In a lead article published late yesterday, headlined How a powerful rightwing lobby is plotting to stop minimum wage hikes Britain's Guardian newspaper (hello American media???) reports that the conservative business-friendly group ALEC met recently to strategize policy on how to combat the nationwide drive to increase the minimum wage.
ALEC gained fame and visibility in recent years when progressive groups began noticing that legislatures across the country were almost simultaneously taking up and passing business-friendly legislation - much of it almost identical in language.
Despite its generally low profile, ALEC has drawn scrutiny recently for promoting gun rights policies like the Stand Your Ground law at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida, as well as bills to weaken labor unions and tighten voter identification rules. Amid the controversies, several companies, including Coca-Cola, Intuit and Kraft Foods, have left the group.Most of the attention has focused on ALEC’s role in creating model bills, drafted by lobbyists and lawmakers, that broadly advance a pro-business, socially conservative agenda. But a review of internal ALEC documents shows that this is only one facet of a sophisticated operation for shaping public policy at a state-by-state level. The records offer a glimpse of how special interests effectively turn ALEC’s lawmaker members into stealth lobbyists, providing them with talking points, signaling how they should vote and collaborating on bills affecting hundreds of issues like school vouchers and tobacco taxes.
