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The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a “free-market association of state lawmakers” that also resembles a conservative lobbying group, is facing intense scrutiny for its role in helping corporations influence

Issues:

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a “free-market association of state lawmakers” that also resembles a conservative lobbying group, is facing intense scrutiny for its role in helping corporations influence and even draft legislation that has been enacted by many states, with little transparency or accountability to constituents. As of April 23, the legitimacy of ALEC’s public-charity status is being questioned in major media outlets, prompted by a submission of internal documents to the IRS by the watchdog organization Common Cause.

Laws produced or inspired by ALEC have privatized prisons, freed telecommunications companies from regulatory oversight, slashed some public school funds while diverting others to for-profit charter schools, and prevented public-sector employees from taking part in collective bargaining.

We used LittleSis.org’s “network search” function to generate a roster of 16 individuals who have leadership positions at more than one of the organizations that were funding sponsors of ALEC’s 2011 annual meeting. Network search is a sort of flexible interlocks search that allows advanced users to explore LittleSis data in new ways.

ALECnetworksearch
This advanced search tool can be used to search for secondary or tertiary connections between people and/or organizations.

The link to the ALEC network search query is here, but note that it is only accessible to logged-in, advanced users. Drop us a note if you’d like to give it a test drive.

The ALEC network search query turns up some interesting names. They are hardly uniformly Republican  – several, such as Kenneth Frazier and Suzanne Nora Johnson, are Democratic donors. Two others, Pamela Carter and Gerard Baliles, have been elected to state office as Democrats. One, Carrie Walton Penner, hails from a family/company that has recently become embroiled in a massive foreign bribery scandal.

If anti-ALEC organizers were to start targeting the board members of ALEC companies, a la OccupyTheBoardroom.org, perhaps they would start with this list. (Please note that a growing number of corporations and member organizations have recently announced that they have severed ties with ALEC, and others may soon follow, including some listed below.)

Here is a full rundown of the list and their notable connections/background – 2011 ALEC sponsors are in bold: