No, ALEC is not a new kid on the block. ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC was born in 1973 – the brainchild of Paul Weyrich and a group of Republican Party state legislators. This was not Weyrich’s first brainchild: he also fathered the Heritage Foundation and somewhere along the way coined the expression: “the moral majority.” ALEC says it is not a lobby and not a front group. ALEC describes itself as a non-partisan, non-profit organization. Bloomberg Businessweek (BBW; Dec. 5-11, 2011, p. 68) found 92 ALEC veterans in the U.S. House of Representatives, 87 of...
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“It was a machine like no other.” With this sentence Franz Kafka opens his metaphorically true story In the Penal Colony. The “machine” is a device that tatoos social imperatives into the skin of those perceived as violating them. The Pioneer (the protagonist of the story, acting in the capacity of a sociologist) shows up in the penal colony just in time to witness the tatooing of a miscreant. The soldier who is duty-bound to administer the tatoo is checking and preparing the machine for operation. He personally is opposed to use of the machine, but he has his...
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Mark Fishman, associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, investigated routine news production by examining the work practices of reporters and other news workers. His research findings were published by the University of Texas Press in 1980 in a book entitled Manufacturing the News. At the beginning of his book, Fishman touches on the practical mode of social reproduction by quoting from W. I. Thomas, The Child in America (1928): “Our picture of how the world works is integrally tied to how we work in the world. By acting in accordance with our conception...
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The United States of America has been under one-party rule since its birth at the drafting of the Constitution. This document was drawn up by a small group of men (the founding “fathers”) representing four major economic interests – money, public securities, manufactures, and trade and shipping. In the conclusion to his classic work An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Charles A. Beard reports the results of his extensive research: The Constitution was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond...
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