This is the Tom Hartman Program.

Today we're reading from State Capture how conservative activists, big business and wealthy donors

reshaped the American states and the nation by Alexander Hurtel Fernandez.

This is some chapter one titled the most dangerously effective organization.

Wanna by a law, teasedase the Normally Stayed Trade Publication Bloomberg Business Week in a 2011 article.

That piece explain how a relatively unknown group, the American Legislative Exchange Council,

Alec, could turn one bill idea from a business

into many, many laws in exchange for hefty membership dues.

Corporations drop bills off at one end concluded the

journalists and they come out the other stamped with the imprimatur of a nonprofit

nonpartisan group of state legislators in the journalist assessment that

process made Alex a corporate bill laundry for the states.

Investigative journalists in the nation reached a similar conclusion, writing that Alex Project was best summarized as the complete

business domination of American public life. The good government reform

outfit common cause agreed summing up their take on Alec is a group in which

quote dozens of corporations are investing millions up their take on Alec is a group in which, quote,

dozens of corporations are investing millions of dollars a year

to write business-friendly legislation that

has been made into law in state houses coast to coast

with no regard for the public interest.

And in a book on corporate lobbying across the states, Labor Scholar Gordon Laffer has concluded

that, quote, above all, the corporate agenda to shape state policy is

...