The American Legislative Exchange Council met in New Orleans in early August. Since ALEC wants to operate behind the scenes (or under a rock as I prefer) we have only bits and blotches of what happened there. What we do know is that behind the curtain, Alec prepared a want list, prepared talking points and worked on public relations for selling their stinky ideas.

Another thing we do know is that at least one eastern Iowa legislator, Mark Lofgren of Muscatine attended. I can not find the story online, but there was a story in their print edition. Local resident Don Paulson wrote a letter to the Journal making sure that the public understood what ALEC was trying to do.

“At least he is honest.  We learned from the August 19 Journal that Republican Mark Lofgren admitted attending the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) annual meeting.

ALEC has become corporate America’s easy way to get what they want through legislation.  The best way to describe the process is to state from the website alecexposed.org.

“ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group.  It is much more powerful than that.  Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line.  Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC.  Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote wth legislators to approve “model” bills.  …Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring home those proposals home and introduce them in state houses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations- without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills.”

The Center for Media and Democracy recently published more than eight hundred leaked ALEC model bills.

This is just the wrong way to go about doing the people’s business.”

But one progressive legislator did get in to the meetings. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin attended and he has been more than happy to tell the world what he able to see. Pocan blogged his experience. In one story, he gets to the very essence of why ALEC is wrong. Wrong policies from the wrong people created in the wrong way – in secret! Very anti-democratic process.
“So there are many good reasons why ALEC should be a secret society. If the public really knew what they were and what they do, a lot of legislators would have some explaining to do. But fortunately for them, most media will never report on this. That allows the “secret” part to keep going, unfortunately for us, at a very successful pace.”

Read Pocan’s blogs from ALEC here  and here

Also, Rep. Pocan has a couple of short, quite interesting interviews.  Watch him on the Thom Hartmann show here  and watch the video at end of this post.

Progressives need to be prepared to expose their agenda before and during the next legislative session.

And the running of America from behind closed doors, behind drawn curtains or as I prefer from under a rock, needs to be stopped. For any extra legislative group to have such power – the power to control legislation – goes against the very grain of small ‘d’ democracy.