Democratic Underground - BLOOMBERG Pssst ... Wanna Buy a Law – When a company needs a state bill – ALEC can get it done Dec 1

Another HUGE Bloomberg piece on ALEC, this time from the Businessweek team.

Pssst ... Wanna Buy a Law?
When a company needs a state bill passed, the American Legislative Exchange Council can get it done
By Brendan Greeley and Alison Fitzgerald
Bloomberg Businessweek - Features
December 01, 2011, 5:15 PM EST
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/pssst-wanna-buy-a-law-12012011.html

VERY LONG (7 pages 10 pt font), but a couple CLIPS:

A week after the meeting, Huval got a call from Lafayette’s statehouse lobbyist in Baton Rouge. Noble Ellington, then a state senator from Winnsboro, three hours northeast of Lafayette, was going to introduce a bill. It was too late in the session for new legislation, but Ellington would offer it as a wholesale substitution for a bill that had been filed two months earlier.
The lobbyist brought back to Lafayette a copy of what would become Senate Bill 877. It named telecommunications as a permitted city utility, then hamstrung municipalities with a list of conditions. (break) It also, almost word for word, matched a piece of legislation kept in the library of the American Legislative Exchange Council. The council’s bill reads, "The people of the State of _______ do enact as follows..."

Mentions of previous investigations and volume of models being peddled:

"ALEC’s online library contains model bills that tighten voter identification requirements, making it harder for students, the elderly, and the poor to vote. Such bills have shown up in 34 states. According to NPR, the Arizona bill that permits police to detain suspected illegal immigrants started as ALEC model legislation. Similar bills have passed in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, and Utah, and have been introduced in 17 other states. Legislators in Oregon, Washington, Montana, New Hampshire, and New Mexico have sponsored bills with identical ALEC language requiring states to withdraw from regional agreements on CO2 emissions. Sound a national trend among state legislators, and often you will find at the bottom of your plumb line a bill that looks like something that has passed through the American Legislative Exchange Council."

Give examples of Telco in UT, then used in other states, etc AND referenced the ALEC Exposed CMD site:

"ALEC does not share a list of the model bills that become law or the full text of any of its model bills. Until the Center for Media and Democracy published the entire library earlier this year, it was hard to figure out which state laws might have come from the council’s library. The council also doesn’t share a list of its members, complicating any attempt to figure out which members—legislators or companies—might have brought the legislation to ALEC in the first place."

Picking up on some of the language we have been using to criticize ALEC:

"It offers companies substantial benefits that seem to have little to do with ideology. Corporations drop bills off at one end, and they come out the other, stamped with the imprimatur of a nonprofit, “nonpartisan” group of state legislators. Among other things, ALEC is a bill laundry."

Mentions the fact that Raegan Webber (ALEC PR girl) HAS LEFT ALEC... now there's a great source now, buy her a cocktail.

Of course most of us are still reeling from the ATOMIC BOMB Bloomberg dropped earlier this week:

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion Undisclosed to Congress
By Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz –
Bloomberg Markets Magazine
Nov 27, 2011 7:01 PM ET
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-28/secret-fed-loans-undisclosed-to-congress-gave-banks-13-billion-in-income.html

Must be eating their Wheaties, or just interested in some of the biggest stories this year, ALEC's role in the 1% taking away our country, state by state... well that's one of them.

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