ALEC is a tool for corporations to obtain access to thousands of legislators, helping them pocket option demo work hand in hand to develop profitable legislation. ALEC generates socially and environmentally destructive policies which prioritize profits over people. Due to their secret nature, ALEC has thrived, but its days of anonymity are numbered. We now know where to point the finger at the corporations writing laws in America.
SOURCE: Arizona Resists ALEC
The Florida “Stand your Ground” law that may protect George Zimmerman, the man who recently shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, became the template for an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “model bill” that has been introduced in dozens of other states. As the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has reported, the bill was brought to ALEC by the National Rifle Association (NRA). (The law at issue is also known as the “Shoot First” bill or the “Castle Doctrine” law in various states.)
SOURCE: PR Watch from the Center for Media and Democracy
… in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder and pocket option demo account voter suppression laws in dozens of states, it is likely that Wendy’s, like McDonalds, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Intuit, and Kraft understand that aligning their brand with a radical anti-democracy and anti-government group may not be in the best interest of their shareholders and business model and make no mistake, ALEC is decidedly anti-government.
SOURCE: PoliticusUSA.com
Many of the toughest sentencing laws responsible for the explosion of the U.S. prison population were drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, which helps corporations write model legislation. Now a new exposé reveals ALEC has paved the way for states and corporations to replace unionized workers with prison labor. We speak with Mike Elk, contributing labor reporter at The Nation magazine. He says ALEC and private prison companies “put a mass amount of people in jail, and then they created a situation where they could exploit that.” Elk notes that in 2005 more than 14 million pounds of beef infected with rat feces processed by inmates were not recalled, in order to avoid drawing attention to how many products are made by prison labor.
SOURCE: Democracy Now!
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 membership in ALEC. Corporations pocket options demo sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) Corporations 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.
These bills and resolutions reach into almost every area of American life: worker and consumer rights, education, the rights of Americans injured or killed by corporations, taxes, health care, immigration, and the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. Only by seeing the depth and breadth and language of the bills can one fully understand the power and sweep of corporate influence behind the scenes on bills affecting the rights and future of every American in every single state.
SOURCE: AlecExposed.org
Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt, the 1997 recipient of ALEC’s Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award, in March 1999 signed House Bill 131 authorizing the state Department of Corrections to contract with private corporations for prison services.
SOURCE: “The Prison Payoff: The Role of Politics in the Incarceration Boom,” Partnership for Safety and Justice, 2000.
According to an investigation by NPR, Arizona Rep. Russell Pearce took his version of the legislation to an ALEC meeting, where it was then revised and adapted by members of the corrections industry, obtaining their unqualified support. SB 1070 has been imitated by similar laws — some even stricter and more encompassing — in at least five other states. These include HB 56 in Alabama, Utah’s Compact / HB 497, Indiana’s SB 590, Georgia’s HB 87 and South Carolina’s S 20.
SOURCE: JonathanTurley.org
ALEC’s Health and Human Services task force is led by representatives of PhRMA and Johnson & Johnson, and representatives of Bayer and GlaxoSmithKlein sit on ALEC’s board. The group’s model bill, the “Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act,” has been introduced in forty-four states, and ALEC even released a “State Legislators Guide to Repealing ObamaCare” discussing a variety of model legislation including bills to partially privatize Medicaid and SCHIP.
SOURCE: People for the American Way.
If you think [the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act] was passed by Congress and your elected representatives with sufficient knowledge, time, and debate, think again. This bill was introduced and pushed by big businesses for big businesses. AETA protects the interests of animal enterprises such as the National Pork Producers Association, Pfizer Drug Co. and other pharmaceutical corporations that engage in cruel and unnecessary animal testing, McDonald’s and other fast–food corporations that profit from the sale of factory–farmed animals for food, and Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble and other cosmetic companies that repetitiously abuse animals to test and retest their latest line of beauty products. Of course, their lobbying power is only viable in its disguise as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
SOURCE: Civil Liberties Defense Center
The mission of the American Legislative Exchange Council is … to enlist state legislators from all parties and members of the private sector who share ALEC’s mission … to conduct a policy making program that unites members of the public and private sectors in a dynamic partnership to support research, policy development, and dissemination activities.
SOURCE: ALEC’s official website, ALEC.org
ALEC has passed resolutions against increasing the minimum wage, against attempts by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, and against “comparable worth” legislation that would encourage equal pay for women. It drafted the Voter ID Act, which requires voters to present a photo ID, disenfranchising some youth and low-income voters. And, perhaps most importantly for many of the protesters in Cincinnati on Friday, ALEC supports right-wing education policies, such as a proposal to raise tuition for students who exceed a 140 credit hour limit.
SOURCE: WagingNonviolence.org
…ALEC is nothing less than a tax-exempt facade for the country’s largest corporations and kindred entities. Companies likes Enron, Amoco, Chevron, Shell, Texaco, Coors Brewing, Koch Industries, Nationwide Insurance, Pfizer, National Energy Group, Philip Morris, and R. J. Reynolds, [ Monsanto, Wal-Mart, Visa, BP, the drug companies and so many more] pay for essentially all of ALEC’s expenses. The payments might be membership dues, fees to sit on nine industry-specific committees that approve “model” bills, expenditures for lavish parties and entertainment, or “scholarships” to pay for targeted legislators to attend ALEC’s junket-like meetings. … ALEC’s approach, carefully constructed to assure corporate control, is “pay to play.”
SOURCE: “Corporate America’s Trojan Horse in the States: The Untold Story Behind the American Legislative Exchange Council,” Natural Resources Defense Council, 2002