Through the corporate looking glass.

• Author: Pocan, Mark
• Position: Essay

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Navy blue. The day called for deep, dark, traditional navy blue. I picked out my most staid conservatively patterned gold tie to match the gold buttons on my navy suit.

I was going undercover. I'm a progressive state legislator from Wisconsin, and I was about to meet my enemy, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). This organization promotes conservative policies at the state level. Made up of state legislators ($100 membership) and rightwing foundations and corporations ($5,000 to $50,000 membership), ALEC provides research and drafts model bills for state legislators that promote the agenda of its sponsors.

The occasion was ALEC's policy summit in Washington, D.C., held at the elegant Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in early December. I felt like I was in a corporate "Mice in Wonderland" as I watched and listened as private power and public policy intertwined in the most strange and unnatural ways.

Case in point: According to workshops at ALEC, global warming is a huge, huge myth. At least two workshops addressed this issue, one titled "Taking the Politics Out of Science" and the other about "New Energy Technologies in a Carbon Constrained World." The first workshop tried to point out inaccuracies about global warming and other "junk" science. The second was designed to talk up "clean coal" options and to make the point that C[O.sub.2] emissions are not all bad.

One attendee during the question and answer portion of the presentation asked, "Is it true that with increased C[O.sub.2] emissions we have had higher yields of some crops?" That elicited coos from two of the panelists. Somehow, increased C[O.sub.2] is good because some crops may have increased growth, at the expense of rising sea levels, glacial retreat, devastating hurricanes, and soon-to-be swamped cities. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.

At a working group on state health reform, we soon realized a lack of access or affordability is not a problem. The real problem is government getting involved. An angry white male legislator (in a room of about eighty people, the only African American was the man running the audio-visual system) barked "baloney" during a discussion about using state dollars to promote health care.

One presenter received a roomful of nodding heads to her claim that the health care debate is not about health care but actually about "increasing government control." A presenter from the Cato Institute went on to explain the...