How corporations write our bills

Ruth Conniff, Common Dreams – The Center for Media and Democracy rolled out a new web site, ALEC Exposed, based on a massive leak of information from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the powerful coalition of corporations, rightwing foundations, and state legislators who have been literally writing the laws at the state level to push their pro-business, anti- democracy agenda.

For many years, big corporations, including Kraft, Pfizer, WalMart, and AT&T, to name a few, have been paying hefty dues to belong to a group that gives them access to state legislators. The legislators, for a much smaller fee, get to attend annual conferences, receive briefings from ALEC, and get the honor of putting their names on boilerplate legislation the groups drafts.

One of the many new pieces of information to emerge from the impressive ALEC Exposed project is that the corporate members of this group vote these bills out of their own, corporate committees before passing them on to their pet legislators.

Much of the group's legislation--privatizing the public schools, taking away collective bargaining rights, loosening environmental regulation, even suppressing the vote--got a huge boost when ALEC foot soldiers, including Governor Scott Walker and the heads of both of Wisconsin's legislative chambers, took power. The group's hard work and careful planning for just such an opportunity over the last two decades accounts for the head-spinning all-fronts attack ordinary citizens are currently enduring in Wisconsin.

The site, which posts and analyzes more than 800 bills produced by ALEC, is a treasure trove of information, including never-released text of the actual ALEC bills broken down and organized by topic, information about the corporate membership of ALEC's task forces on particular issues, the names of ALEC's state chairmen, and the effects of the bills: on working people, schools, the environment, consumer rights, and our democracy.

Reporters and citizens can now look at bills that were introduced in their states under the names of their elected officials, and trace the actual, corporate origins of these profoundly anti-democratic efforts.


John Nichols, Nation - Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists frustrated by recent electoral setbacks, ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. Inspired by Milton Friedman’s call for conservatives to “develop alternatives to existing policies [and] keep them alive and available,” ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more. In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by GOP governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alums.