Sometimes the blinders are lifted. And sometimes people do the right thing. ALEC is bleeding members. Really important members. Take that you damn NRA.
Now maybe a few of our State legislatures might try writing laws themselves again, if they haven’t forgotten how.
Five more companies, including Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), the No. 1 computer maker, have left the controversial American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) since the Feb. 26 killing of Trayvon Martin, 17, in Sanford, Fla
ALEC is a Washington, D.C.-based group that lobbies for laws in state legislatures, including the “stand your ground” law. George Zimmerman, 28, who’s been charged with second-degree murder in the case, has cited the law as part of his defense.
The others to resign are CVS Caremark (NYSE: CVS), Deere & Co. (NYSE: DE), private MillerCoors LLC and BestBuy (NYSE: BBY), respective giants in drugstores, tractors, beer and electronics retailing.
Last month, Dell (Nasdaq: DELL), the No. 3 PC maker, quit ALEC after the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and other liberal groups launched anti-ALEC activities. Nearly 30 companies and nonprofits have quit by now.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 
I like the smiley face gun.
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😆
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This is great to hear and all but I can see all these corporations, millionaires and billionaires just going off and getting back together under a different named group, doing to very same thing all over again.
But maybe it’s good just to finally know that a number of our laws were written not by elected representatives but big corporations. Perhaps, making the public aware of it was enough to stave this practice off for a little while at least.
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Spuds, I fear you’r right about the ‘re-grouping’.. But orgs like ALEC took years to build up. Let us hope they crash and burn! And let us hope that it’ll be years before anything quite that powerful gets on its feet.
Vigilance is us!
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Take a look at the last couple of expose articles I wrote on Daily Kos over the past week on ALEC’s hidden memberships and their Federal Forum Task Force being used to influence Congress from inside. See both at: http://www.dailykos.com/blog/Bob%20Sloan/.
Been researching and exposing ALEC since 2006.
Bob Sloan
Ex. Dir. Voters Legislative Transparency Project
http://www.vltp.net
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Will do Bob, and thanks for doing the good work. Blogging at Marcos place? I am impressed!
Wrote about him in a media post last year . . . I became a reader on Day One and still remember his first post. It began “I am a liberal” :
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Yepper – been on DK since late 2010 writing on ALEC and prison industry issues and corruption. Met Marcos at Netroots this year (won a DFA Scholarship to attend for my ALEC work) and had a great discussion with he and Mr. Dean at a luncheon about ALEC and Indiana politics.
Hoping by this time next year ALEC will be no more…then we can move up the chain toward the Kochs and work on eliminating them as well 🙂
Bob
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Just did some reading at your diary . . . wondeful stuff. I’m now following. Amazingly,even though I haen’t actually signed in in years, my account is still active. It’s so old that my user ID is just ‘Florida’, I imagine if I were signing upp today it would be Florida 2200!
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Great that the work on ALEC brought you back to DK after so long away. You’re right, by now the username you chose would have been long gone and followed by at least triple digits. You’ll find a lot of stuff I’ve written on the ALEC topic. Hopefully you can use the research that went into some of the diaries to raise more awareness.
Bob
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Count on it Bob!
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When exposed to the light of day, the roaches will scurry away from any den.
Those companies aren’t sorry for having belonged to an egregious organization, they are sorry for having belonged to an egregious organization when it is called out for dispensing evil.
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OF course – and getting caught! The ultimate sin.
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Actually, the concept of groups such as ALEC is a good – damn good. Most of our legislators couldn’t write good legislation if you held a gun to their heads.
A professional group doing it and presenting it, along with predictive case-studies of enforcement methods and possible court challenges, can do a better job of it.
You just don’t like the legislation in question. If it was some Leftist group, you’d be all for them and for the same reasons I stated above.
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No I wouldn’t jonolan. Absolutely not. And actually writing the legislation is and always has been done by staff. That’s one of their jobs.
If ALEC’s membership were wider than mostly multinational for-profit corporations, I might feel differently. Remember, we constantly hear that the number one job of corrporations is to make money for their shareholders. That’s quite different from the responsiblity to protect a nation and its people and ‘provide for the general welfare’. Quite different.
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