ALEC Exposed

Walk the red carpet at the Barrymore Theatre! The Center for Media and Democracy/ALEC Exposed, in partnership with the Brave New Foundation, presents a Robert Greenwald film: Koch Brothers Exposed, a film screening followed by a discussion on the billionaire Koch brothers' attack on democracy. Watch the trailer here.

-- by Brian Austin, originally posted on Badger Blue, Times Two.

"The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away."

-- William Golding, Lord of the Flies

Question of the day: What interest would a corporate lobbyist group have in expanding the rights of citizens to shoot and kill each other?

A great deal has been written about the shooting deaths of Trayvon Martin and Bo Morrison over the past several weeks. I don't need to rehash that conversation, as there is little I can offer regarding specific facts of those cases. What I would like to do instead is examine why these Castle Doctrine/Stand Your Ground Laws have been promoted with such enthusiasm by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

I have written about ALEC in several prior posts, including Enemy at the Gates and Contempt, thy name is Fitzgerald. In short, ALEC is a corporate lobbyist group that writes model legislation favorable to its corporate members and presents this legislation for passage in statehouses across the nation. The conduit for this legislation are the legislators who are also members of ALEC. This partnership between corporate lobbyists and politicians has been very fruitful for the corporations hawking their legislation. This is fact, not conspiracy theory, as evidenced when ALEC legislation was recently introduced in Florida still bearing the ALEC mission statement.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg held a press conference Wednesday in Washington, DC to denounce the "Shoot First" law conceived by the National Rifle Association and promoted through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The law, pushed by its supporters under the name "Stand Your Ground," had been cited in Florida to potentially allow Trayvon Martin's killer to escape liability.

Wendy's International, the parent company of Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburger, is the sixth corporation to say that it is no longer a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the past week. Wendy's International sent an email to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) this morning stating that the fast food chain had decided not to renew their membership at the end of 2011. CMD
launched ALEC Exposed and named Wendy's as corporate member in July 2011.