The Center for Media and Democracy recently put on line over 800 pieces of “model legislation” from an organization known as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. The Rochester Citizen was in Madison when the story broke and the ALEC Exposed web site live.
The Center for Media and Democracy is located in Madison, Wisconsin and we had a chance to sit down with its Executive Director, Lisa Graves and talk about the disclosure of over 800 pieces of model legislation and the implications for America and ALEC.
How ALEC Interferes With The Constitutional Legislative Process
First we asked Ms. Graves to explain how ALEC is interfering in the normal legislative process in the country and in state legislatures.
“ALEC describes itself as one of the largest, if not the largest group of state legislators in the country. They are a group of legislators, but they are also a group of corporations who have extraordinary influence with and over those legislators. ALEC’s literature talks about the unique synergistic partnership of business and politicians and it talks about in its promotional materials it talks about working in unison with business as equal partners at the table with legislators and that may sound like just maybe business as usual in the lobbying world, but it’s not, because what ALEC does, ALEC’s perhaps unique function in some ways, is to have politicians on its task forces vote behind closed doors on model legislation, what they call model legislation, what I call wish lists legislation.
They have politicians vote behind closed doors along with corporations that are members of those task forces voting behind closed doors to pre-approve legislation that is then introduced all across the country cleansed of any reference of the fact that it came from ALEC, cleansed of any reference to the fact that it was voted on, pre-voted on by corporations and legislators in these ALEC task forces and then approved by ALEC’s board, its legislator board and what you have is, in a nutshell, an extraordinary circumstance in which politicians and corporations are voting on bills to take away your rights, to change your rights in every single area of the law, to adopt policies to outsource American jobs, to undermine the middle class and working class and the American dream by an extreme policy that basically tries to protect windfall profits of oil companies, tries to protect the wealthiest among us from having to pay their fair share of taxes in our society and they do it through a non-profit organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC.
What the Center for Media and Democracy has done is make available to the public this trove of bills and resolutions from this secretive organization that has advanced a shadowy corporate agenda to radically re-write our laws and we’ve made those documents available by way of a whistle blower to help insure that every American can see what this agenda is, what those bills say, to see our analysis of them and how these bills would affect and change every area of American life, education, health care, the rights of people on Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, voucher systems for all these things to privatize and put a profit motive, put your tax dollars in to making some CEO richer, rather than investing in our public institutions. So this is a really extraordinary trove of documents and it’s available at ALECExposed.org.”
Does ALEC Eliminate The Need For Lobbyists?
Would you say that ALEC is something beyond a lobbyist? Lobbyists normally influence legislation. They might get a sentence or two or one provision inserted into a bill and work for months to do that. But ALEC seems to be something even beyond a lobbyist.
“We say that ALEC is not just a front group, it’s much more than that for many reasons that you say. The fact is that, as you point out, ALEC in essence operates like a big factory for bad ideas, for really, in many cases, pretty extreme ideas. In the case of the particular thing you’re talking about is one to get the states to withdraw from regional agreements that were negotiated to try to cap emissions and create incentives, actually incentives for businesses to do better for the environment and to reward businesses that do better, in essence, under this climate initiative for their activities. They want to withdraw from that.
Click here for the rest of the story.