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Kurt Malmgren was a Senior Vice President of State Activities at the Tobacco Institute in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1999, he was also Vice President of State Government Affairs at pharmaceutical trade and lobbying group PhRMA, and a member of the Private Enterprise Board of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).^[1]

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. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door. Learn more at ALECexposed.org.

Related documents

• 1989 Draft Tobacco Institute Strategy Speech

References

1. ↑ American Legislative Exchange Council, 1998 Form 990, form filed with the IRS and available via Guidestar.org, May 14, 1999

This article may include information from Tobacco Documents Online.