February 2, 2013
Members of the Securities and Exchange Commission:
It's long past time to end secret political spending by corporations.
So I strongly support the SEC issuing a rule in the near future that would require publicly traded corporations to publicly disclose all their spending on political activities.
Both shareholders and the public deserve to know how much a given corporation spends on politics (directly and through intermediaries), and which candidates are being promoted or attacked.
Personally, along with millions of other individual citizens, I believe the Supreme Court got it entirely wrong in their Citizens United decision. They unabashedly voted for Goliath, not David, making minorities of individuals, who cannot begin to compete with these massive undisclosed monies. If our constitution was built around protecting and defending minorities, the Citizens United decision is absurd to the extreme. Please do your part to, at the very least, force public corporations' public disclosure of all of their political spending. The law should be struck down, but, for now, disclosure is one way to cast light on this darkly foreboding underbelly of our political system, thanks to those Justices who favor might over right.
Thank you for considering my comment.
Sincerely,
M Schutt