September 07, 2012
Dear members of the Securities and Exchange Commission:
I am writing to urge the SEC to issue a rule requiring publicly traded corporations to publicly disclose all their political spending.
The Citizen's United decision was a horrible thing. I'm a retired lawyer and in my opinion the reasoning was weak and ignored precedents this very court had set only recently.
More importantly, however, I strongly believe that secrecy of what and for whom corporations are spending corporate (actually more accurately shareholder) funds on political campaigns and attack ads is even worse than the court allowing corporations to spend money on political campaigns.
Both shareholders and the public should be fully informed as to how much the corporation spends 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.
Sincerely,
Kenneth Labdon