Legislators represent NH voters, not largecorporations

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

To the Editor:

On Feb. 9, NH House Speaker O’Brien invited House members to attend a briefing by the extreme Conservative group American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC will be coming to New Hampshire to try to influence our representatives and senators on health care legislation.

ALEC is a nonprofit which receives funding from large corporations, their trade groups, and their foundations, including ExxonMobil and the Koch Foundation. Through ALEC, corporations write the laws they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Participating conservative legislators then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land, without disclosing that corporations crafted these bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law.

Some of these bills would weaken laws governing oil spills, such as the BP spill which occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. Some of these bills would weaken anti-smoking laws, such as that which O’Brien and his reckless Republicans pushed through here in NH and now are finding has cost the state millions in lost revenue. Some of these bills, opposed by most law enforcement groups, would weaken gun laws, making it easier to obtain and use guns without permits in such places as campuses, courts, and crowded sporting events.

This program by ALEC is designed to influence our state representatives and senators to support legislation that represents the best interests of corporations, not those of their constituents here in New Hampshire. In fact, much of this legislation has the goal of dismantling current laws that are already benefitting us, such as the Affordable Care Act.

We the citizens of NH need to send our “Republican legislators” a message that they represent the interests of NH voters and not the large corporations represented by ALEC who do not even reside in NH. This is just another instance of the insidiousness of the Supreme Court’s ill-conceived Citizens United ruling giving corporations the rights & privileges of people.

RAY IANNUZZELLI

Amherst