RSN (Reader Supported News)

By Sara Jerving, PR Watch

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Just one look at the cover of the brochure for this year's annual meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) reveals where some of the corporate bill mill's loyalties lie: with the "natural" gas industry. The full-page ad on the brochure's cover - paid for by the American Gas Association, a trade group for gas utilities companies - identifies just one of the corporate underwriters that litter the pages of the conference booklet shared with all of the elected representatives and unelected corporate lobbyists who attended the convention at the luxurious Grand America resort. (To see a pdf of the ad, which appeared in a key spot on the inside cover check downloads below.)

The conference brochure listed some 15 corporations that stand to benefit from the expansion of fracking, including Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Koch Industries.

Through ALEC, corporate lobbyists have an equal vote with state legislators on ALEC "model" bills, that are pushed in states across the nation. Often the bills were drafted by the corporate lobbyists before being approved by ALEC "task forces." ALEC's legislative agenda includes efforts to bar taxes on windfall profits of energy companies and numerous bills that would make it harder to regulate carbon or address global climate changes, as well as bills that would make it harder to hold these and other companies accountable when Americans are killed or injured as a result of a corporation's product or practices in regulated industries.

ALEC's corporate wish list also includes legislation that creates loopholes specifically for companies engaged in the extraction of oil and gas through the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking."

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