February 2, 2013
Dear Members of the Securities and Exchange Commission:
Elections should be very public affairs. The only thing not public about elections should be the secret ballot vote. Corporations do not have the privilege of voting, so any donataion they make in any way shape or form should be made public. Otherwise, we are allowing corporations to secretly influence our elections.
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.
Thank you for considering my comment.
Sincerely,
Anthony Ricci