Exposing ALEC

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

No, it’s not an Alec Baldwin expose. This is about The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) who “owns” and “runs” the US and state governments.

Democracy for Sale?

Andrew Gillum, Director of Leadership Programs at People for the American Way Foundation, joins The Last Word to discuss a Republican group more powerful than the Koch brothers.

From People for the American Way

ALEC: The Voice of Corporate Special Interests In State Legislatures

When state legislators across the nation introduce similar or identical bills designed to boost corporate power and profits, reduce workers rights, limit corporate accountability for pollution, or restrict voting by minorities, odds are good that the legislation was not written by a state lawmaker but by corporate lobbyists working through the American Legislative Exchange Council.  ALEC is a one-stop shop for corporations looking to identify friendly state legislators and work with them to get special-interest legislation introduced. It’s win-win for corporations, their lobbyists, and right-wing legislators. But the big losers are citizens whose rights and interests are sold off to the highest bidder.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, who helped build a nationwide right-wing political infrastructure following the reelection of Richard Nixon. In the same year, he helped establish the Heritage Foundation, now one of the most prominent right-wing policy institutes in the country. One year later, Weyrich founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, the predecessor of the Free Congress Foundation. In 1979, he co-founded and coined the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell, and in 1981 he helped establish the ultraconservative Council on National Policy.

2 comments

    • TMC on May 19, 2011 at 18:31
      Author
  1. The country was smaller then and a lot fewer people to dupe. Reconstruction began its decline, the 14th Amendment was coopted by corporations,and the birth of direct coercion in state and national politics had begun.

    And in just 25 years, the great engine that drove American Politics was full steam ahead giving birth to the business school and the archetype company man. The “Trust Dragons” of steel, iron, copper, lead, sugar, coal, paper, tin and whatever you can think of knew how to “make and own” friends in high places.

    And if it weren’t, ironically enough, for Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, the labor movement never would have made the inroads it had. Why did the momentum begin to be slowly derailed after the 1950’s? Well, it’s hard to say since we’re still in that period, but I suspect the Cold War politics bled into domestic policy with the great fears of communism and socialism.

    And when you throw in the new forms of electronic communication, manipulation of public opinion had begun in ernest. The very idea of Public Opinion was a brand, spanking new idea in the late 19th Century, and has been

    carefully cultivated ever since.

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