July 2011
26 posts
KEEP YOUR FAITH-BASED GOD OUT OF MY REALITY-BASED LIFE.
They meet in secret. They write our laws. They want us silent. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a conservative organization designed to bring together state legislators and corporate representatives to craft legislation later introduced in state chambers. →
alecexposed.org
ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have full membership standing in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board, which has a second, final vote on all legislation. They fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. We agree. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door.
I’m serious: torches. pitchforks.
