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"Poison Papers" Snapshot: Transcript Illustrates EPA Collusion with Chemical Industry
The world of independent chemical testing has a shiny veneer. The public is reassured that chemicals they're exposed to on a daily basis are certified by technicians in spotless white lab coats who carefully conduct scientific studies, including on animals in neat rows of cages.
Jul 27, 2017
The world of independent chemical testing has a shiny veneer. The public is reassured that chemicals they're exposed to on a daily basis are certified by technicians in spotless white lab coats who carefully conduct scientific studies, including on animals in neat rows of cages.
But a federal grand jury investigation that ended with convictions in the early 1980s discovered that Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories (IBT), the largest such lab in the United States, conducted trials with mice that regularly drowned in their feeding troughs. The dead animals would decompose so quickly that "their bodies oozed through wire cage bottoms and lay in purple puddles on the dropping trays." IBT even invented an acronym "TBD/TDA" for its raw safety data, later discovered to mean "too badly decomposed."
That was just one of a host of problems uncovered at IBT which conducted an estimated 35 to 40 percent of all the toxicology tests performed in the United States including for FDA regulated products and EPA regulated pesticides and chemicals. Scientists at the FDA were the first to spot the fraud and misconduct and blew the whistle on IBT in Senate hearings in the late 1970's. Soon after, the EPA was forced to deal with the issue and estimated behind the scenes that some 80 percent of the data provided to them for chemical registration from IBT was nonexistent, fraudulent, or invalid.
The IBT scandal presented the EPA with a potentially immense crisis. Knowing that almost every IBT test it had looked at was seriously flawed and presumptively fraudulent, it could order retests and withdraw its approval from every IBT-tested chemical. This course of action would have been fully warranted, scientifically. But it would have had drastic effects on the chemical industry, on public confidence, and on the newly-formed EPA itself.
What the EPA did instead is revealed in a transcript of a meeting that took place at the Howard Johnson Inn in Arlington, Virginia on October 3rd, 1978. This secret meeting was between senior figures at EPA, Canada's Health Protection Branch, and executives of the chemical industry, and was intended to solve the IBT "problem."
This transcript is part of more than 20,000 documents, weighing over three tons, just released by the Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), on the "Poison Papers." website. Most of the Poison Papers were collected by author and activist Carol Van Strum, who used documents obtained through public interest lawsuits and open records requests to investigate chemical pollution, and digitized by journalist Peter von Stackelberg. Van Strum's remarkable story was detailed this week in the Intercept.
A Conversation About Collusion
The Poison Papers represent a vast trove of rediscovered chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back to the 1920s. Collectively they shed light on what was known about chemical toxicity, when, and by whom, in the often-incriminating words of the participants themselves.
The Howard Johnson's transcript is a prime example of the materials in the trove. It allows us to "listen in" on a conversation that took place decades ago, but still has implication for us today.
The transcript "exemplifies as well as any other single document among the Papers the history of everyday regulatory failures and agency complicity that is the unknown story of the EPA and its enduring collusion with the chemical industry, and whose result is a systemic failure to protect the American public from chemical hazards," says Dr. Jonathan Latham, Director of the Bioscience Resource Project.
"Not One" IBT Study Free of Errors
The Howard Johnson's meeting was called to discuss the IBT scandal and plan a way forward. No consumer groups, environmental groups or members of the public were present that day in Arlington under HoJo's cheerful orange roof when the topic of how to deal with the dead animals, the fraudulent, and the corrupt data was discussed.
Near the outset of the meeting, the EPA's Fred Arnold, Acting Branch Chief of Regulatory Analysis & Lab Audits, assured the chemical company representatives present that no chemicals would be removed from the market, even though the studies supposedly showing their safety had been proven fraudulent:
"We determined that [i]t was neither in EPA's interest or the public interest or the registrants' interest [to replace all IBT data] because a large number of studies, which were performed at IBT, were performed satisfactorily," Arnold said (p. 6).
Yet Arnold's contention that some of the studies were "satisfactory" was contradicted multiple times in the same meeting. It was later stated, for example, that not one IBT study was free of errors (p. 16). Dr. Arthur Pallotta, Consultant to the Special Pesticide Review Division in the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs, stated that "there were few [IBT] studies that did not have discrepancies, errors and omissions" (p. 27). Elsewhere in the transcript, EPA accepted that over 80 percent of the test results from IBT were invalid (p. 123).
But Arnold's assertion that it wasn't in anyone's interest to demand new studies had striking ramifications. It was the grounds for not removing any chemicals from the market, for reassuring the public, and for kicking the IBT mess down the road. By 1983, EPA had determined that over 90 percent of IBT's studies submitted to them had serious, invalidating problems.
A "Salvage Operation": Ignoring Scientific Controls
Early in the meeting, EPA made a list of IBT errors that it planned to ignore to make the task of "validating" IBT's studies manageable.
It planned to ignore whenever animals were missing from (or added to) studies. No statistic existed then - nor does it now - to compensate for such measurement irregularities, but this difficulty was glossed over by the EPA.
Just as bad, many IBT studies appeared to be shorter in time than protocols called for. As David Clegg of Canada's Health Protection Branch explained to the meeting:
"Now, we have come across the 90-day study where the study started on, let's say, the 1st of June. The invoice for shipment of the test material from the firm was the 9th of June, and the diet preparation sheets are for the 12th of June.
"In other words, by the time the diet was prepared, according to the raw data, the study has been underway for 12 days for a 90-day study.
"This does not necessarily invalidate the study, of course. You can still get some information from it, but the whole base line, which you are working from, has to be altered to deal with an 88-day [sic] study or whatever length it is and conclusions have to be drawn on this sort of basis" (pp. 34-35).
EPA also noted that IBT had major problems with its controls. It had run a system known as "common controls." These controls were often in different rooms or carried out at different times, presumably with rats from different batches. EPA proposed cobbling such experiments together and thus making use of these controls. Clegg's tone was apologetic:
"I can't say that I am very happy about this on scientific grounds, but we are trying to run this as a salvage operation and, if we can come up with something which gives us a reasonable base line for controls which may be applicable to a number of studies, then, when controls are not available, we'll compare them against those controls," he said (p. 41).
EPA Adopts Unsigned Studies
EPA's Arnold also admitted at the meeting what appeared to be EPA's own historical fraud. In revisiting original data sent to them by IBT, manufacturers might find that, in the past, EPA had itself examined the tissue samples and determined there to be "no significant finding" when in fact "the truth of the matter is the organ was never examined" (Arnold, p. 102).
By the time the FDA and EPA had taken a strong interest in the testing lab, IBT had begun a "policy not to sign" its own reports, according to the transcript, indicating that staff were unwilling to stand behind the findings.
As Fred Arnold told the attendees, "A number of scientists, who may have been involved in the early states of a test, are no longer there and nobody can state, categorically, that everything reflected in the report, in fact, is borne out by the raw data" (pp. 63-64).
Arnold admitted that EPA had in the past sometimes accepted unsigned studies. So he stated that its remedy to the new signature problem would be to adopt such unsigned studies in order not "to create a double standard now" (p. 64), effectively adopting IBT's unprecedented practices as its own.
It was later uncovered in court proceedings that IBT also forged signatures.
The Howard Johnson Take-Home
Three IBT officials went to prison, closing a chapter on a massive scientific fraud, but the book was never closed.
"As the Howard Johnson transcript reveals, a majority of the IBT studies were never intended to be redone, and still underlie the U.S. chemical regulatory system," said Latham.
Author Carol Van Strum commented on the significance of the transcript for CMD:
"The 1978 Howard Johnson transcript records a crucial meeting of EPA, Canadian, and pesticide industry officials to discuss EPA's response to massive fraud in the safety tests for pesticide registrations. At the meeting, Fred T. Arnold, chief of EPA Regulatory Analysis and Lab Audits, assured industry that EPA's discovery of fraudulent, invalid, or nonexistent safety tests would 'not interfere with the ability to control pests and market pesticides.' This document was the linchpin of my book, A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights, documenting the government's acceptance of phony industry studies while dismissing reports of human illness, death, involuntary abortions, birth defects, and other effects of pesticide exposure."
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Hey "Polluting Pruitt" - What Are you Trying to Hide?
As the world reacts to President Trump's chaotic turkey-shoot politics it is easy to get sucked into the headlines, but miss the real news.
Later today, Scott "Polluting Pruitt" could be confirmed as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, after a vote in the Senate. The fact that Pruitt, a man who has sued the EPA fourteen times, could be even considered for the job is a scandal. But it gets worse.
Pruitt's confirmation is hardly making international news. And that is because Trump is causing so much outrage elsewhere.
Feb 17, 2017
As the world reacts to President Trump's chaotic turkey-shoot politics it is easy to get sucked into the headlines, but miss the real news.
Later today, Scott "Polluting Pruitt" could be confirmed as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, after a vote in the Senate. The fact that Pruitt, a man who has sued the EPA fourteen times, could be even considered for the job is a scandal. But it gets worse.
Pruitt's confirmation is hardly making international news. And that is because Trump is causing so much outrage elsewhere.
As Robinson Meyer brilliantly writes in The Atlantic: "President Donald Trump has a way with scandal. His biggest controversies are so huge, so ludicrously bamboozling, that they suck up much of the attention in the country. The smaller disputes facing his staff can therefore slip by unnoticed. In his three-week-old administration, perhaps no man has benefited from this more than Scott Pruitt, Trump's nominee to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the current attorney general of Oklahoma."
As I have pointed out before, Pruitt "has sued the Agency at least fourteen times, arguing it cannot regulate toxic mercury pollution, as well as soot, carbon emissions from power plants, clean air standards for the oil and gas industry and the quality of America's waterways, amongst others. Research by EDF has revealed that "in every suit except one, at least one of Pruitt's co-litigators contributed to Pruitt's campaign or a political action committee affiliated with Pruitt - directly, or via an employee or member."
A month ago, I wrote "this is dirty cronyism". Take just one case of this dirty cronyism that many people would feel verges on being corrupt. As the New York Times reported in 2014:
"The letter to the Environmental Protection Agency from Attorney General Scott Pruitt of Oklahoma carried a blunt accusation: Federal regulators were grossly overestimating the amount of air pollution caused by energy companies drilling new natural gas wells in his state. But Mr. Pruitt left out one critical point. The three-page letter was written by lawyers for Devon Energy, one of Oklahoma's biggest oil and gas companies, and was delivered to him by Devon's chief of lobbying."
Devon Energy, which called the letter "outstanding", went on to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican Attorneys General Association. Scott Pruitt was its then chairman.
But the scandal gets worse.
Pruitt has deep close ties to the fossil fuel industry and he is trying to keep those ties - and his communication with the industry - hidden.
Over the last 2 years, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which runs PR Watch, has submitted nine public record requests to Pruitt's Oklahoma Attorney General's office for correspondence between Pruitt and numerous oil companies. The only problem is that Pruitt's office has been withholding them. Earlier this month, it released just 411 out of the thousands it said existed.
So CMD sued to gain access to the emails Pruitt wants to keep secret. Two days ago, a group of Senators weighed in to the legal action too. The Senators, all members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, had requested the information from Pruitt during his confirmation process.
Rather than divulge it in the interests of transparency, Pruitt had referred the Senators to his own office's process for requesting documents under Oklahoma's Open Records Act, a process he had not been complying with.
The letter says: "we write to the Court today because we need to understand whether in his current capacity Mr. Pruitt engaged with the industries that he will be responsible for regulating if he is confirmed as Administrator in ways that would compromise his ability to carry out his duties with".
And in a major victory, yesterday an Oklahoma County Court judge found Pruitt in violation of the state's Open Records Act. The Judge, Aletia Haynes Timmons, criticised the Attorney General's office for its "abject failure" to abide by the Oklahoma Open Records Act.
Now Pruitt's office has until next Tuesday to turn over more than 2,500 emails it has withheld, and a further 10 days to turn over an undetermined number of additional documents.
"Scott Pruitt broke the law and went to great lengths to avoid the questions many Americans have about his true motivations," argues Nick Surgey, CMD's director of research. "Despite Pruitt's efforts to repeatedly obfuscate and withhold public documents, we're all wiser to his ways and the interests he really serves."
By the time these emails are released, Pruitt could well be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. There are therefore calls to hold off the vote, until at least Senators have seen these emails.
"A rushed Senate vote to confirm Pruitt as EPA Administrator right now would be a travesty," argues Elizabeth Thompson, from the Environmental Defense Fund. "The documents in question are related to Pruitt's fitness to serve as head of EPA. Senators should exercise due diligence when confirming nominees, and they can't do that when they've been denied access to relevant information."
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Revealed: The Trump Administration's Energy Plan
Dec 06, 2016
The future Donald Trump administration's energy agenda is revealed in a memo prepared by Trump's energy transition head Thomas Pyle, titled "What to Expect from the Trump Administration." The document, obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), was sent by Pyle on November 15th, just days before the Trump campaign announced Pyle's appointment as head of his Department of Energy transition team.
Pyle is the President of both the American Energy Alliance and the Institute for Energy Research. Both organizations have received cash from numerous fossil fuel funders including ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy and Koch Industries. From 2001 to 2005, Pyle was Director of Federal Affairs for Koch Industries.
The memo outlines fourteen policies to be expected from President-elect Trump, which collectively amounts to a fossil fuel industry wish list and which would be devastating for attempts to slow climate change.
The agenda includes withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Climate agreement, eliminating the Clean Power Plan, increasing the leasing of federal lands for exploitation of coal, oil and gas, expediting the approval of pipeline projects including the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline and rolling back federal fuel economy standards.
Read the memo here.
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Groups Slam Republican AGs Big Oil Collusion to Protect ExxonMobil
'This is a smoking gun when it comes to fossil fuel industry corruption'
Sep 29, 2016
Environmental and advocacy groups on Thursday responded to recent reports that Republican attorneys general colluded with fossil fuel lobbyists to shield ExxonMobil from fraud investigations, saying the revelations were a clear case of industry corruption.
"Republican attorneys general are working for Exxon," said R.L. Miller, co-founder of Climate Hawks Vote. "Silly me, I thought they were supposed to be working for the people."
"RAGA is facilitating secret meetings between the profit-motivated fossil fuel industry and attorneys general...and then raising money from oil and gas companies to keep those same Republican attorneys general in office."
--Nick Surgey,
Center for Media and Democracy
The corporate accountability group PR Watch, part of the Center for Media and Democracy, on Tuesday published undisclosed notes from secret meetings held in July between the 13 Republican AGs and representatives from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), discussing the ongoing investigation into ExxonMobil's decades-long campaign to suppress climate science. The meetings took place at the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) annual summit in Colorado.
"The recently-exposed collusion between Republican attorneys general and fossil fuel lobbyists exemplifies exactly why we need to kick big polluters out of climate policymaking," said Katherine Sawyer, senior international organizer at Corporate Accountability International. "These attorneys general have a duty to serve the people, not the interests of fossil fuel corporations. It is unconscionable that financial contributions and closed-door meetings may have persuaded these attorneys general to turn a blind eye to Exxon's decades of climate deception."
In an audio recording of one of the meetings, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange introduces leading climate skeptic--and head of Donald Trump's energy team--Myron Ebell, who tells the audience, "So right now the climate inquisition is in retreat," naming a number of the Democratic attorneys general investigating the oil and gas giant with updates on their progress.
"It is unconscionable that financial contributions and closed-door meetings may have persuaded these attorneys general to turn a blind eye to Exxon's decades of climate deception."
--Katherine Sawyer,
Corporate Accountability International
"Claude Walker, the Virgin Islands AG has been pushed back. Maura Healey has been somewhat pushed back. Kamala Harris is running for governor and she has gone quiet at least for the moment. But Eric Schneiderman in New York has the Martin Act, which is much more powerful," Ebell says, referring to the New York law that gives a wide berth of power and discretion to AGs investigating financial fraud.
Claiming Schneiderman had been "rattled" by a letter sent in June from Republican AGs stating that the Exxon investigation infringed on the corporation's First Amendment rights, Ebell added, "So we need to keep pushing that. We need to keep saying this is a matter of constitutional rights."
As the green groups noted in their response on Thursday, RAGA has also received more than $2.25 million in donations from the fossil fuel industry and assorted allies since 2015, including $100,000 from Exxon alone.
"The great irony here is that we have heard false cries from the Republican attorneys general about a conspiracy between environmental groups and the Democratic attorneys generals," said Nick Surgey, research director of the Center for Media and Democracy. "But these documents reveal a serious conflict of interest: RAGA is facilitating secret meetings between the profit-motivated fossil fuel industry and attorneys general to engineer pushback on investigations of ExxonMobil--and then raising money from oil and gas companies to keep those same Republican attorneys general in office."
Later in the recording, Strange closes out the meeting by telling the audience of lobbyists, "we appreciate your presence here and your participation in this debate. We are winning now. I think [that] our fellow AGs that are on the other side here have pulled back to say this is going to be a long, standing effort that we need to be engaged in and be diligent about it."
Jamie Henn, spokesperson for 350.org Action, said the recordings and other reports are "a smoking gun when it comes to fossil fuel industry corruption. These recordings are more evidence that Big Oil is bankrolling Republican attorneys general's attacks on climate legislation and the Exxon Knew investigation. It's just like Big Tobacco, but this time the entire planet is at stake."
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Why I Chose to Get Arrested in Defense of Our Democracy
Apr 19, 2016
On Monday, I joined hundreds of fellow citizens who were arrested as part of a non-violent act of civil disobedience on the steps of our U.S. Capitol.
I stood with people of all ages and all walks of life as part of a growing movement to reclaim an America that guarantees the unimpeded right to vote for all and a government that works for the people instead of the powerful plutocrats.
I was there as someone who has worked for Clean Elections and ethical government for 20 years, and on behalf of my colleagues at the Center for Media and Democracy. CMD serves as a watchdog against corporate influence on democracy and public policy, and it sounded the alarm on the dangerous Citizens United decision of the U.S. Supreme Court six years ago.
CMD was one of a handful of public interest groups that helped launch the movement for a constitutional amendment to repair the severe damage done to our democracy by an activist Court bent on rewriting the First Amendment in a way that allows billionaires and big corporations to drown out the voices and votes of ordinary people.
The last time I chose to take such a stand was in 1987, as 1,500 of us tried to block CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in protest of the agency's illegal arming of the Contras during the Reagan Administration.
That time, I made my act of civil disobedience in defense of democracy in Nicaragua.
This time I did it in defense of democracy at home.
For most of the past decade, the corporate right has waged an unrelenting war on American democracy at every level, from the Supreme Court and Congress to State Houses and City Halls across the country.
We see the results every day:
- Premeditated gridlock in Congress
- Anti-constitutional power grabs to retain right-wing, corporate control of the Supreme Court
- A political organization run by Koch Industries that rivals--and outspends--both major political parties
- Brazen gerrymandering and cynical manipulation of voting laws so that politicians get to choose their voters, and not the other way around
- Corporations calling the shots on legislation through front groups like ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council)
- Attacks on local control to ensure that lawmakers bankrolled by special interests maintain a monopoly on power
Those forces have been at play for a long time, but the gloves came off when the far right gained control of the Supreme Court after Justice Sandra Day O'Connor retired in 2006.
The dramatic deregulation of election spending under the current Court has set loose a flood of special interest money that makes the covert cash payments bagged for President Nixon in the days of Watergate seem quaint.
And the walls between wealth and democracy have been torn down, making the direct relationship between economic power and political power painfully clear
The good news is that the people see it for what it is and are pushing back.
Citizens have organized for countless local fights, won many battles, and are making important new alliances.
Whatever issue is near and dear to your heart, we have learned that the key to progress is taking back our democracy.
As I looked around me on the Capitol steps today, under a blazing hot sun, I saw the faces of people passionate about campaign reform, civil rights, workers' rights, climate change, and justice for immigrants who had come together to fight for the American dream of democracy and opportunity.
And I felt hope.
Now it's time to take the fight back home.
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Revealed: The Chamber of Commerce Strategy to Kill Empathy of Its Members
'Rather than listening to its members and crafting a policy agenda that reflects their priorities, Chamber lobbyists pick their policy positions behind closed doors and then figure out how to convince their members to fall in line.'
Apr 04, 2016
Did you know that a high percentage of powerful business executives represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or its more local affiliates actually support an increased minimum wage, paid sick days for employees, extended maternity and paternity leave, and other progressive policies that benefit workers and families?
If you didn't, there's a reason for that.
Newly leaked materials--including results from internal polling of members and a webinar explaining how the results should be spun publicly--reveal just how far the business lobby group goes in order to hide that fact that many of the people and businesses it claims to represent don't actually agree with the regressive policies the Chamber pushes on local, state, and national governments.
"It think it is outrageous how the public and the press have been misled that businesses oppose these policies, by chamber lobbyists trotting out some business leader aligned with their anti-worker agenda even though most people--including most of their business members--support these policies, like increasing the minimum wage and paid sick leave." --Lisa Graves, Center for Media and DemocracyObtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and released publicly on Monday, the results of the poll--conducted by LuntzGlobal, the prominent firm run by Republican pollster Frank Luntz--were accompanied by a revealing online presentation which explained to state Chamber of Commerce lobbyists how to "manipulate the public debate over those policies rather than implement the views of the business executives who were polled."
The poll, commissioned by Council of State Chambers (COSC), targeted 1,000 C-level executives (CEOs, CFOs, or COOs) who were members of their local chamber (46%), state chamber (28%), or the U.S. Chamber (16%). According to the results, there was lop-sided support for various pro-worker positions. Of those asked, 80% supported raising the state minimum wage, compared to only 8% who didn't. Meanwhile, paid sick time was supported by a margin of 73% to 16%. And asked about "more time off to take care of sick children or relatives," the executives supported it 83% to 5%.
However, as CMD notes, there is no force in America in recent years that has "spent more time and effort to keep wages low than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the state chambers that aggressively lobby against increasing the minimum wage."
During the webinar, Luntz himself explained to the participants the reasoning behind the results and how they could potentially be combated. "So what do these results all have in common?" he asks. "Well quite frankly they are all empathetic. If you ask about them in isolation, of course we want to give folks more benefits, or more leave, or more income..." But then, exposing the real purpose of the presentation, he adds, "So what we'll try and do is actually give you a few helpful hints on how to actually combat these in your states."
In other words, how to suppress the "empathy" of your members or distract them with other issues.
"With their internal polls showing that business owners and executives support raising the minimum wage by an overwhelming 80-to-8 percent, it's unconscionable that the U.S. Chamber and state chambers continue to fight the wage increases that America's workers and our economy need," said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project.
Here's a clip from the actual online presentation:
The Washington Post, which received an advanced look at the leaked documents, notes how the "materials shed light on how some business trade associations operate, and why they've continued to oppose minimum wage increases even as the rest of the public thaws towards them."
CMD executive director Lisa Graves says that this kind of behavior is exactly what people should expect from the Chamber of Commerce and its various affiliates. "They are pushing a national agenda that ignores the concerns of the overwhelming majority of Americans and of their own business members in the states," Graves told Common Dreams in an email. "The state business lobby has aggressively fought crucial workplace improvements that ordinary people and CEOs strongly support, and they are being taught by GOP pollsters how to spin words to try to overcome support for these popular policies."
"It think it is outrageous," she continued, "how the public and the press have been misled that businesses oppose these policies, by chamber lobbyists trotting out some business leader aligned with their anti-worker agenda even though most people--including most of their business members--support these policies, like increasing the minimum wage and paid sick leave."
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Flint Is a Casualty in the Right Wing's War on Local Democracy
Mar 30, 2016
How did an American city's water end up being poisoned with lead?
This month's hearing in Congress about the crisis in Flint, Michigan shed more heat than light on the decisions that poisoned the water more than 100,000 residents rely on to drink and bathe, including nearly 30,000 children and teens. Democrats focused their ire on Governor Rick Snyder, while Republicans predictably tried to deflect blame onto the Environmental Protection Agency as part of their long-standing campaign to eliminate the agency responsible for regulating polluters.
But two Members of Congress honed in on the real culprit in the debacle: Governor Snyder's "emergency manager" law that stripped Flint of any local democratic control and put its fate in the hands of unaccountable executives hand-picked by Snyder.
"Did that emergency management system fail under your leadership in this matter?" asked Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), demanding a yes or no response from Snyder.
"That would be a fair conclusion," Snyder eventually conceded.
"This is a failure of a philosophy of governance you advocated," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA). "A city in America... is on its knees because of your emergency manager's decision to save $4 million. And now it's going to cost a lot more to clean up."
Is this really happening in the world's leading republic?
Funding the War on Local Democracy
Governor Snyder's controversial emergency manager law is a cornerstone of the right wing's war on labor and local democracy in Michigan, which has been orchestrated by a network of "think tanks" and committees backed by the billionaire DeVos family, the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the Kochs, and other conservative politicos.
Thanks to record spending by outside groups in 2010 and $6 million of Snyder's own fortune, the Republican Party in Michigan joined 11 other states in capturing the governor's mansion from the Democrats and flipped the Michigan House, giving the party a lock on political power for the first time since 2002.
The Republican Governors Association Michigan 2010 PAC dominated the playing field to become the "largest political action committee in the history of Michigan politics," according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.
Through an elaborate shell game, 98 percent of the $8.4 million raised and spent by the RGA MI 2010 PAC came from outside Michigan, while Michigan donors gave the national Republican Governors Association (RGA) $8.6 million, including $5.4 million from the state Chamber of Commerce.
The RGA MI 2010 PAC then contributed $5.3 million to the state Republican Party, and sent off $3 million to back Rick Perry's bid for a third term as governor of Texas, while the national RGA spent $3.6 million on sham issue ads attacking Snyder's Democratic opponent. Still with me?
All in all, the RGA raised and redistributed $114 million to PACs in at least 15 states, helping to elect a slate of right-wing governors, including Wisconsin's Scott Walker, who moved quickly to attack public sector unions.
Right-wing billionaires and their corporations played a big role in raising all that money. Records on Open Secrets show that the DeVos family, Amway, and its parent company, Alticor, pumped $1.9 million into the RGA's 2010 political operation.
David Koch personally gave $1 million, while his brother William chipped in $100,000 and Koch Industries another $50,000. The Kochs have since become RGA's #1 source of cash, bankrolling the RGA to the tune of $5.3 million during the 2014 election cycle.
Paul Singer also ponied up $1.4 million. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson gave a million that year, and News America, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. that owns the pro-Republican outlet Fox News, sprung another $1.3 million.
DeVos Dynasty Targets Michigan
Although Snyder--a business executive and venture capitalist--campaigned as a moderate Republican who promised to run the state like a business and create jobs, the deep pockets driving the Republican surge had more ambitious ideas.
Their goals: break the unions, scrap public sector labor contracts, and privatize government services.
Dick DeVos, son of billionaire businessman and Amway co-founder Richard DeVos, took a first crack at this agenda when he spent $35 million of the family fortune to run for governor in 2006. He lost badly, but he didn't let up.
In 2009, DeVos helped his close ally, Ron Weiser, get elected as chair of the Michigan Republican Party, where he was able to coordinate the party's 2010 landslide victory. By 2014, political observers were calling the DeVos family Michigan's "most potent interest group," and their spending on in-state candidates and political committees had increased to $4.9 million.
After Snyder's election, DeVos-backed groups like the Mackinac Center for Public Policy were poised to help move his legislative agenda forward.
Launched in 1987, the Mackinac Center is one of the nation's largest state-based, right-wing pressure groups promoting "free market," pro-business policies. It is an active member of the State Policy Network (SPN) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), two important cogs in the Koch machine.
Mackinac has long been one of the key groups leading the Michigan charge for the big ticket items on DeVos' right-wing wish list, including breaking the back of organized labor.
Ronald Reagan may have once said, "[w]here free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost," but that's just crazy-liberal talk as far as the Mackinac Center is concerned.
As a Mackinac staffer told a state legislator in 2011: "Our goal is [to] outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan."
Mackinac's activities have been fueled by DeVos as well as money from the Koch network of billionaires. Between 2010 and 2012, the Mackinac Center received $1.5 million from the DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, preferred investment vehicles of the Koch donor network, and four DeVos foundations kicked in another $560,000 between 1998 and 2011.
However, those totals public do not reveal how much billionaire cash Mackinac has received through checks from personal trust accounts or from corporations, which are not publicly reported.
Mackinac at the Root of Sweeping Emergency Manager Powers
Once sworn in, Snyder wasted no time in making one of the most audacious power grabs in the country.
On March 16, 2011, while thousands protested outside, he signed Public Act 4 into law, giving him the ability to take near-total control over financially struggling municipalities through appointed "emergency managers."
Few could have been more pleased than the DeVos family and their confederates at the Mackinac Center.
The provision for emergency financial managers dates back to a 1988 Michigan law, but those managers wielded limited power.
Mackinac's Louis Schimmel called for loosening limits and expanding managers' powers as early as 2005, and the group reprinted his article in January 2011. They argued that: "The state's policy prescription for fiscally floundering cities should be to appoint[] far more powerful emergency financial managers than they have in the past."
Mackinac pressed for sweeping authority for emergency managers to assume the powers of elected city councils and mayors, break union contracts, and revise municipal charters, while getting legal immunity from any liability for the results of their actions.
Snyder's emergency manager law included all four of those changes, and the Mackinac bunch patted themselves on the back while singing the law's praises.
Concerned citizens and critics, however, denounced it as "financial martial law."
Other cities around the country have had emergency managers, including New York City in the 1970s, but their powers were limited to financial matters.
The Snyder-Mackinac approach to the law was dramatically, exponentially different. It gave unelected and unaccountable managers chosen by the governor near total control over all city decisions--including things like where a city gets its water.
Snyder's First Emergency "Tyrant"? A Mackinac Guy
Snyder chose the architect of the expanded emergency powers--Mackinac's Louis Schimmel--to be the first person he appointed as an emergency manager, installing him as the potentate for Pontiac, Schimmel's home town.
Within months, Schimmel had fired key city officials and privatized the entire public works department. The Pontiac City Council still held their weekly meetings, packed with angry citizens, but they had no authority to make any decisions.
When asked by a local radio station if the emergency manager law made him a dictator, Schimmel replied: "I guess I'm the tyrant in Pontiac then, if that's the way it is."
Schimmel didn't get any argument from state court judge Rae Lee Chabot, who reversed the manager's action to cut Pontiac's pension board in half, a decision that ignored the legal requirements of Michigan's Open Meetings Act.
"[I]t looks like a dictatorship," Chabot said.
State-Controlled Pontiac Outsources Water to Indicted Corporation
Shortly before Schimmel took control of Pontiac using the law he helped create, his predecessor as emergency manager of Pontiac, Michael Stampfler, flexed his muscles under Snyder's new law and outsourced the city's water treatment to United Water Services.
Watchdog Chris Savage broke the story on Eclectablog.
"This is big news," he wrote, because the giant for-profit water company had just been indicted by a federal grand jury in 2010 on 26 felony counts of conspiracy and Clean Water Act violations for its mishandling of water services in Gary, Indiana. (The company's workers have since been acquitted of criminal charges in the Gary case, but United Water paid $645,000 in civil fines under a consent agreement in 2014.)
Schimmel completed the outsourcing process in November 2011 by firing key public works employees and turning full control over to United Water.
Before long, consumer complaints over water quality, outages, and sewer backups started piling up. It took nearly three years before Oakland County, where Pontiac is situated, announced that it was taking over operations.
All the warning signs were there for Flint.
Savage summed up the problem well:
"Emergency Financial Managers are generally good at what they do. They are typically trained as accountants and business optimizers. They know how to trim and cut and lean out organizations to squeeze every last drop of profits out of them. Unfortunately for the residents of Michigan, things like parks, public safety and the protection of natural resources don't produce profits and generally are presented as 'costs'...When we begin to put a price tag on the very things that make our cities, society and state good, safe, livable and lovable, while putting CPA-like EFMs in charge, you can expect that these things will suffer in order to save money, even if it puts our citizens at risk."
Democracy? What Democracy?
Citizens and public employees in Michigan were not having it.
Following extensive protests, opponents sprang into action and quickly gathered more than 200,000 signatures to qualify a voter initiative, Proposal 1, for the November 2012 ballot to repeal Snyder's expanded emergency manager law.
Stand Up for Democracy, the ballot committee backing Proposal 1, received 91 percent of its funding from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Michigan Council 25, according to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.
Opposition to Proposal 1 was led by Bob LaBrant, Senior Counsel at the Sterling Corporation, a leading Republican PR firm, and the former director of political and legal campaigns at the Michigan Chamber of Commerce for 34 years. LaBrant's ballot committee, called Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility, focused its strategy on a court fight to bump Proposal 1 off the ballot. That effort ultimately failed, and the group spent little on campaigning against the measure.
On November 6, 2012, 53 percent of Michigan's voters cast ballots to repeal Snyder's emergency manager law. But that didn't stop Governor Snyder and his backers.
Barely one month later, Snyder pushed a slightly revised bill through the lame duck legislature and restored the sweeping powers of his emergency managers.
Only this time, he added an appropriation which, under Michigan law, prevents it from being subject to referendum. Check and mate.
Kevyn Orr, who later became emergency manager for Detroit, sent an email to the Detroit Free Press saying, "Michigan's EM law is a clear end-around the prior initiative that was rejected by the voters in November. ...[A]though the new law provides the thin veneer of a revision it is essentially a redo of the prior rejected law."
The new law did contain what critics call a "choose your poison" provision, allowing municipalities to choose between an emergency manager, bankruptcy, arbitration, or a consent agreement.
Not on the table for cash-strapped cities reeling from the collapse of the auto industry and the impact of free trade agreements: any state largesse like the 86 percent corporate income tax cut that Snyder handed Michigan businesses in 2011, worth an estimated $1.7 billion per year.
The resurrection of Snyder's emergency manager law wasn't even the most dramatic thing to happen in the 2012 lame duck session.
According to Mother Jones, DeVos and his close allies--who led a $23.2 million campaign to defeat another voter initiative, Proposal 2, aimed at enshrining collective bargaining in the state constitution--had devised a plan to ram through "right-to-work" legislation before anyone knew what hit them.
They pitched the plan to legislative leaders and a Snyder aide on November 20, and by early December unleashed an ad campaign using a new group, the Michigan Freedom Fund, closely tied to Dick DeVos.
Snyder surprised the public by calling the measure to a vote on December 6, and five days later the birthplace of modern industrial unions became a "right-to-work" state.
The following May, at the State Policy Network's annual meeting in Oklahoma City, Dick DeVos and the Mackinac Center were recognized for their leadership in the legislative fight to win passage of the "right-to-work" law in Michigan. As reported by PR Watch, Dick's wife Betsy DeVos personally presented SPN's highest award to Mackinac's president, Joseph Lehman.
Mackinac's blog noted that it had been pushing for "right-to-work" since 1990 and had posted more than 500 "articles, blog posts, special essays and news [clips] generated by Mackinac Center analysts" backing the legislation.
The victory didn't come cheap.
The big players of Michigan's right wing had spent millions to defeat Proposal 2, an attempt to protect union rights in the state.
That funding included $9.2 million from the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, $5.5 million from the Michigan Alliance for Business Growth, $2 million from the DeVos family, and $2 million from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.
The Michigan Freedom Fund spent another $1 million on the post-election ad campaign leading up to legislature's adoption of the "right-to-work" law.
The Mackinac Center had an annual budget of $4.4 million as of 2012. Aside from checks to groups that do not disclose their major donors, the DeVos family spent more than $44 million in publicly reported funding on the Republican Party, party committees, and candidates in Michigan between 1997 and 2013.
Expanded Emergency Management Comes to Flint
Plagued by the loss of 90 percent of its industrial workforce, disinvestment, and depopulation, Flint was facing a severe financial crisis by the time Governor Snyder took office.
Since then, Snyder has appointed four emergency managers to seize control of the city's assets and run Flint's local affairs.
Flint voters elected a new mayor on November 8, 2011, but a state review panel declared a "local government financial emergency" the same day, and Snyder had installed his first emergency manager, Michael Brown, by December 1.
The next day, Brown dismissed more than half a dozen key city administrators and Flint's elected officials had their pay and benefits removed.
In January 2012, angry Flint residents joined a protest near Governor Snyder's home. AFSCME filed suit and managed to get a restraining order on Brown, but Brown was back by April in time to unveil his budget, which included cuts in nearly every department and a tax hike.
Jack McHugh at Mackinac claimed in a March 2012 column that municipal budget problems were a "cancerous fiscal malpractice," and he argued that Snyder's emergency manager expansion provided the "rigorous 'chemotherapy'" needed "to sustain the necessary functions of tapped-out school districts and local governments."
In Flint's case, the cure turned out to be worse than the disease.
Frustrated with expensive water service from Detroit and frequent rate increases, Flint and surrounding Genesee County had joined nearby cities in 2010 to form the new Karegnondi Water Authority. The plan was to obtain water directly from Lake Huron once a new pipeline was complete. (That is now projected to be June 2016.)
The Flint City Council voted for the new water source in March 2013, albeit symbolically as it had no power, and the emergency manager and state treasurer approved a plan to switch water supplies a few weeks later.
That's when the trouble started.
"Flint Residents Can Taste History"
In April 2014, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) notified Flint that its contract would be up in a year and offered to negotiate a short-term contract while the city waited for the new pipeline.
However, Flint's second emergency manager, Ed Kurtz, hired a private engineering firm to develop a plan to switch to the polluted Flint River for the interim period instead, in order to save money.
Come March 2014, Darnell Earley, now Snyder's third emergency manager for Flint, wrote to DWSD that "there will be no need for Flint to continue purchasing water to serve its residents and businesses after April 17, 2014," despite DWSD's renewed offers. Why Earley couldn't work out an agreement with DWSD remains a mystery, as Detroit was also under the complete control of another emergency manager, Kevyn Orr.
Governor Snyder's Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) gave its blessing to the change on April 9. The changeover was expected to save Flint $5 million over two years.
On April 25, 2014, Flint officially made the fateful switch to the Flint River for its water in a ceremony attended by local and state officials. "This is indeed the best choice for the city of Flint going forward," Emergency Manager Earley said.
"It will take two days before Flint residents can taste history," reported the press, M-Live.com.
Flint's otherwise powerless mayor pressed the button to switch the water feed, and officials raised glasses of treated water in a toast.
Unfortunately, Flint residents tasted history pretty quickly.
Complaints started flooding in about the water's taste, smell, and color by June, and people said it was making them sick. Residents endured two "boil" advisories due to high coliform bacteria levels and faced unsafe levels of a carcinogenic chlorine byproduct before the University of Michigan-Flint was the first to find high lead levels in its water on January 9, 2015.
Flint's City Council voted to return to Detroit water in March 2015, but Emergency Manager Earley said no. In fact, a $7 million emergency loan from Governor Snyder's state government in April 2015 was conditioned on Flint not rejoining the DTWS.
Even as the findings of lead contamination piled up over the ensuing months, the state insisted there was no problem.
The Rachel Maddow Show and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now were the only two major national television news outlets to sound the alarm and persistently cover the disaster unfolding in Flint, while Snyder and others said there was no story, no crisis to tell--despite the pleas from Flint residents.
It took more than nine months after the state university found high lead in the water before Governor Snyder finally conceded, on September 30, 2015, that "mistakes were made."
The next day, Genesee County declared a public health emergency for Flint.
Emails since released by the governor's office show that "nearly every person in the governor's inner circle was aware of alarming concerns about the city's water" as early as October 2014. And a task force appointed by Snyder found that individuals and scientists who sounded the alarm about Flint's water were met with "aggressive dismissal, belittlement, and attempts to discredit [their] efforts."
A week later, Governor Snyder announced that Flint would switch back to Detroit water at a cost of $12 million. But by then the damage was done.
The children of Flint face permanent damage.
And, after a closed-door meeting with Snyder, Flint's mayor said that the cost of replacing pipes corroded by Flint River water could reach $1.5 billion.
Snyder's role in the Flint scandal led native son Michael Moore to call for his arrest, and the Board of State Canvassers has approved two petitions to put a voter recall of Snyder on the ballot.
Poisoned by Hubris
Flint's water disaster serves as an urgent warning of the dangers communities face when they lose their democracy.
Flint's City Council never voted to use the Flint River while it waited for the Karegnondi pipeline to be completed. That decision was made by Snyder's hand-picked managers with the power to override all elected officials, local contracts, and even the city's charter, with no way for local citizens to hold them accountable.
Howard Croft, former director of Flint's public works, told the ACLU of Michigan that the decision to use the Flint River "went up through the state...all the way to the governor's office."
The decision to use Flint River, in turn, was signed off on by Snyder's pick for director of the DEQ, Dan Wyant, who had helped business owners grow their companies and had managed the Department of Agriculture, but who had zero environmental experience.
Wyant resigned in December 2015 after a state task force blamed DEQ for failing to ensure that Flint residents had safe drinking water.
What happened to the other communities in the same position as Flint but living under actual local democracies?
Flint Township and Genesee County are also leaving Detroit water for the new Karegnondi pipeline, but they negotiated interim contracts with the DTWS and kept clean water for their residents.
Only the powerless residents of Flint were poisoned.
Racial Bias
The racial implications of Snyder's emergency manager law and the Flint scandal are hard to overlook.
While Snyder's law is neutral on its face, it has had a dramatically disparate impact on blacks.
By 2013, half of Michigan's black population had been placed under emergency managers or consent agreements, and no longer had any meaningful right to vote or redress their grievances at the local level.
Only 2 percent of white Michigan residents were subjected to rule by emergency managers.
Flint has a majority black population, while the rest of Genesee County is majority white and considerably wealthier.
When the mostly white communities of Handy Township and Livingston County experienced a financial crisis, their Republican state representatives went to bat for them and fought for a state bailout. State Rep. Cindy Denby (who is white) was quoted as saying the emergency manager law was "not intended for places like Livingston County."
One of the top black elected officials in the state, U.S. Congressman John Conyers, asked the Justice Department to review the emergency manager law for violation of the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.
A coalition of civil rights groups also filed a federal lawsuit, Phillips v. Snyder, arguing that the law violates multiple state and federal constitutional rights.
In December 2014, U.S. District Court Judge George Caram Steeh ruled that part of the case can move forward on the grounds that the emergency manager law disproportionately impacts African Americans, saying that the law gives "enormous discretion to state decision makers and creates a significant potential for discriminatory decisions." The plaintiffs have filed an appeal to the 6th Circuit challenging the judge's decision to dismiss the rest of their constitutional claims.
It's Not Just Flint
The same emergency manager, Darnell Earley, who mishandled Flint's water situation went on to become Snyder's pick as emergency manager for Detroit's school system in January 2015. The results have been pretty comparable.
Darnell's tenure has been marked by widespread news reports of deteriorating and unhealthy conditions in the schools, including leaking roofs, mold, broken windows, and bullet holes in classroom walls. Detroit teacher protested those conditions with a series of "sickouts" in January 2016.
After earning a $221,000 salary for his appointment to oversee Detroit's schools, Earley resigned his Detroit position under fire in February. But he walked away with an $83,000 consulting contract and signed an agreement holding the Snyder Administration harmless from any claims relating to his actions as emergency manager. One school board member called it "hush money."
Critics point out that, after 16 years of state control, the Detroit school system is in much worse shape now than it was before, with a significantly larger deficit.
That's interesting, given that when an earlier emergency manager for the school system, Roy Roberts, resigned in 2013, he said his initial instructions were to "blow up the district and dismantle it," but that he spent the first few months on the job convincing state officials it was worth saving.
The International Business Times recently reported that the Department of Justice and the FBI are investigating Snyder administration officials for alleged corruption--receiving bribes from contractors--in the Education Achievement Authority and Detroit Public Schools agencies created by Snyder.
Even some early supporters of Snyder's law have had a change of heart.
Former emergency financial manager Michael Stampfler, the guy who outsourced Pontiac's water, eventually concluded that Snyder's expanded emergency manager (EM) law doesn't work:
"I do not believe EMs can be successful--they abrogate the civic structure of the community for a period of years then return it virtually dismantled for the community to attempt to somehow make a go of it. The program provides no structure for long term recovery, and that is why most communities slide back into trouble, if they experience any relief at all--a vicious cycle. The Public Act is not sufficient and the state bureaucracy isn't up to a performance offering any significant success--as can be noted from the communities repeating."
Snyder's law is not just anti-democratic, it is producing poor results.
Michigan residents were promised increased efficiency from "running government like a business" and an end to corruption. The emergency manager law has failed on both counts.
"We still have incredibly bad decisions being made," says Chris Savage, one of Snyder's most vocal critics. "[A]nd we very clearly still have corruption and criminal activity going on."
"The emergency manager law is just one in a long line of failed government experiments imposed on the people of Michigan," said Senator David Knezek (D-Dearborn Heights). "Cities and schools are left in worse shape than they were before the emergency managers came to town, and now taxpayers are left footing the bill for Earley's payout. For shame."
Mackinac Remains Unapologetic
The Flint debacle and troubles in Detroit and Pontiac haven't fazed anyone back at the Mackinac Center, the special interest pressure group that scripted Snyder's emergency manager law.
Despite its deep involvement in pushing for "enhanced" powers for managers, Mackinac has declined to admit even the possibility that the policies it pushed for played any role in the Flint water crisis.
Without a hint of irony, Mackinac's Michigan Capitol Confidential recently posted an article lauding the ACLU and Michigan Radio for their work exposing how Michigan state officials attempted to ignore or cover up Flint's water crisis, folding Flint's problems into Mackinac's constant narrative of supposed government incompetence and corruption.
But perhaps worst of all, Mackinac's spin could be seen as discouraging people from looking at the root causes of the Flint crisis. "Which Is Better: Finding Fault or Providing Help?," asked communications director Dan Armstrong in a December blog post, as if the two were mutually incompatible. Armstrong's article didn't even mention emergency managers.
Snyder to Local Democracy: Drop Dead
Snyder's emergency manager law stands as a testament the corporate right's disrespect for local democracy, both in terms of how it strips away all local democratic powers of self governance, and because the voters of Michigan went to the polls and voted it down, only to have Snyder bring it right back. It embodies the idea that a state "CEO" knows better than the people what works best for their communities.
A task force appointed by Snyder released its report on March 23, 2016, concluding that the emergency manager law contributed to the Flint crisis by removing the checks and balances at the heart of American democracy, and calling for a review of the law and a search for alternatives.
But the emergency manager law wasn't the right's last shot at local democracy in Michigan. In June 2015, Snyder signed into law legislation barring municipalities from passing ordinances to improve the lives of workers by raising the minimum wage or requiring family leave.
Such "preemption" laws are an increasingly popular tool being promoted by ALEC and other Koch-funded organizations, and something the Mackinac Center had lobbied for as far back as 2003.
In January 2016, Snyder signed another bill into law prohibiting local governments from providing voters with factual information about ballot measures, including local tax increases. Republican legislators had crammed that (and many other) provisions into a non-controversial campaign finance measure without notice or public hearing, and sent it to Snyder's desk.
DeVos' Michigan Freedom Fund praised Snyder for signing the bill.
Governor Snyder may have conceded to Congress that his dictatorial emergency manager law failed the people of Flint, but he continues to push a right-wing "philosophy of governance," as Rep. Connolly put it, that is profoundly undemocratic.
Snyder says he wants to run government like a business, but a corporation is not a democracy and, at this rate, Michigan may not be one much longer either.
CMD's Jessica Mason, Sari Williams, and Lisa Graves contributed to this article.
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Cashing in on Kids: 172 ALEC Education Bills Push Privatization in 2015
Mar 10, 2016
Despite widespread public opposition to the corporate-driven education privatization agenda, at least 172 measures reflecting American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model bills were introduced in 42 states in 2015, according to an analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy, publishers of ALECexposed.org and PRWatch.org. (A PDF version of this report may be downloaded here.)
One of ALEC's biggest funders is Koch Industries and the Koch brothers' fortune. The Kochs have had a seat at the table--where the private sector votes as equals with legislators--on ALEC's education task force via their "grassroots" group Americans for Prosperity and their Freedom Partners group, which was described as the Kochs' "secret bank."
The Kochs also have a voice on ALEC's Education Task Force through multiple state-based think tanks of the State Policy Network, ALEC's sister organization, which is funded by many of the same corporations and foundations and donor entities.
ALEC's Education Task Force is also funded by the billionaire DeVos family, which bankrolls a privatization operation called "American Federation of Children," and by for-profit corporations like K12 Inc., which was founded by junk-bond king Michael Milliken.
ALEC's education task force has pushed legislation for decades to privatize public schools, weaken teacher's unions, and lower teaching standards.
ALEC's agenda would transform public education from a public and accountable institution that serves the public into one that serves private, for-profit interests. ALEC model bills divert taxpayer money from public to private schools through a variety of "voucher" and "tuition tax credit" programs. They promote unaccountable charter schools and shift power away from democratically elected local school boards.
ALEC Vouchers, a Step toward "Abolishing Public Schools" according to Milton Friedman
Until recently, ALEC boasted on the "history" section of its website that it first started promoting "such 'radical' ideas as a [educational] voucher system" in 1983, taking up ideas first articulated decades earlier by ALEC ally, Milton Friedman, who was an economist with the University of Chicago.
Although ALEC and other school privatizers today frame "vouchers"--taxpayer-funded tuition for private, and often religious, schools--in terms of "opportunity" for low-income students and giving parents the "choice" to send their children to public or private schools, the group was less judicious in its earlier years.
The commentary to ALEC's original 1984 voucher bill states that its purpose is "to introduce normal market forces" into education, and to "dismantle the control and power of" teachers' unions by directing money from public institutions to private ones that were less likely to be unionized.
Friedman was more explicit when addressing ALEC's 2006 meeting. He explained that vouchers are really a step towards "abolishing the public school system."
"How do we get from where we are to where we want to be?" Friedman asked the ALEC crowd.
"Of course, the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it. Then parents would have enough money to pay for private schools, but you're not gonna do that."
Instead, Friedman said, the politically feasible way of moving towards an entirely private educational system is through vouchers:
So you have to ask, what are politically feasible ways of solving the problem. The answer, in my opinion, is choice, that you have to change the way government money is directed. Instead of it being used to finance schools and buildings, you should decide how much money you are willing to spend on each child and give that money, provide that money in the form of a voucher to the parents of the children so the parents can choose a school that they regard as best for their child.
Thanks to the work of the Koch-funded ALEC, David Koch's Americans for Prosperity, and the DeVos-funded American Federation for Children, thirteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted a basic voucher scheme.
The Camel's Nose under the Tent
Many voters are repelled by the idea of taxpayer dollars flowing to private or religious entities. 70 percent of Americans oppose funneling taxpayer money to private schools via vouchers.
Even traditionally conservative groups like the Farmers Union worry that a statewide voucher program will harm rural schools as public funds have been siphoned off to private operators. Promises of improved educational outcomes and closing achievement gaps have largely failed to materialize in cities such as Milwaukee.
So, ALEC has cooked up a variety of means of gaining ground on school privatization, many of which moved through state legislatures in 2015.
A handful of ALEC bills claim to offer "scholarships" for sympathetic populations--like students with disabilities or foster kids--but are actually targeted voucher programs that act as the proverbial "camel's nose under the tent" to advance a privatization agenda.
One ALEC bill, the Special Needs Scholarship Program Act, carves out vouchers for students with special needs, regardless of family income. Nine states--Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New York, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island--considered similar legislation in 2015, or expanded existing laws. This bill uses taxpayer funds to send vulnerable children to for-profit schools not bound by federal and state legal requirements to meet a student's special needs that public schools must follow.
Another ALEC bill, The Foster Child Scholarship Program Act, would create a voucher program specifically for children in foster care, and was introduced in Missouri.
"Opportunity Scholarships," introduced in four states--Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, and New Mexico--earmark vouchers for students in schools deemed "failing."
The similar Smart Start Scholarship Program, introduced in four states--Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Tennessee--offers vouchers for pre-school and kindergarten on a sliding scale starting with families eligible for reduced price school lunches. The strategy with these bills is to use the notion of helping poor families as a first step towards expanding taxpayer-funded, private "scholarships" to any family, regardless of their ability to afford private school.
ALEC and its allies have additionally sought to move away from the term "vouchers" and towards "education savings accounts," even though the impact is ultimately the same: to shift taxpayer funds from public schools to private or religious institutions.
Versions of the ALEC Education Savings Account Act were introduced in seven states--Iowa, Illinois, Nevada, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia--in 2015. The bill subtracts funds directly from state school aid and deposits these funds into savings accounts for low-income students that can be used to pay private school expenses.
Ultimate Goal: Universal Vouchers
In 2015, developments in Wisconsin illustrate that the ultimate goal of all these measures is not a small voucher program, but a universal system that funds middle and upper income families, and leaves community schools in the dust.
When first proposed for Milwaukee in 1990, vouchers were pitched as social mobility tickets, a means of offering the city's low-income students of color access to private education. The initial voucher program, which was restricted to students from families earning less than 175 percent of the federal poverty level, gained support from some African-American leaders and was supported by State Representative Polly Williams, a Milwaukee Democrat, along with then-Governor Tommy Thompson, an ALEC alum.
Yet, privatization proponents--many funded by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation--soon sought to expand vouchers beyond the limited scope of the early program. First, voucher proponents achieved a major expansion to religious schools in the 1990s under Republican Governor Tommy Thompson. More recently, under another ALEC alum, Governor Scott Walker, they have expanded Milwaukee's program to reach statewide and to include families with higher incomes.
"They have hijacked the program," Polly Williams said in 2013, a few years before she passed away. "As soon as the doors open for the low income children, they're trampled by the high income," she said. "Now the upper crust has taken over."
Under Walker, the income requirement for Milwaukee has been upped to 300 percent of the poverty level. A married couple with two children can currently earn $78,637--far more than the median U.S. family income of $52,250--and still send them to private schools at the public's expense.
Early data from the statewide program indicates that Wisconsin is subsidizing many families who were already paying to send their kids to private schools.
According to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), nearly eighty percent of students participating in a recent statewide expansion of the voucher program were not previously in public schools, and nearly seventy five percent were already attending a private school.
What happened in Wisconsin is far from unique.
Other states have introduced vouchers as "civil rights" measures only to expand the programs to higher-income white families. The voucher-like corporate tax credit program in Georgia was originally billed as a way of helping African-American and Latino families, but most scholarships have been awarded to "white students from upper income families," the Southern Education Foundation wrote in a scathing report.
Education experts agree that Milton Friedman's vision of universal vouchers could lead to the destruction of the public school system, the abandonment of impoverished community schools and increased segregation.
Notably, in 1955, the year after Brown v. Board of Education, Friedman called for free market schools to allow people to choose "exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools."
A Voucher by Any Other Name
In some states, the state Constitution bars the creation or expansion of vouchers, especially for religious schools, and advocates have also opposed the use of taxpayer money to effectively subsidizing religious education under First Amendment principles. So, ALEC has worked to achieve the same diversion of public funds to private institutions in other ways.
The ALEC Great Schools Tax Credit Act seeks to bypass this separation of church-and-state issue by offering a form of private school tuition tax credits that indirectly funnel taxpayer dollars to these institutions.
In contrast with basic vouchers, where the state directly reimburses a private or religious school for tuition costs, these "tuition tax credit" proposals--sometimes called neo-vouchers--instead offer tax credits to individuals and corporations who donate to a nonprofit "school tuition organization." The nonprofit then pays for a student's tuition.
The "donation" is really just a way for individuals and corporations to bypass state legislatures and the state budgeting process and reroute tax revenue relied upon by the state to private schools.
The Great Schools Tax Credit Act was by far the most popular ALEC bill in 2015: seventeen bills in thirteen states--Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, South Dakota, and Texas--introduced or expanded tuition tax credit legislation.
Following a tradition of incrementally ratcheting up its school privatization schemes, ALEC amended the model Great Schools Tax Credit legislation in 2015 to allow corporate taxpayers to receive a tax credit for up to 100 percent of their tax liability, up from 50 percent in previous iterations.
ALEC's own endnotes to the amended model bill warn that, "Allowing taxpayers to claim a tax credit for more than 50 percent of their liability opens the program up to charges that money is being diverted from non-education programs to support private schools." Indeed, that is precisely what is happening.
ALEC based this change in corporate tax credit on states such as Arizona, Florida, and Georgia that had already implemented the 100 percent liability tax credit, giving corporations in those states the choice to divert their taxes away from public institutions, and towards private schools.
In 2015, Nevada enacted a similar bill allowing for a 100 percent liability tax credit, and Alabama expanded their 100 percent liability corporate tax credit to non-corporate taxpayers.
Attacking Teacher Credentials and Teachers Unions
In addition to directing money away from public schools to private and non-union institutions, ALEC's efforts also make running those schools a lot cheaper for the corporations and private entities involved. ALEC has been engaged in a relentless attack on teachers, their credentials, and the organized voice of teachers-unions.
Versions of ALEC's Alternative Certification Act were introduced in four states--Michigan, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and West Virginia.
These bills offer teaching credentials to individuals with subject-matter experience but not the appropriate education background. In Wisconsin, an amendment that would allow people without a college degree or even a high school degree teach certain subjects was slipped into the budget with no public warning and largely beaten back after a public outcry.
ALEC's direct assault on unions also accelerated in 2015.
As many of the groups pushing this agenda in the states are also involved in campaigns and elections, such as the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity and the DeVos' American Federation for Children, the assault on unions is clearly a strategy to weaken institutions that often back Democrats in an election cycle.
ALEC "Right-to-Work" bills--which make it hard to organize and sustain unions by making fair share fees optional--passed in Wisconsin in 2015 and in West Virginia in 2016 affecting private-sector workers only.
Both bills contained language nearly verbatim to the ALEC "model." Similar bills were introduced in eleven other states in 2015--Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Maine, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Washington.
A version of ALEC's Public Employees Freedom Act, which prohibits payroll deductions for union dues, was passed in Oklahoma and became law in 2015. The Oklahoma bill (HB 1749) specifically targets teachers unions and was modeled on Wisconsin Act 10, which ended collective bargaining for almost all public employees in 2011.
(The Oklahoma Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers Oklahoma filed a lawsuit in Augusts 2015 challenging the law as unconstitutional and discriminatory. That suit is still pending.)
Five other states also introduced versions of this ALEC bill--Iowa, Maine, Missouri, New Mexico, and Oregon.
Along with its bills supporting minimum wage repeal, living wage repeal, prevailing wage repeal, the "alternative certification" bill and ALEC's union-busting portfolio can be viewed as part of ALEC's ongoing effort to undermine an educated and well-paid workforce and promote a race to the bottom in wages and benefits for American workers.
Other Koch-ALEC Educational Priorities in 2015
Other ALEC-influenced bills introduced in 2015 include legislation to:
- Promote the creation of taxpayer-subsidized charter schools through the Next Generation Charter Schools Act, introduced in three states--Maryland, Utah, and West Virginia--which exempts charter schools from complying with the legal requirements that govern traditional public schools, such as teacher qualification standards. This legislation also creates an appointed, state-level charter school authorizing board, safeguarding charter schools from local accountability.
- Shield charter schools from democratic accountability through bills such as The Innovation Schools and School District Act, introduced in three states--Connecticut, Mississippi, and Texas. This legislation removes local accountability by giving state-level officials--rather than elected local school boards--chartering authority for schools that do not follow the legal obligations of public schools, including possibly waiving provisions of teacher collective bargaining agreements.
- Send taxpayer dollars to unaccountable, for-profit online school providers through the Virtual Schools Act, introduced in five states (Alabama, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, and Virginia), the Statewide Online Education Act, introduced in three states (Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia), and the Course Choice Program Act, introduced in five states (Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin). These bills promote an education model where a single teacher remotely teaches a "class" of hundreds of isolated students working from home. The low overhead for virtual schools certainly raises company profits, but it is a model few educators think is appropriate for young children. Even the Walton Family Foundation, no friend to public schools, has documented the failure of online schools in 2015.
- Allow schools to revoke tenure for teachers through the Great Teachers and Leaders Act, introduced in three states--New Mexico, New York, and Oklahoma. This bill allows these schools to let go of teachers, despite seniority or contracted tenure, and purports to base these decisions on "performance," mostly measured through "student growth."
- Limit teacher tenure through the Career Ladder Opportunities Act, a version of which was enacted in Idaho, which modifies teaching contracts and pay scales to base them upon teaching "performance," potentially demonstrated in part by student test scores.
- Create mandated curriculum supporting ALEC's rhetoric about "federalism" in the Founding Principles Act, introduced or expanded in six states--Arkansas, Georgia, Michigan, New York, South Carolina, and Texas. This bill requires the teaching of a semester-long course on the "philosophical understandings" of America's founders that appears geared toward indoctrinating children with conservative views.
- Require the government to facilitate and fund sending students to any school in the state through The Open Enrollment Act, introduced or expanded in three states--Arkansas, Florida, and Rhode Island. These "open enrollment" programs are an alternative to voucher programs and have a similar fiscal impact on state education budgets.
Drivers of the School Privatization Agenda in ALEC
Some of the interests funding ALEC and driving the effort to undermine universal public education include:
The Kochs' Americans for Prosperity (AFP) group. AFP has long been a member and funder of ALEC's education committee and has been active in promoting ALEC policies in the states, lobbying in favor of measures like vouchers in Wisconsin and holding rallies in Oklahoma to support the Special Needs Scholarship Act. AFP has also launched "issue ads" to support ALEC modeled school reforms.
Members of the State Policy Network (SPN) are also key drivers of the ALEC agenda in the states. SPN is a network of state-based "mini-Heritage Foundations" that provide academic cover and the appearance of local grassroots support for ALEC policies--even though the groups are working in a coordinated fashion. For example, SPN affiliates like Colorado's Independence Institute, Arizona's Goldwater Institute, Florida's James Madison Institute, and others are part of the ALEC Education Task Force. SPN was created to help ALEC's national agenda look local, as CMD has documented.
K12 Inc., the nation's largest provider of online charter schools, in which low-paid teachers manage as many as 250 students at a time and communicate with their pupils electronically. The corporation, co-founded by famed Wall Street junk bond king Michael Milliken, is on the ALEC Education Task Force and its lobbyist Lisa Gillis has Chaired ALEC's Special Needs Subcommittee. On top of other studies showing that full-time virtual schools are not appropriate for most children, the conservative Walton Family Foundation commissioned a study from Stanford University in 2015 which found that, over the course of a school year, students in virtual charters learned the equivalent of 180 fewer days in math and 72 fewer days in reading than their peers in traditional charter schools, on average.
The 501(c)(4) American Federation for Children and its 501(c)(3) wing the Alliance for School Choice are key drivers of the school privatization agenda in ALEC. The groups were organized and are funded by the billionaire DeVos family (heirs to the Amway fortune); Richard DeVos has received the ALEC "Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award" and Betsy DeVos chairs AFC. AFC's top lobbyist at ALEC is disgraced former Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, who was convicted of three felonies for misuse of his office for political purposes and banned from the state Capitol for five years (though the charges were later reversed and dropped as part of a plea deal).
The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, one of the top school privatization funders in the country, has spent more than $31 million promoting "school choice" nationwide between 2001 and 2012. For decades, Bradley has also been a major ALEC funder bankrolling ALEC operations and key reports. The foundation has over $800 million in assets and has been headed for many years by Michael Grebe, Governor Scott Walker's longtime campaign co-chair (he is retiring in mid-2016).
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DuPont Rakes in Federal Dollars Despite History of Hazards
Feb 29, 2016
Four workers were tragically killed when an insecticide leaked into a building at DuPont's LaPorte, Texas plant in November 2014. After two workers were overcome by toxic fumes, another responded to a distress call and was overwhelmed. His brother, too, died attempting to aid the fallen. Three others were injured.
OSHA officials blasted DuPont in the strongest terms, stating those who died "would be alive today, had their employer taken steps to protect them." Yet, just months later, the same plant was cited by OSHA for even more safety violations. Now, DuPont--which with its subsidiaries has held multiple federal contracts over recent years totaling millions of dollars--is part of a corporate coalition trying to block rules that would ensure federal contractors abide by health, safety, and labor laws.
President Obama's Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order aims to protect hard-working Americans by requiring companies with an ongoing history of violating safety and labor standards to clean up their acts and comply with federal health and safety laws before being rewarded with taxpayer dollars. DuPont and its subsidiaries, whose history of OSHA violations as of January 2016 includes dozens of "Serious" citations, multiple "Repeat" and "Willful" citations, and more than $500,000 in penalties since 2013, are exhibiting exactly the type of behavior the new rules were created to discourage.
With millions in federal contracts at stake, federal contractors have pushed back hard against the new rules through little-known trade organizations like the Human Resources Policy Association (HRPA), which has attacked the executive order in congressional testimony, media statements, and lobbying efforts. A DuPont executive sits on HRPA's board of directors.
HRPA complains that holding regular OSHA violators to account is an effort to "create a black list" and "intimidate companies." The organization also claims that the rules "seek to solve a problem that does not exist" as its member companies "have a long standing commitment to complying with all federal and state employment and labor laws."
But as the records of DuPont and its subsidiaries show, pervasive safety problems with federal contractors are all too real.
Four Tragic Deaths Follow "Serious Failures" by DuPont
On November 15,2014, operator Crystal Rae Wise collapsed when 20,000 pounds of gaseous methyl mercaptan, a gas used in insecticide production, leaked into the enclosed space where she was working at the the LaPorte chemical plant. Other employees were killed and injured by the toxic fumes in the building trying to rescue her and each other. OSHA documented what went wrong in a training film.
OSHA issued DuPont one "Repeat" violation and nine "Serious" violations for what it called "serious failures," including failing to train its employees properly, along with a $99,000 fine. Investigators found a "Repeat" violation because the company didn't teach the employees how to use the plant's ventilation system. OSHA had found similar problems involving inspection and training failures following the death of a DuPont worker at its Belle, West Virginia plant in 2010.
"Four people lost their lives and their families lost loved ones because DuPont did not have proper safety procedures in place," Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health Dr. David Michaels said of the horrific incident at the LaPorte plant, but the violations are being contested by the company.
The same plant was inspected again in January 2015. DuPont, which chalked up $34.7 billion in annual revenues and paid its CEO Ellen Kullman $14.3 million in 2014, had failed to clean up its act, so OSHA enrolled the company in its "Severe Violator Enforcement Program."
"We have concerns about the safety culture," Dr. Michaels told the Texas Tribune in July 2015 as OSHA issued another 4 "Serious," 3 "Willful," and 1 "Repeat" violation, and $273,000 in penalties on top of those issued in 2014. "We expect chemical facilities where highly toxic materials are used to have a culture that focuses on ensuring worker protection. It appears to have broken down." These penalties are also being contested.
History of Dangerous Violations
The LaPorte tragedy is not an isolated incident.
A tanker truck leak exposed workers at the DuPont Chamber Works plant in Deepwater, New Jersey to hazardous chemicals in May 2014. DuPont Chamber Works was issued 8 "Serious" violations over process safety management standards, and 2 "Repeat" violations for failing to perform inspections and tests on the equipment used in chemical processes. The plant had been cited for the same violations in 2010 and 2011, but the most recent violations are being contested.
When a hose ruptured at DuPont's Belle, West Virginia plant in January 2010--the third hazardous chemical release in two days at that plant--a worker's face was sprayed with phosgene, a hazardous herbicide that was used as a chemical weapon in World War I. The man died in the hospital the following night. OSHA fined DuPont $43,000, citing it for 6 Serious and 5 other violations.
A storage tank at DuPont's Yerkes facility in Buffalo, New York exploded on November 2010 due to an undetected leak of flammable vinyl fluoride, killing one worker and causing first-degree burns on another. The Chemical Safety Board, which produced a safety video based on the incident, called it "preventable" and identified problems with DuPont's monitoring of flammable vapor. After a separate investigation, OSHA cited the DuPont Yerkes Plant and a contractor for a combined total of 17 Serious violations, and $61,500 and $55,440 in proposed fines, respectively. The case was closed in February 2012, after an Administrative Law Judge sustained 7 of the Serious citations against the DuPont Yerkes Plant and a fine of $49,000.
Millions in Federal Contracts for an OSHA "Severe Violator"
It may come as news to HRPA and DuPont, but no taxpayer wants to subsidize federal contractors that have an established pattern of flouting health and safety laws.
Between 2013-2016, the "look back" period that triggers action under President Obama's executive order, DuPont and its subsidiaries incurred a total of 41 "Serious," 3 "Willful," and 4 "Repeat" OSHA violations. Yet during this same time period, DuPont or its subsidiaries were still awarded significant federal contracts.
Once President Obama's executive order is fully implemented, companies like DuPont would have to report this data as part of the process of gaining federal contracts and federal agencies could begin holding companies with bad records to account.
"Dupont is such an egregious violator that OSHA placed them in their Severe Violator Program, which focuses agency resources on employers who have demonstrated indifference towards creating a safe and health workplace," OSHA expert Deborah Berkowitz, a Senior Fellow at the National Employment Law Project, told CMD.
HRPA may try to spin the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive order as a "blacklisting" of "well-intentioned companies." But the executive order addresses a serious flaw in the federal contracting system.
"This executive order is about saving lives and making sure federal tax dollars don't reward companies that are indifferent to their obligation under the law. It's not about blacklisting, it provides an opportunity for DuPont to fix these dangerous conditions and come into compliance with the law," said Berkowitz.
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Ford Revealed as Funder of Climate Denial Group ALEC
Nov 06, 2015
Ford Motor Company, despite its much-hyped commitment to the environment, has been quietly funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group widely criticized for its promotion of climate change denial and for its opposition to the development of renewable alternatives to fossil fuels.
A Ford spokesperson, Christin Baker, confirmed the ALEC grant to the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch, but said that the funding was not intended to be used by ALEC to block action on climate change.
"Ford participates in a broad range of organizations that support our business needs, but no organization speaks for Ford on every issue. We do not engage with ALEC on climate change," said Baker.
Major Corporations Flee ALEC over Climate Denial
CMD is breaking the story of Ford funding of ALEC as other major international corporations have continued to withdraw financial support for the organization. Since CMD first launched the ALEC Exposed investigation in 2011, revealing the extensive agenda of the corporate lobbying group, more than 100 corporations have left ALEC, including BP, Occidental, Yahoo, Visa, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Walmart, and McDonalds.
In September 2014, Google announced that it would end its ALEC funding. "I think the consensus within the company was that that was some sort of mistake, and so we're trying to not do that in the future," Chairman Eric Schmidt told National Public Radio.
Schmidt then slammed ALEC for the deceptive claims it has showcased on climate change, even though "The facts of climate change are not in question anymore. Everyone understands climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place. And so we should not be aligned with such people--they're just, they're just literally lying."
Most recently, Shell Oil announced it would withdraw support for ALEC in August 2015, telling the Washington Post: "ALEC advocates for specific economic growth initiatives, but its stance on climate change is clearly inconsistent with our own."
Ford has attempted to present itself as a leader in addressing climate change, in part through its participation in the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). The compact requires corporate members to address ten principles concerning human rights, labor standards, anti-corruption, and the environment.
As part of its UNGC commitment, Ford boasts that it "is committed to doing our share to prevent or reduce the potential for environmental, economic and social harm due to climate change."
Ford's funding of ALEC is inconsistent with that aim.
At a session held during the 2014 ALEC Annual Meeting in Dallas, Texas, ALEC legislators were repeatedly told: "There is no scientific consensus on the human role in climate change." At another session during the same conference, legislators heard that: "The idea that there is a "scientific consensus" [on climate change] does not hold up." ALEC counts more than 2,000 legislators as members and it has touted its reach in Congress with former House Speaker John Boehner plus several GOP members of the Senate and House who have publicly denied climate change.
Despite ALEC's efforts to promote climate change denial among U.S. politicians, there is in fact wide consensus that the earth is warming because of human activity. Respected scientific bodies including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, along with 97% of climate scientists agree on this point.
Earlier this year, CMD/PRwatch co-launched a new website that documents the teaching of climate change denial to legislators at ALEC conferences: ALECClimateChangeDenial.org.
ALEC's next meeting is in Scottsdale, Arizona, at the same time as the UNFCC's COP 21 meeting on climate change will be taking place in Paris, France.
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