ALEC and its stealth efforts to undermine our democracy
a good look at ALEC 
http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2013/05/17/shining-sunlight-on-a-secretive-lobby-group/
Shining sunlight on a secretive lobby group
Published on May 17th, 2013
Written by: Nancy MacLean
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As a U. S. historian, I am deeply alarmed at the growing power of this secretive body, founded by the longtime right-wing strategist Paul Weyrich in 1973 and bankrolled by some of the largest corporations in America.
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Breathtakingly unethical and cynical in the extreme, the effort worked. It helped build a mass base for the Republican right. As the religious right turned citizens against one another through a deliberately amped-up “culture war,” ALEC quietly built a powerhouse out of the limelight.
Today, as we have witnessed in North Carolina, the group can move the same legislation in dozens of states at once. In neighboring Virginia, Weyrich’s and Falwell’s home state, ALEC’s minions in the General Assembly have been even more audacious: as the New York Times reported in February of this year, Virginia GOP legislators introduced more than 50 ALEC-proposed laws, “many practically word for word.”
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Our nation has never seen a bolder private bid to transform public life—even in the heyday of corporate influence, the Gilded Age. Every school child (at least in public schools) encounters the irrefutable evidence that this period between the overthrow of Reconstruction in 1877 and the progressive reforms of the early 1900s was the nadir of American democracy; a period in which corporations controlled both major parties, virtually ran the Congress, and produced corruption on a scale that left even brilliant humorists like Mark Twain at a loss for words. What most people today don’t understand, though, is that this dismal era was the golden age of the ALEC version of “liberty.”
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Business money
Through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state laws that govern your rights. These so-called "model bills" reach into almost every area of American life and often directly benefit huge corporations.
In ALEC's own words, corporations have "a VOICE and a VOTE" on specific changes to the law that are then proposed in your state. DO YOU? Numerous resources to help us expose ALEC are provided below. We have also created links to detailed discussions of key issues, which are available on the left.
