The American Legislative Exchange Council
(ALEC) has been pushing crazy
anti-environmental bills benefiting corporations and deregulation so much so that it can be considered an environmental train wreck. I'm just going to focus on the damage it has done and wants to continue to do to our agriculture system, primarily factory farms. Yes, ALEC and its supporters, including the Koch brothers are one of the
major reasons that we have a factory farm system that breeds disease, toxic food, and is a major contributor to climate change.
One of its latest debacles is the introduction of legislation which would eliminate country of origin labels on our meat. There is a new law called COOL which mandates country of origin labeling and of course the meat industry is not happy and is using ALEC to try to eliminate COOL. Meat labeling is a public health issue as the danger is that if there should be a pathogen outbreak from meat ingestion its very difficult to trace the origin or even the country of the suppliers if it's not labeled.
PR Watch has exposed ALEC:
As suburbs engulfed the rural landscape in the boom following World War II, many family farmers found themselves with new neighbors who were annoyed by the sound of crowing roosters, the smell of animal manure, or the rumble of farming equipment. In defense of family farming, Massachusetts passed the first "Right to Farm" law in 1979, to protect these farmers against their new suburban neighbors filing illegitimate nuisance lawsuits against them when, in fact, the farms were there first. Since then, every state has passed some kind of protection for family farms, which are pillars of our communities and the backbone of a sensible system of sustainable agriculture. ...
Capitalizing on the sentiment of protecting traditional farming, giant agribusiness interests have convinced some states to revise their Right to Farm laws to stealthily protect the most egregious of industrial farming practices from legitimate nuisance suits. The Center for Media & Democracy has recently exposed and analyzed a cache of bills voted on by corporations and politicians behind closed doors and then introduced in state legislatures without any notice to the public of the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) bill factory in the production of the legislation and no disclosure of the fact that corporations pre-voted on the bills, let alone disclosures of the names of those companies. In 1996, ALEC suddenly took an interest in expanding right to farm laws. ALEC's corporate backers, unsurprisingly, hail from the factory farm side of the equation.
ALEC has been successful in pushing the proliferation of factory farms throughout the US.
Areas in red have a high concentration of factory farms. The US is a factory farm nation.
Tell Congress to reject the attack by ALEC and its meatpacker masters and keep the common-sense labeling measure that Americans overwhelmingly support.