By now, hopefully, you've come across the website ALEC Exposed, the Center for Media and Democracy's wiki resource featuring model legislation after model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). CMD describes what the site is all about:
On July 13, 2011, the Center for Media and Democracy unveiled this trove of over 800 "model" bills and resolutions secretly voted on by corporations and politicians through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These bills reveal the corporate collaboration reshaping our democracy, state by state.
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 our publication of this trove of bills, it has been 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 whistleblower provided a copy to the Center.
The other day while scouring Facebook I wound up on the additional bills tab of ALEC Exposed. I hadn't yet looked through any of the site's bills or blogged about its existence. In a way, you don't need to read the bills to know what they say, it can be assumed. Laws designed to achieve nauseating levels of corporate favoritism, blind privatization and the abolition of workers' rights are the backbone of the ALEC playbook. Their inclinations are not news. Still, I decided to click a random law as if closing my eyes and reaching my hand in to a cookie jar filled with socio-political smut and leeches.
I expected to find something mundane in its predictably free enterprise adorations, something aimed at strangling collective bargaining or profiting from the inmate trade. But what I discovered, with just one click, was even more nuanced in its abhorance: it was the Licensing and Certification of Businesses and Professionals Act, a piece of model legislation that "would require that all activities related to the licensing of businesses, professionals and tradepersons by the State and its subdivisions be conducted in the English language."
WOW. Just wow.
Nevermind that Census Bureau projections from 2008 indicate that minorities -- scores of whom are Spanish-speaking -- will be the majority in the U.S. by 2050. Nevermind that minorities already account for nearly half of all births in the United States. Never mind that the U.S. sports the third largest spanish-speaking population in the world (see graph). And nevermind that the list of cities where Hispanics are the majority population is longer than the unemployment line in Detroit last week and includes San Antonio, population 1.3 million. Colorado has 39 such cities. Florida has more than twice that number and California more than four times the figure.
Granted, the law was drafted in 1995 (it was pulled from the publication titled "Volume 1: Sourcebook of American State Legislation 1995). Surely statisticians and economists were already aware of the developing multiculturalism of the land of the free.
The main provision of ALEC's one page business-and-culture-don't-mix mandate reads as follows:
All procedures, applications, documents, attests, and other materials related to the licensing or certification of businesses, professionals and tradepersons in the State shall be conducted, printed and recorded in the English language; and any such files, licenses, certifications or other recorded information maintained by the State related to the licensing and certification of said licensees shall be available to the general public.
This gives new meaning to the term private sector. This is the exclusive sector, where your money ain't green and your document's no good unless it's drafted in Uncle Sam's English. Free enterprise isn't very free with ALEC at the helm. No way, Jose.
Perhaps most perverted of all the fear-based phraseology of this document is the filing of the bill under Part VI: Empowerment, Opportunity and Urban Poverty. One distinction more comical than the next when viewed through the lens of blatant barriers to entry, this chapter of the ALEC playbook seeks to subvert the very concept of American opportunity and to replace it with the forced isolationist nationalism reserved for rogue fundamentalists.
If only ALEC could re-segregate the water fountains of San Antonio's City Hall. Then we might all be able to free ourselves from the shackles of urban poverty.
If you bought the barfbag app, click to read more "ADDITIONAL BILLS".