The Devil’s Workshop For The Corporatocracy

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Ever wonder where all that radical conservative legislation comes from? (Hint: Russell Pearce doesn't write his own bills). There really is a devil's workshop that produces "model legislation" for anti-democratic, pro-plutocratic corporatocracy legislation that does not receive nearly enough public scrutiny from our "lamestream" corporate media. And average Americans are completely unaware that it even exists.

Gaius Publius at Americablog.com posts What's the source of these anti-union measures? Meet ALEC, a right-wing group that writes state laws for Republicans:

If it seems that all of this state-by-state union-stripping legislation is coordinated … that's because it is coordinated. Also pre-written, gift-wrapped and hand-delivered.

Meet ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national right-wing group that writes "model" legislation for its members. Who are its members? Republican state legislators and private organizations (think ExxonMobil).

Because ALEC is very secretive, only members get to know who its members are, what goes on at meetings, and what legislation is being authored and pushed. But sometimes the light shines through, and sometimes they own up.

About the union-busting laws, ALEC owned up. The New York Times, in the (next-to-last) paragraph of this story, fingers ALEC as the anti-union coordinating group (my emphasis throughout):

A group composed of Republican state lawmakers and corporate executives, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is quietly spreading these proposals from state to state, sending e-mails about the latest efforts as well as suggested legislative language.

Michael Hough, director of the council’s commerce task force, said the aim of these measures was not political[.]

NPR has a nice report on ALEC (h/t commenter SCLiberal):

When you walk into the offices of the American Legislative Exchange Council, it's hard to imagine it is the birthplace of a thousand pieces of legislation introduced in statehouses across the county.

Only 28 people work in ALEC's dark, quiet headquarters in Washington, D.C. And Michael Bowman, senior director of policy, explains that the little-known organization's staff is not the ones writing the bills. The real authors are the group's members — a mix of state legislators and some of the biggest corporations in the country.

"Most of the bills are written by outside sources and companies, attorneys, [and legislative] counsels," Bowman says.

Here's how it works: ALEC is a membership organization. State legislators pay $50 a year to belong. Private corporations can join, too. The tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp. and drug-maker Pfizer Inc. are among the members. They pay tens of thousands of dollars a year. Tax records show that corporations collectively pay as much as $6 million a year.

With that money, the 28 people in the ALEC offices throw three annual conferences. The companies get to sit around a table and write "model bills" with the state legislators, who then take them home to their states.

The Arizona Send-Browns-to-Prison-for-Profit law (sorry, the "SB-1070 immigration law") is a good example. Thanks to that law, prisons-for-profit companies like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) stand to make out like, er, banditos.

Guess who helped write that law? CCA. Guess where that law was written? In the dark bowels of ALEC:

The largest prison company in the country, the Corrections Corporation of America, was present when the model immigration legislation was drafted at an ALEC conference last year. … ALEC's Bowman says that is not unusual; more than 200 of the organization's model bills became actual laws over the past year.

I'll say it again; these guys are playing a whole different game than we are.

William Cronon, a research professor at the University of Wisconsin -Madison, writing for Scholar as Citizen blog has a dissertation on the right's anti-union strategy in Wisconsin and other Midwest states. Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here):

After watching the sudden and impressively well-organized wave of legislation being introduced into state legislatures that all seem to be pursuing parallel goals only tangentially related to current fiscal challenges–ending collective bargaining rights for public employees, requiring photo IDs at the ballot box, rolling back environmental protections, privileging property rights over civil rights, and so on–I’ve found myself wondering where all of this legislation is coming from.

* * *

But even though I’m more than prepared to believe that David and Charles Koch have provided large amounts of money to help fund the conservative flood tide that is sweeping through state legislatures right now, I just don’t find it plausible that two brothers from Wichita, Kansas, no matter how wealthy, can be responsible for this explosion of radical conservative legislation.

* * *

So…who is?

I can’t fully answer that question in a short note, but I can sketch its outline and offer advice for those who want to fill in more of the details.

Continue reading Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here). "What you’ll quickly learn even from reading these few documents is that ALEC is an organization that has been doing very important political work in the United States for the past forty years with remarkably little public or journalistic scrutiny."

If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote. You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. Begin with its home page at http://www.alec.org.

First visit the “About” menu to get a sense of the organization’s history and its current members and funders. But the meat of the site is the “model legislation” page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Model_Legislation1

You’ll of course be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.

* * *

An important partner of ALEC’s, by the way, is the State Policy Network (SPN), which helps coordinate the activities of a wide variety of conservative think tanks operating at the state level throughout the country. See its home page at http://www.spn.org/.

Mr. Cronon provides links to resources for researching the "vast right wing conspiracy" that I use all the time which you may want to bookmark:

If you run across a conservative organization you’ve never heard of before and would like to know more about it, two websites can sometimes be helpful for quick overviews:

Right Wing Watch: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/
SourceWatch: http://www.sourcewatch.org

My rule for all legislation is to first find out who wrote it, and who is sponsoring it. Once you know that you can "follow the money" to whom it is intended to benefit. Does the political media ever provide this kind of useful analysis? Rarely, if ever, and only after the fact when they do. Organizations like ALEC are able to fly under the radar for decades because of our "lamestream" corporate media.