FuzzyLumpkins
04-19-2012, 01:03 AM
This is just an excerpt but this is perhaps the best and most encouraging political commentary that I have read this year. I still think that the prospects for a truly representative republic are limited but I will take whatever hope I can get in what to me is a bleak bleak era.
I strongly encourage everyone regardless of partisan inclinations or lackthereof to click the link and read this. I had forgotten about TNR but I think i am going to renew my subscription.
Understanding the actual psychology of corporate decision-making about political activity is essential to devising any way of balancing the potential power of corporations in the less-restricted world after the Citizens United and even more important SpeechNow.org cases. Yet very little journalism or research looks closely at those decisions. A recent exception was Steve Coll’s superb article on Exxon-Mobil in the April 9 New Yorker, which showed how distinctive that oil company is in becoming “a finance arm of the Republican Party.” Most large shareholder-owned corporations, Coll reported, based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, more or less split their Political Action Committee contributions between the parties. A look at the CRP’s “Heavy Hitters” database makes clear that Coll is right—most major corporations stay within about a 60-40 range in the partisan split of their PAC contributions, with some swings in the direction of the winners after recent elections. Besides Exxon-Mobil, the exceptions among corporate PACs are privately held companies like Koch Industries.
What this suggests is that corporate political giving is not typically about political speech, or trying to change the actual outcome of elections. It’s about access to the elected officials, whoever they are. What organizations like ALEC do is sell access, which they in turn use to promote a broader range of conservative causes. Boycotts and shareholder activism can break that pattern—not by intimidation, as conservatives suggest, but by forcing the decision out of the hands of the lobbyists alone and into higher levels of the company. A similar tactic was developed by The Center for Political Accountability, which uses shareholder resolutions to encourage companies to disclose their political giving. More than 100 companies have agreed to disclosure, but much of the value comes not just from disclosure, but from forcing companies to consider at a high level whether the organizations they are supporting really reflect the values the company wants to express.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/102714/tk
I strongly encourage everyone regardless of partisan inclinations or lackthereof to click the link and read this. I had forgotten about TNR but I think i am going to renew my subscription.
Understanding the actual psychology of corporate decision-making about political activity is essential to devising any way of balancing the potential power of corporations in the less-restricted world after the Citizens United and even more important SpeechNow.org cases. Yet very little journalism or research looks closely at those decisions. A recent exception was Steve Coll’s superb article on Exxon-Mobil in the April 9 New Yorker, which showed how distinctive that oil company is in becoming “a finance arm of the Republican Party.” Most large shareholder-owned corporations, Coll reported, based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, more or less split their Political Action Committee contributions between the parties. A look at the CRP’s “Heavy Hitters” database makes clear that Coll is right—most major corporations stay within about a 60-40 range in the partisan split of their PAC contributions, with some swings in the direction of the winners after recent elections. Besides Exxon-Mobil, the exceptions among corporate PACs are privately held companies like Koch Industries.
What this suggests is that corporate political giving is not typically about political speech, or trying to change the actual outcome of elections. It’s about access to the elected officials, whoever they are. What organizations like ALEC do is sell access, which they in turn use to promote a broader range of conservative causes. Boycotts and shareholder activism can break that pattern—not by intimidation, as conservatives suggest, but by forcing the decision out of the hands of the lobbyists alone and into higher levels of the company. A similar tactic was developed by The Center for Political Accountability, which uses shareholder resolutions to encourage companies to disclose their political giving. More than 100 companies have agreed to disclosure, but much of the value comes not just from disclosure, but from forcing companies to consider at a high level whether the organizations they are supporting really reflect the values the company wants to express.
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/102714/tk