Jem Sullivan
When you think of America’s great Constitutional originators, names like Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, and Franklin come to mind. And, of course, Abbott.
In early 2016, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the multimillionaire protégé of the Koch brothers and darling of the American Legislative Exchange Council, revealed to a startled nation that he has penned not one but nine (!) new amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
Forget the Bill of Rights, Abbott is proposing a Bill of Sale, effectively transferring the title of our national government from The People to The Plutocrats. Abbott announced in early December that he is renewing his push for a constitutional convention to implement his agenda. His proposed “tweaks” include outlawing government actions that restrain corporate abuse of workers and consumers, and preventing future Congresses from meeting crucial public needs such as health care, voter rights, and the maintenance of our national infrastructure.
One could call Abbott’s Founding Father pretensions ludicrous—which they are—but he’s not the driving force behind this diabolical, ideological tampering with our Constitution and our nation’s ideals of fairness and justice. ALEC, the Kochs, and their corporate cohorts are the real authors of Abbott’s Bill of Sale.
Convening an explosive convention, permitted under Article V of the Constitution, is a longtime dream of the elites who seek to establish an American Koch-istan, and ALEC is spearheading a hodgepodge of rightwing groups that—believe it or not—are alarmingly close to succeeding. An ALEC/Koch affiliate with the cumbersome acronym of BBATF (Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force) came out of the Tea Party maelstrom in 2010 and is now aggressively pushing governors and state legislatures to endorse an Article V convention.
At the convention, they would attempt to rewrite our nation’s fundamental governing document by adding a balanced budget amendment and other changes meant to enthrone the “moneyed corporations” that Jefferson abhorred as destroyers of America’s democratic possibilities.
Absurd? Of course. Even the late Phyllis Schlafly, who headed the rightwing Eagle Forum, called this push “a prescription for political chaos,” adding,
“Alas, I don’t see any George Washingtons, James Madisons, Ben Franklins, or Alexander Hamiltons around who could do as good a job as the Founding Fathers, and I’m worried about the men who think they can.”
Well, Abbott, ALEC, and the Kochs sure do think they can, as part of their plan to take over our country’s political system. Having already spent hundreds of millions of dollars to get policy-pushing puppets like Abbott into office, the Kochs want to bend the will of the people as well. They recently started a new program, called Grassroots Leadership Academy, that gives how-to lessons in everything from mounting successful protest actions to recruiting middle-of-the-road voters.
Using Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, they are training thousands of people to become organizers and political activists. This so-called “grassroots” outfit has been set up by the gabillionaire Koch boys to train cadres of rightwing corporatists to spread their ideological laissez-fairydust across the land. The academy is run through Americans for Prosperity, Charles and David Koch’s political wing, which put up the cash to get it going. About 10,000 people have gone through some of the training sessions in three dozen states.
The academy’s curriculum is loaded with such corporate nonsense as a course titled “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” Attendees are indoctrinated with two overarching lessons: (1) Freewheeling corporate power, unrestrained by labor, environmental, or other public protections, is good; and (2) Social Security, unemployment benefits, and other social programs are baaaad!
Koch Kollege for rightwing social engineers is peddling a status quo agenda of corporate elitism and trickle-down ideology, which the vast majority of Americans have rebelled against. It’s like trying to sell chicken salad made out of chicken manure.