The corporate front group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has come under increasing fire for secretly passing off corporate-written legislation to state legislatures. Yesterday, the medical device company Medtronic announced that it chose not to renew its membership in ALEC in 2010. Medtronic joins companies including Scantron, which announced earlier this week it was leaving ALEC, as well as Coca-Cola, Kaplan,PepsiCo, Kraft Foods, Wendy’s, Mars, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and BlueCrossBlueShield.
Today, at Amazon.com’s shareholder meeting in Seattle, organizers from groups including Color of Change, CREDO, People for the American Way, and Working Washington delivered petition signatures from over half a million people calling on Amazon.com and other corporations to stop funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate front group responsible for pushing an extreme agenda in states across the country, including voter ID and Stand Your Ground laws.
Word from the meeting is that Amazon.com has decided not to renew its membership in ALEC. It joins companies including Scantron, which announced yesterday it …
Brian Moran, the chairman of the Virginia Democratic Party, has been taking heat over the fact that he also serves as a lobbyist for the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), a trade group representing for-profit colleges. APSCU is engaged in an ongoing battle against President Obama’s efforts to hold its member schools accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse with taxpayer dollars. With Virginia a critical swing state in this fall’s presidential election, it is remarkable that the state Democratic party chair holds a day job as a corporate lobbyist focused on opposing key parts of President Obama’s …
We’ve just received word from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee — which has been campaigning to get Democratic Party lawmakers to quit the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — that an additional eleven Democrats have now left the corporate front group . Here are the eleven who have announced they will be leaving:
- 8 Pennsylvannia legislators: Sen. Lisa Boscola, Sen. Leanna Washington, Sen. Anthony Williams, Rep. Nick Kotik, Rep. Ted Harhai, Rep. William Keller, Rep. Joseph Markosek, Rep. Joseph Petrarca
- 2 Illinois legislators: Rep. Mary Flowers, Rep. Brendan Phelps
- 1 Iowa legislator: Rep. Brian Quirk
These lawmakers join at least 45 others, Republicans and Democrats, …
On Saturday, Republic Report’s Zaid Jilani reported that the National Association of Charter School Authorizers was one of the many covert members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, the controversial front group that helps lobbyists ghostwrite state law. As Jilani noted, NACSA is funded in large part by taxpayer dollars:
NACSA is financed in part by school districts and state departments of education. Here are just a few of NACSA’s members that fall into this category: Denver Public Schools, Baltimore City Public Schools, Arkansas Department of Education, California Department of Education, and the Los Angeles Unified School District.
NACSA …
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a powerful corporate front group that works to pass Big Business-written laws in state legislatures. Following the outcry over the group pushing “Stand Your Ground” laws, at least fifteen major corporations, foundations, and other organizations have decided to end their funding commitments to ALEC.
But ALEC has another way of financing itself that doesn’t involve private corporations at all. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) is one of ALEC’s members at least through 2009 and may well still be a member. NACSA’s president and CEO Greg Richmond joined ALEC’s Education Task Force around …
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the most powerful corporate front group you’ve never heard of ,or at least until more than a dozen major corporations recently quit in the wake of the controversies over it pushing the “Stand Your Ground” laws. ALEC lets corporations write model legislation that it then secretly ships to state legislatures across the country. These bills — which do everything from attack your right to vote to privatize your schools — pass into law without citizens ever knowing that corporations wrote them.
But it gets worse. Not only is ALEC secretly coordinating with …
The corporate front group American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) likes to claim that it’s about “free market” ideas. But if that were true, it wouldn’t be fighting against conservative lawmakers to manipulate tax policy to harm mom and pop stores in favor of giant corporations (who just happen to be their corporate donors).
Here’s how they do it.
Right now, massive online retailers like Amazon.com or Newegg get away without charging sales taxes in most states that they operate in.
That’s bad for mom and pop, brick and mortar stores, which are required by law to charge sales taxes. So, for example, …
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