On June 18, 2012, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration writes:
“In the upside-down world of regressive Republicanism, McConnell thinks proposed legislation requiring companies to disclose their campaign spending would stifle their free speech.
“He describes the current push to disclose the sources behind campaign contributions as a “political weapon,” used by the Democrats, “to expose its critics to harassment and intimidation.”
“Harassment and intimidation? It used to be called accountability to shareholders and consumers.
“Five members of the Supreme Court think corporations are people. Mitt Romney agrees. And now the minority leader of the Senate – the highest-ranking Republican official in America – takes this logic to its absurd conclusion: If corporations are people, they must be capable of feeling harassed and intimidated if their shareholders or consumers don’t approve of their political expenditures.”
The Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act or DISCLOSE Act was first introduced by Democrats in 2010 after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC ruling that allowed unlimited contributions and corporate funds to flow into political campaigns.
The legislation aims to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 by prohibiting government contractors from making expenditures in elections, banning foreign influence in U.S. elections and forcing corporations to disclose campaign expenditures. Democrats in the House passed the measure in 2010, but it was blocked by Republicans in the Senate. Democratic senators introduced an updated version of the bill in March of this year.
What we need is BIG MONEY and corporate lobbing influence out of government and government that responsibly enacts policies that promote its responsibility for the health and prosperity of the economy, not discharge its responsibility through coerced trickle-down and through redistribution achieved by the rigging of labor prices, by taxation to support redistribution and job “creation,” or subsidization by inflation and by all kinds of welfare, open and concealed. We need government that is founded on the principal that economic power has to be universally distributed amongst individual citizens and never allowed to concentrate.
