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Scoop.it!
Time for the life-blood of ALEC to be cut-off. No more money fellas! 
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Scoop.it!
But what has the Walker/ALEC agenda gotten Wisconsin residents?
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Not a good day for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
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by Rebekah Wilce, PR Watch
Scantron Corporation, a $200 million for-profit educational testing and online tutoring company that makes, among other things, those ubiquitous scan forms for standardized tests (please make sure you fill in the bubble completely and clearly with a #2 pencil, etc.), joined the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) late in 2010, but a company spokesperson told CMD that it is no longer a member. Scantron's departure makes it the 15th corporation to cut ties with ALEC.
Scantron was joined in its move by the non-profit Lumina Foundation for Education, a private foundation that says it is "committed to enrolling and graduating more students from college," with "invested assets in excess of $1 billion," which makes it "among the nation’s top 40 private foundations." Its recent grantees include the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, the Aspen Institute, and the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). A Lumina spokesperson told CMD that it is also no longer a member.
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Kaplan , a for-profit education, tutoring, and testing empire that is the largest division of the $4 billion Washington Post Company , recently ...
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It turns out that one of the great consumer victories from the Texas Legislature last session was a bill so industry-friendly that ALEC and ExxonMobil adopted it as model legislation.
Last December, ALEC adopted model legislation, based on a Texas law, addressing the public disclosure of chemicals in drilling fluids used to extract natural gas through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The ALEC legislation, which has since provided the basis for similar bills submitted in five states, has been promoted as a victory for consumers’ right to know about potential drinking water contaminants.
This is interesting insight into how ALEC functions: The group's "task forces" don't necessarily come up with corporate-friendly laws all on their lonesome. No need for cold pizza, loose-tie spitballing jam sessions around the conference table when a vast talent pool of state legislators and their lobbyists can be found in the several states.
And the Texas Legislature, that Laboratory of Bad Ideas, proved rich territory in this instance.
A close reading of the bill, however, reveals loopholes that would allow energy companies to withhold the names of certain fluid contents, for reasons including that they have been deemed trade secrets. Most telling, perhaps, the bill was sponsored within ALEC by ExxonMobil, one of the largest practitioners of fracking — something not explained when ALEC lawmakers introduced their bills back home.
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Via Alternet.org: "Shortly after issuing a press release announcing that it was disbanding its "Public Safety and Elections Task Force" after 30 years, the A... (Oh, 'ALEC begs for help' with its social media problem?
's comment April 23, 2012 12:06 PM
Great clip, but the subtitles must have been written by either a poorly programmed robot or an unpaid intern for ALEC.
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by JASON EASLEY, Politicus
Another display of grassroots muscle caused the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to drop their financial support for ALEC.
The Gates Foundation had donated $375,000 to ALEC over the past two years, but a spokesman told Roll Call that they were not a dues paying member. “We have made a single grant, narrowly and specifically focused on providing information to ALEC-affiliated state legislators on teacher effectiveness and school finance.”
The effort to get the Gates Foundation to drop ALEC was spearheaded by Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC). In just a few hours, the PCCC had gathered 23,000 signatures on an online petition calling on the foundation to drop ALEC. Their original goal was 20,000 signatures, but they have blown past that and are now over 31,000.
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After years of working behind the scenes, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is being noticed by more and more Americans, and the public doesn't much like what it sees. .... ALEC lists the members of its Private Enterprise Board on its website. These companies range from pharmaceutical companies like Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline, to consumer products creators like Johnson & Johnson and Diageo (which distributes alcoholic beverages like Crown Royal, Johnny Walker, Smirnoff and Guinness.) Via Lynda Park
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Shoot-em-up Charlie takes a look at the killing of Trayvon Martin and what may be behind the "Stand Your Ground" laws that have spread around the United Stat...
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ALEC anti-union push includes key players from Michigan, Arizona think tanks - The Huffington Post...
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The national certifying body for teachers in the U.S., the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS), participated in the Education Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) until April 2012. In an official statement sent to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) today, NBPTS spokesperson Brian Lewis said, “Given recent events, the new NBPTS President and CEO decided to discontinue engagement with ALEC. As a result, NBPTS terminated its membership as an Education Task Force Member of ALEC effective April 18, and also withdrew from participating in the upcoming ALEC conference .... The decision to participate in ALEC had been made by previous NBPTS leadership.”
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OLYMPIA, Wash. — Open government advocates accused a conservative legislative group Monday of falsely claiming tax-exempt status while doing widespread lobbying.
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ALEC has an agenda for public education. This includes implementing common core standards across the nation, charter school implementation, and unreasonable accountability at all levels. Public education is under a "reform attack". These reforms are not really about helping kids or teachers. The reforms are drastic, painful changes that make it easier to privatize public education by "proving" it is failing and moving schools to hybrid charters that drain resources. These changes also make it easier for textbook and testing corporations to implement national standards. Then corporations can sell products nationwide. They are starving public schools, innudating them with impossible and possible hurtful reforms, and then pointing out that public schools are not doing the job. Corporations stand to make a lot of money - if they can continue to buy and sell products for schools that are failing the tests - the same tests they are selling.
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WASHINGTON -- When the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) first started facing public scrutiny about its extraordinary ability to turn "model bills" written by corporate lobbyists into state law, the secretive group sent out a list of...
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The nonprofit famous for supporting "Stand Your Ground" also aids drilling companies in protecting their trade secrets.
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Exceprt from article by MIKE McINTIRE, New York Times
At the conferences, internal records show, representatives of corporations sit with legislators on eight task forces dealing with issues like telecommunications, health care and product liability. (ALEC announced last week that it was disbanding a ninth task force on public safety and elections, which was the focus of much of the recent scrutiny of the group.) Each task force is led by a legislator and someone from the private sector. Corporate members in recent years have included Bank of America, Walmart, Verizon, Microsoft and Connections Education, an online learning company.
The task forces develop model bills that legislators then introduce in their home states. The provenance of those bills is not always apparent to those being asked to vote on them. But minutes of task force meetings, not available to the public, show how some of the bills were produced and who within ALEC sponsored them.
Last December, ALEC adopted model legislation, based on a Texas law, addressing the public disclosure of chemicals in drilling fluids used to extract natural gas through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The ALEC legislation, which has since provided the basis for similar bills submitted in five states, has been promoted as a victory for consumers’ right to know about potential drinking water contaminants.
A close reading of the bill, however, reveals loopholes that would allow energy companies to withhold the names of certain fluid contents, for reasons including that they have been deemed trade secrets. Most telling, perhaps, the bill was sponsored within ALEC by ExxonMobil, one of the largest practitioners of fracking — something not explained when ALEC lawmakers introduced their bills back home.
ALEC says that its lawmaker members have the ultimate say over its policy deliberations, and that no model bills are adopted unless its governing board, made up entirely of legislators, approves it. But the organization’s rules give corporations a great deal of influence on the task forces, where model legislation must first clear a preliminary vote before going to the board. As a result, meeting minutes show, draft bills that are preferred by a majority of lawmakers are sometimes killed by the corporate members at the table.
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by Brendan Fischer, The Center for Media and Democracy
The executive director of Gun Owners of America Larry Pratt has hit the airwaves with a rare defense of George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old man who shot and killed unarmed African-American high school student Trayvon Martin. Prosecutors and law enforcement in Florida have cited Florida's "stand your ground" (aka "shoot first") law, which was conceived by the National Rifle Association and ratified by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Pratt is a former ALEC board member and notorious for racially-charged rhetoric.
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by ADAM PECK, Think Progress
Wendy’s, the nation’s newly crowned second largest fast-food restaurant, announced that they too have declined to renew their membership in corporate front group ALEC for 2012. The company sent out a tweetlast night from its official account, saying that their withdrawal from ALEC had been anticipated for several months. “We decided late 2011 and never renewed this year. It didn’t fit our business needs,” read the message.
Wendy’s joins a quickly growing list of large corporations and other institutions that pulled their support and funding from ALEC, a conservative organization that has helped draft controversial voter ID bills in dozens of states. Coca Cola, Pepsi Co, Intuit, Kraft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wendy’s fellow fast-food giant McDonalds all previously announced that they would drop ALEC as well.
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by JOHN NICHOLS, The Nation What's happening with ALEC is good. But not good enough. Pressured by a coalition of civil rights, clean government and religious groups to quit their memberships in the American Legislative Exchange Council, multinational corporations are indeed exiting ALEC. Now, it's time to demand that the 2,000 legislators who have joined ALEC do the same. Via Lynda Park
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by Suzanne Merkelson, Republic Report
Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have both dropped their memberships in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the shadowy, ideologically conservative organization behind “Stand Your Ground” and other controversial state laws, including a ban on living wages, school and prison privatization, and disenfranchising voter ID requirements. ALEC links corporations with friendly state lawmakers and drafts model legislation to be pushed in state legislatures. “Stand Your Ground” and its implication in the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin have pushed ALEC and its member corporations, including not only Coca-Cola and Pepsi, but also Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, FedEx, Johnson & Johnson, and others, into the spotlight.
Read More: http://ow.ly/a78b1
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