Smart ALEC

The ALEC Documents Exposed

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

The Guardian -- which, of course, we should all ignore because people don't like Glenn Greenwald and will not have him over for dinner any time soon -- has gotten its hands on a whole trove of documents from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and is doing god's work with them. The most interesting of them notes that ALEC started seriously bleeding corporate support when it lined up on the wrong side of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, who was killed by misunderstood crimebuster George Zimmerman for the crime of carrying snack food in a neighborhood where Zimmerman didn't think he belonged. It also notes that ALEC is concocting new scams to revive itself.

The Guardian has learned that the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which shapes and promotes legislation at state level across the US, has identified more than 40 lapsed corporate members it wants to attract back into the fold under a scheme referred to in its documents as the "Prodigal Son Project". The target firms include commercial giants such as Amazon, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Kraft, McDonald's and Walmart, all of which cut ties with the group following the furore over the killing of the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida in February 2012...The reference to the Prodigal Son Project is just one of many revelations contained in a batch of internal Alec documents that have been obtained by the Guardian. The documents, prepared for its most recent annual board meeting in Chicago in August, cast light on the inner workings of the group. They show that: Alec has set up a separate sister group called the "Jeffersonian Project" amid concerns over possible government inquiries into whether its activities constitute lobbying - which would threaten its tax-exempt status; the network has suffered a decline in its membership among state-based Republicans and among big corporations following the Trayvon Martin controversy; its income raised from conferences, membership fees and donations has fallen short, leaving the group with a potential funding crisis; a draft agreement prepared for the board meeting proposed that Alec's chairs in each of the 50 states, who are drawn from senior legislators, should be required to put the interests of the organisation first, thus setting up a possible conflict of interest with the voters who elected them.

(More here.)