The post NRA takes its “no-gun-restrictions-ever” argument to the United Nations appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Apparently, the National Rifle Association isn’t content merely to enforce its no-gun-restriction marketing strategy on Americans. [Notice that I’m not calling it an ideology. It’s a marketing strategy disguised as an ideology.] Oh, no. The NRA wants to prevent limits on gun sales world-wide—as evidenced by an intense lobbying effort the gun-manufacturers’ group is making in the United Nations. Yes, you read that right: The United Nations.
At issue is the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). According to the Washington Post, “the treaty would require countries to determine whether weapons they sell would be used to commit serious human rights violations.”
The UN has been trying to pass the ATT for years. Its provisions would cover battle tanks, artillery, combat aircraft, warships and missiles, as well as small arms and light weapons.
Human rights activists say that the ATT would reduce the trafficking of weapons, including small arms, such as the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle, to outlaw regimes and rebel groups engaged in atrocities against civilian populations.
The treaty is a common-sense alignment of the interests of governments, law-abiding citizens and individuals all over the world, who deserve the right to live free from harm,” says Amnesty International. “Any step toward restraining the illicit sale and transfer of weapons used to commit horrific crimes is a good move forward, and the world could use a lot more steps in the direction of ending human rights abuses.”
The NRA doesn’t like it, for all the usual reasons–the main one, unspoken of course, is that the NRA’s corporate sponsors simply want to sell as many guns as possible in a completely unregulated market. The reason quoted publicly is that “the treaty would imperil Americans’ right to bear arms.” In 2011 and 2012, Senate Republicansintroduced a resolution urging President Obama not to sign the treaty and calling on Congress to withhold funding to implement any part of it, saying it fails to “expressly recognize the … right to keep and to bear arms” and that its “vague” criteria for assessing the potential consequences of arms transfers could open up the United States to lawsuits.
That bill reflects the U.N.-conspiracy, “world-government” meme that right-wing conservatives have been serving up for as long as the United Nations has existed. Need I point out that the U.N. Charter specifically prohibits the organization from infringing on national sovereignty? Sigh.
The NRA also contends that ATT limits what the NRA calls “civilian weapons.” Not a valid argument, say pro-ATT advocates:
The NRA claim that there is such a thing as ‘civilian weapons’ and that these can and need to be treated differently from military weapons under the Arms Trade Treaty is—to put it politely—the gun lobby’s creativity on full display. There is no such distinction. To try to create one would render the treaty inoperative, as anyone could claim that he or she was in the business of trading ‘civilian weapons.’
The Obama administration has wavered on the treaty. In 2012, after initially backing the ATT, President Obama backed down, presumably as a result of election-year pressures. In 2013, he has once again signaled his support for the ATT.
Some supporters, such as progressive Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), like the treaty a lot—but note that it lacks enforcement powers, and want it to be even stronger. According to The Hill, advocates would like to see the current draft strengthened to:
• Ban arms transfers if exporting countries “know or should have known of a substantial risk” that the weapons would be used to violate humanitarian law;
• Establish clear standards that countries will have to use when assessing the risk that the weapons they export could be misused; and
• Create a comprehensive export-import control regime for guns and ammunition.
The NRA’s lobbying activities at the United Nations are not new. The NRA has had a lobbying presence at the UN for nearly 20 years. When the ATT was first introduced at the UN in 2006, the NRA was there to shoot it down. The NRA also successfully lobbied the Bush Administration to oppose the ATT. [That probably didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting.]
You have to wonder if the NRA sees the tide turning against it on the gun free-for-all in the U.S., so it’s turning its attention to the wider world market, where it can sell more guns–sort of like what happened to the tobacco industry. We should also note that, while the NRA is adamantly opposed to the [false] notion that the United Nations might dictate gun-ownership policy to the United States, it’s perfectly comfortable attempting to dictate what the United Nations can and cannot do. [That particular hypocrisy is not exclusive to the NRA. of course.]
In any case, what the United Nations is calling “final negotiations” on the Arms Trade Treaty are taking place during the third week of March 2013. The question is, who will call the shots?
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]]>The post Which “freedoms” are legislators protecting? appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>“We’ve trended toward more freedoms for law-abiding citizens.” That’s how Missouri State Senator Brian Munzlinger recently described the outlook of the Missouri legislature.
I have been thinking about which citizens have been receiving these “freedoms.” A partial list of some of these “freedoms,” enacted and proposed, helps me arrive at the answer:
Now it becomes clear: Follow the money. Our legislators are protecting the groups that put and keep them in office. They are protecting:
But what freedoms do we, the law abiding citizens of the state of Missouri—and other states, too—really need? Freedom from the grip of the moneyed few. We need to have our voices heard above the din of the lobbyists.
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]]>The post Get re-elected. Resign immediately. Go to work for a lobbying group. Repeat. appeared first on Occasional Planet.
]]>Political manipulation and cynicism hit a new low in December 2012, when, just 30 days after being re-elected, Jo Ann Emerson, the ten-term Congressperson from Missouri’s 8th district announced that she was resigning her seat in Congress to become president and chief executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. According to the New York Times, “the electric cooperative, which lobbies for electric utility companies, spent more than $1.7 million to support candidates, most of them Republicans, in the 2012 Congressional elections, according to federal elections data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.”
[The Times reports that the lobbying group she’s joining did not contribute to Emerson’s campaign. That’s at least some comfort to cynics like me, who assumed otherwise.] But she did manage to uphold the fine revolving-door tradition of lawmakers who cash in by going to work for a lobbying organization—with the added twist of not waiting until after one’s term in Congress is over.
One could write off Emerson’s move as a uniquely dickish tactic, motivated by greed and personal ambition– punctuated by disregard for ethics and a who-cares attitude about the costs it will engender for taxpayers–but, unfortunately, it’s not an anomaly. It’s just the most high-profile in a rash of similar, jerk-the-voters-around, post-election abdications. I’m not sure anyone has been keeping close historical tabs on this phenomenon, but it certainly seems like the post-November-2012-election period could be setting a record for the most resignations by newly elected legislators.
Similar shenanigans happened at the state level, as well. Democratic State Representative Bryan Quirk announced his resignation from the Iowa State Legislature on Nov. 28, 2012, less than a month after he was re-elected—by a landslide. Instead of serving in the legislature, Quirk, an electrician, will be general manager of the New Hampton, Iowa, Municipal Light Plant. Apparently, his new employer asked him to quit the legislature. Quirk’s resignation will trigger a special election.
Nearby, in Illinois, 97th District State Representative Jim Watson (R-Jacksonville) resigned his seat just days after his re-election in November. Watson has been in the state legislature for more than 10 years. His new job title is executive director of the Illinois Petroleum Council. The group represents–a genteel term for “lobbies for”–oil refineries, marketers and others in the industry. GOP chairmen in his district will decide on his replacement.
But the grand prize goes to Georgia, where a slew of just-elected people jumped ship almost before the state’s election authority could hit “save” on the official election spreadsheet. Georgia’s predicament is reflected in a recent article entitled, “Doesn’t Anyone Want to Serve in the Office They Were Elected To?” The author puts it this way:
In the weeks since the Nov. 6 general election determined the winners of 236 seats in the General Assembly, we have seen people resigning all over the state before they could even take the oath of office.
It’s not unusual to see someone resign from public office midway through a term; that happens quite often. In these instances, people are quitting before they have served one day in the office for which the voters picked them.
John Bulloch resigned after being reelected to his Senate seat in a southwest Georgia district, but he at least had a valid reason. He had some health issues related to his hospitalization for meningitis.
Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers (R-Woodstock) stepped down from the Senate when he was offered a high-paying position with Georgia Public Broadcasting.
When Rogers resigned, a special election was called to fill his Senate seat. One of the candidates who qualified for that election was state Rep. Sean Jerguson (R-Holly Springs), who then had to resign from his House seat. That required another special election to replace Jerguson in the House.
The early resignations didn’t stop there. Robert Stokely, the Coweta County State Court solicitor, was elected to a House seat in the general election but resigned from that position six weeks later before he could be sworn into office.
In some of these instances, a state official will be appointing a replacement for the outgoing legislator. That strategy conveys an aura of incumbency on the successor making him or her harder to beat in the next election. An appointed successor also conveniently avoids the need to run a campaign and subject himself to the scrutiny and approval [or disapproval] of actual voters.
In other cases, there will be a special election to fill out the unfinished term. That’s the scenario in Missouri, where replacing Emerson means holding an election with an estimated price tag of $1 million.
Part of what makes these post re-election resignations so galling is that they flout common-sense ethics. In addition, they’re obviously calculated to keep the seat safe for one’s own party, without all that messiness of making your successor actually run for the job. Equally stomach-turning is the resigning politicians’ total disregard for the economic consequences to taxpayers of their decisions.
Clearly, the old revolving-door gambit—in which legislators and agency officials become lobbyists, and lobbyists become legislators and regulators—lives on. Periodically, public opinion pushes federal and local governments to put in place rules that limit this behavior. One example was the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, which has been updated several times. But a recent study shows that about 57 percent of lobbyists who move through the revolving door from Capitol Hill into the private sector fail to adequately report their former government employment as mandated by the act.
And that’s just on the federal level. According to , the National Association of State Legislatures:
Thirty-five states have a ‘cooling-off period’ before a former legislator can come back to work at the legislature as a lobbyist. …Statutes range from Maryland, where the ban is until the conclusion of the next regular session, to seven states—Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York and Oklahoma—that ban former legislators for two years.
But fifteen states have no restrictions. In Minnesota, the ban only applies to House members, not those in the Senate. Ohio formerly had a one year ban, but the law was overturned by a federal district court in 2010.
Is the post-election free-for-all that we have just witnessed an indicator of a new trend of shamelessness and ethics-free behavior,? One can only hope that, in our lifetimes, our collective, moral pendulum will swing back toward higher expectations. I’m not holding my breath.
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]]>The post Wising up to ALEC: better late than never appeared first on Occasional Planet.
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A new website—ALEC Exposed—is shedding much-needed light on the politically conservative American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC]. Launched on July 13, 2011 by the Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC Exposed offers:
…a trove of more than 800 “model” bills and resolutions secretly voted on by corporations and politicians through ALEC. These bills reveal the corporate collaboration reshaping our democracy, state by state.
Until ALEC Exposed came along, these “model” bills were available only to members on ALEC’s password-protected site.
ALEC bills, which largely benefit the organization’s corporate members, have been introduced in legislatures in every state—but without disclosing to the public that corporations previously drafted or voted on them through ALEC.
Before ALEC Exposed published these bills, it was difficult to trace the numerous controversial and extreme provisions popping up in legislatures across the country directly to ALEC and its corporate underwriters.
The Center obtained copies of the bills after one of the thousands of people with access shared them, and a whistle-blower provided a copy to the Center.
The bills and resolutions, says ALEC Exposed, affect worker and consumer rights, education, the rights of Americans injured or killed by corporations, taxes, health care, immigration, and environmental issues. The Center for Media and Democracy has analyzed and annotated the bills and resolutions to help readers understand what the bills do, which often is the exact opposite of their public-relations-shaped and frequently Orwellian-double-speak titles.
Only by seeing the depth and breadth and language of the bills can one fully understand the power and sweep of corporate influence behind the scenes on bills affecting the rights and future of every American in every single state.
ALEC Exposed invites readers to engage in the analysis and dialogue—not just through comments, but as active analysts and reporters. The site encourages readers to report on ALEC-created bills in their own states and to document the corporations, organizations and politicians who are backing them. To this end, the site offers a Wikipedia-like format open to contributors’ findings and observations.
A good example of an analysis of how ALEC’s model bills have shaped state legislation–in Missouri– has just been published at Progress Missouri.The report not only shows the direct connection between ALEC’s model language and specific bills introduced in the Missouri Legislature, it also names names, revealing which state legislators backed the ALEC-dictated bills.
All of the above is the good news. The bad news is that ALEC is far from new and has been molding [even that seems too weak a word] state legislative agendas and votes for many years. [In August 2011, ALEC is holding its 38th–yes, 38th!– annual meeting, this time in New Orleans.] I learned this disheartening fact a few months ago, when the topic of ALEC arose during a casual conversation I had with a former Missouri legislator known as a stalwart progressive. While the legislator was glad that people were wising up to ALEC and its far-right and far-reaching agenda, she was bemused by leaders of progressive blog world announcing that they had suddenly “discovered” this supposedly new and nefarious political force. To illustrate the belatedness of the left’s new-found awareness of ALEC, she shared a story: Many years ago, when she was a political newbie, she was invited to attend a regional meeting of ALEC, which she knew little about. A much savvier colleague clued her in, she remembered, and advised her, in no uncertain terms, to stay as far away from that meeting as possible. She didn’t attend, but at least she knew what ALEC was up to, and that was long before the rest of us got the memo. Back then, “reasonable” people were shocked—shocked—at Hilary Clinton’s seemingly bitter and paranoid remark about a vast, right-wing conspiracy. [In the 90s, I would have had to encase that phrase in quotation marks. At least we’re finally over that.]
Clearly, progressives have been asleep at the wheel, while ALEC has been wide-awake, hyper-active, injecting itself with right-wing growth hormones and muscling —quite effectively—its corporate-sponsored, anti-democracy agenda. It makes you wonder: What else are we missing, ignoring or denying?
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