Sunday, June 30, 2013
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Snipers: Fire
DJ what are you doing?
Never don't know what, don't know where
Don't know when, don't know how
You are the ........ on the floor, it's sure
Can't you see that if I leave I won't come back anymore
Now I wanna get, I wanna see the vision
You can never tell him
You don't have to come around and to come in
What I keep playing is work, music is work
Music and you know you're gonna loose it
Do what you gotta do, know what you gotta know
Got to ........ one then I need a ................
You do the fast one, this is the fast one
What is the last one? This is the last one
It takes to make a break caught in a fake
Give it up, come and drop, once again get it paid
Word, this is the best I've ever heard
Da da da da da da da da
Can you feel the fire, fire?
And let me take you higher and higher
Can you feel the fire, fire?
And let me take you higher and higher
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it higher and higher?
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it higher and higher?
Stay back as I flow to the rhythm of the rhyme
Baby keep, baby keep, never waste no time
Think about your own situation
Never care about the .......................
Yes I know, yes I know and I'll pay the price
'Cause your style is ........, cool and fat
So what da di di di dam
Da di di di di da di go
Da da da da da da da da
Can you feel the fire, fire?
And let me take you higher and higher
Can you feel the fire, fire?
And let me take you higher and higher
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it higher and higher?
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it higher and higher?
Quiet, listen to what I gotta say something for that
God damn DJ play my favourite song please
You've got the records and I got this
Dance, I wanna get a move, I gotta dance
The beat is in trance, me and my friends
Say this is the best I've ever heard
Da da da da da da da da
Can you feel the fire, fire?
And let me take you higher and higher
Can you feel the fire, fire?
And let me take you higher and higher
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it higher and higher?
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it higher and higher?
Can you feel the fire, fire?
And let me take you higher and higher
Can you feel the fire, fire?
And let me take you higher and higher
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it higher and higher?
Can you feel it?
Can you feel it higher and higher?
Moyers & Company 062813
BILL MOYERS: This week on Moyers & Company… A Place at the Table
KRISTI JACOBSON: When we were making this film we traveled all over the country and again and again met people who were working and trying to make ends meet but were not able to put food on the table.
MARIANA CHILTON: There's no opportunity for people who are low income to really engage in our democracy. And I think that they're actively shut out as well.
BILL MOYERS: And…
GREG KAUFMANN: There are a lot of corporations that are, you know, want to be involved in the fight against hunger. And the best thing they can do is get onboard for fair wages.
ANNOUNCER: Funding is provided by:
Carnegie Corporation of New York, celebrating 100 years of philanthropy, and committed to doing real and permanent good in the world.
The Kohlberg Foundation.
Independent Production Fund, with support from The Partridge Foundation, a John and Polly Guth Charitable Fund.
The Clements Foundation.
Park Foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues.
The Herb Alpert Foundation, supporting organizations whose mission is to promote compassion and creativity in our society.
The Bernard and Audre Rapoport Foundation.
The John D. And Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. More information at Macfound.Org.
Anne Gumowitz.
The Betsy And Jesse Fink Foundation.
The HKH Foundation.
Barbara G. Fleischman.
And by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, designing customized individual and group retirement products. That’s why we’re your retirement company.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome. The summer blitz of blockbuster movies has arrived. Super heroes or lesser mortals with excellent motor skills are here to save the Earth from: super villains, asteroids, aliens or other disasters, natural in nature but probably induced by global warming.
Yes, it’s another summer of excess and escapism with the thrills and chills of Hollywood scaring us down to our popcorn, yet always with a happy ending. Meanwhile, back here in the real world, where we actually live, the best film of the summer isn’t an epic tale of horror or adventure but an eye-opening, heart-moving and mind-expanding reminder that millions of people in this richest country in the world, working men and women and their children, don't have enough to eat. The film’s called A Place at the Table and it's one of the best documentaries I've seen in years.
Fifty million Americans, one in six, go hungry. And yet the House of Representatives can’t pass a farm bill because our members of Congress continue to fight over how many billions to slash from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps. Once again we’re hearing all the clichés about freeloaders who are undeserving of government help, playing the system and living large at the expense of taxpayers. This movie,A Place at the Table breaks those stereotypes apart and shows us that hunger hits hard at people who work hard to make a living. Don’t miss this one, it’s real life.
With me is Kristi Jacobson, one of the film’s directors and producers. You’ve seen her work on public television, HBO, ABC, Lifetime, and other TV networks. Mariana Chilton is here too. She teaches public health at Drexel University and is director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities. She’s also founder of Witnesses to Hunger, a group featured prominently in A Place at the Table.
In this excerpt from the film, we meet a rancher and a police officer in Colorado, each struggling to make ends meet. Believe it or not, they have to rely on the charitable food programs sponsored by the church of a local minister, Pastor Bob Wilson.
ADAM APPELHANZ in A Place at the Table: About a month ago we had three officers, including myself, but however, due to budget constraints we’re now down to just me. It was always kind of a prideful thing that I never needed anybody’s help. Unfortunately, I haven’t received a pay raise in four years and what I used to spend on a month in groceries now gets me about two weeks.
I have utilized Pastor Bob’s food bank. The way it makes me feel, it’s, it’s very humiliating. Well I correct that; it’s not humiliating, it’s very grounding. The stereotype of food banks is always for the unemployed or the disabled, people that can’t go out and get a job. That’s not always the case. Sometimes in life you just get to points where you need a little extra help.
JOEL in A Place at the Table: Ranching is a good part of life. It’s a lot of work but it’s an honest, actually, it’s an honest trade. But the way the economy and everything has gone south, I have had to go find another job out of the house. So I work on the ranch from 7:00 in the morning till 3:00 in the afternoon and then at 3:00 in the afternoon till 11:00 at night I go down and clean the school.
It’s a good job. It’s close to home. There’s a lot that you worry about. Your kids is the main one and that’s part of the reason I did take a second job, is so I can help buy groceries and put food on the table for my kids.
Come on dogs…
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to you both.
MARIANA CHILTON: Thank you for having us.
KRISTI JACOBSON: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: So, a cop who doesn't make enough money to meet all of his food needs and a cowboy who has to take two jobs to help feed his children, are they truly representative or was this just a filmmaker's good luck?
KRISTI JACOBSON: Sadly they're not the exception, in fact they're very representative. When we were making this film we traveled all over the country and again and again met people who were working and trying to make ends meet but were not able to put food on the table. So I think what the sort of filmmaker's luck or hard work paid off in that these are people who might not be willing to share their story.
But we filmed in Collbran because it was a town where the pastor, Bob, was working really hard to remove that stigma that people feel around, around admitting and then getting help. And so that helped us because we were welcomed into the community.
And you know, I remember the first time I met the police chief and I met him first on the phone and then in person and I thought he's probably not going to share this story on-camera, but it's still important to understand. And then he said, "Absolutely." And that was really, really I think a victory for the film in that we were able to show this very important group that are experiencing hunger and food insecurity but that are not, it's very hidden.
BILL MOYERS: What do you take from their stories? Because you worked with a totally different population.
MARIANA CHILTON: I'm not so sure they're that different, that's the thing. I think that when you were saying before about stereotypes I think that in the press and our legislators have a certain stereotype about who's poor and who's not and this concept of the deserving poor. But the women that I work with through Witnesses to Hunger are very hardworking.
They're excellent mothers, excellent parents. They want the best for their kids. They're often working two or three jobs. Sometimes they'll have to work under the table in order to make ends meet, trying to find side jobs. They're hustling really hard.
And I see the police chief, I see the cowboy who's also taking on that second job. What I see is common among then is a loss of dignity in the work. You can actually work full time and your family is still hungry? There's a very big problem in this country that we are not valuing hard work like we used to.
BILL MOYERS: There's a young woman in the film who says quote, "Hunger could be right next door and you would never know because people are too afraid to talk about it." Why are people afraid to talk about it, Dr. Chilton?
MARIANA CHILTON: Well, I think there's an enormous amount of shame that goes, especially when… I work with moms of little children, young children. And there's an enormous amount of shame that they experience that they, may run out of money before they can get more food. And it really tests their sense of motherhood, their sense of citizenship, of belonging. And it's very isolating. And I think that when the moms that I speak with, they talk about when they were children they, too, were hungry and they were always told, "Don't talk about it. Don't let anybody know how hard it is. Always put on a good face. Always look good," you know, it’s about being able to be in the world and be treated with a sense of dignity and respect. So they would often hide their own experiences of hunger or hide the experience that they can't feed their own children.
BILL MOYERS: Do we sometimes pass hunger down as a legacy to the next generation?
MARIANA CHILTON: Oh yes, we do. It gets transferred from generation to generation. Now, it also happens that during an economic downturn when there are not enough good paying jobs of course hunger will skyrocket. But I think that when people don't realize that hunger is very damaging to children, to, especially to young children. Food insecurity affects the cognitive, social and emotional growth of very young children.
That means that by the time they arrive to kindergarten they're not ready for school. That means that when they're in school if they're hungry they won't be able to concentrate on what they're learning and they won't do as well on their math and their reading tests. That means they won't be as successful, won't get a good paying job so that when they have children they, too, will be poor. So poverty is an experience that's really seared into the bodies and brains of children.
BILL MOYERS: What happens to someone who gets too little nutrition early in life?
MARIANA CHILTON: Oh, it's extremely important. If you think about what's happening in the first three years of life the brain is growing so fast. They're the most important years of human development. So every moment those are the building blocks of good cognitive, social and emotional development. Neurons are growing and pruning and very active. 700 neurons are growing a second for an infant. It’s an important window of human development.
So any type of nutritional depravation during this time has a severe impact on the brain even if it's just episodic, even if it happens once or twice a month those are moments of lost opportunity to be able to interact with their family and their environment, to pay attention and to learn something new which helps to grow more neurons.
So again it affects the cognitive, social and emotional development. It creates a certain kind of a stress on the child that's very toxic. And we know that children who experience that kind of toxic stress can't learn as well, can't learn as fast. And you can turn that around with food assistance programs, with a program called WIC, Women, Infants and Children or the food stamp program. The best investment of our dollars in this country is investing in very young children and their families because again those are the most important times when a child’s brain is growing. So for every one dollar that you spend on a child you make seven dolalrs back when they become an adolescent. It's a beautiful investment.
BILL MOYERS: Kristi has a remarkable profile, portrait in the film of a young girl named, I think her name's Rosie…
ROSIE in A Place at the Table: I struggle a lot and most of the time it’s because my stomach is really hurting. My teacher tells me to get focused and she told me to write focus on my little sticker and every time I look at it and I’m like oh I’m supposed to be focusing. I start yawning and then I zone out and I’m just looking at the teacher and I look at her and all I think about is food. So I have these little visions in my eyes. Sometimes when I look at her I vision her as a banana so she goes like a banana and everybody in the class is like apples or oranges and then I’m like, oh, great.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me about Rosie.
KRISTI JACOBSON: Rosie is an incredible young girl. And I think that what struck me so much about Rosie is that her story sort of embodied, everything about this issue which is that while she's experiencing this hunger and food insecurity it's affecting her self-esteem, it's affecting her ability to learn which is very upsetting. But at the same time she has this incredible spirit which gives you this, you know some feeling of hope and inspiration. So she's just an incredible young girl.
BILL MOYERS: And that story is replicated in your experience?
MARIANA CHILTON: Oh, very much so, very common. And I think what people forget is that, you think you can somehow see hunger, you can't look at Rosie and see oh, she's hungry. So where do you see it? You see it in school performance, their ability to get along with others, their ability to pay attention for children of school age.
KRISTI JACOBSON: Attendance.
MARIANA CHILTON: And attendance. But also for really young children where do you see it? You see it in the increased hospitalizations, showing up more to the emergency room when they don't-- with preventable diseases, or preventable exacerbation of asthma.
This, you know, if we could think about poverty during childhood as a type of a disease, if we could pay as much attention to poverty for children as we pay attention to infectious disease we might be able to do something in this country.
BILL MOYERS: The film makes dramatically clear the relationship between malnutrition and obesity.
MISS. CHILDREN’S HEALTH PROJECT NURSE in A Place at the Table: Step up on there. Step up on the table right there and I’ll be with you in just a second. What grade you in?
TREMONICA in A Place at the Table: Second.
MISS. CHILDREN’S HEALTH PROJECT NURSE in A Place at the Table: Second? You’re in the second grade? How old are you?
TREMONICA in A Place at the Table: Fixing to be eight.
MISS. CHILDREN’S HEALTH PROJECT NURSE in A Place at the Table: Fixing to be eight… Alright. And you’ve got asthma? Okay. Do you ever have problems with shortness of breath when you’re outside playing or anything?
TREMONICA in A Place at the Table: I have to stop playing to take a deep breath.
MISS. CHILDREN’S HEALTH PROJECT NURSE in A Place at the Table: Okay. What did you eat for breakfast this morning?
TREMONICA in A Place at the Table: I didn’t eat.
MISS. CHILDREN’S HEALTH PROJECT NURSE in A Place at the Table: You didn’t eat breakfast this morning? Okay. When you get home in the afternoon do you eat a snack? What do you eat?
TREMONICA in A Place at the Table: Chips.
MISS. CHILDREN’S HEALTH PROJECT NURSE in A Place at the Table: Chips? What else, baby? What do you drink?
TREMONICA in A Place at the Table: Pop.
MISS. CHILDREN’S HEALTH PROJECT NURSE in A Place at the Table: Pops. Okay. Do you have any other snacks besides chips you could eat?
TREMONICA in A Place at the Table: Cookies.
MISS. CHILDREN’S HEALTH PROJECT NURSE in A Place at the Table: Kisses?
TREMONICA in A Place at the Table: Cookies.
MISS. CHILDREN’S HEALTH PROJECT NURSE in A Place at the Table: Cookies. Cookies and chips, okay... Well maybe you could ask mom to start buying you some – some carrots and some celery and maybe some apples. You could slice some apples up; that’d be good, hm?
RAJ PATEL in A Place at the Table: A lot of people think there is a yarning gap between hunger on the one end and obesity on the other. In fact, they’re neighbors and the reason that they happen often at the same time and often in the same family, in the same person is because they are both signs of having insufficient funds to be able to command food that you need to, to stay healthy.
[…]
MARION NESTLE in A Place at the Table: If you look at what has happened to the relative price of fresh fruits and vegetables it’s gone up by 40 percent since 1980 when the obesity epidemic first began.
In contrast, the relative price of processed foods has gone down by about 40 percent. So if you only have a limited amount of money to spend you’re going to spend it on the cheapest calories you can get and that’s going to be processed foods. This has to do with our farm policy and what we subsidize and what we don’t.
BILL MOYERS: Help me understand the connection between hunger and obesity.
MARIANA CHILTON: Hunger and obesity are both forms of malnutrition.
BILL MOYERS: Meaning?
MARIANA CHILTON: Meaning not, it means not getting the right kinds of nutrients for an active and healthy life. If you go back to the definition of food insecurity it means having enough food for an active and healthy life. So when people think about hunger they think, "Oh, it's just not enough food." But actually food insecurity which is a much broader term, much more precise, captures that type of experience where families don't have enough money for healthy and fresh food so they will, in order to stretch their dollar, they'll spend it on soda or on foods that have very high calories. Because they know that their kids are hungry, they have to be able to stretch their dollar in order to fill their own tummies and the tummies of their children.
They know it's not healthy, but they're just trying to figure out what the immediate, the immediacy of hunger. So they eat lots of high calories, salt, sodium. Those are the kinds of things that are not good for an active and healthy life. It's another form of hunger. So you can look at people who are overweight and obese and think maybe they don't have enough money for food, maybe they're anxious about where their next meal is coming from.
BILL MOYERS: You say in the film that there are 50 million people, one in six who are food insecure, who do not have enough good nutrition to thrive.
KRISTI JACOBSON: It's shocking that here in the wealthiest nation on earth we have this many people who do not have either access to healthy foods or nor can they afford it.
BILL MOYERS: What does it say that one out of every two kids in this country at some point in their childhood as I learned from your film will be on food assistance, one out of two?
KRISTI JACOBSON: I see a country in crisis. And it's a crisis that we need to address and we need political leadership and policies that tackle this problem dead on. And when we were making the film we looked to a film that aired on CBS in 1968 called “Hunger in America.”
CBS NARRATOR in Hunger in America: Food is the most basic of human needs.
KRISTI JACOBSON: That showed the nation shocking conditions and children that were starving right.
CBS NARRATOR in Hunger in America: But man can’t remain alive without food. We’re talking about ten million Americans. In this country, the most basic human need must become a human right.
KRISTI JACOBSON: And citizens reacted. And what they did though and part of this had to do with the reporting at the time, was they demanded legislative response. They demanded that their politicians take responsibility and address the problem. And I think that today we have, you know, every maybe once a year around the holidays there are portraits of the hungry in America.
But instead of pointing to political solutions they're often pointing to a charitable response as the solution. And I think that is a really also significant cause for how we have gotten to the point where one in six are food insecure.
BILL MOYERS: You have a sequence in the film that drives home the reliance on charity and the conclusion that it's not enough. Let's take a look at that.
JOEL BERG in A Place at the Table: The 80’s created the myth that A. hungry people deserved it and B. well we could really fill in the gaps with the charities.
JANET POPPENDIECK in A Place at the Table: And so we had a proliferation of emergency responses, soup kitchens, food pantries moving from literally a shelf in the cupboard of the pastor’s office to an operation with regular hours.
LARRY BROWN in A Place at the Table: Something changed during that period of time. There developed this ethos that government was doing too much and more importantly, the private sector is wonderful and let’s feed people through charity.
JANET POPPENDIECK in A Place at the Table: We have basically created a kind of secondary food system for the poor in this country. Millions and millions of Americans, as many as 50 million Americans, rely on charitable food programs for some part of meeting their basic food needs.
[…]
MARIANA CHILTON in A Place at the Table: That’s something that’s extremely important. The churches and the community groups that do hand out food are doing an incredible service to this country and to the children that are experiencing hunger, but that’s just a quick fix, that’s for today and tomorrow and maybe for next week. We call it emergency food? It’s no longer emergency food. This is called chronic use of a broken system for which people cannot be held accountable.
[…]
JEFF BRIDGES in A Place at the Table: Charity is a great thing, but it’s not the way to end hunger. We don’t fund our Department of Defense through charity, you know. We shouldn’t, you know, see that our kids are healthy through charity either.
BILL MOYERS: So Americans responded with "a thousand points of light" in the first Bush administration. But you say it's not enough?
KRISTI JACOBSON: Well, it's not enough because despite all of that, despite all the money that's being raised, despite the food drives, despite the proliferation of these food banks and soup kitchens we still have 50 million people who are food insecure.
And what we've found both during the making of the film and in fact since showing the film, you know, food bank directors repeatedly sharing with us, you know, "We can't do this alone. We need government to play its role." Because it should be an emergency food system, as Mariana says in the film. And it should be complementing government programs that really address the needs of the most vulnerable.
MARIANA CHILTON: I would like to really draw your attention to the impact that the emergency food system has compared to the government food assistance programs. What emergency food can do is about this much, about 5 percent of dealing with the problem, this much. What does the federal government do with the nutrition assistance? Food stamps or SNAP it's called, WIC, Women, Infants and Children, school breakfast and school lunch, after school feeding programs.
Those programs we know make a tangible difference in the health and wellbeing of children and adults. So we know that if families are receiving food stamps or SNAP Benefits their cognitive, social and emotional development is better. We know that they're less likely to be hospitalized.
The same thing goes for WIC. We also know that WIC can reduce the stress that moms often feel when they're a new mom and they're very poor. So these programs we know have a tangible public health impact. There's no research that shows what kind of impact the emergency food system is having. We know that when about 30 million children are being fed every day in this country through school breakfast and school lunch, that is magnificent. And those kinds of programs need to be protected and to be promoted.
BILL MOYERS: There's a young woman in the film, Barbie Izquierdo. She was a year looking for a job. She had food stamps while she was doing so. Then she got work. And yet as a result of getting work she no longer qualified for food stamps or subsidized childcare and her children could therefore no longer receive breakfast or lunch at daycare.
BARBIE IZQUIERDO in A Place at the Table: Anyone can sit there and tell you I’ve been through this, I’ve been through that, I got through it. Yes, I’ve been through this, I’ve been through that, I got through it, but if you’re open my fridge I’m there again. Five days into the month. And I’m going to be there next month and the month after that. It gets tiring.
When I was on food stamps I didn’t have to worry about my kids not eating. It was just how can I make it stretch, you know… I might have to take a little bit from this day. It was more about balancing everything where now we have nothing.
I literally have nothing left. Like I’m going to give them a Hot Pocket for dinner tomorrow like what am I supposed to do? What do I give them?
BILL MOYERS: What's happening there?
MARIANA CHILTON: First of all stress. Stress is very damaging to moms and kids. Secondly, you also see Barbie having the sandwich away from her kids.
So you have moms that will often scrimp on their own diets in order to feed their children. But what you see overall, the big picture there is that Barbie was working full time in those moments and therefore became ineligible for food assistance.
So what they-- what you see is what we call in the research world the cliff effect. So if a family makes just enough money to get themselves over the lip of whatever the income limit is they'll lose benefits that are actually very helpful to them and to their own children and to their health. So you can have a family kind of going up and up and say, "Oh, I'm going to take that extra-- I'm going to get a raise," or, "I'll work overtime."
They work just enough to fall over the cliff, lose their benefits and then they're worse off than where they were before. So we have a really big problem in this country with the way that we are looking at our wages and our public assistance programs and how they're interacting with each other.
KRISTI JACOBSON: And that scene was one of the most difficult to film. And both because of just, you know, the pain that Barbie was feeling and allowing us to capture, but also as filmmakers Barbie had gotten the full time job and so we thought this is the end of the film and--
BILL MOYERS: The arc of the story.
KRISTI JACOBSON: Exactly. And when this happened we were devastated for Barbie and thought what is this going to do to the story? Well, of course as filmmakers we have to follow the story. And I remember the conversation that we had with Mariana where we were talking about this and we were worried that it wasn't representative and then learned this is in fact so representative and a really important problem to expose. Because we need for these programs, if we're going to have them and we're going to fund them which is a different issue, they should be meeting the needs of the people who are using and benefiting from the programs.
MARIANA CHILTON: And in our research we know that food stamps do help to prevent hospitalizations, they do promote health, it does help. But the type of allotment is called the Thrifty Food Plan. The way that the government calculates how much an adequate meal or an adequate sort of thrifty food basket costs is actually inadequate for a healthy diet. So even if you have families that are receiving the maximum allotment, as if they had no other income, they still can't make ends meet.
BILL MOYERS: There's a nice twist in the film. When you're reporting on what it's like to live on food stamps and you have an interview with Representative James McGovern of Massachusetts who did his own research, as you do, into the subject.
REP JAMES MCGOVERN in A Place at the Table: I lived on a food stamp diet for a week along with Jo Ann Emerson from Missouri. We did so because we thought that the food stamp benefit was inadequate. Most of my colleagues had no idea that the average food stamp benefit was $3 a day.
I had my budget and I went to a supermarket and it took me an awful long time because you have to add up every penny and it has to last you for a week. And so I did it and I will tell you I, I was tired, I was cranky because I couldn’t drink coffee because coffee was too expensive. I mean there are people who are living on that food stamp allocation. And you really can’t. For us it was an exercise that ended in a week. For millions of other people in this country that’s their way of life; every day is a struggle just to eat.
KRISTI JACOBSON: Sadly Representative McGovern is one of few leaders and voices in Congress pushing to do the right thing here which is to protect and improve food stamps and other government programs.
He's an incredible leader, but he is even having trouble getting his members of his own party to support his efforts to protect these programs. And that's really troubling and upsetting.
BILL MOYERS: The road to reform always leads to Washington. And there almost every reform whether it's the environment or whether it's agriculture or food hits up against the power of big money to write the laws it wants and influence the politicians it needs. You found that to be the case, didn't you?
KRISTI JACOBSON: Yes, I think that, you know, I believe, and I don't think naively, that we Americans should be able to influence how our politicians vote on these issues. That's not happening right now. And the problem with this issue is that you don't always-- it's not so obvious necessarily how a politician is voting when it comes to programs that address food insecurity.
BILL MOYERS: There was a poll taken I think in connection with your film that found the majority of Americans actually were surprised to hear that 50 million people don't know where their next meal is coming from. And many of those polled just don't think of hunger as a pressing issue. Given your work on this how do you explain it?
MARIANA CHILTON: There's this concept that you can somehow see hunger, that we would know that there are hungry children if they were fishing around in the garbage can or if there were flies coming or they had swollen bellies and, you know, limp on the sidewalk. But that's not what hungry children look like. We don't see that in the United States. You might see that's severe starvation when you're dealing in times of war and massive drought.
BILL MOYERS: Somalia, the Congo, Sudan, all…
MARIANA CHILTON: So in the United States there-- it's children like Rosie who light up the room when they come in. It's moms like Barbie Izquierdo who's beautifully spoken, so brilliant. Her children are funny and enjoyable. And yet they're still experiencing food insecurity and hunger. So I think people are actually shocked "Well, I don't see it, so it can't be real." And they don't believe the numbers.
But what it is happening underneath is a massive crisis in human potential in the United States. Our kids are showing up to school not ready to learn. When they're in school they can't concentrate. You have kids who are food insecure when they're adolescents. They're suffering with stress and suicidal ideation. That's what we find in our research. How can we--
BILL MOYERS: Suicide ideation?
MARIANA CHILTON: Suicidal ideation, so it's thinking about, "Oh, what does it matter that I live?" It's thinking about killing yourself. These are very depressing and stressful experiences to experience hunger, to see your parents struggling with that and to struggle yourself.
So when you-- what's happening is that we are developing a whole half of the country overall is really left out of the public dialog. They are underpaid, undervalued, unhealthy. And we can prevent this kind of-- and we can prevent this.
That's why I think it's so important, what's so exciting about what Witnesses to Hunger is trying to accomplish is to make sure that people who know the experience of hunger and poverty firsthand are a part of the national dialog, that they're not silenced, they're not short of shamed over off in the corner, that they're actually front and center. They're the ones who can turn it around.
So we have to take back our democracy, be more engaged. And I think that a lot of people sort of in the middle who haven't struggled with hunger or poverty think, "Oh, we'll just let the government handle it. They must be doing the right thing," and, "There's no hunger," that's just called disengagement. We've got a big problem in our country with being engaged about what our politicians are actually doing for us.
BILL MOYERS: So you've tried to engage them. Let's take a look in the film at a very interesting sequence.
BARBIE IZQUIERDO in A Place at the Table: Everybody say, “Washington.”
WITNESSES TO HUNGER in A Place at the Table: Washington.
MARIANA CHILTON in A Place at the Table: Here’s the plan; at 11:30 the reception at the Senate. Senator Casey will speak, I will speak, Tianna will speak, Barbie will speak and every time that you have an opportunity give your ideas for change, for what you need for the success and healthy life of your kids, okay? These guys are the ones who make it happen.
BARBIE IZQUIERDO in A Place at the Table: I was the first mother of Witnesses to Hunger and I didn’t think anyone would take us seriously. But I’m here to let everyone know that just because we live where we live and come from where we come from doesn’t mean that we’re not smart. Doesn’t mean that we don’t have potential. Doesn’t mean that we do not want education. Doesn’t mean that we want to depend on welfare for the rest of our lives. I want the same hopes and dreams as everyone in this room for their children. We just need the opportunity to make it come true.
BILL MOYERS: Did they listen?
MARIANA CHILTON: I think they listened a little bit. They felt it a little bit. But it's not long enough, you can't just go to Congress and talk to legislators one time and they'll get it.
I think it's really hard to break through the cloud over our legislators. I'm not really sure who they're listening to except for people who have a lot of money and a lot of influence. So I think they're very touched by the personal experiences of a person who's poor, especially from a mom.
So I've actually seen Senate staffers get very teary-eyed listening to these stories and they say, "Oh, keep telling your stories, keep telling you think stories." But then they'll turn around and vote to cut food stamps. And that doesn't make a lot of sense. So I'm wondering who is it that's influencing Congress? Who's got their thumb on what Congress can do? And I think that there's just not enough people who are poor who have an opportunity to speak out.
I don't think they get enough press, they don't have, they're sort of shut out, there's no opportunity for people who are low income to really engage in our democracy. And I think that they're actively shut out as well.
BILL MOYERS: So bear with me though as I put on my horns and play devil's advocate. There are a lot of Americans who think that we're spending too much on food stamps and that the cost is out of hand. Your poll associated with your film suggests that last year alone the government spent $81 billion on this nutritional safety net as you call it, now SNAP, what we used to know as food stamps. And some folks say that is simply way too much and that we're creating a culture of dependency.
Here's Representative, Republican Representative Steven King of Iowa.
REP. STEVE KING: Handing out benefits is not an economic stimulator. But we want to take care of the people that are needy, the people that are hungry, and we’ve watched this program grow from a number that I think I first memorized when I arrived here in Congress, about 19 million people, now about 49 million people. And it appears to me that the goal of this administration is to expand the rolls of people that are on SNAP benefits. And their purpose for doing so in part is because of what the gentleman has said from Massachusetts. Another purpose for that though is just to simply expand the dependency class.
MARIANA CHILTON: All right, well, first of all I'm a researcher, so I like to base things on empirical evidence. There is no evidence that the food stamp program creates dependency.
Let me show you what this congressperson is doing. Basically they're pinning the problems that we have in this country on people who are poor. If you think about people who are poor really-- you have 80 percent of people who are food insecure are actually working. That means their wages are so low that they're eligible for food stamps.
So you want to talk about dependency in this country? Let's talk about corporations and businesses that pay such low wages that they depend on the United States government to add money to those wages through the Income Assistance Programs, like SNAP. So because if you take a company like Walmart, pays their workers so low that their workers are actually eligible for food stamps. Who's dependent on the U.S. government? I'd have to say it's Walmart is the welfare queen here.
BILL MOYERS: But if I were Congressman King sitting here I might say to you make a very convincing case and I believe that both of you are genuinely committed to this issue, but you know, 48 million people are receiving food stamps. Can't you see why some of my constituents in Iowa would be shocked by that and at that cost?
KRISTI JACOBSON: Well, I think it's also important to look at how many corporations and agribusinesses are collecting subsidies out of the same government bill, the farm bill.
Well, yeah, and I think that there is an ethos in Congress right now that assisting those individuals who need help via the food stamp program or WIC or school meals is big government and is going to put us into debt. But providing subsidies to large agribusinesses and big corporations is just business as usual.
And I think that we're looking at, you know, investing in our youth and investing in our future. And if it doesn't get to you, congressman, from the moral point of view that it's really frankly not okay to have kids like Rosie and Barbie's kids to the tune of 17 million of them in our nation-- well, what about the cost of not doing anything? Because the cost of food insecurity, the cost of obesity and malnutrition is way larger on the back end and the health care than it is to get these programs adequately funded and feed kids nutritious foods.
MARIANA CHILTON: If you think about what government is supposed to be doing, it's supposed to create the conditions in which people can make healthy choices and live an active and healthy life.
It's all about creating good conditions for us to prosper, right.
Somehow when we think about helping people who are poor, many of whom are working, it's there becomes this type of societal vitriol towards people who are poor as if they're not us. Well, actually people who are poor are all around us. Their children are going to the same schools oftentimes. We need to really rethink about who we are as a country, what does it mean to be an American. If you think about one in five of our children living in households that are food insecure, they're just as American as the rest of us, we need to really invest in our own country and who we are.
BILL MOYERS: You've been to Washington with some of your constituents. You've made your case. You're up against the interlocking power grid of big agriculture, big corporations and big government. What makes you think you have a chance of turning them around?
MARIANA CHILTON: The power of the human spirit. When you have a lot of moms who have had enough we can take over Congress and say we care about our children just like you care about your children. But we need more moms, we need more families to be able to speak up. I think that we need to take over, take back our democracy, take back our sense of involvement, of belonging, that this is our government.
This government is supposed to be working for everyone regardless of how you were born or where you were born or how much money you make. It's supposed to work for all of us.
We've got to figure out a way to just help the people who are in power to recognize their own sense of humanity and recognize that they are no different than Barbie Izquierdo, no different than Rosie, that their kids are no different than Rosie, that we're all a part of that same human family. Ultimately that's what we need to tap into.
BILL MOYERS: On that note thank you, Dr. Mariana Chilton, for your work and Kristi Jacobson, thank you for an extraordinary film. And thank you both for being here.
MARIANA CHILTON: Thank you so much.
KRISTI JACOBSON: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: Food stamps were at the core of the monster farm bill that went down to defeat in the House of Representatives last week. That bill would have cut food stamps by some $20 billion over 10 years, but that was too little for House Republicans and too much for House Democrats, although Senate Democrats had already agreed to cuts of more than $4 billion.
Here to talk about food stamps and the farm bill is a journalist whose beat is hunger, politics, and policy. Greg Kaufmann is poverty correspondent for “The Nation” magazine and a contributor to our website, BillMoyers.com. He’s also an advisor to the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich and the Institute for Policy Studies. Greg Kaufman, welcome.
GREG KAUFMANN: Great to be with you, Bill.
BILL MOYERS: There are almost 48 million people using food stamps a day, and over recent years that’s a 70 percent increase. What does your own reporting tell you about why?
GREG KAUFMANN: Well, the biggest reason, I think, is the proliferation of low-wage work. People are working and they're not getting paid enough to feed their families, pay their utilities and pay for their housing, pay for the healthcare. We had 28 percent of workers in 2011 made wages that were less than the poverty line. Poverty wages.
Fifty percent of the jobs in this country make less than $34,000 a year. Twenty-five percent make less than the poverty line for a family of four, which is $23,000 a year. So, if you're not paying people enough to pay for the basics, they're going to need help getting food.
And food stamps expanded because we went through the greatest the worst recession since the Great Depression. And it did what it's supposed to do. And now, you know, mostly Republicans are saying, "Why are there so many people on food stamps?" You know, they're claiming the recession's over, but we know that most people on food stamps are, if they're getting work, it's low-wage work that doesn't pay enough to pay for food.
BILL MOYERS: The farm bill that failed in Congress last week would've spent $743.9 billion on food stamps and nutrition over the next ten years. Republicans wanted to cut that by some $20 billion over the same period, ten years. Given that we're spending $75 to $78 billion a year now on food stamps, do they have a case?
GREG KAUFMANN: Well, look, do they make a point that we’re spending too much? I mean, if they're comfortable saying two million people should be thrown off food stamps, 200,000 low-income children should not have access to meals, to their meals in school. Hey, they can make that argument all they want. I think it's out of sync with the values of this country.
BILL MOYERS: Here is what Representative Steve King of Iowa said in the debate on the floor at the time the farm bill was up for consideration. Quote, "When we see the expansion of the dependency class in America, and you add this to the 79 other means-tested welfare programs that we have in the United States, each time you add another brick to that wall it's a barrier to people that might go out and succeed." What does your own reporting find?
GREG KAUFMANN: Boy, I wish he would take a look at this great study done just in November of 2012, that was released. Dr. Hilary Hoynes at the University of California Davis and her colleagues looked at this issue of self-reliance and food stamps.
They looked at the rollout of food stamps county by county and adults who were born between 1956 and '81 who were born in disadvantaged families defined as parents not having a high school diploma. And they looked at those people in their adult outcomes who had had access to food stamps when they were young or even in utero.
And they found that the adults, all the adults had significant reductions in metabolic illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure. And even more remarkable to me was women in particular had higher earnings, higher income, higher education attainment and less reliance on welfare assistance in general.
All these years these guys have been saying it's promoting dependence, and it's been building self-reliance. I wish that the congressman from Iowa would take a look at that study.
BILL MOYERS: You watched the debate over the farm bill. You followed it very closely. What did you-- summarize it for me. What was going on there?
GREG KAUFMANN: You know, with some exceptions of people who are committed to telling the truth, we heard that this was about the deficit. But food stamps, over the next ten years, are projected to be one 1.7 percent of federal spending according to the Congressional Budget Office. We heard this was about fraud, but less than one cent on the dollar of food stamp spending is lost to fraud, less than one cent on the dollar.
And we heard fraud from the chairwoman Senator Stabenow, Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. We heard a lot about this was, you know, rural districts versus urban districts and welfare on the back of farmers. But you know what? The truth is Food Research and Action Center has shown that the percentage of households in rural districts participating in food stamps is the same as the percentage of households in urban districts.
So my big takeaway is that if we don't insist on a fact-based discussion, these are the kinds of absurdities that we're going to hear. And we're going to get bad bills. You mentioned the House bill, but even the Democratic bill started with $4 billion in cuts. Senator Gillibrand had a good amendment, restoring those cuts which she would pay for by reducing the profit that the government guarantees to crop insurance companies. They guarantee a 14 percent profit. She said, "Let's do 12 percent and not do the food stamp cuts." Makes sense. Was trounced by Democrats who didn't want to stand up to the chairwoman and maybe lose their projects in the final farm bill.
BILL MOYERS: And they weren't eager to stand up to agribusiness, either, were they? The big factory farms? Weren’t there still a lot of subsidies in that bill for big farms?
GREG KAUFMANN: Yeah, what we saw in A Place at the Table in terms of the agribusiness subsidies was consistent in this farm bill, too. And if you look at the donations and I think some other reporters have done this and I know the Environment Working Group has worked on this if you look at the political contributions in the House ag committees to both Democrats and Republicans, and those businesses are giving big bucks to those campaigns.
BILL MOYERS: What's the one most important thing you'd like for us to know about the issue as it plays out in Congress? What's going on up there when they're debating the farm bill and food stamps?
GREG KAUFMANN: Well, they're catering to the most powerful interests, just like seems like with pretty much all legislation. You mentioned the agribusiness interests, the crop insurance interests. We aren't talking about hunger and what does it mean in this country to commit to ending hunger.
BILL MOYERS: Why did you take this beat on as a commitment?
GREG KAUFMANN: Well, on a personal level, I think I had worked for a Boys and Girls Club in Ohio for a few years and got to know so many of the families there didn't know what to expect. But all the things I've been describing about how hard people work, I mean, that was the first thing that hit me, how hard they work two jobs, how they hard they work to arrange child care, how hard they work to get their kids to a safe place. And I got tired of sort of annual articles on poverty -- not at “The Nation,” “The Nation” has always been committed to covering it.
But when the new poverty statistics would come out, you'd see screaming headlines, "Record Poverty," oh my god, poverty, poverty. Very few of the articles actually interviewed people who were in poverty. You know, the fact that over one in three Americans, over 100 million Americans are living at just twice the poverty level, so just—
BILL MOYERS: Which is about what?
GREG KAUFMANN: Less than $36,000 for a family of three. That's crazy. I mean, because we have poverty defined at, you know, at such a low level, $18,000 for a family of three. But really, if you think about poverty as access to the basics that we, that everybody needs food, housing, healthcare, a decent job, you know, education, you know, we know it takes a lot more than that.
BILL MOYERS: What's your own sense of why this is the case, this vast inequality in a country as rich as ours? I mean, what does this say to you, the richest 400 people on the “Forbes” list made more from the stock market gains last year than the total amount of the food, housing and education budgets combined. I mean, the Walmart corporation made $17 billion last year, $17 billion.
GREG KAUFMANN: Right.
BILL MOYERS: Paying its workers so little, they have to use government programs to get by. In other words taxpayers are subsidizing Walmart's--
GREG KAUFMANN: Right.
BILL MOYERS: --low-income jobs.
GREG KAUFMANN: Yeah. I mean, I think not having organized labor plays a huge role in that, the declining unionization rate. I think, yeah, I mean, Walmart's a great example. Paying employees, helping them sign up for food stamps. I mean, I'm glad that people can get food stamps but, like, why not just pay a wage? I mean, there are a lot of corporations that are, you know, want to be involved in the fight against hunger. And the best thing they can do is get on board for fair wages.
So, yeah, I think there has been turning away from real people and what they're experiencing in this country. That's why I was so disappointed as crazy as the House farm bill was, the fact that the Democrats started with a $4.1 billion cut almost made me angrier, because they're supposed to be the party that's in touch with people's real experiences.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
GREG KAUFMANN: Well, like, why aren't they talking about that food stamps create nine dollars of economic activity for every five dollars in spending? Why aren't they talking about what Dr. Chilton talks about, the benefits socially, emotionally, cognitively, physically that's documented for children, and we care so much about children and what that means for their future opportunities. I mean, the Democrats are supposed to be connected to the experiences of ordinary Americans. And when you start with this defensive wimpy posture of, "Oh, okay, we'll cut this much," instead of fighting for what you believe in, we're in trouble.
BILL MOYERS: Our viewers, what would you like them to know about what you know about hunger in America?
GREG KAUFMANN: I would like them to know that there are great groups that they can get involved with who are trying to work on this. Witnesses to Hunger, Share our Strength is doing good stuff with communities to get school breakfast programs expanded, New York City Coalition Against Hunger, who, you know, Joel Berg was saying we need to do town halls. We've got to pressure all these congressmen to do town halls in every district to make it more visible.
Food Research and Action Center did a great lobbying day involving more people in the community. So, there are groups to get involved with that are really committed to using science and evidence to inform our policy and to pressure the candidates and make this issue more visible.
BILL MOYERS: We will link our viewers and readers on our website, BillMoyers.com, to those groups. And we will follow your work in “The Nation” and online. Greg Kaufmann, thank you very much for being with me.
GREG KAUFMANN: Thanks so much, Bill.
BILL MOYERS: At BillMoyers.com, we’ll link you to the website for the film A Place at the Table. And you can read analysis and opinion on this week’s historic Supreme Court rulings.
That’s all at BillMoyers.com. I’ll see you there and I’ll see you here, next time.
Moyers & Company 062113
BILL MOYERS: This week on Moyers & Company…
Privatizing America one statehouse at a time.
JOHN NICHOLS: Through ALEC, you can change the whole country without ever going to Washington, without ever having to go through a congressional hearing, without ever having to lobby on Capitol Hill, without ever having to talk to a president.
BILL MOYERS: The United States of ALEC.
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And by our sole corporate sponsor, Mutual of America, designing customized individual and group retirement products. That’s why we’re your retirement company.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome. What if you were a corporation that stood to make a bundle if oil from the Canadian tar sands was imported by the United States?
And what if you thought federal laws to protect the environment were going to stop that oil-importing from happening?
You’d set your sights on Washington, spread some money around inside the beltway, hire big gun lobbyists to wine and dine the politicians, and stroke the regulators to let the “free market” work, right? Right. You would do all that, but you wouldn’t stop there.
You’d also take your battle to the states, because if you can get laws that serve your interest in one state capitol after another, it might not matter much what Washington has to say about it. Especially in a time like this when our national government is polarized, paralyzed, and dysfunctional and an obstinate minority is determined to keep it that way.
Our 50 state capitols have long been the place where things happen. The taxes you pay, the roads you drive on, the quality of the air you breathe, and the water you drink; your right to privacy and your right to vote – these all bear the imprint of laws passed by the legislature in your home state.
This report is about how some of those laws get enacted thanks to an organization called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a consortium of corporations and state legislators with so much muscle they’re changing the country one law at a time, one state at a time.
In the case of those Canadian tar sands, ALEC reportedly turned to an oil-industry lobby for a bill that makes it hard for the states to slow the flow of Canadian crude into this country, no matter the environmental consequences.
This is how ALEC has worked for years, pushing changes state by state that could never have been achieved if they had been put to the test of open and broad popular support. ALEC has been so successful working its will behind closed doors in secret, that most Americans had never even heard of it until recently. ALEC had never even been subjected to scrutiny on national television until the documentary report we broadcast last fall. That was a collaboration between Okapi Productions and the Schumann Media Center that I head. Schumann supports independent journalists and public watchdog groups like the Center for Media and Democracy and Common Cause. Their investigators have been tracking the intersection between money and politics and finding ALEC squarely in the middle of it all across the country. There have been some new developments since our broadcast. So here’s that report, expanded and updated, on “The United States of ALEC.”
PAUL WEYRICH: They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. […] As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
ARIZONA DEM. REP. STEVE FARLEY: I’ve often told people that I’ve talked to out on the campaign trail when they say “state what?” when I say I’m running for the state legislature. I tell them that the decisions that are made here in the legislature are often more important for your everyday life than the decisions the president makes.
JOHN NICHOLS: If you really want to influence the politics of this country, you don’t just give money to presidential campaigns, you don’t just give money to congressional campaign committees. The smart players put their money in states.
FORMER PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: ALEC has forged a unique partnership between state legislators and leaders from the corporate and business community. This partnership offers businessmen the extraordinary opportunity to apply their talents to solve our nation’s problems and build on our opportunities.
LISA GRAVES: I was stunned at the notion that politicians and corporate representatives, corporate lobbyists, were actually voting behind closed doors on these changes to the law before they were introduced in statehouses across the country.
HOUSE SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER: ALEC has been, I think, a wonderful organization. Not only does it bring like-minded legislators together, but the private sector engagement in partnership in ALEC is really what I think makes it the organization that it is.
BOB EDGAR: Corporate influence is tainting the legislative process, particularly out across the states. And average Americans are paying the price.
BILL MOYERS: The American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC. It’s headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. But it operates in every capitol in the country. And its efforts produce some hundreds of new state laws each year.
JOHN NICHOLS: Well, I cover politics for a living. So, I've known about ALEC for a long time. I was always conscious of ALEC, but to be honest, not that excited about it.
MARY BOTTARI: I just thought it was, you know, folks got together and discussed their policy issues. That’s all I knew and that’s not unusual. And that’s how they portray themselves today. But now with this project we’ve learned all sorts of things that we didn’t know.
BILL MOYERS: In 2011, an investigation began cloak-and-dagger style at the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy.
LISA GRAVES: In the spring I got a call from a person who said that all of the ALEC bills were available and was I interested in looking at them. And I said I was.
BILL MOYERS: In early April, Lisa Graves, the head of the center, received a document drop from an ALEC insider.
LISA GRAVES: These are the bills that were provided by the whistleblower. That’s just the index.
BILL MOYERS: They would come to tell a story, she says, of how a seemingly innocuous nonprofit was actually fronting for some of the world’s most powerful corporations. ALEC had been changing the country by changing its laws – one state at a time.
LISA GRAVES: I remember the day well. It was first thing in the morning and I looked at the bills, and I was astonished. Until I saw the bills and the depth and breadth and duration, I did not have a full understanding of their reach and their impact.
BILL MOYERS: Graves was familiar with some of the bills because versions of them had already become law in many states. But she’d had no idea ALEC was behind them.
LISA GRAVES: Bills to change the law to make it harder for American citizens to vote, those were ALEC bills. Bills to dramatically change the rights of Americans who were killed or injured by corporations, those were ALEC bills. Bills to make it harder for unions to do their work were ALEC bills. Bills to basically block climate change agreements, those were ALEC bills.
BILL MOYERS: The Center for Media and Democracy is a small, nonprofit, investigative reporting group. Researchers here knew the documents they’d gotten had enormous implications. ALEC had been around for nearly four decades, but no one on the outside was even certain exactly who belonged to it. Graves and her team began to plow through ALEC documents, as well as public sources, to compile a list of the organizations and people who were or had been ALEC members. They found: hundreds of corporations, from Coca-Cola and Koch Industries to ExxonMobil, Pfizer, and Walmart; dozens of right-wing think tanks and foundations; two dozen corporate law and lobbying firms; and some thousand state legislators – a few of them Democrats, the majority of them Republican.
LISA GRAVES: After I spent some time really looking through the bills, I went to dinner with my colleague here, Mary Bottari, and her husband, John Nichols.
MARY BOTTARI: Lisa called us and said, “I have some stuff. I don’t know how much stuff I have, but I have some stuff. I think this is going to be a big story.”
JOHN NICHOLS: This was an incredible thing. You know, ALEC, this organization that's usually been, you know, very much behind the scenes, sort of the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
BILL MOYERS: The Center was about to go on a mission.
LISA GRAVES: I was determined to really break through the story of ALEC and how its operations actually work. I was also determined that this not be like a Wikileaks situation where there was no context and no real storytelling about them.
BILL MOYERS: But telling that story wouldn’t be easy. ALEC does its most important business behind closed doors. And just understanding all of the bills was a task in itself.
MARY BOTTARI: And we decided to call in the troops.
BILL MOYERS: University of Wisconsin professor Joel Rogers has written widely on public policy. He was enlisted to examine the bills affecting working people.
JOEL ROGERS: So one big thing that ALEC was excited about were these ‘living wage’ laws. Have you heard of that, that were passing around cities? And they would – they had a bill where they said, the states should preempt that. They should use their power to forbid that. So it’s not – it’s not cuddly, you know, let’s have some neighborhood grass roots lively democracy.
BILL MOYERS: For health care issues, they called in a former insurance company executive turned industry watchdog and whistleblower, Wendell Potter.
WENDELL POTTER: And even though I had known of the organization for a long time, I was astonished. Just about everything that I knew that the health insurance industry wanted out of any state lawmaker was included in that package of bills.
BILL MOYERS: Potter found among the ALEC documents a resolution to urge congress to privatize Medicare, a bill that would limit the amount of money a plaintiff could win in a medical malpractice suit, and another that would thwart any effort by the federal government to impose a health insurance mandate.
MARY BOTTARI: Also, in the ALEC archive there’s a giant stack of school choice bills and they’re fat bills, too. And it’s this little slice of school choice, and that little slice of school vouchers, and it’s basically a long-term agenda of how to privatize public education. And this was not our issue area. So I started asking friends, “Who can I talk to about school choice and school vouchers?” And everybody pointed to Julie.
BILL MOYERS: Julie Underwood, attorney and professor of education at the University of Wisconsin.
JULIE UNDERWOOD: I've done education policy for a long time, and many times said people are trying to defund and dismantle public education, but I'd never put all of these forces together, until I saw all of those documents. The kind of changes that ALEC is trying to impose on public education isn't really just mild reform, it's actually creating a drastically different kind of educational system than what we have now.
BILL MOYERS: ALEC describes itself as a non-partisan partnership of state legislators, members of the private sector and the general public, devoted to limited government, free enterprise, and Jeffersonian principles. Founded close to 40 years ago, it produces what it calls “model legislation” –proposed laws that its legislative members introduce into statehouses throughout the country as their own. ALEC says close to a thousand bills, based at least in part on its models, are introduced each year. And an average of 200 pass.
JOHN NICHOLS: ALEC doesn't run candidates. ALEC doesn't train candidates. ALEC doesn't really play politics, you know, on Election Day. ALEC plays the day after the election. They look at who got elected and they say, "You should join ALEC."
BILL MOYERS: ALEC’s members and representatives either refused or didn’t respond to interview requests for this story. But it’s not hard to get the group’s philosophical point of view. ALEC’s own videos help to do that.
STEPHEN MOORE: If you want to get more revenues out of rich people, the enduring lesson of the last 50 years is you cut their tax rates, you don’t raise them, and by the way, that’s an important lesson for you all as state legislators.
BOB WILLIAMS: This is really a great time to re-size government and really hold the feet to the fire.
LEONARD GILROY: Actually it’s a pleasure to be able to stand here today and actually say there are cities that very closely resemble what we envisioned many decades ago where you have pretty much the private sector running almost entirely everything in the city.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN: ALEC is a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests that eventually the relationship culminates with some special interest legislation and hopefully that lives happily ever after as the ALEC model. Unfortunately what’s excluded from that equation is the public.
BILL MOYERS: Democrat Mark Pocan, now a member of the U.S. Congress, was until recently a Wisconsin State Representative. He is one of ALEC’s loudest critics.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN: This is part of a national conservative movement […] that's involved in all 50 states, that introduces the same cookie cutter legislation state by state on behalf of their corporate paid members.
BILL MOYERS: By one count, nearly a third of Wisconsin’s lawmakers are ALEC members.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN: When you look around especially on the Republican side of the aisle, a lot of members of ALEC. Front row: ALEC. When you start going down to the chair of finance and some of the other members are all ALEC members, in fact the ALEC co-chair for the state – row by row you can point out people who have been members of ALEC over the years. There's two main categories they have. One is how to reduce the size of government. And the other half of it is this model legislation that's in the corporate good. In other words, there's a profit-driven legislation. How can you open up a new market? How can you privatize something that can open up a market for a company? And between those two divisions you are kind of getting to the same end goal, which is really kind of ultimate privatization of everything.
BILL MOYERS: Mark Pocan is something of an expert on ALEC – in fact, to learn as much about it as he could, he became a member.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN: What I realized is if you join ALEC for a mere hundred dollars as a legislator you have the full access like any corporate member.
BILL MOYERS: Those corporate members pay up to 25 thousand dollars for that privilege. For a first-hand look at how corporations interact with ALEC legislators, Pocan took himself to an ALEC conference.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN’S VIDEO BLOG: Hi, I’m state representative Mark Pocan and welcome to my video blog. I’m outside the Marriott on Canal Street in New Orleans at the ALEC convention, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN: That was where you watch the interaction of a room full of lobbyists— you know, free drinks, free cigars, wining, dining, many people just came from a dinner that was sponsored by some special interests, coming to a party that’s sponsored by special interests, so they can continue to talk about special interests.
LISA GRAVES: This is from the New Orleans convention. This includes a number of seminars that they held for legislators, including one called “Warming up to Climate Change: The Many Benefits of Increased Atmospheric CO2.”
BILL MOYERS: That 2011 ALEC conference, lo and behold, was sponsored by BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Shell, among others. Another event featured guns.
LISA GRAVES: This is the NRA-sponsored shooting event. For legislators and for lobbyists. Free.
BILL MOYERS: There was even one offering free cigars.
LISA GRAVES: Sponsored by Reynolds American, which is one of the biggest tobacco companies in the world, and the Cigar Association of America.
BILL MOYERS: Despite it all, ALEC says it’s not engaged in a lobbying effort. In fact, ALEC operates not as a lobby group, but as a nonprofit… a charity. In its filing with the IRS, ALEC says its mission is “education.” Which means it pays no taxes, and its corporate members get a tax write-off. Its legislators get a lot too.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN: In Wisconsin, I can't take anything of value from a lobbyist. I can't take a cup of coffee from a lobbyist. At ALEC, it's just the opposite. You know, you get there and you're being wined and dined by corporate interests, I can go down there, and be wined and dined for days in order to hear about their special legislation. I mean, the head of Shell Oil flew in on his private jet to come to this conference. The head of one the largest utility companies in the country was there on a panel. Utility company in 13 states – and here he is presenting to legislators. I mean, they clearly brought in some of the biggest corporate names in “special interestdom” and had that meeting with legislators because a lot of business transpires at these events.
BILL MOYERS: The most important business takes place behind closed doors. Researcher Nick Surgey, of the watchdog group Common Cause, would delve deep into internal ALEC documents to figure out what goes on inside ALEC’S Task Forces. There are currently eight of them, with a corporate take on every important issue in American life, from health and safety to the environment and taxation.
NICK SURGEY: They have corporate members and legislators who are members of these Task Forces. Corporations can pay to be members of a Task Force or multiple Task Forces depending on what interests they have and what legislation they want to promote.
BILL MOYERS: Surgey, who now works for the Center for Media and Democracy, has in some cases been able to determine which corporations sit on which task forces, producing which model bills.
NICK SURGEY: For example, there is a civil justice task force that mainly concerns access to the courts.
BILL MOYERS: In 2011, that Task Force included lobbyists from companies that could face serious legal penalties if their products are found to harm, or to kill. They included tobacco giant Altria and drug makers Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline. There’s another Task Force with a bill designed to exempt energy companies from disclosing some of the chemicals they inject underground. That Task Force has included companies that manufacture or inject plenty of those chemicals: Koch Industries, Chevron, BP, and the company that sponsored the bill at ALEC, ExxonMobil. Five states have introduced or passed versions of that ALEC bill. ALEC says “elected legislators,” not corporations, “fully control the model legislation process.” But Nick Surgey read ALEC’s operating procedures and found a different story.
NICK SURGEY: If the corporations do not vote for a model bill, it does not become an ALEC model. We've seen an example in the Telecommunications Task Force, where the legislators voted 17 to 1 to approve a telecoms bill, they – clearly the will of the legislators was for it to become an ALEC model. However the corporations voted and tied 8-8, which meant that it was killed, it didn't become an ALEC model.
LISA GRAVES: And I can understand why a corporate lobbyist wants to have an equal say to an elected representative. Who wouldn't? But the fact is that I have been a lobbyist before. It has never been the case that any – any legislator has said to me, "Here's the plan. You get an equal say to me and if you don't, if you don't agree, the bill doesn't go forward."
JERRY WATSON: There is a model bill for you to review if you might be interested in introducing such a measure.
BILL MOYERS: This is Jerry Watson, Senior Legal Counsel for the American Bail Coalition, speaking at an ALEC meeting in 2007.
JERRY WATSON: Now if you don't like the precise language of these suggested documents, can they be tweaked by your legislative counsel? Well absolutely. And will we work with them on that and work with you and your staff on that? Absolutely.
BILL MOYERS: This video provides a rare look at a private sector representative pitching a bill to ALEC’s legislative members.
JERRY WATSON: But I’m not so crazy so as not to know that you've already figured out that if I can talk you into doing this bill, my clients are going to make some money on the bond premiums. But if we can help you save crime victims in your legislative district and generate positive revenue for your state, and help solve your prison-overcrowding problem, you don't mind me making a dollar.
BOB EDGAR: These guys who are paying to be part of this organization, are not there just to be nice, they are there to get something out of it.
BILL MOYERS: The late Bob Edgar was the president of Common Cause until early this year. We interviewed him in 2012.
BOB EDGAR: Normally lobbyists have to register, normally corporations have to disclose their lobbying activity. But here under the guise of a nonprofit, these corporate lawyers and corporate officials are sitting side by side with mostly conservative state legislators. They’re shaping these bills.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN: When I went down to New Orleans, to the ALEC convention last August, there was a proposal to provide special needs scholarships. And lo and behold, all of the sudden I come back to Wisconsin and what gets introduced? Get ready, I know you’re going to have a shocked look on your face: a bill to do just that.
BILL MOYERS: That special needs bill was sponsored by 26 ALEC members in the Wisconsin legislature. But the real sponsor was ALEC. Mark Pocan knew because the bill bore a striking resemblance to ALEC’S model. Have a look.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN: If the average person knew that a bill like this came from some group like ALEC, you'll look at the bill very differently and you might look at that legislator a little differently about why they introduced it.
FORMER WISCONSIN DEM. REP. MARK POCAN ON LEGISLATURE FLOOR: This is not about education, this is not about helping kids with special needs, this is about privatization, this is about corporate profits, and this is about dismantling public education.
BILL MOYERS: The bill passed in the Wisconsin House but failed to make it through the Senate. However, in its 2012 “Education Report Card,” ALEC boasted that similar bills have become law in Oklahoma, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Ohio. And it’s not just special needs education: ALEC’s education agenda includes online schooling as well.
JULIE UNDERWOOD: There's a model ALEC bill called the “Virtual Public Schools Act,” which actually creates cyber academies…
MAN FROM ‘CONNECTIONS ACADEMY’ COMMERCIAL: When kids enroll in Connections Academy…
JULIE UNDERWOOD …Where children receive all of their instruction in front of a computer. They don't go to school, they don't interact with adults, they don't interact with other children. All of their instruction is received online.
TENNESSEE REPUB. SEN. DOLORES GRESHAM: Thank you Mr. Speaker. House Bill 1030 has to do with the establishment of virtual public schools.
BILL MOYERS: In 2011, an online schooling bill based on the ALEC model turned up in another state where ALEC has a powerful influence: Tennessee. It was introduced in both the State Senate and House by ALEC members. Like the special needs bill in Wisconsin, this one too had its opponents.
TENNESSEE DEM. REP. MIKE STEWART: We have never opened up our state to virtual schools broadly, and that’s why we have an army of lobbyists outside, many of you may have talked to them, trying right now to pass this virtual schools act. And the concern I have is that whether you like them or don’t like them, the fact is that virtual schools involve a dramatic transfer of sizable amounts of money to private sector for-profit companies.
BILL MOYERS: And there was something else that Julie Underwood found dramatic about ALEC’S model online education bill. In 2004, ALEC had credited two of the nation’s largest for-profit, online education corporations, Connections Academy and K-12 Inc., with helping to craft the “Virtual Schools Act.”
JULIE UNDERWOOD: You can actually follow the line where you see a corporate interest and this model piece of legislation that then was proposed pretty much in whole in Tennessee.
BILL MOYERS: K-12 then lobbied for the bill – and began to benefit almost immediately after it was passed in Tennessee.
JULIE UNDERWOOD: Lo and behold they get a no-bid contract to provide these services in Tennessee. And so it's not even a leap of faith or imagination. You can see the steps where you see the corporations creating a piece of model legislation, lobbying for it, being successful, and then having that accrue to their bottom line. What's the purpose of privatizing education in the United States? Because there are some things in the United States like courts, legislatures, public education, that really need to remain public. I mean that's the heart of what we are as a democracy, and what ALEC seems to be doing is taking public education and legislation and privatizing them.
LORI ROMAN: Individual liberty, free enterprise, limited government: whether you are a state legislator …
BILL MOYERS: The philosophy of privatization goes way back. It came to ALEC by way of conservative economist Milton Friedman.
LORI ROMAN: Every decision you have made on one of these issues has been influenced by Dr. Friedman's work, whether at that very moment you were realizing it or not. And it is my greatest honor to introduce you to Dr. Milton Friedman.
DR. MILTON FRIEDMAN: The real problem is how do we get to a system in which parents control the education of their children. Of course the ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.
BILL MOYERS: But ALEC was spawned, in 1973, in part as the brainchild of a very different conservative icon.
PAUL WEYRICH: We are talking about Christianizing America.
BILL MOYERS: The noted activist of the religious right: Paul Weyrich.
PAUL WEYRICH: We are talking about simply spreading the gospel in a political context.
CHIP BERLET: Paul Weyrich was the key strategist of the New Right and the right-wing backlash that began really strongly with the election of Ronald Reagan as president.
BILL MOYERS: Archivist Chip Berlet studies the right-wing movement.
CHIP BERLET: He was a Christian conservative who was also a political strategist and really wanted to roll back the role of government in the society and cut back taxes, cut back social security, cut back all of the social welfare programs that the Roosevelt administration had established.
PAUL WEYRICH: They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by…
BILL MOYERS: Weyrich recognized that too much democracy could endanger his movement.
PAUL WEYRICH: As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.
BILL MOYERS: Another of his contributions was the recognition that the movement would never succeed if it only focused on Washington.
JOEL ROGERS: He was not interested in the next cycle. He was not, certainly not interested in the next candidate, which is what the left or the liberals have always been obsessed by. You know, “Let’s just get Obama in or let’s do this or that and we’ll be saved.” No, it was always about building an infrastructure, building a real machine, especially at the state and local level.
PAUL WEYRICH: We have been far too presidentially focused, and far less focused on state and local conservatism, which is where it ought to begin.
CHIP BERLET: People say: “Well how do you know what they think?” It’s because they tell you!
BILL MOYERS: Berlet has collected ALEC documents going back several decades. Among them is a 1979 ALEC fundraising letter showing how quickly ALEC moved into the realm of practical politics. Its author: Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch.
CHIP BERLET: “I'm totally convinced that if you and I are to regain control of our schools our homes our businesses and our government it must be through a concerted effort on the state and local level, that is why I joined the American Legislative Exchange Council.”
As time goes on, ALEC draws more and more interest from corporate funders who begin to see it as a way to get their pet projects brought down to the state level. And so somewhere between around 1974 and 1980 you see ALEC transform into a very powerful organization with scores of corporations involved in it, putting out sample state policy legislation packets on many different issues. This is a list and it says some of our corporation and foundation donors, it's tiny type and it fills a lot of the page: the All State Foundation, the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Exxon, the Illinois Manufacturers Association, Gulf Oil, Iowa Power and Light. It's quite a list.
BILL MOYERS: Anti-government sentiment, Christian activist certainty, power both political and corporate… it was a potent mix that helped propel ALEC’S success. An early ‘80s annual report, for example, boasted that: “literally every state has been influenced by the work of ALEC … scores of ALEC’s model bills have been enacted into law throughout the country.”
FORMER PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN [1990]: The critical questions of our day will be decided by state legislators, how our children are educated, how we’re protected from crime. […] ALEC has forged a unique partnership between state legislators and leaders from the corporate and business community.
FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH [1990]: I value our partnership, our dynamic partnership, and look forward to working with you in the years ahead.
BILL MOYERS: ALEC’S 1995 report got specific: 978 bills introduced. 231 passed. Over half the states passed ALEC laws that would lengthen prison sentences. Meanwhile, bills to foster the rise of for-profit prisons were introduced in seven states. Eight states enacted bills creating medical savings accounts, which would shift costs from insurance companies to policy holders. So-called “Civil Justice” bills – which would limit the amount corporations pay if their products kill or injure someone, were “introduced or enacted more than 20 times.” ALEC’s head at the time boasted, “with our success rate at more than 20 percent, I would say that ALEC is a good investment. Nowhere else can you get a return that high." And as ALEC grew more influential, it became a home not just for corporations and conservative politicians, but for their fellow travelers, the billionaire bankrollers of the American right.
DAVID KOCH: Five years ago, my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start the Americans for Prosperity. And it’s beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organization.
JOHN NICHOLS: The Koch brothers: David and Charles Koch, two of the wealthiest men in America, two of the wealthiest men in the world, are incredibly active political players. They like to form organizations and help them to grow and to put ideas into the mix as the great funders of the structures of conservative and, frankly, pro-corporate politics. And they were very early funders of and active players with ALEC.
BILL MOYERS: David and Charles Koch, the billionaire businessmen behind a vast industrial empire, are also political activists with an agenda. Their companies and foundations have been ALEC members and funders for years.
JOHN NICHOLS: The Koch brothers get that if you really want to influence the politics of this country, you don't just give money to presidential campaigns. You don't just give money to congressional campaign committees. The smart ones, the smart players, put their money in the states, because it's state government that funds education, social services. And it taxes. And so if you want to play big-time politics, you play in 50 state capitols. And so through ALEC, you can change the whole country without ever going to Washington, without ever having to go through a congressional hearing, without ever having to lobby on Capitol Hill, without ever having to talk to a president.
BILL MOYERS: If anyone demonstrates the success of the Koch brothers and ALEC at the state level, it’s Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s governor is almost a household name today. The whole nation watched a grateful walker survive a bitter recall election fight in June of 2012.
WISCONSIN GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER: I want to thank God for his abundant grace.
BILL MOYERS: But before he hit the national scene, Walker spent close to a decade in the Wisconsin Legislature – where he became a member of ALEC.
JOHN NICHOLS: And in 2010 he ran not presenting himself as an ALEC alumni or as an ally of big corporations or big business people outside the state. He ran a very down-home campaign.
WISCONSIN GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER [Campaign Ad]: This is my lunch. I pack a brown bag each day so I can save some money to spend on, you know, the more important things in life, like sending my kids to college.
BILL MOYERS: John Nichols says that despite the folksy image, in the years leading up to Walker’s 2010 campaign, he had become a master political fundraiser.
JOHN NICHOLS: And he began to really forge incredibly close ties with a lot of corporate interests that he had first been introduced to in ALEC, individuals and groups like the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers were among the two or three largest contributors to Scott Walker's campaign for governor of Wisconsin.
WOMAN AT GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER’S SWEARING-IN CEREMONY: Please raise your right hand and repeat after me…
BILL MOYERS: The new governor moved quickly with a raft of ALEC-inspired bills. They included a law that made it easier to carry concealed weapons. There was a resolution opposing the mandated purchase of health insurance. And of course there was a law limiting corporate liability. The Wisconsin Legislature passed a so-called tort reform measure that included parts of eight different ALEC models. ALEC was elated, praising Walker and the legislature in a press release for their – quote – “immediate attention to reforming the state’s legal system.” But Scott Walker was also shooting for another big ALEC prize.
WISCONSIN GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER: Now some have questioned why we have to reform collective bargaining.
BILL MOYERS: Taking away workers’ collective bargaining rights: that had long been an ALEC goal. A candid video caught him talking about it with one of his financial backers, a billionaire businesswoman, Diane Hendricks.
WISCONSIN GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER: We’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions. ‘Cause you just divide and conquer.
BILL MOYERS: Despite an extraordinary public outcry, and after a brief but intense political struggle, Walker’s anti-collective bargaining measures became state law.
JOHN NICHOLS: It was ALEC's ideas, ALEC's values, that permeated the bill and un-did almost 50 years, more than 50 years, of collective bargaining law in Wisconsin.
BILL MOYERS: But again, remember this isn’t just about one state. It’s about every state. Take Arizona: practically an ALEC subsidiary. One report last year found that 49 of Arizona’s 90 legislators were members. And two-thirds of the Republican leadership were on ALEC Task Forces. The governor, Jan Brewer, was an ALEC member too.
ARIZONA DEM. REP. STEVE FARLEY: All of us here are very familiar with ALEC and the influence that ALEC has with many of the members here.
BILL MOYERS: ALEC’s domination of Arizona proved too much for State Representative Steve Farley.
ARIZONA DEM. REP. STEVE FARLEY: I just want to emphasize: it’s fine for corporations to be involved in the process. Corporations have the right to present their arguments, but they don’t have the right to do it secretly. They don’t have the right to lobby people and not register as lobbyists. They don’t have the right to take people away on trips, convince them of it, send them back here, and then nobody’s seen what’s really gone on and how that legislator’s gotten that idea and where is it coming from.
BILL MOYERS: Last year, Farley introduced a bill to force legislators to disclose their ALEC ties – just as the law already requires them to do with any lobbyist.
ARIZONA DEM. REP. STEVE FARLEY: All I’m asking in the ALEC Accountability Act is to make sure that all of those expenses are reported as if they are lobbying expenses and all those gifts that legislators received are reported as if they’re receiving the gifts from lobbyists, so the public can find out and make up their own minds about who is influencing what.
BILL MOYERS: Farley’s bill went nowhere. For most of its existence, ALEC stayed out of the national news. That changed in March 2012, when a gunshot sounded in the Florida night.
RACHEL MADDOW: Trayvon Martin, unarmed but for a bag of candy and iced tea that he was carrying…
BILL MOYERS: You’ll recall that the shooter in Trayvon Martin’s death was protected at first by Florida’s so-called “Stand Your Ground” law. “Stand Your Ground” was the work of the National Rifle Association. There’s its lobbyist standing right beside Governor Jeb Bush when he signed it into law in 2005. Although ALEC didn’t originate the Florida law, it seized on it for the “Stand Your Ground” model it would circulate in other states. Twenty-four of them have passed a version of it.
RASHAD ROBINSON: How did this law not only get in place in Florida, but around the country? And all the fingers kept pointing back to ALEC.
BILL MOYERS: When civil rights and grassroots groups learned about ALEC’s connection to Stand Your Ground laws, they were outraged.
RASHAD ROBINSON: ALEC doesn’t do its work alone, they do it with some of the biggest corporate brands in America.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Tell us what you know about what the impact has been of the Trayvon Martin case in terms of funding this organization which has been pushing these “Stand Your Ground” laws.
LISA GRAVES: This is a group that has lost funders in the last few weeks as people have learned about ALEC’s role in promoting “Stand Your Ground” laws.
BILL MOYERS: Before long, corporations were pulling out of ALEC, including Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, McDonald’s, Mars, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson. Caught in the glare of the national spotlight, ALEC tried to change the subject.
KAITLYN BUSS: You know, I think the entire debate needs to be reframed, and really what ALEC is, is a bipartisan association of state legislators. We have, you know, legislators of all political stripes coming together to talk about the most critical issues facing the states […] and trying to come up with the best solutions to face some of the problems that we’re having.
FOX NEWS ANCHOR MEGYN KELLY: Alright, so your point is it’s not a partisan organization.
BILL MOYERS: But the floodgates had opened. At least 40 corporations have fled ALEC, including many additional big names. Still, many companies have stayed in, and ALEC continues to strengthen ties to conservative groups. In 2012, it held a high-level, closed-door meeting with congressional conservatives in Washington to better coordinate policy goals.
JOHN NICHOLS: Here’s the interesting thing. This story isn't done. This is an ongoing fight in America, and it really gets us to a question of: how do you counter so much organized power, organized money, in our politics?
BILL MOYERS: Last year, Common Cause filed a complaint about ALEC with the Internal Revenue Service.
BOB EDGAR: We think there is tax fraud involved.
BILL MOYERS: The group is challenging ALEC’s tax-free status, claiming that ALEC “is a corporate lobbying group masquerading as a public charity.” And this year, Arizona legislator Steve Farley has re-introduced his ALEC Accountability Act, in the State Senate this time. Meanwhile, researchers continue to pore over ALEC’s documents, connecting the dots between its corporate patrons and compliant legislators.
MARY BOTTARI: State by state by state, citizens have to decide. Do they want legislators to go to fancy resorts and sit behind closed doors with lobbyists and write their bills and then bring them back and introduce them without exposing their ALEC roots, or do they want to do want to do something about that?
DOUG CLOPP: As more and more people become aware of the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council, they are becoming more aware that this corporate agenda does not match the values of the American People.
BILL MOYERS: Citizens are catching on. But ALEC is still everywhere. Watch for it: coming soon to a statehouse near you.
And sure enough, since that report last year, ALEC has kept on coming. Now, though, the word is out and ALEC can no longer hide in the shadows.
When its lawmakers and lobbyists got together last month in Oklahoma City to draft some more model bills, they were met by hundreds of protesters.
PROTESTORS: ALEC is not OK! ALEC is not OK!
BILL MOYERS: Firefighters, teachers, environmentalists, teamsters, religious leaders, all with one message:
PROTESTORS: ALEC is not OK! ALEC is not OK! ALEC is not OK!
BILL MOYERS: Let me tell you a little more about what ALEC has been up to. In the interest of a healthy environment, 29 states have laws requiring utilities to provide a portion of their electricity from renewable energy sources. The idea, of course, is to cut back on the use of fossil fuels, which, as everyone knows, contribute to global warming.
Yet even as headlines about climate chaos confront us every day, ALEC is doing its damnedest to undermine the use of clean, renewable energy.
Take a look at this. It’s called the “Electricity Freedom Act” – one of ALEC’s ‘model’ bills. Sounds great – who doesn’t like freedom? But the bill amounts to an effort by the fossil fuel industry to curtail the freedom of states to set Renewable Energy Standards, by repealing those state laws.
In the last two years, 21 of the 29 states with Renewable Energy Standards have seen bills proposed that would weaken or repeal them, over half of them pushed by lawmakers with confirmed ALEC ties. In two states – Ohio and New Hampshire – such bills have already become law.
It will hardly surprise you that ALEC gets millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry, or that companies that have served on the ALEC task force that produced the “Electricity Freedom Act” include representatives of – hold your breath – ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Koch Industries.
Now ALEC doesn’t like all this to be publicized. It doesn’t like exposure to sunshine at all. In fact, they’ve recently begun including fine print on their materials saying they believe the documents are, quote, “… not subject to disclosure under any state Freedom of Information or Public Records Act.”
Got it? Take another look: “…not subject to disclosure under any state Freedom of Information or Public Records Act.”
So, when your elected legislators are meeting with corporate lobbyists behind closed doors, ALEC thinks you – the public, the voter – have no right to know what they have done or even talked about.
That’s not all. ALEC thinks that even the name “ALEC” has gotten far too much attention. So it’s come up with a new strategy, described recently by its chief flack in a memo to his members.
Quote: “You May Have Noticed We are Limiting the Use of the Acronym ‘ALEC’… Over the last year, the word ‘ALEC’ has been used to conjure up images of a distant, mysterious, Washington alphabet organization of unknown intentions…”
So, “The organization has refocused on the words ‘Exchange’ and ‘Council’ to emphasize our goal of a broad exchange of ideas to make government work better and more efficiently.”
Ah yes, but better and more efficient government for whom? ALEC’s “Private Enterprise Advisory Council” still contains a who’s who of elite corporate power; its health care agenda still calls for privatizing Medicare; its economic agenda for tax cuts for the rich; and its education agenda for more public money going to private schools.
And there’s always the spirit of Paul Weyrich…
PAUL WEYRICH I don’t want everybody to vote…
BILL MOYERS: Who as you will remember wanted less voter turnout, not more. That spirit suffused ALEC’s sponsorship last year of so-called “Voter Reform” measures, which would have made it harder for young, elderly, and low-income Americans to vote.
And for sheer audacity in the capture of government, you can’t beat what happened under the capitol dome in South Dakota earlier this year: ALEC allies decided the cost of sending some state legislators to wine and dine with those corporate lawyers and lobbyists should be paid by taxpayers. But that wasn’t enough. Those same South Dakota taxpayers now have to pay ALEC dues for legislators who are members.
It’s like tipping the thief for picking your pocket.
But give them credit where credit’s due: the political, religious and corporate right conceived a brilliant strategy for advancing their agenda by going to the states. Brilliant, but disingenuous. They choose to talk about “free markets” when in fact their member corporations prefer to arrange the markets to their advantage. They boast that “government closest to the people” is, quote, “fundamentally, more effective, more just, and a better guarantor of freedom than the distant, bloated federal government in Washington, D.C."
But what is “just” about laws written to benefit powerful organized interests at the expense of everyone else? What is just about going to great lengths to make sure “the people” don’t know who is writing those laws? If getting closer to “the people” is really your goal, it’s curious behavior to cover your tracks, keep your sessions closed to the press, and do most of the “people's work” in secret.
No, when all is said and done, the pro-capitalist magazine “Businessweek” got it right: quote, “part of ALEC’s mission is to present industry-backed legislation as grass-roots work.”
But their cover’s been blown…
PROTESTORS: ALEC’s got to go! Hey, hey! Ho, ho!
BILL MOYERS: The protests are growing, and the story’s not going away. We'll be reporting on it in the months ahead.
PROTESTORS: ALEC’s got to go!
BILL MOYERS: Coming up on Moyers & Company: “A Place at the Table.”
RAJ PATEL: The reason people are going hungry is not because of a shortage of food, it’s because of poverty.
BILL SHORE: One out of every two kids in The United States at some point in their childhood will be on food assistance.
LESLIE NICHOLS: I was one of those kids that was hungry. It messes with you.
JAMES MCGOVERN: The average food stamp benefit was $3 a day. There are people who are living on that and you really can’t.
MARION NESTLE: If you have a limited amount of money to spend you’re going to spend it on the cheapest calories you can get and that’s processed foods.
BARBIE IZQUIERDO: My dream is to go to college but I can’t tell my kids, “I’ll make sure you guys eat in two years.” I’m struggling to even feed my kids every day.
Put that in there. Okay, that was a bad idea.
JANET POPPENDIECK: As many as 50 million Americans rely on charitable food programs.
ADAM APPELHANZ: I haven’t received a pay raise in four years and what I used to spend on a month in groceries now gets me about two weeks.
PASTOR BOB WILSON: It’s amazing how the need has increased.
JEFF BRIDGES: Charity is a great thing, but it’s not the way to end hunger.
JAMES MCGOVERN: We’re weakening our nation.
ROSIE: I don’t really know what to do.
I struggle a lot and most of the time it’s because my stomach is really hurting. My teacher tells me to get focused and she told me to write focus on my little sticker and every time I look at it and I’m like oh I’m supposed to be focusing. I start yawning and then I zone out and I’m just looking at the teacher and I look at her and all I think about is food. So I have these little visions in my eyes. Sometimes when I look at her I vision her as a banana so she goes like a banana and everybody in the class is like apples or oranges and then I’m like oh great.
KRISTI JACOBSON: What struck me so much about Rosie is that her story sort of embodied everything about this issue which is that while she's experiencing this hunger and food insecurity it's affecting her self-esteem, it's affecting her ability to learn, which is very upsetting. But at the same time she has this incredible spirit which gives you this, you know, some feeling of hope and inspiration. So she's just an incredible young girl.
MARIANA CHILTON: You can’t look at Rosie and see oh, she's hungry. So where do you see it? You see it in school performance, their ability to get along with others, their ability to pay attention for children of school age--
KRISTI JACOBSON: Attendance.
MARIANA CHILTON: --and attendance. If we could think about poverty during childhood as a type of a disease, if we could pay as much attention to poverty for children as we pay attention to infectious disease we might be able to do something in this country.
BILL MOYERS: And Baldemar Velasquez, the people’s organizer.
BALDEMAR VELASQUEZ: "Son, I got to ask you a question." I say, "Yeah, go head." He says, "Well, you're the only person I've ever had here as a volunteer that hasn't complained about the rats. Why is that?" So I told him my rat story, that I grew up with the rats.
The couch that in the living room was my bed and my brother's bed. He slept on one end. And I slept on the other end. And that couch was pushed up against a window overlooking the front porch. And there was a crack underneath the pane. And that's where the rats would come in at night.
So at night, you'd hear the scratching along the back of that couch. And we knew there was a rat going to get up on the top up there. And we knew that the rat had to jump on the seat where we sleeping before he got on the floor. So when we'd hear the scratching on the back of that couch, we'd kick each other and pull the blanket taut. And, to make kind of like a trampoline for the rat.
And the rat would jump down on the blanket. And when we'd hear that, we'd go with our fists underneath, boom, like that, to see how far we could make the rat fly. And that was our game, to see how far we could make the rat fly.
But the man says, he looked kind of stunned. And he said, "Good Lord, son, why aren't you doing something for your own people?" And that's what provoked the thought. I said, "I need to go back and start organizing the migrant workers and try to follow the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement to speak for people and organize them so they can speak for themselves."
BILL MOYERS: Meanwhile at BillMoyers.com we’ll show you how to keep track of ALEC and you’ll also find a map that marks the state legislators that are ALEC members. We’ve been updating the map since we first launched it, but we want your help filling in the blanks by calling your local representatives and asking if they belong.
Become a citizen journalist on BillMoyers.com. I’ll see you there and see you here, next time.
[Credits]
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