July 26, 2013
It is wrong that corporations can secretly give money without disclosing to their stockholders and the American people. We bailed some of them out in 2008 and now they want to hide their political spending.
In many of these corporations hide their money overseas – so maybe they really are a foreign government/foreign corporation and should not be legally allowed to contribute to political spending anyway.
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.
Penny Hlavna
Anchorage, AK