Dear Friend,
This week we have won a key victory in our campaign to stop excessive corporate spending from dominating our elections.
When the Supreme Court struck down crucial campaign finance reforms on corporate spending in its Citizens United decision, my office started demanding that corporations adopt new standards of transparency and accountability in their political activities. Now, as yesteday's New York Times reports , after months of negotiations with our office Goldman Sachs has agreed to refrain from spending any money in elections, setting an important standard for the entire financial industry.
Building a new movement to combat the impact Citizens United is even more critical now that Republicans in the U.S. Senate have successfully blocked the DISCLOSE Act , which President Obama put forward in order to require some level of transparency in corporate political spending in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision .
Our campaign at Goldman started with people on the street and online speaking out and demanding that they do the right thing and agree not to take advantage of new opportunities to flood our campaigns with corporate dollars. In May, I held a protest at Goldman Sachs's annual shareholders meeting and delivered a petition signed by over 1,000 New Yorkers demanding that Goldman disclose their political spending. Now we need to use the same approach to get more corporations to follow Goldman's lead.
Sign our petition calling on other corporations to follow Goldman's lead, join our Facebook group calling for real corporate disclosure of political spending and help us build a movement to make our government accountable to the people, not corporate interests.
Bill de Blasio