Tag Archives: common cause

TODAY: 14 Protests in U.S. Cities against Koch bid for Newspapers

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Help bolster today’s fourteen protests to keep Tribune Company newspapers out of the Koch Brothers’ hands: Call Tribune Company and urge the company to reject the Kochs’ offer!

Add your voice: Click for directions to call Tribune Company and tell them to say no to Koch!

Photos below. Today, protests are being held in fourteen U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, to amplify over 500,000 petition signatures to Tribune Company not to sell its newspapers to Koch Industries. Tribune Company publishes the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant, and four other daily national papers, as well as several weekly papers including Spanish publications.

The protests are being held outside the headquarters of Tribune Company’s major national newspapers, its TV stations, and cities with offices of companies who purchased Tribune Co after it filed for bankruptcy–Oaktree Capital Management (L.A.), Angelo Gordon & Co (New York City) and JP Morgan Chase (Boston).

Greenpeace has joined SEIU, Forecast the Facts, Daily Kos, Courage Campaign, Free Press, The Other 98%, DeSmogBlog, Common Cause’s national, Maryland and California chapters, CREDO Action, Working Families and 99 Uniting as the Coalition to Save our News. Continue reading →

Coalition to Duke Energy: Dump ALEC!

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SIGN OUR PETITION TELLING DUKE ENERGY TO DUMP ALEC!

Today Greenpeace joins a coalition of environmental, civil rights and democracy reform groups that are calling upon Duke Energy to join the 38 other companies that have left the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC — see the letter the coalition sent to CEO Jim Rogers this morning.

Why, you ask? And WTF is ALEC??

ALEC is a corporate bill mill–it brings companies like Duke, Exxon, Koch Industries, Phillip Morris and other bad actors together with conservative state lawmakers in order to draft laws. You may have noticed how certain controversial state laws spread like wildfire across the country, including voter suppression, union-busting bills, attacks on clean energy programs, and other items you wouldn’t expect the average person to ask their politicians to do. ALEC was behind all of these on behalf of its corporate members, who are eager to dodge lobbying laws and get relatively cheap access to our Statehouses. Continue reading →

ALEC slips Exxon fracking loopholes into new Ohio law

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Wake up and smell the frack fluid! But don’t ask what’s in it, at least not in Ohio, cause it’s still not your right to know.

Ohio is in the final stages of making an Exxon trojan horse on hydrofracking into state law, and it appears that the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) connected Exxon’s lawyers with co-sponsors of Ohio Senate Bill 315: at least 33 of the 45 Ohio legislators who co-sponsored SB 315 are ALEC members, and language from portions of the state Senate bill is similar to ALEC’s “Disclosure of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid Composition Act.”

…disclosure of fracking fluids? On behalf of ExxonMobil?!

Frack fluids include unknown chemicals that gas drillers mix with sand and large amounts of water. The mixture is pumped underground at high pressure in order to retrieve gas and oil by fracturing shale formations. These are the chemicals that have caused widespread concern among residents near gas fracking operations, concerns echoed by doctors who don’t know how to treat patients harmed by exposure to chemicals that oil companies keep secret. Oil companies like XTO Energy, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, the first company lined up to drill in Ohio’s Utica shale. Continue reading →

What’s on ALEC’s polluter agenda tomorrow?

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Tomorrow, the American Legislative Exchange Council–known as ALEC–will host their 2012 Spring Task Force summit in Charlotte, NC. At tomorrow’s meeting, the corporate front group will round up its various committees and prepare to peddle new state-level legislation to attack clean energy laws, protect polluting industries, privatize education, and suppress voters, among other big business schemes.

Need a refresher on ALEC? It’s the group that brings state legislators to the table with representatives from major corporations in the sectors of energy, healthcare, tobacco, private prisons, and other groups to manipulate state politics to maximize their profits and limit their liabilities. These companies help craft template bills for state legislators to bring home and introduce in their respective statehouses.

Documents obtained and published by Common Cause now give us a roster of specific attendees at ALEC’s environmental meetings, a consortium of state legislators and a who’s who of the most offensive polluting political heavyweights including: Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Duke Energy and Peabody.  Participating legislators know well they’re walking into a dirty party, sometimes using state taxpayer money to foot the bill.

The corporations that fund ALEC are well known for their political spending on both sides of the aisle. ALEC funders include Koch Industries, known for its coordinated political spending against President Obama, and Duke Energy, which is laying down a ten million dollar line of credit to host the Democratic National Convention in their hometown of Charlotte, NC. But these polluting companies are co-conspirators under the banner of ALEC, where partisan politics are set aside to focus on the mission of destroying environmental protections, clean energy competition and liability for crimes against both people and the ecosystems sustaining us.

So what exactly are ALEC and these oil, coal, chemical and public relations companies focusing on tomorrow? Continue reading →