It's called the American Legislative Exchange Council, but we prefer to think of it as Aristocrats Lambasting Employed Citizens.
It's a secret organization that aims to let corporations loot the government and turn working families into serfs. ALEC hosts secret meetings in which corporate executives and lawmakers cook up model legislation that is then inflicted on the public. In These Times calls it
...a legislative roach motel controlled by corporations, special interest groups and right-wing think tanks.Earlier this year, one of those roaches crawled out of ALEC and became Scott Walker's bill destroying collective bargainnig rights for government workers.
News articles are starting to appear about ALEC since a new website, http://www.alecexposed.com/ has posted something like 800 leaked documents.
According to In These Times
An exhaustive analysis of thousands of pages of documents obtained through public records requests from six states, as well as tax filings, lobby reports, legislative drafts and court records, reveal that these suddenly popular anti-public employee bills, while taking different forms from state to state, were indeed disseminated as "model legislation" by ALEC.
Not coincidentally, bills similar to those in Florida and Wisconsin have been introduced in Arizona, California, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Vermont.Here's a great piece at Crooks & Liars, which reports,
They approved legislation for tort reform, block grant funding for Medicaid, and selling insurance across state lines. You recognize these policies as the current conservative platform, I'm sure. However, what's new about this is that the platform was dictated, agreed to, drafted and disseminated by a small group of corporations, right-wing supporting think tanks and their conservative legislative partners and we can finally prove it....
This is why, by the way, idiots like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann can actually run for office and get serious support. They're just the marionettes behind the real policymakers, just like Governor Bighair in Texas and Governor Gollum in Florida.People for the American Way lists some of ALEC's major donors. The list won't surprise you one little bit:
Exxon Mobil, the Scaife family (Allegheny Foundation and the Scaife Family Foundation), the Coors family (Castle Rock Foundation), Charles Koch (Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation), the Bradley family (The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation) and the Olin family (John M. Olin Foundation). These organizations consistently finance right-wing think tanks and political groups.
