Moyers writes: "What does Walmart have to do with the tragic death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin? The answer starts with Florida's 2005 Stand Your Ground law, promoted across the country as 'model legislation' by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC..."
Trayvon Martin, 17, was fatally shot by self-appointed neighborhood watch patrolman George Zimmerman. (photo: ABC News)
ALEC, Walmart and Trayvon Martin?
29 March 12
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Our apologies. We originally posted this piece as having been authored "by Bill Moyers." In fact the author is "Lauren Feeney" and it was originally published on Bill Moyers' website BillMoyers.com. So the correct author is Lauren Feeney and the original publisher is BillMoyers.com. Entirely our mistake, so sorry.
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hat does Walmart have to do with the tragic death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin? The answer starts with Florida�s 2005 Stand Your Ground law, promoted across the country as "model legislation" by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC � "a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence," as Paul Krugman of The New York Times explains:
Despite claims that it�s nonpartisan, it�s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn�t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators.
The citizen�s advocacy group Common Cause has an explanation as to why it believes ALEC, which mostly promotes corporate interests, has campaigned for Stand Your Ground laws nationwide. The National Rifle Association is a longtime funder of ALEC. The NRA pushed for the Florida bill�s passage and one of its lobbyists then asked a closed-door meeting of ALEC�s Criminal Justice Task Force to use the law as a template for other state legislatures. At the time, that task force was co-chaired by Walmart, America�s largest seller of guns and ammunition. In September 2005, the bill was adopted by ALEC�s board of directors.
Since then, more than two dozen states have passed laws based on Stand Your Ground (also known as the Castle Doctrine). In Wisconsin, The Nation reports, an unarmed 20 year old named Bo Morrison was shot and killed while hiding on a neighbor�s porch after fleeing an underage drinking party broken up by the police. Last week, the district attorney announced that the shooter was protected from prosecution by the state�s new Castle Doctrine law.
Bo Morrison and Trayvon Martin aren�t the only victims � according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the number of "justifiable homicides" has nearly tripled since the Stand Your Ground law went into effect.
An online petition posted by Martin�s parents demanding further investigation and prosecution of his murder has gathered more than 2 million signatures. Color of Change, a group working to make government more responsive to the concerns of Black Americans, has a related petition protesting another ALEC campaign, this one for what critics say are discriminatory voter ID laws.
Krugman writes, "If there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin�s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society � and our democracy."
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**Is nowadays are real word? Ah that's one of the great mysteries of the universe....
"Nowadays" is NOT a 'real word'. Except for the fact that "usage" determines acceptable English, and this bastardization "Nowadays" has infiltrated Standard English from "somewheres" in the Ozarks.
I know that it probably *sounds* perfectly acceptable in Texas.
Could you BE any more snarky ? What is more trivial, the question, or someone wiling to take valuable time out of their day to lift a leg on the person asking the question ?
One contemptible addition some decades back was the inclusion of "DoctorWelbyish " (since removed) in the USA.
Thank you for your important and very interesting coverage.
Anyone else want to chip in right now?
There's only one thing I can think of that can do that: GENERAL STRIKE.
We've a long, long way to go to protect people in foreign lands from the continued war and war crime from the West and most importantly the USA.
Predator Drones murder on a continued basis in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia for certain. How many other places we do not know.
This alone is heavily indicative of what is to come.
But they can't hide forever from a better-informed world outside of the "approved" US Corporate State chowderhead media.
There is a lot more than just P'v't Manning's fate riding on this show trial.
It might just serve to plunge the US back into further isolation as experienced during the Dimwits/Chain-g ang reign of error and terror and shoot it down to the bottom of the world trust and popularity list, where it is currently at the lower-middle (source; BBC).
Gawd knows how Manning is bearing up during this prolonged lynching but his stoicism and perhaps resignation (or is he being drugged?) should be a spur to world support for his Nobel prize nomination. Sign on at http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5459.
Stuff it all back down their hypocritical throats!
And I hope that they enjoy reading this on RSN's surveilled database.
"Ah fart in their general directions" (Monty Python's Holy Grail). I hope they get a chuckle at some of my daffy scribblings on RSN.
Abb-abb-abb-t-th-th-at's al ffolks: He-heh-heh!
Complicity to murder and genocide is on trial, and Manning refuses to be complicit. Do we, as human, also? We are the ones on trial, but you cannot call it one. Should we let them convict us without our knowledge?
Hierarchies have lead to garbage gathering police who are deputized to 'take it out,' the garbage which is provided in droves by the central media outlets as lies, or, as a paper-trade. They have to produce so much garbage to successfully alter the cultural landscape permanently, or tectonically, hollowing out under our feet instead of being hallow, or having any predisposition for that. Purposefully, they drive people from their evolutionary design to learn and to participate.
Learning leads to learning-to-lea rn (Bateson) where we would, then, know the 'container' relevant to the learned where both exist together as form, not word. "In the beginning, all was mush and without form," Denial allows proceeding upon no truth at all. This is usury.
We make up for missing truth when being instructed to be in a container that contains none, or, maybe is 50/50. Tricks are not epistemology, or real knowledge, in any event. One needs imagination. Learning, in reality, is not a trick. It would be an oxymoron. If there is any distinction to made, any leap for cognitive powers we could possess, for the power that makes it all just, this is another drama designed, solely, to make us shudder, and is not random.
"..A military spokesman said that the media operations center located half a mile away from the courtroom was "a privilege, not a right...."
It seems amazing to hear someone in the US military advise us that they grant privileges. And all while the US tax payers fund their entire lives from salaries and health care to retirement.
This is an indication of the power we have given to a group that is supposed to defend the USA. Now they tell us what our privileges are. And even more frightening will be the day that an American civilian is arrested by the military and indefinitely detained as allowed by the NDAA.
One more clear indicator of Eisenhower's warning about the "military-indus trial complex. It's all out of control!
Well, that's the US attitude to healthcare too and education, innit!? It's only for the elite and privileged.
There's a long way to go before this country joins the "civilized" world -if ever!
What's a "secure telephone"?
I agree that life goes on" (Oobladee-oobla dah!) but this country is becoming more and more like Spain's Franco era and Suharto's Indonesia I'm tired of repeating this), both supported and armed by the "land of the faux-free-to-sh op and the home of the cowed and surveilled".
It's the QUALITY of life we are looking at here and which is endangered!
Te US is becoming more and more like one of these Sci-fi box rooms where the walls keep sliding in on and constricting it's occupants, or the four-poster bed that lowers it canopy in the night to smother it's sleeping occupants.
Wake up and smell the shite -then fight!
The U.S. Army, as with other entities with the U.S. empire's power structure is ethically bankrupt. The more it protects an monetary empire's interests, the more chance for change.
There is also an NSA entity, PRISM, that is apparently being used to spy on the emails of who knows how many people, foreign and domestic.
The U.S. Constitution has been violated by the very status quo power brokers-and their supporters-who claim to support it. And it's nothing new.
progressives.
Is that the message?
Who do you think will win that 'discussion'?
Well, the IRS hasn't attacked anyone since Nixon ordered them to, and that was the liberals, the FBI, for all its' faults has a long horrendous record of attacking liberal groups and still does, although they occasionally go after obvious criminal right wing groups, the brunt of their actions still falls on liberal groups. And the ATF goes after the people committing gun crimes, which is nearly 100% conservative. So, in this case, they do go after conservatives mostly, but it isn't targeting conservatives per se, it's targeting subversives.
And the military isn't attacking liberals per se, they're attacking the first and fourth amendments.