The Devil went down to Georgia… ALEC caught on tape wining and dining state legislators on behalf of corporate lobbyists in Savannah

Have you ever wondered how legislation gets written and passed into law at the state level? Did you think, as I once did, that ideas for new laws percolate up from local constituents who contact their elected representatives with legitimate concerns that need to be addressed for the good of society? Well, thanks to a determined television news crew in Georgia, we now know definitively that’s not the case… A good percentage of state legislation these days is written by corporate lobbyists and sponsored by state legislators who have been wined, dined, and paid-off by an organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

If all television stations in the United States took their responsibility to serve the public interest as seriously as this station in Georgia, we might not have corporate front groups like ALEC actively subverting democracy by essentially paying our elected officials to sponsor and pass legislation written by industry lobbyists to eradicate environmental protections, roll back worker rights, eliminate taxes on the wealthy and make it more difficult for people to seek legal recourse against corporations.

[For information on how ALEC has worked to pass to legislation in Michigan written by corporate lobbyists, check this outand this.]

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5 Comments

  1. Posted May 25, 2015 at 9:07 am | Permalink

    Don’t just watch this. Watch it, and send it to your local television stations. This is what they should be doing on our behalf.

  2. Anonymous
    Posted May 25, 2015 at 1:59 pm | Permalink

    To make matters worse, ALEC is a 501C3 charitable organization, so corporate contributions to them can be written off.

  3. David Kulpanowski
    Posted May 25, 2015 at 7:47 pm | Permalink

    I saw this posted by another person from GA. I knew this was happening but was stunned by how brazen it was. This is what we are up against.

  4. Eel
    Posted May 26, 2015 at 6:55 am | Permalink

    My favorite part was when they used public law enforcement officers to keep the journalists from the secret meeting. #democracy

  5. Lynne
    Posted May 26, 2015 at 11:10 am | Permalink

    When my brother was just out of college, he got a job on the staff of a congresswoman from Georgia. I was surprised to learn that *he* wrote some of the bills sponsored by his employer. I guess I always figured that our reps in congress wrote the laws themselves but it turns out that it is way easier to have your staff write them and even easier still to have lobbyists write them. Ugh. It doesn’t make me feel good about things.

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