Corporate Lobbyist Concedes He Does Not Always Register As A Lobbyist For ALEC

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Video
Corporate Lobbyist Concedes He Does Not Always Register As A Lobbyist For ALEC Bills He Helps Write
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/17/290713/alec-lobbyist-disclosure/

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a nonprofit that touts itself as a “Jeffersonian” limited government organization for state lawmakers. In reality, the group is little more than a sophisticated front group that allows corporate lobbyists — from companies like Peabody Coal, McDonalds, AT&T, and others — to literally write big business-friendly legislation and pass it off to state-level legislators to be eventually introduced and passed into law. As we have reported, health insurance lobbyists drafted ALEC’s anti-health reform legislation, private prison lobbyists drafted ALEC’s harsh immigrant detention policies, and as the NRDC has documented, multitudes of other corporate giveaways have been drafted as ALEC reform legislation.

Some have challenged the very model of ALEC, claiming that it is designed to skirt state disclosure laws requiring corporate lobbyists to register. A corporate lobbyist can avoid disclosure by simply writing bills via ALEC, at conventions or other meetings with legislators, so when the bill is introduced it no longer has the fingerprints of whatever corporation is employing the lobbyist who wrote the law.

At ALEC conference in New Orleans earlier this month, we ran into Victor Schwartz, an attorney with the firm Shook Hardy and chair of an ALEC task force (the committees charged with writing draft legislation). Schwartz runs what he calls “the iron triangle” at Shook Hardy, a business practice comprised of litigation, lobbying, and public relations to limit liability for corporations. We asked Schwartz, who has helped pass tort reform laws across the country, at times using the support of ALEC, about the ethics of the ALEC strategy for passing laws without lobbying disclosure:


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Watch it:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/17/290713/alec-lobbyist-disclosure/

[sakabatou]

1. That group seems to be made out of pure evil