Difference between revisions of "American Legislative Exchange Council"

Latest revision as of 05:27, 21 September 2020

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is an association of state legislators and corporations.

History

Notable members

State legislators

Corporations

• AES Corporation
• Amazon (cut ties)
• Amoco
• Amway
• AT&T
• Bank of America (cut ties)
• Bell Helicopter
• Boeing
• BP America (cut ties)
• Charter Communications
• Chevron
• Comcast
• DCI Group (associated with Michael Connell's companies)
• Dow Chemical
• Exxon
• Fidelity Investments
• GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut's private prison division)
• Google (cut ties)
• Koch Industries
• Microsoft (cut ties)
• Monsanto
• Northrop Grumman (cut ties)
• Pfizer
• Shell
• Time Warner Cable
• Union Pacific Corporation (cut ties)
• Verizon
• Wal-Mart (cut ties)
• Williams Companies

Trade groups

Law firms

• Greenberg Traurig

Non-profits

Conferences

Lobbying efforts

Political connections

Financiers

• Charles and David Koch

Lobbying allies

• US Chamber of Commerce
• Karl Rove
• Club for Growth

Officials and politicians

• Jack Kemp
• Tom DeLay
• Donald Rumsfeld
• John Boehner
• Katherine Harris
• Sonny Perdue - made governor of Georgia in the suspect 2002 Georgia election
• Tom Feeney
• Scott Walker
• Donald Trump administration (source)
  • Mike Pence
  • Scott Pruitt
  • Tom Price
  • Nikki Haley
  • Rick Perry
  • Mike Pompeo

References

External links

• Sourcewatch pages on ALEC
  • American Legislative Exchange Council
  • ALEC Corporations
• Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange, "Lowndes County and Valdosta history: origins of the old boys", 2012/04/??: "Only a generation ago, the general understanding was that a couple of local families said frog and all the local elected bodies hopped. Nowadays I’m told by some in the know that it’s a bit more broad-based than that. Unfortunately, some of the slightly more broad-based old boys have hooked up with a source of top-down autocracy in DC: ALEC. That’s where the pushes for private prisons, charter schools, school consolidation, and some other shadowy things we’ve been shining a light on have been coming from, sprayed like pesticides around here and as far as the statehouse by certain of our state- and nationally-prominent newer old boys."

Founding members

• Paul Weyrich background
  • Infamous speech in 2008 where he says "I don't want everybody to vote"

Economic ideology

• The Atlantic, "McDonald's Can't Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage", 2013/07/16
• Minyanville's Wall Street, "McDonald's Sample Budget Sheet Is Laughable, but Its Implications Are Not", 2013/07/27
• Institute for New Economic Thinking, "Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent’s Stealth Takeover of America" by Lynn Parramore, 2018/05/30
• CBS, "Minimum wage doesn't cover the rent anywhere in the U.S.", 2018/06/14
• FactCheck.org, "The Cost of ‘Medicare-for-All’", 2018/08/10 - in a weird sleight-of-hand, a Koch-linked study found that the assumptions based on Bernie Sanders' bill would lead to cost savings, but disputed those assumptions
  • "Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are referring to a working paper, “The Costs of a National Single-Payer Healthcare System,” published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The Mercatus Center gets some of its funding from the libertarian Koch brothers, but more about that later.
    
    The author of the paper, Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center who once was the deputy director of President Bush’s National Economic Council, says the two proponents of a universal health care system are distorting the findings of his paper."
  • "Miller-Lewis referred to figures not highlighted in the report that show that between 2022 and 2031, the currently projected cost of health care expenditures in the U.S. of $59.4 trillion would dip to $57.6 trillion under the “Medicare-for-all” plan. That’s how Sanders arrives at his claim that the study “shows that Medicare for All would save the American people $2 trillion over a 10 year period.” (See Table 2.)"
  • "In an email to FactCheck.org, Blahous said he didn’t highlight that figure because he doesn’t think it’s realistic.
    
    As Blahous wrote in the fourth sentence of his abstract, “It is likely that the actual cost of M4A would be substantially greater than these estimates, which assume significant administrative and drug cost savings under the plan, and also assume that health care providers operating under M4A will be reimbursed at rates more than 40 percent lower than those currently paid by private health insurance.”"
  • "Documents published earlier this year show the Koch brothers, at one point at least, used their donations to gain influence over the hiring and firing of professors at the Mercatus Center. An Associated Press story about the donor agreement with the school noted, “The Koch Foundation issued a statement saying the agreements with Mason are ‘old and inactive’ and that newer agreements contain no such provisions.”"
• Bloomberg, "Higher Minimum Wage Boosts Pay Without Reducing Jobs, Study Says", 2018/09/06
• Bloomberg, "What Minimum-Wage Foes Got Wrong About Seattle", 2018/10/24
• Common Dreams, "After Promising More Jobs From Trump Tax Cuts, Report Shows AT&T Has 'Done Just the Opposite' by Slashing Over 10,000 Jobs in 2018", 2019/01/07 (Communication Workers of America, "AT&T 2018 JOBS REPORT", 2019/01; CNBC, "AT&T CEO says a corporate tax cut would mean thousands more jobs for 'hard hat' workers", 2017/05/04; NBC26 (Green Bay), "AT&T moving jobs from Appleton call center", 2018/12/19)
• The Intercept, "AOC, Sanders, and Warren Are the Real Centrists Because They Speak for Most Americans", 2019/02/26
• World Socialist Web Site, "Single mother and healthcare worker jailed for three days in Indiana over unpaid ambulance bill", 2019/03/01

Education system

• The Atlantic, "Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing", 2014/07/15: "This is because standardized tests are not based on general knowledge. As I learned in the course of my investigation, they are based on specific knowledge contained in specific sets of books: the textbooks created by the test makers. All of this has to do with the economics of testing. Across the nation, standardized tests come from one of three companies: CTB McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, or Pearson. These corporations write the tests, grade the tests, and publish the books that students use to prepare for the tests."

Climate change

• The Independent, "Have scientists really admitted climate change sceptics are right?", 2017/09/19
• Liberal proponents of climate action who covertly support fossil fuels
  • George Soros investments
    • The Guardian, "Climate philanthropist George Soros invests millions in coal", 2015/08/19: "Billionaire climate philanthropist George Soros invested more than $2m (£1.3m) in struggling coal giants Peabody Energy and Arch Coal in recent months, despite having once called the fuel “lethal” to the climate. Filings with the Securities and Exchange commission show that between April and June this year Soros Fund Management (SFM) bought more than 1m shares in Peabody ($2.25m), the world’s largest private coal company, and 500,000 shares in Arch ($188,000)."
    • Daily Caller, "George Soros Makes Massive Financial Investments On Fossil Fuels", 2018/02/19: "In the last quarter of 2017, Soros Fund Management reported investments in eleven new fossil fuel corporations totalling nearly $160 million, according to his company’s December 31, 2017, filing before the Securities and Exchange Commission reviewed by TheDCNF. [...] The billionaire’s newest fossil fuel investment was $87 million in Alerian, MLP, a fund that solely invests in “energy infrastructure” consisting of pipelines, storage tanks and processing plants for crude oil and natural gas. He purchased eight million shares of the company. His company’s second biggest energy investment was Halliburton, one of the world’s largest oil exploration and drilling companies. His firm purchased 842,000 shares valued at $30 million. [...] Other oil and gas companies purchased by Soros include oil and gas firms Noble Energy and Energen Corporation, oil field service firms like Ocean Rig UDW and Oasis Petroleum, propane, natural gas and natural gas liquefaction product UGI Corporation, and the oil and natural gas distributor Atmos Energy Corporation. Soros finds oil and natural gas pipelines to be attractive. Despite the political activist uproar in the building of the Keystone XL project, in June 2016 the billionaire invested $54 million in Columbia Pipeline, an oil and gas pipeline company that completed its merger with TransAmerica, the owner of the pipeline."
  • The Guardian, "Revealed: Google made large contributions to climate change deniers", 2019/10/11: "Google has made “substantial” contributions to some of the most notorious climate deniers in Washington despite its insistence that it supports political action on the climate crisis. Among hundreds of groups the company has listed on its website as beneficiaries of its political giving are more than a dozen organisations that have campaigned against climate legislation, questioned the need for action, or actively sought to roll back Obama-era environmental protections. The list includes the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a conservative policy group that was instrumental in convincing the Trump administration to abandon the Paris agreement and has criticised the White House for not dismantling more environmental rules. [...] Google is also listed as a sponsor for an upcoming annual meeting of the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella organisation that supports conservative groups including the Heartland Institute, a radical anti-science group that has chided the teenage activist Greta Thunberg for “climate delusion hysterics”. [...] CEI has opposed regulation of the internet and enforcement of antitrust rules, and has defended Google against some Republicans’ claims that the search engine has an anti-conservative bias. [...] Apart from CEI, they include the American Conservative Union, whose chairman, Matt Schlapp, worked for a decade for Koch Industries and shaped the company’s radical anti-environment policies in Washington; the American Enterprise Institute, which has railed against climate “alarmists”; and Americans for Tax Reform, which has criticised companies who support climate action for seeking out “corporate welfare”. It has also donated undisclosed sums to the Cato Institute, which has voiced opposition to climate legislation and questioned the severity of the crisis. Google has also made donations to the Mercatus Center, a Koch-funded thinktank, and the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action, a pressure group that said the Paris agreement was supported by “cosmopolitan elites” and part of Barack Obama’s “destructive legacy”."

Prison abuses

• The Nation, "The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor", 2011/08/01
• Corruption of prison guards (both public and private)
  • Miami New Times, "Cop Who Locked Darren Rainey in Scalding Shower Until He Died Keeps Having Sex on Duty", 2018/10/02

Net neutrality

• CNN, "4 bad things Internet companies can't do anymore -- if the FCC gets its way", 2015/02/05
• Ars Technica, "Comcast and other ISPs celebrate imminent death of net neutrality rules", 2017/04/26
• Huffington Post, "FCC Commissioner Tells ALEC To Help Squash Net Neutrality", 2017/05/08
• The Next Web, "When it comes to net neutrality, AT&T can’t be trusted", 2017/08/31
• Media Post, "ALEC Urges FCC To Block State Broadband Laws", 2017/11/13
• American Legislative Exchange Council, "ALEC Applauds FCC Efforts to Restoring Internet Freedom", 2017/11/21
• WIRED, "Here's How the End of Net Neutrality Will Change the Internet", 2017/11/22
• Wccftech, "Before Net Neutrality, Internet Providers Consistently Abused Their Powers (Brief Timeline)", 2017/11/23
• WIRED, "FCC Plan to Kill Net Neutrality Rules Could Hurt Students", 2017/12/12
• Open Secrets, "Koch nonprofit president’s anti-net neutrality campaign", 2017/12/13

Voter suppression

• Spurious voter fraud claims
  • American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR) - phony GOP front group supported by Bob Ney
    • BradBlog coverage of the story
      • ...
  • ACORN "voter fraud" in 2008
    • BradBlog coverage of the story
      • ...
  • The Atlantic, "Maine's GOP Chair Now Says He's Not Racist Because He Plays Basketball with a Black Guy", 2012/11/15
• Effort to destroy ACORN - heavy involvement by Project Veritas
  • Child prostitution allegations
    • BradBlog coverage of the story
      • ...
• Admissions of intent
  • Daily Beast, "Republicans Admit Voter ID Laws Are Aimed at Democratic Voters", 2013/08/28: "And the particular restrictions imposed by Republican lawmakers—limiting the acceptable forms of identification, ending opportunities for student voting, reducing hours for early voting—certainly do appear aimed at Democratic voters. Indeed, in a column for right-wing clearinghouse WorldNetDaily, longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly acknowledged as much with a defense of North Carolina’s new voting law, which has been criticized for its restrictions on access, among other things. [...] Last spring, for example, Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Mike Turzai told a gathering of Republicans that their voter identification law would “allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” That summer, at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation, former Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund conceded that Democrats had a point about the GOP’s focus on voter ID, as opposed to those measures—such as absentee balloting—that are vulnerable to tampering. [...] After the election, former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer told The Palm Beach Post that the explicit goal of the state’s voter-ID law was Democratic suppression."
  • United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, no. 16-1468: North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v. North Carolina, appeal decision, 2016/07/29: "The State then elaborated on its justification, explaining that “[c]ounties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black” and “disproportionately Democratic.” J.A. 22348-49. In response, SL 2013-381 did away with one of the two days of Sunday voting. See N.C. State Conf., 2016 WL 1650774, at *15. Thus, in what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race -- specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise."
• Voter ID requirements
  • The Atlantic, "How Voter ID Laws Discriminate", 2017/02/18
  • NC Policy Watch, "North Carolinians highlight struggles getting photo IDs ahead of amendment vote", 2018/10/11
  • CBS, "North Dakota voter ID law upheld by Supreme Court could affect Senate race", 2018/10/12
• Registration purges
  • ABC, "Dramatic increase in voters purged from voter rolls between 2014 and 2016: Report", 2018/07/24
• Huffington Post, "GOP Senator Says Voter Suppression Is A ‘Great Idea’", 2018/11/16: "Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) appeared to endorse voter suppression during a campaign stop this month, saying efforts to undermine voting among liberals at certain colleges would be a “great idea.” “And then they remind me that there’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who maybe we don’t want to vote,” Hyde-Smith can be heard telling a small crowd of young people outside her campaign bus in a video taken Nov. 3 and posted on online Thursday. “Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. And I think that’s a great idea.”"
• Associated Press, "Trump adviser: Expect more aggressive poll watching in 2020", 2019/12/20: "One of President Donald Trump’s top reelection advisers told influential Republicans in swing state Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states, according to an audio recording of a private event obtained by The Associated Press. The adviser said later that his remarks referred to frequent and false accusations that Republicans employ such tactics. Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s reelection campaign, made the remarks on Nov. 21 as part of a wide-ranging discussion about strategies in the 2020 campaign, including more aggressive use of Election Day monitoring of polling places. “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Clark said at the event. [...] Clark made the comments Nov. 21 in a meeting of the Republican National Lawyers Association’s Wisconsin chapter. Attendees included the state Senate’s top Republican, Scott Fitzgerald, along with the executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party."
• Thomas Hofeller documents
  • Raw charts and tables for North Carolina in 2015 - includes a file called Table xx - Average Dist to DMV by Cnty and Race 88k File - w Totals.xlsx which tabulates the distance between districts and DMVs and organizes them by the dominant race in each district, highlighting districts where black voters need to drive farther to get to the DMV
• The Guardian, "Trump says Republicans would ‘never’ be elected again if it was easier to vote", 2020/03/30: "Donald Trump admitted on Monday that making it easier to vote in America would hurt the Republican party. The president made the comments as he dismissed a Democratic-led push for reforms such as vote-by-mail, same-day registration and early voting as states seek to safely run elections amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Democrats had proposed the measures as part of the coronavirus stimulus. [...] “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” Trump said during an appearance on Fox & Friends. [...] Trump’s remarks reveal how at least some Republicans have long understood voting barriers to be a necessary part of their political self-preservation. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, an influential conservative activist, said in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”"

Police abuses

• Eric Garner
  • ...
• Sandra Bland
  • ...
• Botham Jean
  • ...
• Left-wing activists
  • Huffington Post, "Portland Cops Knew The Fascists Had A Weapons Cache. They Kept Silent And Attacked Protesters", 2018/10/16

Healthcare industry

• Natural Blaze, "ALEC Behind Recent Push For Mandatory Vaccination", 2015/07/31
• Series of tweets on 2019/12/16 by former Cigna vice president of corporate communications Wendell Potter criticizing the "choice" rhetoric used by the health insurance industry
• Note that Wally Hilliard has a background as a health insurance executive in Wisconsin
• Note that Rick Scott has a background as healthcare provider executive

Other curiosities

• Project Veritas background
  • New York Times, "Erik Prince Recruits Ex-Spies to Help Infiltrate Liberal Groups", 2020/03/07Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents. One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show. Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. [...] Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. [...] Mr. Prince invited Project Veritas operatives — including Mr. O’Keefe — to his family’s Wyoming ranch for training in 2017, The Intercept reported last year."
• Democratic Party relationship with the Koch brothers
  • Support for the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)
    • AMERICAblog, "Koch Industries gave funding to the DLC and served on its Executive Council", 2010/08/25
    • Democratic Leadership Council, "Statement from DLC Founder Al From", 2011/07/05: "I am pleased to report that the historical records of the Democratic Leadership Council will become part of the Clinton Foundation. [...] The DLC has accomplished much of what we first set out to achieve. As a result, the DLC itself ceased operations earlier this year, but the records and materials prepared and formulated by the DLC over the years have significant historical value. Because many of these materials show and explain the growth and development of President Clinton's policies, passions and legacy, the William J. Clinton Foundation has purchased all of the records and materials of the DLC. The Clinton Presidential Center is an important location for telling the story not just of the Clinton administration but also of the world at the latter part of the 20th century. We believe these records are an important part of that history, and believe the Clinton Foundation is an appropriate and fitting repository."
    • Sam Smith, "How the Koch brothers helped dismantle the Democratic Party", 2015/04/14
    • Salon, "Clintonism screwed the Democrats: How Bill, Hillary and the Democratic Leadership Council gutted progressivism", 2016/04/30
  • New Yorker, "The Koch Brothers' Covert Operations" by Jane Mayer, 2010/08/30
    • "By 1993, when Bill Clinton became President, Citizens for a Sound Economy had become a prototype for the kind of corporate-backed opposition campaigns that have proliferated during the Obama era. The group waged a successful assault on Clinton’s proposed B.T.U. tax on energy, for instance, running advertisements, staging media events, and targeting opponents. And it mobilized anti-tax rallies outside the Capitol—rallies that NPR described as “designed to strike fear into the hearts of wavering Democrats.” Dan Glickman, a former Democratic congressman from Wichita, who supported the B.T.U. tax, recalled, “I’d been in Congress eighteen years. The Kochs actually engaged against me and funded my opponent. They used a lot of resources and effort—their employees, too.” Glickman suffered a surprise defeat. “I can’t prove it, but I think I was probably their victim,” he said."
    • "The Kochs continued to disperse their money, creating slippery organizations with generic-sounding names, and this made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington. In 1990, Citizens for a Sound Economy created a spinoff group, Citizens for the Environment, which called acid rain and other environmental problems “myths.” When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigated the matter, it discovered that the spinoff group had “no citizen membership of its own.”"
    • "During the 2000 election campaign, Koch Industries spent some nine hundred thousand dollars to support the candidacies of George W. Bush and other Republicans. During the Bush years, Koch Industries and other fossil-fuel companies enjoyed remarkable prosperity. The 2005 energy bill, which Hillary Clinton dubbed the Dick Cheney Lobbyist Energy Bill, offered enormous subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies. The Kochs have cast themselves as deficit hawks, but, according to a study by Media Matters, their companies have benefitted from nearly a hundred million dollars in government contracts since 2000."
  • Brian Mohr, "Rahm’s donors are Trump’s donors; Thiel, Koch agendas seeping into city deals", 2018/11/03: "Since 2011, the richest man in Illinois has donated almost $1.4 million to the campaigns of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Ken Griffin, the billionaire high-frequency trader and founder of Citadel Investment Group, has also given million$ to the Koch brothers, Trump’s Inaugural Committee, Paul Ryan, Karl Rove’ American Crossroads Super PAC, Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and pro-Jeb Bush super Pac, Right to Rise USA. The money has gained him access to to not only Emanuel’s office but also the White House. On the same day last June that former FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate, Griffin and other investors including Rebekah Mercer, Doug DeVos and Todd Ricketts met at the White House with Trump, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, WH Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Advisor Kellyanne Conway to discuss the administration’s legislative agenda."
• Smear campaign against Ruth Bader Ginsburg
  • Claim that she supported the age of consent being 12 years old
    • "Sex Bias in the U.S. Code", 1977/04 (archived copy)
    • Eugene Volokh, "Justice Ginsburg's Past Endorsement of Lowering the Age of Consent to 12", 2005/09/21: "As it happens, I have just today found another version of S. 1400 § 1633 (excerpted in 13 Crim. Law Reporter 3011, Apr. 4, 1973), which did set the age of consent at twelve. This must be the version to which the Ginsburg report referred."
• Ayn Rand background
  • Mark Ames, "ATLAS SHRIEKED: AYN RAND’S FIRST LOVE AND MENTOR WAS A SADISTIC SERIAL KILLER WHO DISMEMBERED LITTLE GIRLS", 2010/02/26 - name of the killer is William Edward Hickman