ALEC loses 8 more, including Wal-Mart

Even Wal-Mart ditches ALEC! What about the Southern Company?

ALEC Exposed is keeping a list of Corporations Which Have Cut Ties to ALEC, and since the ten we last counted, eight more have jumped the sinking lobbying ship: Blue Cross Blue Shield, YUM! Brands, Procter & Gamble, Kaplan, Scantron, Amazon, Medtronic, and Wal-Mart. That’s right, even Wal-Mart. Jason Easley wrote for Politicus USA yesterday, Wal-Mart Dumps ALEC and Outs Them as Un-American,

In a statement, Wal-Mart representative Maggie Sans wrote, “Previously, we expressed our concerns about ALEC’s decision to weigh in on issues that stray from its core mission ‘to advance the Jeffersonian principles of free markets…We feel that the divide between these activities and our purpose as a business has become too wide. To that end, we are suspending our membership in ALEC.”

Wal-Mart claimed that ALEC was no longer as interested in Jeffersonian free market principles as they were other partisan political issues. Two of those unnamed political issues are most certainly voter ID and stand your ground laws.

When even Wal-Mart complains that ALEC isn’t “free market” enough, Wal-Mart, which socializes its employees health care costs by paying them so little they tend to use food stamps and public medical assistance and housing, Wal-Mart that fires people for no reason and does it legally because of Georgia’s at-will “right-to-work” law, Wal-Mart that has former workers marching at its headquarters, when that Wal-Mart says ALEC is too unsavory for it to remain a member, ALEC has a problem.

ALEC, which pushes “anti-immigrant” bills that create new crimes to provide prisoner customers for CCA’s private prions, and that pushes bills to stop renewable energy in favor of big oil, big coal, and big nuclear. ALEC, which pushes bills to promote fracking, still apparently has as a member the Southern Company (SO), which is rapidly moving electricity production to natural gas because of what SO CEO Thomas A. Fanning called

“the revolution we have seen in the shale gas industry”

by which he means fracking.

I say apparently SO is an ALEC member, because it used to be, and we don’t know now, because SO shareholders once again voted down a resolution that would have required SO to tell us about its political spending.

When will the Southern Company ditch ALEC, or tell us when SO left ALEC?

-jsq