Much has been written lately about the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) a right-wing think tank that drafts state level model, “one-size-fits-all”, legislation aimed at “limited governments, free markets and federalism”. Funded by benefactors like the billionaire Koch brothers the legislation and agendas promoted by ALEC were secret until an insider recently leaked 800 documents spanning decades to Aliya Rahman, an Ohio-based activist who in turn released the information to the Center for Media and Democracy and journalists at The Nation.

Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists frustrated by recent electoral setbacks, ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. Inspired by Milton Friedman’s call for conservatives to “develop alternatives to existing policies [and] keep them alive and available,” ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more. In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by GOP governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alums.

Oregon has enacted bills designed by ALEC that include weakening of environmental protection laws. Locally, State Senator Jeff Kruse confirms that he was a member “in the past, but our budget cuts took some of these options away from us. I still keep up on their activities, however.” Representative Wayne Krieger says he follows ALEC closely but has been too busy to become a member. Legislative membership costs $25 and corporate membership is anywhere from $7,000 to $25,000.

John Nichols of The Nation speaks with Keith Olbermann on Countdown

Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy speaks with Democracy Now

Well, this week, the Center for Media and Democracy made available to the public a wide array of bills from the secretive ALEC, from the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council. And what these model bills, these wish lists for corporations, show is that corporations and politicians, state politicians, voted behind closed doors through ALEC task forces on a set of radical proposals to rewrite our rights in almost every area of the law. And so, this trove of documents that came to us by way of a whistleblower, we felt it was very important for the American people to see these bills, to be able to analyze these bills, to see what was happening in their own legislatures, and to trace these bills back to ALEC and to the corporations that actually voted for them behind closed doors. We were astonished, in these documents, that ALEC touts to its members that corporations have a, quote, “voice and a vote.” They have a voice and a vote, through ALEC task forces, on our lives, on bills before—in many instances, they are introduced in any legislature across the country.

These bills have published, these resolutions, against things like windfall taxes—windfall taxes for the oil companies, resolutions on all sorts of things involving the budget, to try to stop any revenue increases to help address spending crises—or, pardon me, to help address the crises that we’re seeing in terms of the budgets, so that we can deal with the needs of our country. And so, what you see in bill after bill, resolution after resolution, is this radical agenda that has been put forth since the 1970s, funded by some of the wealthiest, wealthiest people and corporations in the world. Corporations like Koch Industries, billionaires Charles and David Koch, who run that company, many other companies, Exxon, the wealthiest of the wealthiest on the planet, have been part ALEC and part of this agenda.

And so, we made these bills, with analysis, available to the public, so the American people can see where bills that are racing through their state legislatures this spring—to radically write worker rights, consumer rights, the rights of Americans killed or injured by corporations, tax law, budget laws, the rights of local democracy, efforts to stop reforming healthcare—where these things are, in many respects, coming from. They’re coming in prepackaged bills to legislators across the country through ALEC.

Read about how ALEC is pushing the privatization of schools, reduced worker rights and consumer rights and infringed on democracy and voter rights at ALEC Exposed.