Money In Politics

In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out six decades of established law by granting corporations the right to use their incredible wealth and power to influence elections. 
The tortured legal argument is that we're infringing on a corporation's right to free speech by limiting the money it can spend on political attack ads. But giving corporations this right could fundamentally change our democracy.

The impact and the stakes in this fight are hard to overstate. If this had been the law of the land in 2008, ExxonMobil alone could have outspent President Obama's campaign almost sixty times over.

Imagine how much more difficult the fights for health care and Wall Street reform would have been if Blue Cross Blue Shield or Bank of America had secretly poured millions into the campaigns of their favored candidates.

To stanch the flow of money into future elections, CALPIRG is working to put California officially on record opposing the Court's decision in the Citizens United case.  And we're sponsoring legislation in Sacramento that would force corporations to tell their shareholders and the public before spending money in politics, as well as organizing shareholders themselves to vote against political spending by the corporations they own stock in. 

Getting these huge faceless political donations out of the shadows will go a long way toward making corporations think twice before mucking around in our democracy. And empowering the people behind the corporations can prevent CEOs and corporate boards from unilaterally making decisions to spend their shareholders' money in politics, and provide an important check in this process.