As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m helping a long-shot local statehouse candidate with his campaign finance filing. I’m his treasurer. It’s not difficult. There’s the Handbook of Ohio Campaign Finance to refer to, and we file with the Secretary of State online. I enter the donor name and address on a form and once the report is filed, those names are publicly available.
We met with a small business owner 2 weeks ago. He wanted to fire questions at us for 45 minutes and then (possibly) donate. It was like a competition to see which side could speak more quickly, interrupt the other more often, and listen not at all. I thought he won that in a walk, so didn’t expect a donation after that disaster of an inquisition. His name is on the door of the local business he owns and operates, and when I file my next report, his name will also be on the candidate’s donor list, because we seem to have survived the hazing: he wrote us a check. Will that matter to his customers in this overwhelmingly Republican county? I don’t know. I hope not. I know that we had local volunteers for John Kerry in 2004 who work at the for-profit hospital here. They parked across the street in the supermarket lot when we met for phone banking, because they were afraid they’d face repercussions at work if it became known that they were volunteering for that Alinskyite radical Leftist, Senator John Kerry.
Contrast that with the absolute cowardice and incessant, bleating whining of the moneyed few, speaking through an editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ:
Shareholder proxy season is coming up, and along with it a new batch of politicized shareholder resolutions. The underreported story this year is the flowering of a long-planned political campaign intended to stop companies from exercising their free-speech rights to influence government. Corporate directors need to know what they’re up against.
The campaign is traveling under the assumed name of “disclosure,” which sounds innocuous and is hard for CEOs and corporate boards to oppose. The specific target is to get companies to publicly disclose what they spend on politics—their donations to candidates or PACs, how much they spend on lobbying or government affairs, which industry associations they contribute to, and even in some cases the political contributions of executives.
It’s part of a multiyear campaign by unions, left-wing activists and their factotums to expose and then vilify companies that disagree with them.
The campaign has gained speed since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling that restored First Amendment rights to unions and corporations.Corporations are not democracies. They are businesses organized for the purpose of making money to increase value for all shareholders, not to serve the narrow goals of some shareholders.
The political left is using this disclosure campaign not to serve the interests of shareholders, but to further its own policy agenda. It is an abuse of the proxy process, and companies would be wise to resist it in the interest of their business, their shareholders, and their country.
And, here’s the great Richard Trumka, in his advocate’s hat, responding:
Your editorial “The Corporate Disclosure Assault” (March 19) falsely claims that disclosure of corporate political expenditures is not in the best interest of all shareholders. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United, which upheld the First Amendment rights of corporations to make independent political expenditures, explicitly relied in part on the principle that “prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.”
Current law enables businesses to spend for many political purposes without disclosure, whether to the public or their shareholders. The editorial’s suggestion that businesses should be able to conceal their political spending in order to avoid criticism or controversy disserves shareholders. As Justice Antonin Scalia recently observed in another case, Doe v. Reed, which rejected First Amendment-based claims for keeping secret the identities of ballot-petition signers, “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”
Unions have long been required to make public disclosures of their political and other spending. Corporations that spend to influence politics have no legitimate gripe against shareholder disclosure resolutions that would require them to publicly disclose that spending—and they have ample opportunity and resources to explain why that spending advances shareholder value and the public interest.
Richard L. Trumka
President
AFL-CIO
Washington
They want what they always want: all of the rewards with none of the risk. Risk is for the people who can least afford it.
CT Voter
Ahem. This is Romney’s core principle, too.
Villago Delenda Est
This is, quite literally, their bottom line.
Privatize reward, socialize risk. Push as many costs as possible to externalities. Don’t be honest in your accounting.
Be criminal and sociopathic in nature.
Steve
It’s weird, we’re such a center-right country, and yet it would apparently be so bad for business if corporations publicly identified themselves as members of that majority coalition. You’d think it would be a badge of honor.
bemused senior
Just a reminder that the more things change, the more they remain the same: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/03/this-day-in-labor-history-march-25-1911
MikeJ
This part:
Shows that the WSJ doesn’t understand what a corporation is. They exist to serve the needs of their owners, the shareholders. If shareholders want to focus single mindedly on profits, that what they should do. But when the owners demand other priorities, those should be the priorities of the corporation.
JPL
Kay, Thanks for this post. All your posts are good but this situation needs to be highlighted. If corporations are people too, who want to share in our democracy, then they need to follow the same guidelines and laws.
Kay
@MikeJ:
I love the huffy, preening sense of OUTRAGE.
Some schmuck with an unpopular yard sign is fair game for any and all comers, but not these guys! They need layers of legal protections.
American royalty.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I’m (delusionally?) hoping that some of the revelations of the last few years will sink in, so that people will see how utterly sociopathic the Republican core values are. But the right wing noise machine is well oiled, and loud.
J.D. Rhoades
It’s part of their basic philosophy: holding corporations accountable is un-American.
Citizen_X
And of course, for the shareholder who owns 10,000 shares, they are a thousand times more attentive than for the one who holds 10 shares. So this “all shareholders” thing needs an asterisk.
BTW, I’m honored to be a “vilifying factotum” now. Is the prose of capitalist propaganda getting as florid and self-referential as that of the old communist propaganda?
becca
Is it shareholder proxy season ALREADY?
It seems deer season was only yesterday.
Roger Moore
Yes, they are. They may not follow the exact one person/one vote rule that’s the basis of our national political system, but the existence of proxy ballots and shareholder initiatives is proof that corporations are supposed to be democratic. And how are the shareholders supposed to hold their boards and executives accountable if they don’t know what those boards and executives are doing with their money? That the biggest media voice of the corporate sector thinks it’s dangerously radical to let shareholders know what the company is doing in their name is a sign of how dangerously out of whack corporate governance has gotten.
WereBear
Me too. We should have a shirt.
Brian R.
So the conservative position is that corporations are people, money is speech, and therefore corporations have the freedom to spend as much as they want in elections because they have the freedom of speech. But we shouldn’t be allowed to see who’s speaking, to know where those arguments are coming from?
I guess corporations are people wearing black ski masks.
WereBear
And what’s with the “restore” free speech to corporations? This is a stinky interpretation of law, and I can’t see the Founding Fathers embracing the modern equivalent of the East India Company.
Ruckus
@Kay:
They need layers of legal protections.
Actually it seems they frequently do. And for more than public relations reasons.
JoyfulA
ok, I’ll start opening those dear shareholder and “proxy” envelopes now, instead of being too busy to bother.
jrg
So, I’m not entitled as a shareholder, an employee, or a customer of a corporation to know about efforts that company makes to influence our political process, even if they’re spending my investment dollars to do it? Awesome! It’s not like I have a right to know.
Clearly, the degeneration of our political discourse is due to Bill Meyer and anonymous blog commenters.
some guy
so let me see if I have this right. according to the WSJ no union money can be spent unless a majority of members vote to approve it ahead of time, but corporations won’t use their PAC dollars under the sdame set of rules.
they can spend their shareholders money on political speech with out approval before or after the expenditures?
gocart mozart
This post is the best thing on the internet today.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/25/1076618/-When-men-were-free
oldmtnbkr
J.K. Galbraith talked about this (i.e. unaccountable corporate governance) over 40 years ago in his book The New Industrial State. Can’t say we weren’t warned!
Roger Moore
@Brian R.:
There is a long and valuable tradition of anonymous and pseudonymous political speech, and there’s great danger in letting people reveal the speaker. If corporations are people (yes, yes, that’s a big if) they presumably have the same right to anonymous speech as any other person. That’s why this is best framed in terms of the shareholders having a right to know what the corporation is doing with their money, rather than in terms of the public having a right to know who’s saying what.
PIGL
The WSJ is, naturally, being shady and distractionating with the truth. Corporations are supposed to be vehicles for their share-holders to engage in joint ventures while limiting risk to the funds invested.
In the post-Washington Consensus world, corporations are in fact vehicles for enriching without bound the upper echelons of the executive suite and their co-conspirators in corporate finance. This is done by robbing the shareholders and also the workers by extracting their productivity and daylight confiscation of their pensions. The way they specifically arrange to do this is by maintaining a regulatory environment highly supportive of control fraud, and the way they ensure that is through highly targeted political conributions. Naturally, they want to keep these in the shadows.
The entire paid and contributing editorial staff of the WSJ, and entire executive suite of every $billion+ corporation, and a great many more culprit-rich environments need to be sent to a gulag in Alaska to pound rocks for 10 years, and their personal and family assets need to be confiscated. Will this cause some injustice? Yes, and that is just too damn bad. Let’s see the bastards socialise the risk of political reprisal.
uptown
It’s much easier to pretend you’re speaking for a larger group of people when you can hide behind pseudonymous political ads. When you have to say: “this ad was bought to you by The Big Humungeth Corporation”, it loses much of it’s impact.
BruceFromOhio
…. hence the need for disclosure, you fucking two bit soulless ratfuck republican asshole.
Gaia strike me dead, it’s like THEY WANT IT ALL TO COME CRASHING DOWN ON THEM.