Over the last four years, Greenpeace has made a Valentine’s Day tradition of spoofing the influence peddling of corporate lobbyists and captured politicians. This year’s installment embodies the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which reporters have characterized as a “dating service” for its role in pushing copycat, corporate-crafted laws through state legislatures.
This year, our PolluterHarmony story wrote itself. Online dating ads running on TV have featured a creepy middleman who plays third wheel on various peoples’ dates. In real life, ALEC is that creepy middleman, creating a tax-deductible process for companies to vote as equals with state politicians on bad laws that appear in legislatures around the country. This all happens with little to no disclosure, away from the constituents who elected ALEC’s member legislators.
This secretive attack on the public comes in many forms: privatizing education, weakening unions and public employee benefits, increasing gun violence, keeping legitimate voters away from the polls, denying climate change science, limiting the liability of corporations that harm people, and many other items on the Big Business wishlist.
Want examples? Check our humorous dating profiles (citing real-life events) on an ALEC senator in Ohio attacking clean energy incentives and an ALEC senator in Nebraska who was courted on a trip to the tar sands courtesy of ALEC, oil companies and the Canadian government.
ALEC has said that one of its top priorities in 2014 will be to make it harder for homeowners and businesses to put solar panels on their rooftops by introducing solar taxes on behalf of big utilities that are afraid of losing customers.
But thanks to increased public scrutiny, ALEC has struggled in recent years to avoid its own controversial shadow. ALEC’s own leaked documents confirm it has lost at least 60 corporate members and 400 legislative members, thanks to ALEC’s role in pushing Stand Your Ground laws and Voter ID legislation that keeps people with social minority status away from the voting booth.
While ALEC staff have given lip service to increased transparency, journalists like Washington Post’s Dana Milbank and Mother Jones’ Andy Kroll have shown how ALEC keeps its doors firmly shut on the public.
Even companies that are sticking with ALEC appear to be embarrassed by the association: Duke Energy has done all it can to not confirm renewed ALEC membership, ignoring repeated calls, emails and a 150,000-strong public petition delivered by a diverse coalition of organizations whose members don’t appreciate how ALEC’s bad policies make Duke appear two-faced.
Please share our video to help spread the word on ALEC, and send a message to state legislators at StandUpToALEC.org.
