Louisiana Voice

Only minutes after posting this story, LouisianaVoice learned that Kraft Foods has become the third company to withdraw its membership and financial support from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has suffered a double hit with the decisions by PepsiCo and Coca Cola to drop their membership in the shadowy organization that has become the fourth branch of government in Republican states.

At the same time, Gov. Bobby Jindal, one of ALEC’s more enthusiastic proponents, and Onmessage, Inc., an Alexandria, Virginia, political consulting firm, appear to be joined at the hip.

Not only did Jindal pay Onmessage more than $1.3 million in fees since 2007, but immediately following his re-election last October, his Chief of Staff Timmy Teepell left to go to work for Onmessage.

ALEC is widely known for working with legislators from across the country to draft legislation for lawmakers to pass back in their home states.

Moreover, scores of corporate members of ALEC have poured thousands of dollars into the campaign coffers of Louisiana candidates. Those include candidates for the legislature, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, as well as to Jindal himself.

Corporate members of ALEC include Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Bayer Corp., GlaxoSmithKline, Wal-Mart Corp., Johnson & Johnson, Altria, Chevron, Shell, Dow, ConocoPhillips, TimeWarner, Eli Lily, Walgreen, AT&T, Reynolds American, PhRMA, Corrections Corporation of America, UnitedHealthcare, Visa, FedEx, UPS, Wackenhut (a private prison company), Kraft Foods and BP, among others.

Besides contributing generously to state campaigns, ALEC pushes its agenda calling for privatization of prisons, Medicaid, state health care benefits, and “reforms” to public education and state employee retirement benefits. Those reforms include charter schools, vouchers, abolishment of teacher tenure and virtual schools for education and a drastic reduction of retirement benefits from public employees.

To that end, thanks to strategically placed campaign contributions, ALEC has succeeded beyond all expectations in the area of public education in Louisiana and Jindal’s retirement reforms agenda will be tested next week when the legislature takes those matters up.

Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil and other giant corporations might believe they are immune to sporadic boycotts but when people use their wallets as weapons, retailers listen. Never think that they don’t. If you don’t believe that, you need only reflect back to the recent campaign that began with a single protester whose crusade went viral and which ultimately caused the giant Bank of America to abandon its monthly $5 debit card fee.

The folks who do much of their shopping at Wal-Mart are the Joe Sixpack types, the very ones most victimized by ALEC policies. They are the people just like us: blue collar whites, minorities and working stiffs who are being asked to work more—if they haven’t already lost their jobs—while earning less as they see rare salary increases eaten up by rising gasoline prices, increases in health insurance premiums, college tuition and food costs.

But Jindal is not stupid. He got to be governor and then solidified his base by being sly, duplicitous and ambitious. To use an old cliché, he knows better than to put all his eggs in one basket.

Take, for instance, Onmessage, Inc., of Alexandria, VA.

Jindal signed on late with Onmessage. He didn’t use the firm in his 2003 campaign for governor and he lost to Kathleen Blanco. Since 2007, however, his campaign has shelled out a whopping $1.3 million to the firm and now Teepell has joined Onmessage to manage its Southern Office—in Baton Rouge, no less. Moreover, one of Onmessage’s partners ghost-wrote Jindal’s riveting book Leadership and Crisis.

One of the first clients to sign on with Teepell was Republican Congressman Bill Cassidy who appears to be gearing up for a challenge to U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, Louisiana’s only statewide elected Democrat.

But Onmessage is not without its problems.

In January, Onmessage paid the state of New Hampshire 15,000 for violating the state’s stringent anti-push polling statutes.

Push polling is an interactive marketing technique involving the use of loaded questions in a supposedly, but in reality far from objective telephone opinion poll during a political campaign on behalf of one candidate in an effort to turn voters against an opponent.

LouisianaVoice has been monitoring key votes by those legislators who have been the recipients of campaign contributions from ALEC member corporations and from Jindal.

We pledge to continue publicizing those votes with reminders of who got what from whom. It may get boring, it may be tiresome to many and it may even turn some readers off. But few nails were ever driven home with a single blow of the hammer. We will keep repeating the message until our readers can recite the numbers in their sleep. Perhaps our readers will pass the information along to non-readers via Facebook or by whatever means available.

Onmessage and ALEC certainly have.