Reply #348: OH - ALEC Investigator Hot on the Trail in OH Multiple Posts [View All]

"This philosophy of making government the manager and not the deliverer of services has been rampant over the past decades and the time is right for ALEC to mush its agenda forward. In the introduction to the 10 year anniversary edition of No Logo, Naomi Klein details the practices of “hollow corporations” which focus solely on branding and outsource all of the physical elements, like the manufacturing or development, of their products to other companies. She argues that Americans have seen the building of a hollow state, where waging war is even outsourced to companies like Halliburton and XE (ISBN:978-0-312-42927-0, pg. xx-xxi). ALEC’s private enterprise board has some of the largest of these brand-centric hollow corporations sitting on it, including Coke, Walmart and Philip Morris. Other hollow corporations that SourceWatch has identified as members are Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson and Bayer.(para) It should be no surprise. The fundamental purpose of ALEC is to streamline the production of bills by essentially outsourcing the writing and lobbying and to save the corporations and the legislators time in the process. ALEC’s functionality as a clearinghouse means legislators can spend less time drafting the bills themselves, thus more legislation can be introduced and ultimately passed."