April, 16 2013, 02:44pm EDT

500,000 Americans Urge SEC to Require Disclosure of Corporate Political Spending
New SEC Chair Mary Jo White should heed public opinion and concerns of investors
WASHINGTON
The Corporate Reform Coalition calls on newly confirmed SEC Chair Mary Jo White to act now to require disclosure of corporate political spending. A record-breaking 500,000 investors and members of the public have submitted comments supporting such a rule, demonstrating the importance of this issue. White should seize this pivotal opportunity to safeguard shareholders by providing them with information necessary for their investing decisions.
In a telephone press conference today, coalition members urged the agency to move swiftly on the rule in response to the overwhelming investor concern.
In December, the agency announced that it would consider a proposed rule to require that public companies provide disclosure to shareholders regarding the use of corporate resources for political activities. A petition requesting this rulemaking was filed in 2011 by a bipartisan committee of leading law professors. The SEC has a responsibility to protect investors by regulating the securities markets to ensure that they have the information they need to make investment decisions.
Investors and members of the public have deluged the SEC with half a million comments urging the agency to act to protect their investments. These comments have come from such diverse sources as John Bogle (former CEO of the Vanguard Group), U.S. Reps. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Michael Capuano (D-Mass.), 70 other members of the House of Representatives, more than a dozen U.S. senators, five state treasurers, the Maryland State Retirement Agency, more than 200,000 CREDO activists, US SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, the Sustainable Investments Institute (a large group of firms managing more than $690 billion in assets) and many more.
"The fact that the SEC has received over 490,000 public comments asking for disclosure of political spending from corporations shows there is wide demand from both shareholders and the public for greater transparency. It seems that some opponents of transparency have forgotten who owns any corporations - the shareholders, not the hired executives. I continue to urge the SEC to move forward with its rulemaking as Congress also explores avenues to address shareholder demands legislatively" Capuano said.
"Shareholders have a right to know how companies in their investment portfolio are spending corporate money and that their political expenditures are advancing proper corporate purposes. The SEC should act now to protect investors," stated New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, trustee of the state's $152.9 billion Common Retirement Fund.
This area requires particular investor protections because certain corporate political spending choices may diverge from a company's stated values or policies, or may endanger the company's brand or shareholder value by embroiling it in hot-button issues.
Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center and general counsel to John McCain's 2008 and 2000 presidential campaigns said, "The proposed rule is a logical response from the SEC to address the changed landscape in the wake of the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, striking down laws restricting corporate spending to influence elections. That decision has exposed investors to significant new risks, and the SEC is in the right in moving forward to issue this rule in order to require disclosure of corporate political spending in order to allow investors to make informed decisions in the markets."
In Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy emphasized the importance of disclosure and accountability for corporate political spending, writing that disclosure requirements "provide[] shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters."
"America should be a place where everyone has an equal say and an equal chance. But right now, investors don't have a chance to say anything about the political spending that public corporations may be engaged in because they don't even know about it. If corporate managers choose to spend corporate money to influence elections, there must be rules that ensure transparency and accountability" said Liz Kennedy, counsel at Demos.
"As the nation's pioneer coalition of active investors, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility has more than four decades of experience identifying areas where corporate transparency leads to good investment decisions for our members. We know that transparency undergirds policies promoting value creation as well as justice and sustainability," said Laura Berry, executive director of the ICCR."Time and time again, we've seen the catastrophes wrought by opacity in corporate spending. The SEC must adopt investor protections to ensure transparency in the post-Citizens United environment."
"Political spending disclosure is critical to ensure honest competition and a strong economy that rewards transparency and innovation, not secrecy and pay-to-play politics," said Tim Christiansen, owner of vino per tutti in Bozeman, Montana and a leader with the Montana Small Business Alliance. "When the U.S. Chamber and other big trade groups defend secrecy in political spending, they're defending a system that stacks the deck against small businesses. Secrecy may be part of the U.S. Chamber's business model, but it's not part of mine."
"The American public believes in this reform, and the American investor demands it. Both polling of the general public and the influx of shareholder comments to the SEC demonstrates that fact," stated Lisa Gilbert, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch division.
Americans across the political spectrum strongly support requiring transparency and accountability in corporate political spending. Polling shows that eight out of 10 Americans (81 percent) believe that corporations should only spend money on political campaigns if they disclose their spending immediately (including 77 percent of Republicans and 88 percent of Democrats). Eighty-six percent of Americans agree that prompt disclosure of political spending would help voters, customers and shareholders hold companies accountable for political behavior (support ranged from 83 percent to 92 percent across all political subgroups).
"It's hard to believe there are people who object to this," said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. "Every shareholder is a part owner. When management decides to spend an owner's money on influencing elections, surely the owner ought to at least be able to find out about it."
Lisa Woll, CEO of US SIF, said, "Representing the only U.S. association of professionals engaged in sustainable and responsible investing, we strongly believe that corporate political spending transparency is in the best interests of investors, companies and the general public. The Securities and Exchange Commission should require this disclosure so that investors can fully understand the actions and risks being taken by companies."
"The American people have waited long enough. We need an overhaul of political spending to be at the top of Ms. White's agenda. With a vote, she can force the kind of disclosure we've been sorely lacking since the Citizens United ruling, and shed light on the millions in shadowy spending distorting our elections," said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, trustee of the New York City Employee Retirement System and founder of the Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending (CAPS).
"Hundreds of thousands of Americans have asked the SEC to move forward with a rule requiring the disclosure of political spending by publicly traded corporations," said Marge Baker, executive vice president of People For the American Way. "There is tremendous momentum around this issue. With a newly confirmed SEC chairman, now is the time to pull back the corporate curtain on election spending. Without the increased transparency and accountability that comes with public disclosure, unchecked corporate spending on our elections will continue to threaten our democracy."
"College students benefit from the $400 billion in endowments at this country's institutions of higher education. These students are fighting for real policy change on issues from climate change to student loans, and support disclosure of corporate political spending because they want to know how the companies their colleges and universities invest in are spending their money," said Dan Apfel, executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition.
Public Citizen, Demos, Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending, Trillium Asset Management LLC, Walden Asset Management, Sunlight Foundation, People For the American Way, the Campaign Legal Center, Democracy 21, New Progressive Alliance, Main Street Alliance, Alliance for a Just Society, U. S. PIRG, Responsible Endowments Coalition, the Coffee Party, Harrington Investments, Inc., CREDO, Social Equity Groupand US SIF: The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment participate in the Corporate Reform Coalition, working to increase transparency and accountability for corporate political spending.
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
(202) 588-1000LATEST NEWS
GOP Still Lacks Votes to Pass Budget Bill 'Because It's a Moral Monstrosity,' Says Senate Democrat
"We have been debating amendments for 21 hours and we are still going because through 12 hours of debate and 21 hours of amendment votes, Republicans still don't have 50 votes for their bill," said Sen. Chris Murphy.
Jul 01, 2025
Even after an all-night session of amendment votes and wrangling behind closed doors, Senate Republicans still did not have enough support to pass their reconciliation package as of Tuesday morning, leaving party leaders scrambling to placate GOP holdovers who are purportedly nervous about the legislation's unprecedented cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition assistance.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) argued in a social media post that the reason for the GOP's inability to quickly rally its own members around the legislation is straightforward: "Because it's a moral monstrosity."
"We have been debating amendments for 21 hours and we are still going because through 12 hours of debate and 21 hours of amendment votes, Republicans still don't have 50 votes for their bill," Murphy wrote at roughly 5:30 am ET, as the marathon "vote-a-rama" continued with no end in sight.
With Democrats unanimously opposed to the bill, Senate Republicans can only afford to lose three GOP votes if they are to send the measure back to the House for final approval. Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) have said they will vote against the bill in its current form, and Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) are undecided.
Republican leaders have been working to bring Murkowski into the yes column with a proposal that would temporarily exempt Alaska and other states from the bill's massive cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, ripped the proposal as "absurd" and said it would reward the states with the highest SNAP error rates.
"Insanity reigns," Klobuchar wrote on social media.
Senate Republicans' margins became more difficult after Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) announced his opposition to the legislation over the weekend, pointing to the Senate version's devastating cuts to Medicaid.
"What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding's not there anymore?" Tillis asked in a floor speech on Sunday, citing an estimate of the number of people in North Carolina who could lose health insurance under the Republican bill.
Throughout the country, nearly 12 million people would lose coverage under the Senate reconciliation bill, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
"Kicking millions off healthcare, blowing up the national debt by trillions, and devastating generational economic harms—all being written into law on the fly," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said early Tuesday morning after hours of debate and amendment votes.
Keep ReadingShow Less
At Least 95 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks Including Massacres at Beach Café, Aid Points
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," said one eyewitness to a strike on the popular al-Baqa Café.
Jun 30, 2025
Israeli forces ramped up their genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip Monday, killing at least 95 Palestinians in attacks including massacres at a seaside café and a humanitarian aid distribution center and bombings of five school shelters housing displaced families and a hospital where refugees were sheltering in tents.
An Israeli strike targeted the al-Baqa Café in western Gaza City, one of the few operating businesses remaining after 633 days of Israel's obliteration of the coastal strip and a popular gathering place for journalists, university students, artists, and others seeking reliable internet service and a respite from nearly 21 months of near-relentless attacks.
Medical sources said at least 33 civilians were killed and nearly 50 others wounded in the massacre, including footballer Mustafa Abu Amira, photojournalist Ismail Abu Hatab—who survived an earlier Israeli airstrike and is reportedly the 227th journalists killed by Israel since October 2023—and prominent artist Frans Al-Salmi, whose final painting depicting a young Palestinian woman killed by Israeli forces resembles photographs of its slain creator posted on social media after her killing.
Warning: Photos shows image of death
Survivor Ali Abu Ateila toldThe Associated Press that the café was crowded with women and children at the time of the attack.
"Without a warning, all of a sudden, a warplane hit the place, shaking it like an earthquake," he said.
Another survivor of the massacre told Britain's Sky News: "All I see is blood... Unbelievable. People come here to take a break from what they see inside Gaza. They come westward to breathe."
Eyewitness Ahmed Al-Nayrab toldAgence France-Presse that a "huge explosion shook the area."
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," he said. "It was a scene that made your skin crawl."
Witnesses and officials said Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking food and other humanitarian aid from a U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution point in southern Gaza, killing 15 people amid near-daily massacres of aid-seekers.
"We were targeted by artillery," survivor Monzer Hisham Ismail told The Associated Press. Another survivor, Yousef Mahmoud Mokheimar, told the AP that Israeli troops "fired at us indiscriminately." Mokheimar was shot in the leg, another man who tried to rescue him was also shot.
IDF troops have killed nearly 600 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded more than 4,000 others over the past month, with Israeli military officers and soldiers saying they were ordered to deliberately fire on civilians in search of food and other necessities amid Israel's weaponized starvation of Gaza.
Another 13 people were reportedly killed Monday when IDF warplanes bombed an aid warehouse in the Zeitoun quarter of southern Gaza City, according to al-Ahli Baptist Hospital officials cited by The Palestine Chronicle. IDF warplanes also reportedly bombed five schools housing displaced families, three of them in Zeitoun. Israeli forces also bombed the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinian families are sheltering in tents. It was reportedly the 12th time the hospital has been bombed since the start of the war.
The World Health Organization has documented more than 700 attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities since October 2023. Most of Gaza's hospitals are out of service due to Israeli attacks, some of which have been called genocidal by United Nations experts.
Israel's overall behavior in the war is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 204,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried under rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose casualty figures have been found to be generally accurate and even a likely undercount by peer-reviewed studies.
The intensified IDF attacks follow Israel's issuance of new forced evacuation orders amid the ongoing Operation Gideon's Chariots, an ongoing offensive which aims to conquer and indefinitely occupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse much of its population, possibly to make way for Jewish recolonization as advocated by many right-wing Israelis.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'We Cannot Be Silent': Tlaib Leads 19 US Lawmakers Demanding Israel Stop Starving Gaza
"This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help."
Jun 30, 2025
As the death toll from Israel's forced starvation of Palestinians continues to rise amid the ongoing U.S.-backed genocidal assault and siege of the Gaza Strip, Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Monday led 18 congressional colleagues in a letter demanding that the Trump administration push for an immediate cease-fire, an end to the Israeli blockade, and a resumption of humanitarian aid into the embattled coastal enclave.
"We are outraged at the weaponization of humanitarian aid and escalating use of starvation as a weapon of war by the Israeli government against the Palestinian people in Gaza," Tlaib (D-Mich.)—the only Palestinian American member of Congress—and the other lawmakers wrote in their letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "For over three months, Israeli authorities have blocked nearly all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, fueling mass starvation and suffering among over 2 million people. This follows over 600 days of bombardment, destruction, and forced displacement, and nearly two decades of siege."
"According to experts, 100% of the population is now at risk of famine, and nearly half a million civilians, most of them children, are facing 'catastrophic' conditions of 'starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels,'" the legislators noted. "These actions are a direct violation of both U.S. and international humanitarian law, with devastating human consequences."
Gaza officials have reported that hundreds of Palestinians—including at least 66 children—have died in Gaza from malnutrition and lack of medicine since Israel ratcheted up its siege in early March. Earlier this month, the United Nations Children's Fund warned that childhood malnutrition was "rising at an alarming rate," with 5,119 children under the age of 5 treated for the life-threatening condition in May alone. Of those treated children, 636 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, the most lethal form of the condition.
Meanwhile, nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,000 others have been injured as Israeli occupation forces carry out near-daily massacres of desperate people seeking food and other humanitarian aid at or near distribution sites run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Israel Defense Forces officers and troops have said that they were ordered to shoot and shell aid-seeking Gazans, even when they posed no threat.
"This is not aid," the lawmakers' letter argues. "UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini has warned that, under the GHF, 'aid distribution has become a death trap.' We cannot allow this to continue."
"We strongly oppose any efforts to dismantle the existing U.N.-led humanitarian coordination system in Gaza, which is ready to resume operations immediately once the blockade is lifted," the legislators wrote. "Replacing this system with the GHF further restricts lifesaving aid and undermines the work of long-standing, trusted humanitarian organizations. The result of this policy will be continued starvation and famine."
"We cannot be silent. This current blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help," the lawmakers added. "We demand an immediate end to the blockade, an immediate resumption of unfettered humanitarian aid entry into Gaza, the restoration of U.S. funding to UNRWA, and an immediate and lasting cease-fire. Any other path forward is a path toward greater hunger, famine, and death."
Since launching the retaliatory annihilation of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed at least 56,531 Palestinians and wounded more than 133,600 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which also says over 14,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Upward of 2 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, often more than once.
On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated a call for a cease-fire deal that would secure the release of the remaining 22 living Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas.
In addition to Tlaib, the letter to Rubio was signed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), Al Green (Texas), Jonathan Jackson (Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Henry "Hank"Johnson (Ga.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Jim McGovern (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Chellie Pingree (Maine), Mark Pocan (Wisc.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Paul Tonko (N.Y.), Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (N.J.).
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular