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Yesterday the Governor of my State offered her endorsement to a candidate for President that has famously declared "corporations are people." Should Romney (or his current chief rival for the GOPer nomination Newt Gingrich) win the Presidency they will accelerate the process of trading our republic for a government of corporate serfdom. The Citizens United decision of the SCOTUS has allowed anonymous and unaccountable money to flood our political campaigns. The Global Financial Crisis has put many state and local governments into an economic tailspin, and they are desperately seeking quick cash now. This has lead to them selling off precious public assets and outsourcing vital government services. Not only does all of this typically result in raw deals for the constituents of these governments, but could in fact end with Americans becoming slaves to the masters of Wall Street.

There certainly is no shortage of villains complicit in this theft of our democracy - from the Koch Brothers to Milton Friedman - but the chief architects of recent wave of "Disaster Capitalism" in response to the Great Recession in the USA is ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). ALEC aims to reshape the government of the United States into a "Utopia of Greed" on the local, State and Federal levels. Laws written by ALEC have spread like a bad infection across the country carried by the TeaPublican wave of 2010, and over 30% of all State lawmakers in the US are dues paying members.

My own State of South Carolina is currently deep under the spell of ALEC, with our Governor even getting reimbursed by ALEC for visits to a strip club. ALEC basically wrote the controversial Arizona immigration law which was then copied in SC and other states. ALEC was also a major factor behind the bills stripping public sector unions of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and others. ALEC minion and Teapublican Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, championed a law that "enhanced" that state's Emergency Financial Manger law to give them more sweeping powers to completely take over local governments.

Here we see what could be the culmination of ALEC's design - to establish the nobility of the new corporate serfdom states. This process saves the corporations from having to buy all the municipal offices in cities, and allows them to overrule the will of the people in cities that might otherwise hold a progressive government. Most importantly it sets up the sale of the schools and prisons at bargain basement prices. This would then allow for the prisons of the city to be turned into work camps.

When you consider the recent return of "Debtor's Prisons" the dark world ALEC's policies would create becomes clear. The vast majority of humanity becomes a simple livestock, snagged from the wild by credit cards and drugs. Then penned up to create cheap plastic junk for the rest of us to consume until we are over our heads in debt as well, and tossed behind bars. Meanwhile the privileged class that can buy justice and tax exemptions live a life of luxury and excess. Many might even say we live in that world already, but while the framework of that distopian future is securely in place we still have time to turn things around.