January 15, 2013
Corporations are not real people and do not deserve the right of unfettered and unreported political spending. Their interests quite often are the exact opposite of the interests of the citizens of the United States, REAL people whose constitutional rights should not be infringed upon! Citizen's United was the wrong opinion and needs to be recitified by appropriate legislative action and beaureaucratic rules.
I am writing to urge the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue a rule requiring publicly traded corporations to publicly disclose all their political spending – and to do so this year.
“Dark money” groups that accept contributions from corporations, but are not required to publicly identify their corporate donors, spent millions of dollars during the 2012 elections. It is a scandal that money from publicly traded corporations – which belongs to investors – can be secretly spent to distort our democracy.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission created the loophole that enables this secret spending, but the SEC has the authority to close it.
Both shareholders and the public must be fully informed as to how much corporations spend on politics and which candidates are being promoted or attacked. Disclosures should be posted promptly on the SEC’s web site.
Thank you for considering my comment.
Herb Hamilton
OH