If you’re not familiar with American Legislative Exchange Council, here’s how they work:
Corporations pay to join ALEC. ALEC writes model legislation that benefits those corporations through favorable tax breaks, deregulation or limiting competition.
ALEC pays for Virginia legislators to attend their annual meeting in sunny San Diego while taxpayers foot the registration fees.
ALEC shares model legislation with politicians. Then the legislators come home and introduce these bills as if they wrote them, thereby hiding the true authors: corporate friends.
Just one case is Delegate Barbara Comstock’s House Bill 33 modeled after ALEC’s Open Contracting Act.
This is one of many examples of multi-national corporations ghostwriting legislation and hijacking Virginia’s democratic process.
While this cozy relationship works wonders for out-of-state corporate interests and the legislators they buy off, it does enormous harm to real life people who live, work, study and raise families in Virginia.
In nearly every case, these bills weaken the influence of regular working people.
These ALEC laws routinely:
- Take away the rights of workers, make it harder to join unions and destroy collective bargaining rights.
- Reduce access to voting
- Turn our public education system over to for-profit entities.
Things move lightning-fast at the General Assembly and often we have just a day or two to mobilize on an issue. That’s where rapid response comes in: by contacting our Delegates and State Senators on key issues at key times, we will remind them that they represent real constituents, not wealthy campaign donors like the Koch Brothers.
Download PDF of Flow-chart for “How ALEC Works”
