What a wonderful day in the neighborhood.
Lots of people opining about ALEC this morning –
blessings to these people who took the time to voice their opinion in their
local papers.
All across the country – what a good day!!!
Snips - the editorials were longer than the sentence examples below:
… in his defense of ALEC, paints a misleading
picture of the group’s activities, asserting that it simply “invites members of
state legislatures to go to conferences, eat hotel food, sit through
PowerPoints, and share legislative ideas.” Sounds benign, right?
What he conveniently skips over is that ALEC membership
and ALEC task forces give an equal vote to corporate lobbyists and other special
interest groups peddling legislation that benefits the bottom line of some of
the biggest corporations in the world
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Tennessee's Legislature and its ruling Republicans rely
far more on the rich corporate collaborators that fund and guide ALEC — the
American Legislative Exchange Council — than most Tennesseans will ever know.
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ALEC has mounted a relentless attack on renewable energy
standards in states across the country in an effort to repeal or weaken them to
the point of being irrelevant.
ALEC’s mechanism is essentially a boilerplate report that
uses bogus analysis to question the cost and economic impact of renewable
energy standards.
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I’m not surprised that as a Republican legislator he
probably agrees with the majority of ALEC’s corporate-directed positions since
it reads like a GOP platform document. The very fact that this legislator is
defending ALEC so passionately is proof of the partisan nature of this group.
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But the goal of movements such as ALEC, and the lawmakers
whom they influence, appears to be to undermine the supportive roles of both
the government and the individual citizen.
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An example of the type of legislation championed by ALEC
in Pennsylvania is PA HB 683. If this bill becomes a state law, then it will be
a felony for a citizen to photograph, videotape, audiotape, or transmit media
that depicts anything occurring within an agricultural setting in Pennsylvania.
One wonders why this legislation targets activities in
agricultural settings. A likely explanation is that Marcellus Shale gas
drilling in Pennsylvania commonly occurs on farms
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Consider the source: the American Legislative Exchange
Council (ALEC), which is notorious for drafting or at least guiding bills, in
statehouses nationwide, that are masked as reasonable proposals but in fact
play on people's fears, such as the Arizona immigration law of a few years ago.
ALEC guides legislation designed to enrich conservative business interests.
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ALEC underwrites legislation that disenfranchises
Montanans and other states on education, taxes and budgets, tort reform,
health-medical issues, work and consumer rights, environmental-pollution law,
and gun-crime-immigrations. ALEC proposes model legislation carrying out a
national agenda which it writes for legislators and then rewards compliant
legislators with campaign donations (dark money) to prevail over their
opponents.
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Gov. Walker has been working with Gogebic for some time,
as have key Republican legislators. This
is all related to big money. American
Legislative Exchange Council is an organization
of big corporations that meet in secret, along with legislators, to promote
enacting of laws that will enhance their profits.
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Greg Forristall may have inadvertently admitted more than
he intended when he said ALEC was as democratic as the state Legislature. Since
ALEC is set up to give corporations veto power over its decisions, maybe we
should not be too surprised when the same seems to happen under the Capitol
dome. Or perhaps the new definition of democracy is, “One Corporation, One
Vote.”
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Isn’t that great???
People taking ten minutes to write an opinion piece
letting their neighbors know about ALEC.
“One Corporation, One Vote.”
Nope!
At the American Legislative Exchange Council, corporations
get as many votes as they want - all
they have to do is buy more seats on a voting task force.
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