Yesterday Coca-Cola announced it would no longer be a member of ALEC, the law-drafting pressure group American Legislative Exchange Council. Pepsi already decided that last year. 
Voting with your pocketbook works! There’s plenty more to do: ALEC pushed Georgia’s HB 87 that provides “customers” for CCA’s ICE prison yet is opposed by local farmers; ALEC backed the “Stand Your Ground” law that Trayvon Martin’s killer is hiding behind; ALEC is behind the charter school constitutional amendment that will be on the ballot in November. ALEC is crony capitalism in our legislature, our neighborhoods, and our schools. Here’s one way to oppose ALEC that works.
Leon Stafford and Aaron Gould Sheinin wrote for the AJC yesteray, Coke cuts ties with ALEC,
“Our involvement with ALEC was focused on efforts to oppose discriminatory food and beverage taxes, not on issues that have no direct bearing on our business,” Coke spokeswoman Diana Garza Ciarlante said.
Here’s ALEC’s “model legislation”: A Resolution in Opposition to Deiscriminatory Food and Beverage Taxes,
…opposes all efforts — federally and on the state level — to impose discriminatory taxes on food and/or beverages.
Now I don’t like food taxes, either: they’re the very model of regressive taxes that affect the poor more than the rich. But beverage taxes? As in taxes on the sugar water Coca-Cola sells? Those might improve public health and increase state revenue.
So how much has Coke supported ALEC in this?
Ciarlante said the company would not disclose its financial support of ALEC but said it was restricted to yearly dues. She said it had been a member for approximately 10 years. The company had received some phone calls protesting its relationship with ALEC, she said, but declined to comment on the decision beyond the company’s statement.
I wonder how much other support Coke provided, as in for example introductions to power-brokers around Atlanta.
Coke’s rival Pepsi also declined to renew its ALEC membership when it expired at the end of 2011, spokeswoman Heather Gleason said. The company’s 10-year membership focused exclusively on tax issues related to the beverage industry, she said.
And Pepsi probably also didn’t want to talk about lobbying for tax breaks for sugar water while legislatures are cutting education budgets.
What does ALEC do, anyway?
Jay Bookman wrote for the AJC yesterday, ALEC’s secret influence on state laws, legislators,
Lobbyists and lawyers who help write ALEC’s model legislation in Washington know the issues quite well; they know all the little ways in which the law can be twisted to their clients’ advantage. Those bills are then taken back home and introduced in state legislatures with no warning of where they originated or who is really behind them. (There are exceptions, of course. Last year a Florida state representative introduced a resolution calling for lower corporate income taxes, but forgot to strip out language indicating it had been written by ALEC.)The result is a system in which a centralized core of special interests, based in Washington, exert a strong and often untraceable influence on state laws and legislators, many of whom frankly don’t understand or in some cases don’t care how they’re being used.
In our own case, it produces laws drafted not to respond to Georgia problems or to protect Georgia citizens, but to secretly benefit interests that really don’t give a whit about the state.
There are still petitions active against ALEC, such as this one about ALEC-sponsored voter-ID laws and this one petitioning several state governors to “Expose and Abolish” ALEC and this one asking the IRS to investigate ALEC.
As Dan Froomkin points out,
Consumer-facing corporations are of course the most susceptible to public pressure. Other familiar brands still on ALEC’s Private Enterprise Board include Walmart, State Farm and AT&T.
Let’s not forget UPS, another ALEC-supporting corporate giant headquartered in Atlanta.
Companies that can lose customers apparently care more about what the people think than some of our elected legislators do.
-jsq
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