Lucas,
Break out the champagne.
If you're the CEO of a giant corporation, that is.
If you're an everyday citizen concerned about the corporate takeover of our democracy, keep reading.
Activists and investors led by Public Citizen and our allies submitted nearly 700,000 comments to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) urging the agency to pass a rule requiring that a corporation's election spending be disclosed to its shareholders (a.k.a. its actual owners).
The public demand was so loud that the agency put issuing such a rule on its official to-do list for 2013.
But the SEC never got around to issuing the rule this year. And it just released its agenda for next year.
Guess what disappeared?
Tell the SEC to stop caving in to Big Business and to put transparency in corporate political spending back on its agenda.
Because of the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United ruling, corporations can spend as much as they want trying to tilt elections toward candidates who will put profits before people.
And the lack of disclosure means the public — and even a corporation's own shareholders — are kept in the dark when executives funnel corporate money into partisan political attack machines operated by the likes of Karl Rove and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Winning this commonsense and popular rule at the SEC is the most important step we can take in the short term — while we keep working to pass a constitutional amendment — to counteract Citizens United.
Tell the SEC to put issuing a rule requiring corporations to disclose their political spending back on its agenda.
It may be that the SEC thought that opponents of transparency would make more noise if the agency went forward with the rule than proponents of democracy will make now that the agency is trying to weasel out of its obligation to We the People.
Let's make some noise.
Onward,
Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen