The ALEC Corporations: Not Necessarily Who You’d Think

OCCUPIED TUCSON CITIZEN

The American Legislative and Exchange Council’s membership roll makes for interesting reading. While we would expect that the Bank of America, Exxon and the Koch companies are members, we can hardly say the same thing when we come across Amazon, Yahoo and AOL on ALEC’s membership list — ALEC, after all, is the lobbying group that brought us SB 1070 and Florida’s notorious “Stand Your Ground” law. But, as this list makes clear, a big corporation is a big corporation, looking out for their interests no matter what the cost to others, whether they’re extracting resources from the ground or conveying digital information.

ALEC is not alone as an organization that brings corporations and legislators behind closed doors to exchange ideas for and drafts of ideal public policy. Other organizations that provide this opportunity are the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Progressive States Network, but ALEC does seem to introduce one innovation: a level of solidarity between corporations and government that goes so far as to give elected legislators an equal voice and vote on proposed legislation with corporate representatives and members of ideologically aligned think tanks and special interest groups.

As Lisa Graves puts it in an interview on Al Jazeera*, “There are legislators in this country who go to ALEC meetings at fancy resorts, behind closed doors with no press present, with no members of the general public present, and they [all have] an equal vote. […] ALEC describes itself to its own members as a unique partnership for the private sector and the public sector. It describes for its members how they get an equal say, and an equal voice and vote. […] ALEC provides both public and private sector members an equal opportunity to present legislation as ideal. In the case of the “Stand Your Ground” law, the “Shoot First” law in Florida, that bill was proposed to a secret closed door meeting of ALEC’s criminal justice taskforce by the NRA’s lobbyist […] with Walmart corporation as the co-chair of that meeting (the largest seller of long-guns and ammunition in the US) along with a Texas legislator.”

The following corporations are members of ALEC’s task forces. This list comes from Common Cause and is current as of July 2011, except for the Tax and Fiscal Policy task force, correct as of March 2011.

*These quotes are taken from the linked video between 6:20 and 10:40