A message from PFAW:
Yesterday McDonald’s announced that it has joined Coca Cola, Pepsi, Kraft Foods and Intuit incutting ties with the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
We’ve already been able to achieve major victories in this campaign. Now we are turning our focus on State Farm Insurance and Johnson & Johnson.
No company should want its consumer brands associated with the dangerous laws ALEC promotes -- including voter suppression, NRA-backed “stand your ground” laws, extreme racial profiling laws targeting immigrants, privatizing public education and protecting corporate polluters.
Much attention has been paid to our petition to ALEC’s member corporations signed by tens of thousands of PFAW members, as well as similar petitions by our allies. Just hours before McDonald’s announced it was ditching ALEC, our affiliate PFAW Foundation, along with Common Cause, the Center for Media and Democracy, CREDO, Color of Change and Progress Now released a statement about the overall effort that specifically called out McDonalds, State Farm and Johnson & Johnson.
We’re already one for three in this phase! Now we need to make sure State Farm and Johnson & Johnson sever ties with ALEC and separate themselves from voter suppression and the other radical right-wing policies ALEC aggressively promotes.
-- Ben Betz, Online Strategy Manager
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You know about ALEC -- the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council; the group behind some of the country’s most notorious right-wing state legislation like Florida’s “shoot first/stand your ground” law, Arizona’s infamous “show me your papers” immigration bill and Voter ID laws aimed at disenfranchising minority and young voters in many states.
PFAW has been tracking and exposing ALEC’s influence for many years. Now, we’re working to pressure the companies that are part of ALEC to sever their ties with the group. And it’s already working, with Coca Cola announcing it will disassociate with ALEC yesterday and Pepsi Co. following suit this morning.
Help us drain ALEC of more of its corporate backing.Sign our petition to ALEC’s member companies urging them to cut ties with the recklessly right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council.
The Koch brothers and other overtly ideological funders of ALEC have a stake in ALEC’s political agenda. Likewise, certain industries are behind ALEC’s specific legislative efforts. For example, gun manufacturers and the NRA push for “stand your ground” type laws, Arizona’s immigration bill had the support of the private prison industry and, obviously, Big Oil and other corporate polluters have a stake in weakening environmental protections. But every company that’s part of ALEC should be held directly accountable for the destructive laws ALEC pushes, even if those laws are not connected to a company’s own corporate agenda.
Coca Cola’s statement said:
“Our involvement with ALEC was focused on efforts to oppose discriminatory food and beverage taxes, not on issues that have no direct bearing on our business. We have a long-standing policy of only taking positions on issues that impact our Company and industry.”
All companies who have supported ALEC should now take this approach. We need to build pressure on companies and let them know that good corporate citizenship means not helping to fund the organization that has helped spread the passage of laws like the Florida “shoot first” law implicated in the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin, or the Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws that deny blacks, Latinos, students and low-income people their right to vote.
Help us turn support of ALEC into a liability for companies. Please join our petition now and help us defund ALEC’s right-wing agenda.
Thank you for being part of this new and important consumer grassroots movement. After you take action, please help build the movement by sharing the petition and asking others to sign.
Sincerely,
Ben Betz, Online Strategy Manager
P.S. By getting companies to remove their support for and participation in ALEC, you’ll be helping to get corporate money out of politics and policy making. Please take this urgent action and sign the petition now.
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