April 28, 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.
Both shareholders and the public must 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.
Shareholders must have the right to know which politicians their corporation supports via company expenditures. Without daylight on these expenditures, the corporate executives have effectively two voices compared to the average shareholder's single voice. In other words, executives could say one thing with their mouths while saying something entirely different with their corporate coffers. Shareholders must be allowed to remove or add their own political voice to the corporate collective speech by selling or buying corporate shares based on that corporation's political contributions. If corporations are allowed to fund campaigns "in the dark" then this would effectively limit the common shareholders' ability to speak freely.
Thank you for considering my comment.
Sincerely,
Adam Whitney