Six RI Legislators Join ALEC, a Pro-Corporate “Model” Legislation Advocate

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a consortium of corporations which drafts and approves “model” legislation for right-wing state legislators on virtually every area of law. As one example, reported by Mike Elk of The Nation, in today’s interview on DemocracyNow!:

“One of the most perverse effects that ALEC has had on American society is the dramatic increase in the amount of prisoners incarcerated in this country. In 1980, there were only half a million people incarcerated in this country. Now that number has quadrupled to nearly 2.4 million…the majority for non-violent offenses. The U.S. has four per cent of the world’s population, but has 25% of the world’s prisoners in this country–and a big part of the reason for that is ALEC.”

As Elk further reports, their advocacy of tougher sentencing laws for drug violations and other offenses benefits the private prison industry–including the Corrections Corporation of America, a member of ALEC. “So they put a mass amount of people in jail,” says Elk, “and then they created a situation where they could exploit that.”

Moreover, using ALEC-approved legislation, states are increasingly using cheap prison labor to displace union workers. Thus, through ALEC’s efforts, are not Blacks, Latinos and poor Whites being subjected to a new form of legalized slavery?

This is but the tip of the iceberg for ALEC’s impact on our political and economic system. As ALECexposed.org summarizes:

“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 with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost all of ALEC’s operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law.”

As cited by ALECexposed.org, six members of the Rhode Island legislature are ALEC members:

• Sen. Leo Blais
• Sen. Francis Maher*
• Sen. Leonidas Raptakis* (Retired to run for Sec. of State)
• Sen. V. Sosnowski*
• Sen. Paul Fogarty**
• Sen. Walter Felag**
• Rep. Laurence Ehrhardt**

*Alternate, ALEC Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force
**Member, ALEC Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force

If you are a constituent of any of these members, you may want to ask questions such as these:  Why are you a member of ALEC? What legislative measures have you reviewed?  Have you introduced ALEC legislation at the RI statehouse?  Did you pay the $50 membership fee personally–or did you charge this to taxpayers?