ALEC, destroying America one law at a time.....

BILL MOYERS: What if you were a corporation that stood to make a bundle if oil from the Canadian tar sands was imported by the United States?

And what if you thought federal laws to protect the environment were going to stop that oil-importing from happening?

You’d set your sights on Washington, spread some money around inside the beltway, hire big gun lobbyists to wine and dine the politicians, and stroke the regulators to let the “free market” work, right? Right. You would do all that, but you wouldn’t stop there.

You’d also take your battle to the states, because if you can get laws that serve your interest in one state capitol after another, it might not matter much what Washington has to say about it. Especially in a time like this when our national government is polarized, paralyzed, and dysfunctional and an obstinate minority is determined to keep it that way.

Our 50 state capitols have long been the place where things happen. The taxes you pay, the roads you drive on, the quality of the air you breathe, and the water you drink; your right to privacy and your right to vote – these all bear the imprint of laws passed by the legislature in your home state.

This report is about how some of those laws get enacted thanks to an organization called ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a consortium of corporations and state legislators with so much muscle they’re changing the country one law at a time, one state at a time.

A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC presents itself as a “nonpartisan public-private partnership”. But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge.

In the case of those Canadian tar sands, ALEC reportedly turned to an oil-industry lobby for a bill that makes it hard for the states to slow the flow of Canadian crude into this country, no matter the environmental consequences.

This is how ALEC has worked for years, pushing changes state by state that could never have been achieved if they had been put to the test of open and broad popular support. ALEC has been so successful working its will behind closed doors in secret, that most Americans had never even heard of it until recently. ALEC had never even been subjected to scrutiny on national television until the documentary report we broadcast last fall. That was a collaboration between Okapi Productions and the Schumann Media Center that I head. Schumann supports independent journalists and public watchdog groups like the Center for Media and Democracy and Common Cause. Their investigators have been tracking the intersection between money and politics and finding ALEC squarely in the middle of it all across the country.  “The United States of ALEC.”

Let me tell you a little more about what ALEC has been up to. In the interest of a healthy environment, 29 states have laws requiring utilities to provide a portion of their electricity from renewable energy sources. The idea, of course, is to cut back on the use of fossil fuels, which, as everyone knows, contribute to global warming.

Yet even as headlines about climate chaos confront us every day, ALEC is doing its damnedest to undermine the use of clean, renewable energy.

Take a look at this. It’s called the “Electricity Freedom Act” – one of ALEC’s ‘model’ bills. Sounds great – who doesn’t like freedom? But the bill amounts to an effort by the fossil fuel industry to curtail the freedom of states to set Renewable Energy Standards, by repealing those state laws.
In the last two years, 21 of the 29 states with Renewable Energy Standards have seen bills proposed that would weaken or repeal them, over half of them pushed by lawmakers with confirmed ALEC ties. In two states – Ohio and New Hampshire – such bills have already become law.

It will hardly surprise you that ALEC gets millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry, or that companies that have served on the ALEC task force that produced the “Electricity Freedom Act” include representatives of – hold your breath – ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Koch Industries.
Now ALEC doesn’t like all this to be publicized. It doesn’t like exposure to sunshine at all. In fact, they’ve recently begun including fine print on their materials saying they believe the documents are, quote, “… not subject to disclosure under any state Freedom of Information or Public Records Act.”
Got it? Take another look: “…not subject to disclosure under any state Freedom of Information or Public Records Act.”

So, when your elected legislators are meeting with corporate lobbyists behind closed doors, ALEC thinks you – the public, the voter – have no right to know what they have done or even talked about.
That’s not all. ALEC thinks that even the name “ALEC” has gotten far too much attention. So it’s come up with a new strategy, described recently by its chief flack in a memo to his members.
Quote: “You May Have Noticed We are Limiting the Use of the Acronym ‘ALEC’… Over the last year, the word ‘ALEC’ has been used to conjure up images of a distant, mysterious, Washington alphabet organization of unknown intentions…”

So, “The organization has refocused on the words ‘Exchange’ and ‘Council’ to emphasize our goal of a broad exchange of ideas to make government work better and more efficiently.”

Ah yes, but better and more efficient government for whom? ALEC’s “Private Enterprise Advisory Council” still contains a who’s who of elite corporate power; its health care agenda still calls for privatizing Medicare; its economic agenda for tax cuts for the rich; and its education agenda for more public money going to private schools.

Then theres PAUL WEYRICH  who said "I don’t want everybody to vote…"

Who as you will remember wanted less voter turnout, not more. That spirit suffused ALEC’s sponsorship last year of so-called “Voter Reform” measures, which would have made it harder for young, elderly, and low-income Americans to vote.

And for sheer audacity in the capture of government, you can’t beat what happened under the capitol dome in South Dakota earlier this year: ALEC allies decided the cost of sending some state legislators to wine and dine with those corporate lawyers and lobbyists should be paid by taxpayers. But that wasn’t enough. Those same South Dakota taxpayers now have to pay ALEC dues for legislators who are members.

It’s like tipping the thief for picking your pocket.

But give them credit where credit’s due: the political, religious and corporate right conceived a brilliant strategy for advancing their agenda by going to the states. Brilliant, but disingenuous. They choose to talk about “free markets” when in fact their member corporations prefer to arrange the markets to their advantage. They boast that “government closest to the people” is, quote, “fundamentally, more effective, more just, and a better guarantor of freedom than the distant, bloated federal government in Washington, D.C."

But what is “just” about laws written to benefit powerful organized interests at the expense of everyone else? What is just about going to great lengths to make sure “the people” don’t know who is writing those laws? If getting closer to “the people” is really your goal, it’s curious behavior to cover your tracks, keep your sessions closed to the press, and do most of the “people's work” in secret.
No, when all is said and done, the pro-capitalist magazine “Businessweek” got it right: quote, “part of ALEC’s mission is to present industry-backed legislation as grass-roots work.”

In state houses around the country, hundreds of pieces of boilerplate ALEC legislation are proposed or enacted that would, among other things, dilute collective bargaining rights, make it harder for some Americans to vote, and limit corporate liability for harm caused to consumers — each accomplished without the public ever knowing who’s behind it.  ALEC’s self-serving machine acting in a way one Wisconsin politician describes as “a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests.”

Former health care industry executive Wendell Potter says, “Even though I’d known of [ALEC] for a long time, I was astonished. Just about everything that I knew that the health insurance industry wanted out of any state lawmaker was included in that package of bills.”

Isn't America great????