Leading progressive organizers met on May 10 to coordinate their attack plan against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), discussing ways to pressure corporations into abandoning the group for its small-government advocacy and turn against what they call the “vast, right-wing conspiracy.”
The participants, including representatives from such far-left groups as Common Cause, Color of Change, and ProgressNow, met for lunch in a conference room at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The New Organizing Institute, a group that provides support and technology for political organizers, sponsored the forum.
“Never relent, never let up pressure, and always increase,” said Aniello Alioto of ProgressNow Colorado, summing up the strategy.
ALEC is a private-public partnership of state legislators and businesses that works to advance free-market legislation. ALEC’s members craft model legislation that is introduced roughly 1,000 times a year in state capitals around the country by a group of about 1,600 to 2,000 legislators, most of whom are Republicans.
ALEC has long drawn the ire of labor and leftist groups for its pro-business and limited government politics. Only in the past year, however, has a coordinated effort against the group taken place.
Those efforts picked up steam after the Trayvon Martin shooting, when Florida’s “stand your ground” law was linked to similar state laws crafted by ALEC.
“The Trayvon Martin thing was like a gift,” Common Cause spokeswoman Mary Boyle recently told Businessweek.
Read more at the Washington Free Beacon.
