A shadowy conservative organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been playing an extraordinary role in the anti-labor movement which is attempting to destroy American democracy:
[A]s of May 2010, Wisconsin's long-serving Republican Sen. Scott L. Fitzgerald, now the state's Senate Majority Leader, the man who has led the charge in the Wisconsin state senate against the state's workers on behalf of Governor Scott Walker, was listed as an ALEC State Chairman. This year, ALEC lists Assembly Rep. Robin J. Vos as its Wisconsin State Chairman. Vos is the co-chair of the Wisconsin budget-writing Joint Finance Committee…
Although thousands of state and local lawmakers pay a "nominal membership fee to attend ALEC's retreats and receive model legislation," the bulk of the organization's financial support - over 80 percent of its income - comes from corporations. ALEC provides state legislators with model legislation in support of limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty.
In a report titled "ALEC: Ghostwriting the Law for Corporate America" and issued last May, the American Association for Justice described ALEC as "the ultimate smoke filled back room." In 2009 alone, according to the report, "826 bills were introduced in the states in 2009 and 115 were enacted into law."
Among ALEC’s activities are promoting the corporate interests of:
- Oil companies to undermine climate change proponents;
- Pharmaceutical manufacturers, arguing that states should be banned from importing prescription drugs;
- Telecom firms to block local authorities from offering cheap or free municipally-owned broadband;
- Insurance companies to prevent state insurance commissioners from requiring insurers to meet strengthened accounting and auditing rules;
- Big banks, recommending that seniors be forced to give up their homes via reverse mortgages in order to receive Medicaid;
- The asbestos industry, trying to shut the courthouse door to Americans suffering from mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases; and,
- Enron to deregulate the utility industries, which eventually caused the U.S. to lose what the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) estimated as $5 trillion in market value.
ALEC was established by the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, the force behind Paul Ryan’s widely touted plan to destroy health care reform in the name of budget cuts. This is the same group which said that Bush’s tax cuts for the rich were supposed to add 1.4 million jobs in 2008, a year in which we lost 2.6 million.
Now that we are beginning to address the fact that the U.S. pays 141% more for health care and has below average outcomes when compared to other developed nations, we cannot let ‘Corporate America’s Trojan Horse’ slaughter our legislative achievements.