In class, we saw that most news is bad news.
This holds true in the
annual review of our student paper. Most of the stories are stories of bad news:
Campus reacts to accusations
Professor ousted from classroom
Solar Homestead brings recognition for sustainability
Coming Out Day messages vandalized
Assault kick-starts hate crime debate
Obama stops in Boone
Tuition increases further
We also learned that corporations and the powerful, including groups like ALEC, often work behind the scenes to control the laws of our nation.
In
this article, the news shows what happens to ALEC once the sheet is pulled off its deeds.
On May 11, 2012, about 20 state legislators from 15 oil- and
gas-rich states are scheduled to meet in a hotel conference room in
Charlotte. Representatives from major energy companies will be there,
too. Oil and gas lobbying groups will give presentations to the
lawmakers on fossil fuel prices and the need for modernizing the
nation’s power grid. But no “lobbying” will take place. What happens in
Charlotte will be called education.
For three decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the meeting’s host, has brought together corporations (including
Pfizer (PFE),
AT&T (T), and
ExxonMobil (XOM))
and state legislators to write what it calls model bills—pieces of
legislation the industries would like to become law. Often this means
protecting favored tax treatment or keeping regulations at bay. ALEC has
also approved model bills on social issues, including gun control and
voter registration. The bills then get passed around among the 1,800
mostly Republican legislators who are ALEC members. They introduce the
model bills about 1,000 times a year in state capitols around the
country, the group says. About 200 become law. ALEC pays for the
meetings through membership fees (called donations) that corporations
pay. The legislators receive travel stipends (called scholarships) to
attend the meetings. ALEC is registered with the IRS as a nonprofit that
provides a public service, not as a lobbyist that seeks to influence.
This
offers two benefits: Corporate members can deduct yearly dues, which
run up to $25,000—more if they want to sponsor meetings; and ALEC
doesn’t have to disclose the names of legislators and executives who
attend. That’s important, because if ALEC operated with complete
openness it would have difficulty operating at all. ALEC has attracted a
wide and wealthy range of supporters in part because it’s done its work
behind closed doors. Membership lists were secret. The origins of the
model bills were secret. Part of ALEC’s mission is to present
industry-backed legislation as grass-roots work. If this were to become
clear to everyone, there’d be no reason for corporations to use it.
Unfortunately
for ALEC, that’s exactly what’s happening. Last year, government
accountability group Common Cause successfully filed Freedom of
Information Act requests with state legislators to learn more about
their dealings with ALEC. At the same time, someone leaked ALEC’s
internal bill library. All told, thousands of pages of internal ALEC
documents were put online, including minutes and attendee lists for the
last two years of meetings.
ColorofChange.org, a civil rights
group, discovered in ALEC’s now-public library a model bill for voter ID
laws passed by 34 states. The laws’ opponents say they suppress voting
by minorities. In December the group began sending letters to ALEC’s
corporate members asking how much they valued their minority customers.
Since then
McDonald’s (MCD),
Wendy’s (WEN),
Coca-Cola (KO),
PepsiCo (PEP),
Yum! Brands (YUM),
Procter & Gamble (PG), and
Intuit (INTU),
among others, have stopped donating to ALEC. The corporate departures
accelerated after the death of Trayvon Martin: Florida’s so-called
stand-your-ground law also sits in ALEC’s model bill library.
In
April, Common Cause sent a tax whistleblower complaint to the IRS,
claiming ALEC is a lobbying group and seeking to strip its nonprofit
status. Common Cause spokeswoman Mary Boyle says the group had been
waiting for months for the right moment to lodge its complaint. “The
Trayvon Martin thing was like a gift,” she says.
Quoting from the
U.S. tax code, ALEC’s lawyer Alan Dye says the group engages “in
nonpartisan analysis, study, or research” and therefore is not a
lobbying group. In an e-mail, he says ALEC is the victim of a “committed
effort by extreme liberal front groups to diminish ALEC’s effectiveness
in supporting free-market solutions in the states. … ALEC does not
lobby and makes every effort to ensure that its processes are effective
and compliant.” Dye is certainly right about one thing: The groups
attacking ALEC are committed to diminishing its effectiveness. Their
most successful tactic has been simply to show what it does.
The bottom line: A trove of private ALEC documents was posted online, leading prominent companies, including Coca-Cola, to leave the group.
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