http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/07/alec-goes-hyper-local-with-new-nationwide-network/
ALEC Goes Hyper Local With New Nationwide Network
March 7, 2014
The American Legislative Exchange Council — ALEC — has had quite a bit of success writing “model” bills that advance the interests of its corporate backers and then wining and dining friendly state lawmakers to grease the wheels for their passage. Now, the organization is looking to replicate that success on the local level with a new sister organization, according to a report by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian.
Pilkington writes:
The American Legislative Exchange Council, founded in 1973, has become one of the most pervasive advocacy operations in the nation. It brings elected officials together with representatives of major corporations, giving those companies a direct channel into legislation in the form of ALEC “model bills.”
Critics have decried the network as a “corporate bill mill” that has spread uniformly-drafted rightwing legislation from state to state. ALEC has been seminal, for instance, in the replication of Florida’s controversial “stand-your-ground” gun law in more than 20 states.
Now the council is looking to take its blueprint for influence over statewide lawmaking and drill it down to the local level. It has already quietly set up, and is making plans for the public launch of, an offshoot called the American City County Exchange (ACCE) that will target policymakers from “villages, towns, cities and counties.”
The new organization will offer corporate America a direct conduit into the policy making process of city councils and municipalities. Lobbyists acting on behalf of major businesses will be able to propose resolutions and argue for new profit-enhancing legislation in front of elected city officials, who will then return to their council chambers and seek to implement the proposals.
http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-united-states-of-alec-a-follow-up/
Full Show: United States of ALEC — A Follow-Up
June 21, 2013
A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge.
In state houses around the country, hundreds of pieces of boilerplate ALEC legislation are proposed or enacted that would, among other things, dilute collective bargaining rights, make it harder for some Americans to vote, and limit corporate liability for harm caused to consumers — each accomplished without the public ever knowing who’s behind it. Using interviews, documents, and field reporting, the episode explores ALEC’s self-serving machine at work, acting in a way one Wisconsin politician describes as “a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests.”
Former health care industry executive Wendell Potter says, “Even though I’d known of [ALEC] for a long time, I was astonished. Just about everything that I knew that the health insurance industry wanted out of any state lawmaker was included in that package of bills.”
Following up on a 2012 report, this update includes new examples of corporate influence on state legislation and lawmakers, the growing public protest against ALEC’s big business-serving agenda, and internal tactics ALEC is instituting to further shroud its actions and intentions.
“United States of ALEC” Executive Producer Tom Casciato says people who saw the first report “might be surprised to learn that, despite more than 40 companies having dropped out of ALEC, the organization is still going very strong.” He adds, “ALEC doesn’t publish a list of its members, so covering will always be hard, but in a democracy it’s a good idea for people to know where their laws originate.”
“United States of ALEC” is a collaboration between Okapi Productions LLC (filmmakers Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes) and the Schumann Media Center, headed by Bill Moyers, which supports independent journalism and public watchdogs including the Center for Media and Democracy, and Common Cause, whose investigators are featured in the report.
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another 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
<snip>
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.
<snip>
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.”
<snip>
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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