If you think of the way Katrina was exploited to end the New Orleans school system and hand it over to the privatized charter school purveyors then you have the idea of what the Shock Doctrine entails. Briefly here it is in a nutshell: (this is my interpretation)

1) Exploit a crisis to privatize everything
2) Impose solutions that create windfalls for corporations, displace poor and other non-desirables
3) Create laws to make this situation legal
4) Use media to extol the virtues of the new system; squash dissent.

And if natural disasters don’t happen fast enough, then create disasters through the misuse of government. For instance, start two wars and cut the taxes that should have been used to pay for them. Or on a state level, give huge tax cuts to the rich and then claim the state is broke. This is a tactic that is now being used at the state and county levels across the nation right now.  Look at any state with a Republican governor or legislature and you will see some form of this tactic.This tactic is being done in concert across the country.

Fortunately, each state or county did not have to go off and write their own versions of laws to create problems or laws that will impose draconian solutions. For that there is ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. Alec is a corporate financed very right wing group that creates very corporate friendly legislation that is ready to go in most governmental units with just a bit of adaptation.

How do you think Walker in Wisconsin, Kasich in Ohio, Snyder in Michigan, Scott in Florida and others (yes even Branstad in Iowa) had so much legislation ready to go, hand the treasury to their buddies and make the middle- and lower-classes pay for it?

The sad thing about ALEC is that it works in the dark. Under a rock I would say. It is nearly impossible to find who the members are, who the sponsors are, and until recently what their agenda was. Slowly they are being exposed. Legislators who are members of ALEC are not working for the “people” but for those corporations aiming to take over the government for their own profit.

Which brings us to Iowa. Early in this session a bill (probably written by ALEC) that would lower property taxes while at the same time cut ways in which cities and counties could tax, failed to make the cut for consideration a couple months back. Yet at what is supposed to be the very end of the session an almost twin bill was introduced on April 28th. Since the legislature is supposed to adjourn on April 30th, this is indeed late. So late that maybe the legislature will not have time to look it over properly; maybe sneak it in.

Should this bill get passed, cities and counties could lose up to 40% of their revenue. I asked our local city manager what that would mean. He told me that the city would have to go totally bare bones. The swimming pool would probably close, maybe the library. There would likely be cutbacks in all but the very essential services. Things like this WILL HAPPEN all over Iowa.

But don’t worry. I am betting that if this bill passes, ALEC will have another one ready to take over town governments across Iowa, just like in Michigan.

This is not what democracy is supposed to be.