American Legislative exchange council ALEC

This is a topic about ALEC, which is a coalition of legislators and corporations/special interests who get together to draft pro business legislation. Many of the policies being implemented in the state legislatures can be traced back to ALEC.

A few things about ALEC:

Membership per year for corporations is $100,000. For legislators, $100.

A representative from a corporation has a veto for any legislation he deems to be not what his company or group wants.

It was founded in 1973, to be a conservative group to plan legislation.

Now, is this a good idea? Have you heard of ALEC before? Do you know of any legislation made by ALEC which has come up in your state?

For my opinion: I think its a bad idea, due to its dangerously close ties to corporations.

Necroing:

Journalists were kicked out of ALEC and threatened with arrest.

And many politicians and businesses are looking to ALEC for policy decisions.

I guess... free assembly is legal.

But, does the ALEC send money into politician hands? I would make that illegal but the supreme court is likely to disagree.

Both politicians and corporations pay into the council in order to be there.

So actually politicians are losing money to see what ALEC has to say.

I'm guessing that politicians are looking for financial connections for personal gain then?

edited 13th Aug '11 11:45:18 AM by breadloaf

there are some politicians who have received funding from ALEC members, which has gotten them into power.

Infamously, Scott Walker, WI governor, was prank-called by someone pretending to be one of the Koch brothers, owners of Koch industries, who are a part of the Council. They discussed campaign financing during the call.

Necroing again, hoping for a better turn out as this is a very important subject, as it affects national as well as state policy. The voter ID laws, the Union-busting laws, both come from ALEC.

Here, you can find the list of 800 "model" ALEC bills, as well as tracking politicians, corporations, and bills from ALEC.

And Florida State Rep. Rachel Burgin (R) introduced a bill from ALEC while forgetting to remove the stuff they put at the beginning of each bill.

They have the right to do this, but it pisses me off that no one in the mainstream media says a word about this junk.

What pisses me off is that it shuts out the population who isn't involved in upper-management at any of those 300 companies.

Furthermore, when state congressmen give the public a "chance" to speak out, they can ignore them. Like Albert Darling, during the time that the 14 Wisconsin senators had fled.

ALEC is one of the shadiest, most villainous groups I have ever read about.

Shutting the public out of the equation in favor of big business cannot end well.

Here's a link with some info: http://www.alecexposed.org/w/images/9/9d/8B17-The_Balanced_Budget_Amendment_Resolution_exposed.pdf

Here is one of their products: http://www.alec.org/wp-content/uploads/Budget_toolkit.pdf

I'm part of an Occupy group that is basically ripping off one of ALEC's handbooks to provide legislators with material to support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and limit the effect of money on political campaigns. Recycling is good!

Bumping again, new information from the 2012 elections thread has become relevant.

Indeed. Paul Krugman stumbled across ALEC while researching the origins of Florida's Stand Your Ground law and was so frightened that he devoted an entire column to the topic.

The greatest threat to democracy in the 21st century is not robber barons, Nazis, Communists, or Islamic terrorists, but rather these shady coalitions of corporate interests who make it their business to suborn the legislative process.

edited 26th Mar '12 12:08:01 PM by Fighteer

Actually, I can't differentiate the coalition of corporate interests from robber barons. They're still working towards one goal, and that is make as much damn money as possible, and this is just a super expedient way to do that. It's basically highly concentrated lobbying, made more efficient and profitable by the multitudinous people being lobbied at once, saving time and money.

They're at least trying to be a bit more subtle about it. The Robber Baron era was about rich capitalists flaunting their wealth and daring government to do anything about it. This era is about us suddenly discovering that they've been writing our laws for the past ten years.

I've basically figured that out pretty quickly. Living in Wisconsin, you hear a lot of the test bills.

If you look at post #7, you can see more.

We're going to need a constitutional amendment to eliminate this kind of stuff...

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/donors-trust-donor-capital-fund-dark-money-koch-bradley-devos

So basically it's a legal way to launder money politically.