Right-Wing “Intellectuals” Really Want Us to Live in a Corporate Hellscape

3 min readRemember ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, that intellectual chop-shop responsible for modeling corporate-friendly laws for state legislators too lazy to do their own jobs? Well, it’s still beavering away at its work, which has been largely obscured by the grotesque scandals of the current moment. From The New Republic:If you can think of an example of everyday people holding huge corporations accountable for harming the public, it was probably made possible in large part by a single legal theory: public nuisance.Public nuisance was a primary basis for the litigation against Big Tobacco in the 1990s, and was the foundation of the opioid cases over the past decade. It’s played a prominent role in lawsuits on lead paint, predatory lending, water pollution, and “forever chemicals” like PFAS. It was the most important hook in recent successful cases against social media companies like Meta for designing their platforms to addict and endanger children. And most recently, it has been a key cause of action in litigation in several states against data centers for the air, water, and noise pollution they cause.Well, this is not very business-friendly, is it? This cannot stand!But not in Utah, Kansas, or Montana. Though it largely passed under the national radar, these states enacted laws this year or last that dismantle public nuisance as a cause of action—laws that, according to the Utah State Legislature’s own Office of Legislative Research and General Counsel, will make claims against data centers and other corporate wrongdoers “more difficult to pursue.” These states are not outliers, either—they’re forerunners. Their laws closely mirror a model bill published this summer by the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate oligarchy’s primary conduit for enacting right-wing laws at the state level. As I write this, ALEC’s Public Nuisance Reform Act is likely being distributed to Republican legislators in dozens of state houses around the country—and you can bet that Big Tech, eager to suppress a valuable tool of data center opponents, is lining up lobbyists to coax its passage.This, of course, is merely one front in the oligarchical right’s assault on the public commons. (These are the same heedless vandals who want to build a ballpark in Grand Tetons National Park. If you build it, the bears will come ... and they will eat you.) Data centers are the latest flashpoints, but blowing up public nuisances will free up American industry generally to despoil at will.ALEC recently published the Energy Producers and Consumers Protection Act, which immunizes all corporations—the fossil fuel industry, certainly, but also all other industries—from liability for any misconduct that is even marginally related to climate change, including “negligence, gross negligence, recklessness, strict liability, products liability, failure to warn, fraud, fraudulent concealment, misrepresentation, unjust enrichment,” as well as all related “criminal charges, indictments, or prosecutions.” In other words, under this legislation, fraud is legal—if you’re a powerful corporation. Meanwhile, Texas Senator Ted Cruz has introduced similar legislation at the federal level.This right-wing blitzkrieg to shield big business from liability for its misconduct extends far beyond the issue of climate change. On a recent Federalist Society panel about climate immunity for corporations, O.H. Skinner, the executive director of Alliance for Consumers—one of numerous front groups spun up by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo—explained that these efforts need to cover not just fossil fuel companies but every major industry, from Big Ag to Big Tech.The average American corporation has the soul of a Gaboon viper. That is not likely to change in the near future. Getting back to regulating these people is another one of the 100 priorities facing whatever comes next.