UPS. State Farm Insurance. Former President George W. Bush.
You might be wondering what these names have to do with you – or our democracy for that matter.
All three of them are involved with ALEC – a secretive group that pushes extreme legislation like Stand Your Ground gun laws behind closed doors.
ALEC is the acronym for the American Legislative Exchange Council – a group of corporate lobbyists, funded by big corporations and a handful of wealthy families working to ram far-right legislation through states.
ALEC is responsible for some of the most extreme ultra-conservative laws passed in the last decade: racially discriminatory voter photo ID laws, rollbacks of environmental protection, and blocking the Affordable Care Act at the state level.
What’s more – ALEC is shrouded in secrecy. We’ve barely scratched the surface of their member list. That means that your very own legislator, or even your favorite store, could be a part of it.
ALEC’s secrecy is its greatest strength. But thanks to a whistleblower who released some of ALEC’s documents and named a few member corporations, we were able to piece together how the organization operates:
ALEC’s member corporations pay top dollar for direct access to state lawmakers – who allow lobbyists to write corporate dream legislation into ALEC “model bills.” Then, these ALEC-backed legislators rush those bills through their state houses, pretending they wrote the bills themselves and churning out laws that enrich corporations and hurt the rest of us.
John, we’ve been able to use the whistleblower’s leak to deal some devastating blows to ALEC in the past few years.
With your help, we launched a public pressure campaign that exposed ALEC for what it is, and named many of the corporations involved. The bad press and public outrage that ensued forced some of ALEC’s biggest funders – like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon – to cut ties with the corrupt organization.
John, our strategy to stop ALEC by ripping away its secrecy works. But here’s the issue: we’re working off of information that's 12 years old.
That means we still might not know which corporations and family foundations are continuing to prop up ALEC today.
So we’re pulling out all the stops to dig deeper into ALEC and expose each and every one of its members. But this work uses up a lot of our resources.
That’s why I’m writing to you today to ask if you can help fund our proven strategy to STOP ALEC.
We’re ready to pressure each ALEC corporate member, one-by-one, until they cut this with this extreme right-wing lobby group – and step up to defend our civil rights, voting rights, and every other right you and I hold dear. But we need your help.
Will you chip in $3 or more today and EXPOSE ALEC?
I’ve seen it firsthand: Our strategy hits ALEC where it hurts. They don’t have grassroots members, and don’t represent anyone besides major corporations – so if we keep uncovering ALEC’s funders and making clear to corporations and their customers what sort of extreme agenda they’re backing and the public disgust that goes along with it, ALEC loses its power.
But we can’t do this without you, John. Please let me know that I can count on your support.
Thank you,
Viki Harrison, Director of Constitutional Convention & Protect Dissent Programs
and the team at Common Cause
