February 1, 2013
Dear 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 as soon as possible that would require publicly traded corporations to publicly disclose all of their spending on political activities.
You know very well that shareholders and the public deserve to know how much corporations spend on elections (directly & through intermediaries). We cannot have anything even remotely close to a democracy until we achieve this modicum of decency in our election process. The U.S. people are tired of having "selections" instead of elections. We are embarrassed at how we are perceived around the world by other societies. Let's stop pretending we are civilized. We lie to ourselves every day we neglect to take money out of the electoral process. Private campaign finance should be ended. Let's at least take a small first step toward that inevitability.
Thank you for considering my comment.
Sincerely,
Roy Sharkey