understand that the left never gives up,” Ridenour said. “If these corporations do not reverse course and immediately grow enough of a backbone to say no when the left tells them what to do, conservatives may as well consider them part of the organized left. It doesn’t matter if corporate executives have free-market sentiments hidden deep inside them if they continually surrender to the left’s Trotskyite strategy of making relentless demand after demand in public.”
You were on notice, Leftists.
Thought we’d check in and see how the Stand With ALEC campaign is coming:
Two months after it was first announced, the “I Stand With ALEC” website supporting the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has finally gone live — and it is underwhelming.
For the past year, ALEC has been under intense public scrutiny, starting in July 2011 when the Center for Media and Democracy launched ALECexposed.org. Since then, Common Cause has filed complaints with the IRS challenging ALEC’s charitable status, groups like People for the American Way and Progress Now! have helped produce reports about ALEC’s influence in individual states, Color of Change has been privately and publicly urging corporations to leave ALEC because of the ALEC agenda’s negative impact on the African American community, and labor unions and shareholder groups have put increasing pressure on publicly traded companies to drop their ALEC membership. CMD has continued its investigation of ALEC, its operations, and its members through reporting on PRWatch.org, and documented ALEC’s role in ratifying as a “model” bill the Stand Your Ground law cited initially to protect Trayvon Martin’s killer from arrest or prosecution.
In response to growing public pressure, nineteen corporations have distanced themselves from ALEC, including longtime ALEC Board members like Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and Johnson & Johnson. For many, the term “ALEC” has become synonymous with corporate corruption of the democratic process.
With ALEC and its agenda exposed, the group has tried replying with a public relations blitz — by hiring PR megafirm Edelman, purporting to disband the task force responsible for its controversial crime, gun, and voting legislation (which may be just a PR stunt), and trying to re-brand itself with easily rebuttable claims that “elected state legislators fully control[ling] ALEC’s model legislation process.”
In April (as CMD/PRWatch reported), ALEC’s Director of External Relations Caitlyn Korb spoke at a Heritage Foundation “Bloggers Briefing,” where she said ALEC was “getting absolutely killed in social media venues” and pleaded with right-wing bloggers for support. She also referenced the coalition-building and institutional support from Americans for Tax Reform, the group led by right-wing activist Grover Norquist. At the time, Korb announced that ALEC would be launching an “I Stand With ALEC” website in the coming days as part of “a very aggressive campaign to really spread the word about what we do.”
But for months, “IStandWithALEC.com” remained dormant. The site was registered to Matt Braynard of the Braynard Group, which also did the website for Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, and had developed sites for groups like the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. The #IStandWithALEC hashtag appeared on twitter but received little traffic, despite being promoted by right-wing commentator Michelle Malkin (who alsounsuccessfully promoted a boycott of companies that dropped their ALEC membership).
After much anticipation, IStandWithALEC.com recently went live. The months between the site being announced and actually published were apparently not spent on developing content.The two-color website consists of a single page in a simple Times New Roman font, and the content appears to have been written by an individual not particularly versed in English grammar.
Nearly every day we’re pelted with recycled press releases from billionaires threatening to crush us all with unlimited piles of campaign cash. I’ve come around to reading these daily missives as not so much factual statements projecting what the billionaires intend to spend on Republican campaigns, but instead as actual threats: “surrender, peons, or we’ll throw another billion at you!” They’re putting us on notice. So great to hear that this one time, anyway, they failed.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
You always keep us so well informed, kay. Thank you.
rikyrah
glad these lowlife have been exposed, and the heat needs to continue to be placed on them.
thanks for the information, kay.
The Republic of Stupdity
What did Bob Dylan once say?
biff diggerence
“You will not win. We outnumber you and we outthink you, and when you kick up a fuss you inspire us to victory.”
When we kick up a fuss, lady, it will be accompanied by functioning guillotines.
gbear
Not to mention blog spam from loser internet trolls…
MattF
This was real success, particularly insofar as it pulled back the curtain on ALEC’s political agenda. One shouldn’t get too worked up over B-listers making threats, though– it’s more important to keep an eye on what’s happening on the ground.
shortstop
Oh, they outnumber us. Except when they don’t.
Thanks, kay.
Violet
Heh. That’s funny. You’d think they could at least afford a competent PR person and/or proofreader given the billions they’re throwing around.
BGinCHI
I stand with Alec.
Baldwin.
Felinious Wench
Actually, there’s more of us than them. And we’re much better at this when we decide to wake up and fight.
Kay
@gbear:
They’re nearly identical, though, aren’t they, trolls and the reprints of the threats?
I keep waiting for a press release that says “ONE.TRILLION. DOLLARS!”
At some point I feel like, “oh, shut up, who cares, just get on with it already”
Do these numbers mean anything to ordinary people? What are we supposed to do in response? Cower, I guess.
Yutsano
@Violet: These people are champions of outsourcing. It wouldn’t surprise me if they just pawned that off to the lowest bidder on the international market.
Ash Can
I can just feel those puny corporate entities such as Wal-Mart and Coca Cola trembling in fear of Amy Ridenour.
Lojasmo
UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH = WINNING!
Where is that fucker, anyway?
jwb
The advantage of the 1% becoming a hereditary class is that they are getting stupider, and a stupid billionaire will be a lot less efficient with political spending than a smart one.
Linda Featheringill
I’ve been watching the anti-ALEC campaign with what must be described as shock and awe. The good guys are doing some great work and are actually making progress.
Bravo! Keep it up!
JWL
“..conservatives may as well consider them part of the organized left”.
What’s “the organized left”?
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Shorter Amy “the Bitch” Ridenour:
“When people learn of our conspiring ways, they don’t like us, so we’re going to call you names.”
Felinious Wench
@biff diggerence: Functioning guillotines and rusty pitchforks.
And exposure of all of their little back-end arrangements, focused on the cash flows.
Linda Featheringill
I went to the website [I stand with alec dot com] and recommend looking at it.
My schadenfreude is gurgling with delight. :-)
MattF
And on the ‘outthinking’ thing– the whole notion of a public relations-oriented defense of ALEC is weird and self-defeating. ALEC was supposed to be a behind-the-scenes formulator of state-level legislation. They wanted to avoid public attention. Maybe someone in some conference room had a synapse that fired, and, consequently, said to themselves “Should we be spending a lot of money on a failed strategy?”
HelpThe99ers
You can almost hear that spokesperson shake their fist at the clouds and tell the world that we’ll rue the day…
Has anyone clued her in to the fact that the free market principle (choosing where to spend one’s money) applies regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum?
Violet
@Yutsano:
They’re also champions of nepotism. Maybe they just hired one of their own twelve-year-olds to make it.
gene108
As much as I want to get excited about this sort of stuff, as long as 80% of Wyoming, Idaho, Nebraska, etc. vote for Republicans, it doesn’t matter what most Americans think.
Most Americans are concentrated on the coasts and our Federal system of government was built to give disproportionate power to small states.
ALEC or other right-wing groups don’t have to do anything but maintain dominance in 5 states and have another 5-10 be up for grabs, so Republicans get elected to the Senate and they can effectively block anything on the Federal level.
I don’t know how stuff will play out on the state level, but in many Southern states the Democratic Party breathed its last gasps in the 1990’s and now states like Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama are Republican strongholds.
Virginia Democrats are holding on.
North Carolina Democrats are going to get obliterated for the foreseeable future. They had a pretty solid level of control at the state level, but a string of corruption charges over the last few years has tarnished the state Democratic Party and I don’t see anyone at the state level having the ability to convince the voters the Democratic good old boys network has been swept clean and things will be different this time.
So chalk me up to thinking this is just a Pyrrhic victory.
PurpleGirl
@Linda Featheringill: Did you see all the way down at the bottom they have American for Tax Reform… they couldn’t even check the title of one of their progenitor groups.
BGinCHI
@JWL: I think they think it’s NPR.
RaflW
Ah, grammar.
I love that at the bottom of the “I stand” site, it says:
Yep, pretty much, one American. Grover Norqiust. He’s the only person willing to stand with ALEC.
Peter
My favorite part of the stand with ALEC website is that they’re still trying to ring the Van Jones bell.
gene108
@JWL:
The Marxist-Lenninist (now allied with Muslim-Kenyan-Fascists) disciples of Saul Alinsky, who have working for generations to destroy capitalism in America and give all the money hard working whites have made to lazy minorities.
EDIT: They almost got away with it, except Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980 and saved America.
Steve in DC
@gene108:
It’s not just a question of turning them Democratic it’s a question of what kind of Democrats you get from them. Virginia is turning blue yes, but only Northern Virginia. Now a fair amount of that is demographic change (tons of Latinos and Asians) but it’s also white college educated liberals. They are on board for the social issues (want their gay friends to get married and their daughters to get an abortion)but they are upper income. Their income comes via defense spending and any Democrat will have to support it. They are closer to the economic 1% than the rest of the nation with the two richest counties here, in other words they are fiscally conservative as hell and while they care about “equal pay” when it comes to women CEOs, they sure as fuck don’t want people making more money down the food chain.
Keep in mind that for a lot of upper income areas turning red states blue, Democrat = socially liberal fiscally conservative “let’s just let the gays get married and kill social security” type nonsense. You may get a Democrat out of the state who won’t try to repeal Roe V Wade, but he’ll chomp at the bit to grand bargain away as much of the New Deal as possible. See our current senator Warner, he’s as probusiness as they get.
Spaghetti Lee
That Ridenour lady’s quite the whiner. “You weren’t supposed to pay attention to us!! No Faaaaaaaair!!!”
Linnaeus
Yes, political participation in a democracy is “Trotskyite”. Got it.
RaflW
@MattF:
I do worry that we’re congratulating ourselves while the Kochs have likely convened another gathering at some gated retreat, planning the next, more fully behind the scenes group to f*up our legislative process.
And that our corporate overlords will make full use of the (c )4 loopholes to funnel cash that they’ll bury deep in MBA speak in their annual 10-Ks.
I really dislike Gramps McCain, but maybe Sheldon Adelson buying the presidency with Macau-generated dollars will wake up just enough conservatives (actual, not the horde of GOPers who’ve shitted on that once-decent word) to make uneasy alliances with progressives to work to overturn Citizens United in Graft.
Spaghetti Lee
Our chief weapon is corporate spending, and propaganda…our two chief weapons are corporate spending and propaganda, and a fanatical devotion to Charles Koch…our three chief weapons are…
handsmile
Nice to see the epithet “Trotskyite” now being tossed about by the radical right (Kay’s first block quote above.)
It’s so much more ideologically specific than Marxist or Socialist (or gene108’s “Muslim-Kenyan-Fascist”), though evidently as little understood or correctly applied by them. What’s next: Hoxhaist? Juchist?
Why not use the tried and true “Commie?” That still has pizzazz for the crowd that ALEC appeals to.
Roger Moore
@JWL:
It’s like the bogeyman to right wingers, but less believable to the rest of us.
Mino
@Violet: Did they use Romney’s folks?
Mnemosyne
@Steve in DC:
Yes, it’s so weird that those new Asian and Latino voters would care about “social issues” like civil rights and equal treatment. Why won’t they listen to you when you tell them that all we have to do is implement the Republican plan of social conservatism and then they will magically benefit from the economic empowerment of white working-class men?
Kay
@handsmile:
That’s why I love it. It’s so unhinged and insular and steeped in decades of conservative lore.
I had a younger person here ask me the other day if Nixon was a Republican or a Democrat. Most people don’t have this huge vat of accumulated grievances and vitriol to draw on. They’re just sort of considering things in isolation.
It’s like when they did the billboard that said “where’s the birth certificate?” early on in Obama’s term and drivers didn’t know what it meant. I imagine people thought, “where IS my birth certificate?”
Mino
@RaflW: Exactly. It’s not the idiots you see.
clone12
Obama’s 2012 Stimulus Plan:
a) Do nothing
b) have deranged billionaries throw billions of dollars of money hiring consultants, interns, venders, organizers, and staff, who in turn buy things from the economy like clothes, food, office supplies, etc.
c) cosumption and hiring improves
d) Obama gets reelected as Amerians become optimistic abount the economy.
dr. bloor
So I guess “Trotskyite” is the free marketeers version of Hitler?
Walmart and Coca-Cola, nothing but shadow Trotskyite organizations. What’s this world coming to?
Violet
@Kay:
This person probably didn’t actually know, but Nixon would be a Democrat these days. A soshulist, leftist Democrat.
handsmile
@Kay: (#39)
catclub
@Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937: Actually, after hearing Mitch McConnell say that more anonymous money is just what we need in politics, their solution is to make sure no one knows what companies or billionaires are giving to these super-Pacs, or ALEC.
More Chinese money in US politics, more Saudi money in US politics. Ask Sheldon Adelson how much money the thinks Saudi ‘businessmen’ should be allowed to anonymously give for political races in the US.
burnspbesq
Ridenour’s bio at Wikipedia is an eye-opener.
It starts with a photo of her testifying before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee re her involvement in the Abramoff scams.
Imagine my surprise.
cckids
@Kay:
I have to laugh because that happened to me in 2009. Had a chance to go to Canada with my sister (alas, it fell thru), and went looking for my BC to get a passport. Could. not. find. it. I know I had it when I got married (1985). . . hmmm. . . I found all of my kids’, and my spouse’s, but mine is a mystery. So I contacted the state where I was born, etc, etc. It turns out it is a HUGE pain in the ass, plus was going to cost $50 & take 6 weeks at least. And, since the trip didn’t happen, I skipped it. So I have MUCH sympathy for the people getting thrown off the voter’s rolls, trying to prove they are who they say they are. If I lost my driver’s license, I’d be in trouble.
NancyDarling
Their page also perpetuates the meme that Van Jones is a “self-proclaimed communist”. I have never heard him proclaim that, but maybe I missed it.
Chris T.
It helps when you realize that, despite being billionaires (or perhaps because of it), these guys don’t even know how to wipe their own butts.
nitpicker
Edelman is the world’s most ethically challenged PR firm–which is saying a lot–so it’s a match made in Heaven.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Chris T.:
They have underlings to do that for them.
JOB CREATION… for VICTORY!
MattF
@cckids: I recently had the same Passport/Birth Certificate problem, but had the good fortune to have been born in New York City. Where you are allowed to apply on-line for a birth certificate, and the desired document arrived in the mail about a week later. I was rather amazed by this, and have to give credit where it’s due.
Added: My identity was verified through NYC’s access to various documents, e.g., I was asked who was the previous owner of the condo I own (in Maryland!).
Kay
@cckids:
I’ve turned into a horrible, impatient, cranky person regarding birth certificates. I need them all the time in my work, so I say “I need the birth certificate with a raised seal” to parents and now, because of idiot birthers, people freak out if they can’t find THE ORIGINAL. They insist “a copy” won’t do, that there’s something magical about the first original. I end up just barking at them: “it doesn’t matter, AT ALL, if you have THAT piece of paper, just go get a new one”.
I swear to God. Half the country are convinced their BIRTH will eternally be called into question if they lose that original piece of paper.
I’m unbearable if they ask about “the long form”. It just sets me off.
This never used to happen. Birth certificates used to be ordinary state records.
slippy
@Linda Featheringill: I went to the site and enjoyed how lame it was. I tried to use their email to send a letter, but unlike most left-ward petition sites, they do not allow you to modify your message. Apparently, Der Volk must speak in a united voice in their support of Industry.
And, is this right-wing harridan issuing a THREAT? I don’t think I’ve had enough threats hurled my way from the assholes on the right. I mean, a few weeks ago one of them promised to put my kid in a concentration camp. Then one of them told me that me, and all my kids, are not welcome in God’s America anymore. Now this bitch.
NancyDarling
Should say “she pounded her ample chest and bellowed thusly:”
Bubblegum Tate
I can’t believe Michelle Malkin failed to get a massive, widespread boycott going. What a shocking development.
Anoniminous
NancyDarling:
FIFY
NancyDarling
@Kay: When I got my passport several years ago, they would not accept my original 1943 state issued birth certificate because it did not have a raised seal. I also had the hospital certificate of live birth—baby footprints and all. The woman who was helping me with the forms was not aware of this. This caused quite a delay. I can’t remember what agency she was with—maybe the post office..
My passport was issued on a Friday and I left for England on Monday. I went to the Federal Building in L.A. to get it. The clerk called #82, I was #81. They said we’ll just take care of this man first since we already called his number. When I got to the window, I was informed that they had just shut down the printer that makes the passport and I should come back Monday because they couldn’t turn it back on. I am not one to make public scenes (at least when sober), but I was prepared to throw myself on the floor and thrash about and throw a screaming meemy fit. Needless to say, before it went that far, they discovered they could turn it back on after all.
Seth Owen
@cckids: You better find it. You might need it to vote pretty soon.
KS in MA
“You will not win. We outnumber you and we outthink you, and when you kick up a fuss you inspire us to victory.”
Sheesh! She sounds like she’s pretending to be a villain in a really bad James Bond movie.
Ben Cisco
Wait, whut?
First she says
Then, in THE VERY NEXT SENTENCE, follows up with:
Somebody’s logic is…flawed.
Patricia Kayden
“surrender, peons, or we’ll throw another billion at you!”
Raise their taxes! Then maybe they won’t have so much $$$ to throw around.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@shortstop:
She’s clearly talking about their outnumbering the left monetarily, which you do have to admit, they do.
Selling your soul pays well on the right.
bjacques
@slippy: Maybe you can’t alter the message, but I wonder how closely they vet names and email addresses, given the general stink of failure emanating from that website.
The canned message won’t sound very credible coming from the likes of Seymour Butts, Johnny Wadd, Gen. Jack D. Ripper, or Rufus T. Firefly, Esq. Just sayin’.
@BiginCHI #9:
You’ve Baldwined the thread: