As all of us now know, ALEC is in the news nationwide with dozens of articles about new legislation and old laws which were distributed by the American Legislative Exchange Council coming out daily.
Many individuals and media journalists reported on ALEC activities, identified their state legislative and corporate members prior to last year - with little impact or notice by the voting public. ALEC has/was always considered to big, too powerful and too influential to go after in earnest. However nobody told this to Kossacks - or if they did, we refused to heed their warning.
In the run-up to the first ALEC protest last year in Cincy, a handful of DK bloggers were busy trying to expose ALEC's activities to the general public (you know who you are). They had been at this for some time and when I happened on the scene in November, 2010, the total number of "ALEC" tags was listed at 9 (this morning it stands at 1,340). I joined the fray, linking prison privatization and prison industry exploitation of prisoners to ALEC model legislation and funding from the Koch cabal. Together we continued to keep ALEC in the news here at Kos. Those who had the ability to rescue and recommend diaries, took note about ALEC and more often than not rescued our diaries about ALEC so more members and readers would have an opportunity to read and learn about ALEC.
In February of last year, we put out a call to activists, Kossacks and the public about ALEC's 2011 Spring Summit. It was to be held in Cincinnati the last week of April. We wanted to Rally, Protest and provide public "teach-ins" to inform citizens about ALEC and why they are so dangerous to our democracy. Students belonging DK picked up this call and those in Cincinnati put together a great protest that included a march on the Hotel where ALEC was meeting to determine what laws would be advanced across the country in state legislatures. The DK group, "Exposing ALEC" was born and everyone involved in going after ALEC was urged to join and take part.
ALEC immediately took notice...[yes, unfortunately then as now, there are ALEC defenders and staff lurking here on DK, monitoring the diaries, comments and diarists who write about them and those involved in their cabal]. We didn't know this at the time but thanks to journalist Beau Hodai's FOIA requests we later found this hidden deep within the Ohio documents: http://dbapress.com/.... At that source there are literally thousands of pages of documents uncovered and offered up for review. To save you hours of searching, I have uploaded the pages that mention daily Kos and other "leftist" activities mentioned by ALEC:
Regardless of the warnings sent out to ALEC members, that protest was a great success and resulted in a whistleblower coming forward and turning over all of ALEC's model legislation and related documents to one of the protest organizers. It took 3 months for those documents to pass through several hands and to be fact checked by researchers, run past legal counsel and prepared for release to the public. During that 90 day period we here at DK continued our research and writing about ALEC. We were not relying upon the eventual release of those documents, rather we knew how influential ALEC was and in case they were able to stop the public dissemination of "their" model legislation, we wanted to ensure there would be no lapse in reporting on ALEC at DK.
In July of last year The Nation magazine and the Center for Media and Democracy broke the stories and released the documents publicly. CMD created a site at Source watch dedicated to everything ALEC: http://alecexposed.org/.... This created an explosion of interest about ALEC and a public awareness that was lacking prior to ALEC Exposed and the site and ALEC stories went viral.
Lost in the uproar and excitement surrounding all the information disseminated by The Nation and CMD, was the participation, work and research that had been put into exposing ALEC by DK diarists over the preceding year that made the protest possible and creating an atmosphere and opportunity for the whistle blower to come forward.
Last year many of us separated from the Exposing ALEC group and formed a DK Abolish ALEC group (American Legislative Transparency Project - ALTP). Under this banner we continued to research and work to make ALEC poisonous to their corporate and legislative members and funders. Our members protested ALEC again in New Orleans in August of last year and in Phoenix in December. We are planning a fourth protest and teach-in for Charlotte, NC in May at ALEC's 2012 Spring Summit and many of our members will be participating.
Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy contacted me last week and advised that the CMD wanted to do an article on the "Anniversary of the First 'Protest ALEC' in Cincinnati" that took place on April 29th last year. CMD wants to interview and do the article about the DK diarist's work on ALEC prior to the protest and after, to provide credit and the story behind how the protests began. Those interviewed can use their DK usernames or blogger handles or their real names, whichever is preferred.
In addition we have been generously offered a link back from the ALEC Exposed.org sourcewatch page to ALTP Group articles here on DK: http://alecexposed.org/... which is already up and operational (under "Bloggers and Activists Expose ALEC" heading on the right). ALTP has finally gotten our sister site up and fully operational on the web at www.vltp.net and it is also linked to from the CMD ALEC Exposed page. Anyone wishing to be interviewed about their work against ALEC, participation in protesting ALEC needs to visit the vltp site and use the "info" contact form to leave your contact information for us. If you rather, you can contact me directly through bobsloan@vltp.net.
This is a chance to get the story out about the hard work, dedication and long hours of research many of us put into ALEC here at DK over the past two years. This forum has been responsible for helping awaken America to the existence and danger of ALEC and their activities. I'm grateful this story is going to be told.
Thanks to Lisa Graves and her staff at CMD for this opportunity and enabling Kossacks to participate in even more ALEC exposure going forward. If you would like to participate in the S.O.S ALEC Protest in Charlotte next month, please contact us for event information. If you have contact with well known speakers, journalists or media pundits who you think could help us make the Teach-In and panel event successful, please reach out to them and encourage them to participate or contact us.