How Much Is Your Congressperson Influenced By Big Business?

Just so you know I’m not kidding you, here is the Alec homepage link. ALEC stands for American Legislative Exchange Council. And according to them, they are the largest non-profit public-private “conservative” organization devoted to drafting research, policy papers and developing model legislation to “assist” government and promote “free-market” conservative ideas, Limited government and Federalism. They say they are non-partisan — bit if that’s so — it’s only because they are so far to the right, they aren’t even Republican.

First, who are they? Well, they are 2,000 American state representatives (representing 1/3 of all sitting state legislators), 14 state Governors and 85 members of our United States Congress (and a few conservative Supreme Court Members) who work side by side with the heads of 300 of America’s most powerful corporations; oil, pharmaceuticals, Wall Street — you name it, they were part of it.

Second, what do they do? The legislators create state and federal (model bills) laws that will benefit their corporate members — I mean free market, less regulation, and any others laws that might help them achieve these goals — i.e., restrictive voter id laws, abortion, gay marriage, etc.

Third, where are you the American citizen in this model? Well, to put it simply, you’re not in it. You’re not even considered. You’re barely a thought.

Let’s look first at our U.S.Congressional members of Alec.

In the next article, we look at the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies influencing our legislators as members of ALEC.