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Absolutely. One thing most people don't realize is that citizens own corporations. Retail investors (anyone with retirement accounts) own or are beneficial own

Absolutely. One thing most people don't realize is that citizens own corporations. Retail investors (anyone with retirement accounts) own or are beneficial owners of the majority of public company common stock. And as shareowners, you have rights. So, you can change this loop if as a shareowner, you change what happens between steps 1 and 2 by engaging with those companies. I built this site to try and make that process accessible. For example, this NGO campaign for fund managers to require companies to disclose political spending: https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-political-activity/ https://www.yourstake.org/campaign/disclose-corporate-politi...

kerkeslager 8y ago
While I applaud your intentions and effort, you're basically hoping that we can start trusting companies to self-regulate if we ask them to do so nicely. I suspect any change in spending habits you might see from companies would fall under what I mentioned: > "Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas." So in this case you'd see companies saying, "Look how transparent we are about our lobbying! Look how we're only lobbying for carbon emissions regulation!" Meanwhile they've bought up a massive campus and put spikes on the sidewalks to prevent the homeless from sleeping there, and pay 75% of their workers minimum wage. And that's even if the disclosure of their political spending gives an accurate impression. It's quite easy to publicly spend to support an anti-carbon-emissions bill that will make a councilman's career, in order to buy that councilman's vote against the housing bill that would hurt your business. In the disclosure, it looks like your political spending was anti-carbon-emissions, when in reality it was anti-homeless. It's not plausible for average citizens to become educated and do enough research to catch companies doing this in every case: there are too many companies and it's too complex. It's the job of politicians to do that research and regulate accordingly, and we need to empower them to do that, and elect politicians who will use that power effectively. The only way out of this that I can see is to not allow companies to spend on politics at all--voters have the sole right to determine our politics, and that right needs to be protected from corporate spending.

kerkeslager 8y ago

While I applaud your intentions and effort, you're basically hoping that we can start trusting companies to self-regulate if we ask them to do so nicely. I suspect any change in spending habits you might see from companies would fall under what I mentioned: > "Companies might choose one or two social issues to do good on for marketing purposes, while creating equal or greater harm in other areas." So in this case you'd see companies saying, "Look how transparent we are about our lobbying! Look how we're only lobbying for carbon emissions regulation!" Meanwhile they've bought up a massive campus and put spikes on the sidewalks to prevent the homeless from sleeping there, and pay 75% of their workers minimum wage. And that's even if the disclosure of their political spending gives an accurate impression. It's quite easy to publicly spend to support an anti-carbon-emissions bill that will make a councilman's career, in order to buy that councilman's vote against the housing bill that would hurt your business. In the disclosure, it looks like your political spending was anti-carbon-emissions, when in reality it was anti-homeless. It's not plausible for average citizens to become educated and do enough research to catch companies doing this in every case: there are too many companies and it's too complex. It's the job of politicians to do that research and regulate accordingly, and we need to empower them to do that, and elect politicians who will use that power effectively. The only way out of this that I can see is to not allow companies to spend on politics at all--voters have the sole right to determine our politics, and that right needs to be protected from corporate spending.