Corporate citizenship

Many moons ago, I worked in a non-U.S.-based multinational corporation's Washington, DC, office, doing so-called "government and public affairs." In addition to monitoring the federal and state governments, the office's principal focus was to implement the company's corporate citizenship program, under which we made focused contributions of cash and product to worthy organizations and developed a grassroots network of support throughout the communities in which we had facilities. As a rule, the company tried hard to be a "good corporate citizen" of those communities, and the nation as a whole.

This week, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) handed down a decision [PDF] in a case known as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Since I'm not a SCOTUS wonk, I won't go into the case's background or the Court's holding. What I will do, however, is note two things.

First, the go-to site for all things SCOTUS is the SCOTUSblog. It has comprehensive coverage and analysis of all events surrounding SCOTUS, including the Citizens United decision.

Second, the decision in Citizens United essentially enhances a corporation's "personhood," making such an entity a "more-equal" citizen. (Although the case has been before the Court for some time, given the right-wing hacks who hold a majority of its seats, the decision's holdings should come as no surprise.) The decision is widely expected to open up the floodgates to relatively unregulated spending on political ads (speech) by corporations and other entities as long as the entity doesn't interact directly with the political campaign.

I think this is a very bad idea. It's not like one of the problems in this country is there's too little money in politics. To the contrary: In my experience, politicians of every stripe spend way too much of their time seeking campaign contributions from PACs and individuals. And now, corporations. It would be naive in the extreme to think this hasn't tainted our political discourse in the past, and won't to a greater extent in the future.

Various political actors, including the White House, have decried the decision and stated they will explore ways to negate or overturn it. Since Rethuglicans basically control Congress these days and are expected to reap the most benefits from the decision, good luck with that.

In my view, the solution here is public financing of elections. By this I mean using state and federal taxpayer funds to pay for election-related political speech. Yes, such a move would be complicated -- where, for instance, do you draw the line preventing someone with no intention of legitimately running for office from establishing a campaign and seeking funding? -- but the alternatives are much worse.

The company for which I worked on corporate citizenship -- which didn't even have a PAC, as I recall -- preferred in part to build support of policies supporting its commercial endeavors at the grassroots level, knowing well-informed citizens advocating on its behalf was more productive to its long-term interests than shoveling huge amounts of cash into the political process. That's the way it should be.

DCr