Last month, a lower court found that the 2007 Federal Election Commission (FEC) regulation that created the loophole “arbitrarily and capriciously” undermined the law’s clear intent to force disclosure, one that even the Citizens United ruling affirmed. By declining to stay that ruling, and finding in the process that it will likely be upheld when it is argued on its merits this fall, the appeals court ensured that donors of more than $1,000 for electioneering communications previously shielded from the public eye are going to have to face disclosure.

This week’s ruling comes in the midst of a loud wave of shareholder activism demanding that corporate leaders stop meddling in electoral politics, and to at least fully disclose what they’re up to if they continue.

Meanwhile, states and local communities are continuing to demand a constitutional amendment that ends the auctioning of our democracy once and for all, by overturning Citizens United and related cases. Tuesday night, the Rhode Island General Assembly became the fifth state legislature to get behind an amendment; cities and towns across the country like Seattle, WA; Evanston, IL; and Hartford, CT continue to echo that call on (literally) a daily basis.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that the notoriously-divided FEC will take meaningful action to craft and enforce new rules. There’s still a possibility that the Supreme Court will grant a stay after all, but that is not likely. The very disclosure law that the district and appellate courts have upheld was even cited by Justice Kennedy in the Citizens United decision as a good thing that would help off-set any damage caused by unlimited corporate spending. More likely, such groups will shift their campaign spending from “electioneering communications,” where donors must now be disclosed, to “independent expenditures,” which still hide behind the anti-transparency rules of the FEC and were not subject to the court ruling.

And deep-pocketed donors and the organizations doing their will are bound to find ways to work around the new disclosure requirement for electioneering communications as well. In fact, they started plotting out potential shortcuts the other month, as Dan Froomkin and Paul Blumenthal report:

The April ruling already prompted one group, the conservative American Future Fund, to ask for an advisory opinion on whether they could continue to keep their donors secret as long as they used “White House” or “administration” in their ads rather than “Obama.”

Make no mistake about it, however: Monday’s ruling is a big victory for greater transparency, and will definitely make some of the corporate interests that have been shelling out record amounts since Citizens United was handed down think twice about the potential to be exposed to a public that is sick and tired of being drowned out by the rich and powerful.

In the end, we need a constitutional amendment to finitely overcome any loopholes and get the corrosive influence of money out of the decision-making process. But sunlight is a strong, and welcome, disinfectant that stands, at the very least, to facilitate public scrutiny of those who have attained unprecedented influence over elected officials in recent decades.

Sean Siperstein is a Legal Fellow with Public Citizen’s Democracy is For People campaign. Follow the campaign on Twitter @RuleByUs, as well as the hashtag #Democracy4 Sale, for the latest on the money and politics and the campaign for a constitutional amendment!

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Nine bills that would roll back the derivatives reforms created in the wake of the financial crisis are moving in Congress. These proposals, most of which have at least passed in committee, have been put forth in the name of furthering the competitiveness of U.S. companies and aiding Main Street job creation. These are quite brazen claims, since deregulating derivatives arguably did more to harm economic competitiveness and job creation than anything Congress has done for a very long time.

Here is the history, in brief: At the end of the Clinton administration, financial derivatives were relatively new and sat in a regulatory netherworld. In practice, they were not regulated. But they bore all the hallmarks of traditional futures, which by law must be traded on regulated exchanges.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and successive Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers (a trio Time magazine dubbed The Committee to Save the World in 1999) argued that financial derivatives investors were too “sophisticated” to require oversight. Regulating derivatives would “cause the worst financial crisis since World War II,” Summers expanded.

In 2000, with the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, Congress established a regulation-free haven for financial derivatives. Derivatives soon became a petri dish for the growth of financial risk-taking, especially relating to the housing market.

In rough terms, derivatives’ dealers sold hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of quasi-insurance policies (called credit default swaps) on mortgage-backed securities to holders of the securities. The illusion of protection provided by these insurance policies helped create a voracious appetite on Wall Street for mortgages to bundle into securities. This, in turn, led mortgage originators to adopt laughably low underwriting standards, causing housing prices to soar to unsustainable levels.

When reality intervened and mortgages defaults began occurring in droves, holders of defaulted mortgage-backed securities submitted claims to the provider of their credit default swap “insurance policies” (primarily American International Group, or AIG), only to learn that AIG could not make good on its promises. The absence of supervision of derivatives had permitted AIG to amass risks well in excess of its resources—and thereby put the entire economy in grave jeopardy.

AIG’s inability to pay its counterparties threatened to cause a ripple effect of institutional failures that could have thrown the economy back into the stone age. A $700 billion taxpayer-funded bailout was ordered up to prevent a total collapse of the financial system. Regular Americans were left to suffer through the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

Experts agree with the essence of the summary above. Each of the members of The Committee to Save the World, for instance, has recanted his advocacy for a laissez-faire approach to derivatives. Rubin now says he even favored regulation when critical decisions were being made in the late 1990s, but that “very strongly held views in the financial services industry in opposition to regulation were insurmountable.”

Which brings us to the present. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act instituted a series of common sense reforms, including requirements for derivatives trades to occur on designated exchanges. This key step would ensure that prices are transparent and that a centralized clearing agency guarantees the credit worthiness of trading participants. This is how stocks and futures have been traded since the reforms of the 1930s. But because more money can be made trading on opaque, unsupervised markets, Wall Street objects to this reform. Once again, its leaders are attempting to subject Washington, and the country, to an insurmountable force.

Of the bills seeking to punch holes in Dodd-Frank, a few are comically ridiculous—and dangerous. One, H.R. 3283, cedes regulatory authority to foreign governments for the overseas activities of U.S. firms. Ask yourself, when was the last time Congress advocated submitting to foreign control of anything? Only Wall Street’s influence could convince lawmakers to favor such a thing.

Another bill is the cleverly titled Swaps Bailout Prevention Act. It does the opposite of what its title suggests. It would repeal Dodd-Frank’s prohibition against bailing out of major derivatives participants and, thus, allow federally insured banks to remain major derivatives players.

Last week brought news that JPMorganChase, the nation’s largest bank, suffered losses of at least $2 billion—which may climb above $4 billion—on bets on credit default swaps, the same scourge that led to the 2008 crisis. More alarming, the bank’s losses came on positions that may have been as high as $100 billion, meaning that a slight change in conditions had potentially enormous implications. This is exactly why derivatives, which financier Warren Buffett presciently labeled financial weapons of mass destruction in 2003, require vigilant public oversight.

The JPMorgan episode may be the warning that Congress needs to return to its role of protecting the public rather than coddling the banks. But it also raises a question: how many times does a lesson have to be taught before it is learned?

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For better or worse, Washington D.C. is a city of awash with acronyms. And this week, there are a few capital letters that the medical device industry would rather you not pay any attention to: MDUFA. Literally, MDUFA stands for Medical Device User Fee and Modernization Act, but in actuality these letters simply mean danger for consumers.  A lot of the coverage of MDUFA has focused on the prescription drug aspect. However, the story is about more than drugs. Medical device safety is at a crossroads, and Congress could really mess things up. Here is where MDUFA stands now.  We recently wrote a report, which documented the average number of high-risk recalls of medical devices in 2011 was more than double than in recent years. We also documented the keen interest the medical device industry seemed to have in weakening already lax regulations. This week Congress will vote on MDUFA and we urge them to put patient safety ahead of corporate profit.

Today, amid the news coverage of JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion loss in derivatives bets, Public Citizen published a report, many weeks in the making, that expounds on the historical lessons of derivatives deregulation and the urgency to implement the rules called for in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Read a copy of the press release which links to the report entitled: “Forgotten Lessons of Deregulation: Rolling Back Dodd-Frank’s Derivatives Rules Would Repeat a Mistake that Led to the Financial Crisis.” The report explains how America’s top financial policymakers deregulated the financial derivatives market in the 1990s and provides a detailed account of how deregulation led to the ensuing housing bubble, financial crisis and Great Recession.

The report comes as members of Congress have introduced nine bills that would weaken the derivatives provisions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

All seven bills moving in the U.S. House of Representatives have been approved by committees, and three have passed the full House. Two bills that would exempt overseas transactions from Dodd-Frank’s derivatives provisions may be voted on as soon as Thursday in the House Agriculture Committee. Other bills would exempt trades by supposedly “small” players, reduce transparency requirements and strike down a provision to ban derivatives trading by federally insured banks. At least three other bills would impose impediments for agencies to promulgate rules concerning financial services in general.

Two bills, HR 1838, the “Swaps Bailout Prevention Act;” and HR 3283, “The Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act,” will be voted on in the House Agriculture Committee on Thursday. The bills call for deregulation of swaps! (Yes, really). And so, this week, Public Citizen’s financial reform policy advocate Bartlett Naylor will be appealing to committee members to not deregulate. Naylor explains, “The massive losses by JP Morgan illustrate the dangers of swaps. The nation’s largest bank, famed for state-of-the-art risk management, posted a $2 billion loss from ‘risk management.’”

Later in the week, Public Citizen will be putting out a second report on dangers in the repurchase agreement market. In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, banks came to rely increasingly on a sinister method of funding their activities—through “repurchase agreements,” or repos for short. Repos contribute to what is known as the shadow banking system—non-traditional banking activities that have by and large escaped government regulation. Repos may look like simple short-term borrowing agreements, but they can quickly create vast instability in the financial system. Without reform, the financial system is still susceptible to the sudden and severe shocks that repo presents, and banks will continue to depend on federal intervention to rescue them from market failures. Stay tuned to CitizenVox for more on this report!

Also this week, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch group and Global Access to Medicines team will continue to monitor the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement (TPP) negotiations in Dallas. The Dallas round is the latest in a series of TPP negotiations where the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is pushing unprecedented intellectual property (IP) measures on eight other countries in the Asia-Pacific that threaten access to medicines and public health, among other issues. Find out why U.S. Trade negotiators got the “surprise honor” of being presented with the “2012 Corporate Power Tool” award of the year. And then, check out this post at The Nation regarding how you can TAKE ACTION TO STOP THE TPP!

The actions of hundreds of activists in California who have worked tirelessly with Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People Campaign and other allies are paying off this week as the California State Senate is expected to pass a resolution calling for the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission U.S. Supreme Court ruling to be overturned!

We are five weeks out from Resolutions Week, a nationwide campaign to get similar resolutions passed at the local level, and we have already surpassed our 100 resolutions goal!  Since the Resolutions Week campaign kicked off, over 200 cities and towns nationwide have passed resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United v. FEC. We expect dozens more to pass in the next few weeks leading up to Resolutions Week itself (June 11) when we’ll showcase these local victories.

On a less positive note, you’ve probably noticed: Faced with budget shortfalls, school districts across the country continue to turn to commercial advertising on school property to raise revenue. This is a phenomenon the New York Times expressed concern about in a recent op-ed.  Today, Commercial Alert sent a letter to the President of the Poway Unified School District Board of Education, located near San Diego, advising the board not to sell such advertising. Poway’s plans appear to be particularly egregious, including selling student and parents’ email addresses to advertisers and placing commercial logos on bus drivers’ uniforms.

Speaking of selling out people online . . . tomorrow Public Citizen will be defending a blogger and the First Amendment in court. Public Citizen litigator Paul Alan Levy has carved out most of the case law relating to Internet Freedom of Speech and we encourage anyone who has ever posted a comment to a blog to read this post by Paul about tomorrow’s case.

Of course, there’s always more to come to the surface as the week progresses so keep checking back here for updates from your favorite watchdog as we strive to be your voice in the Halls of Power.

Rachel Lewis is Public Citizen’s new media strategist and online outreach coordinator. Follow @Public_Citizen on Twitter.

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flickr by viteez

the case is going to become important for a different reasons – the subpoenaing party appears to be claiming the right to a forensic examination of the blogger’s computer system to see whether discarded identifying information can somehow be retrieved.

The case involves Escape Media Group, the host of a music streaming web site that is currently defending lawsuits brought in New York federal and state courts by various record labels accusing it of copyright infringement.  The blogger had written several stories about the controversy.  On one story reporting about complaints by a band member about the hosting of his music, an anonymous commenter, claiming to be an employee of Escape Media, posted comments purporting to “blow the whistle” on the creation of quotas for employee uploading which, in turn, encourages employees to grab  copyrighted recordings for the streaming site without the owner’s consent.  The plaintiffs in one of the copyright actions actually cited one of the anonymous postings in arguing that they had a legitimate basis for alleging copyright infringement.

Escape then sent a subpoena to the blogger claiming both that it needed to know who the poster was to know how to sue for defamation, and that it needed the identity of the poster in order to show that the basis for one of the allegations in the complaint is false.  The blogger began by representing himself pro se, claiming protection against the subpoena based on both the “Dendrite” standard and the California shield law.

We decided to represent the blogger because it seemed to us that the argued basis for the subpoena was transparently spurious.  To be sure, the anonymous posts said things about Escape Media that could damage its reputation, and that could well be defamatory if false.  But Escape Media wasn’t actually suing for defamation (and its reply brief seems to step away from the desire to sue for defamation as a ground for the subpoena).  And anonymous posts are not admissible evidence in the underlying infringement lawsuits; so showing the falsity of the anonymous comments would not, in itself, aid the defense of the lawsuit.  Indeed, the truth or falsity of claims about what Escape Media tells its employees to do, and what those employees actually do, can only determined through discovery of those employees and, perhaps, a careful review of Escape Media’s own documents (and computers).

A second argument against the discovery is that the anonymous comments are the blogger’s sources.  I recently argued as amicus curiae in a Doe case in which the newspaper also made an argument under Indiana’s shield law; although our brief was only on the First Amendment issue, I confess that I was a bit skeptical of the shield argument based on the facts of the case and the language of the Indiana statute. But our client in this case presents somewhat different facts, because he regularly engages with his anonymous commenters by joining the discussion in the comments, and he uses the comments as a basis for stories.  And he has reason to fear that if the commenters are readily identified, his access to comments will dry up.  So the facts that he never learns the identity of the commenters, and that he allows the commenters to publish without intermediation, are consistent with their being “sources” in the usual sense of the term.  We decided to embrace the California Shield Law argument in our brief.

But the most interesting aspect of this case still lies a bit below the surface.  Our client allows his servers to record the IP address of anonymous commenters, but promptly discards the information because he has no business reason to retain it, has limited storage space and, indeed, wants to keep his sources’ identities confidential.  So we have argued that the subpoena motion is moot.  Escape Media, though, it arguing that deleted data doesn’t really disappear, and seems to be laying the groundwork for an attempt to seize our client’s computers to conduct a forensic search for any identifying information that it can find.

Somehow the prospect of letting a company search a journalist’s files — especially the files of a journalist that it has publicly placed on its enemies’ list (for example, here and here) in the hope of finding useful deleted information is a chilling one.  I have been through such a case before – at the dawn of the e-discovery age, when Northwest Airlines was allowed to compel two union dissident bloggers to turn over their computers for examination.  In the end, the airline ended up with egg on his face (its hometown paper ran a nasty Steve Sack cartoon using the parody phrase “some people just know how to pry”) and the federal magistrate judge who let the search happen was telling his colleagues that he knew he had made a mistake.

It will be interesting to see how this case develops.

Paul Alan Levy is an Internet freedom of speech expert and senior litigator with Public Citizen’s Litigation Group. Follow him on Twitter @PaulAlanLevy.

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But, I wonder, what good is planning for the future if my retirement investments are being spent by companies like 3M, Target and Bank of America, to elect politicians who want to allow corporations to pollute our environment and ransack our economy?

This was the question kicking around my head when I joined other opponents of corporate money in politics during the 3M’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this week.

Protestors outside 3M shareholder meeting. Photo via 99% Power.

Despite the stormy weather, scores of protesters carrying signs with messages such as “Post-its, Not Politics” and “Corporat3Money OUT of Elections” rallied outside the meeting, which was held at River Centre in Saint Paul, Minn. Groups joining the rally included Common Cause, Public Citizen, Minnesotans for a Fair Economy, Take Action Minnesota, MPIRG and others associated with the Corporate Reform Coalition and the 99% Power movement.

Several demonstrators went inside as proxies for shareholders who are concerned about the impact of corporate money in elections. Their concern in 3M’s case is well-founded – in 2010, 3M (like Target) gave $100,000 to MN Forward, a front group backing radical right-wing gubernatorial candidate, Tom Emmer.

I attended as a proxy of Trillium Asset Management, a socially responsible investment firm that put a groundbreaking resolution before 3M (and Bank of America too): a resolution that would stop the company from using its general treasury funds to try to influence elections.

During the question and answer session, several shareholders raised concerns about the corporation’s stated position – basically that the company needs to keep dumping money toward corporate-friendly politicians in order to “stay competitive.”

Outgoing CEO George Buckley heard shareholder questions, including mine, but gave glib and misleading answers.

When I asked whether 3M was putting money into any Super PACs or 501(c)4 attack ad groups, he lamely insisted that 3M “needs a voice” in Washington.

This is doubly misleading. Of course 3M’s executives have a right to make their opinion heard – just like every American citizen. But they shouldn’t be doing it with other people’s money – i.e., money that belongs to shareholders, the real owners of any publicly traded corporation. Still worse, a growing body of evidence shows that spending shareholder money like this is actually bad for business. As a shareholder, why would I want to let the company do something that hurts me politically and financially?

Public Citizen's Rick Claypool at 3M's shareholder meeting.

Despite support from many shareholders in attendance, the resolution to prevent 3M from spending its money in politics did not succeed. It did, however, receive enough votes to be re-filed next year, when more people will have time to understand how important this resolution really is. Support for responsible corporate governance is bound to grow as the 2012 election season exposes what the Supreme Court wrought by allowing the corporate takeover of our democratic process.

It’s invigorating to know that the movement to restore democracy to the people isn’t just making progress in communities and in Congress, but even from inside of corporations like 3M, Bank of America and Target.

To read my live Tweets from the 3M meeting, go to #corporat3Money.

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Today, I am proud to be a Californian. I’m here with people from across the Golden State on the steps of the California State House in Sacramento to show support for Assembly Joint Resolution 22 (AJR 22). This resolution calls upon Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, take democracy off the auction block and preserve constitutional rights for people – not corporations.

We’re here to show support for AJR 22 and to urge the state Senate to pass this resolution out of committee with a favorable vote and send it to the Senate floor.

Polls consistently have shown that a large majority of Americans oppose the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. So, these thousands of signatures do not represent the opinion of a fringe group, but are the large tip of an even larger iceberg.

The thousands of signatures on this petition calling for a constitutional amendment represent the voices of actual citizens, who are the “demo” of democracy. These people are asking for passage of AJR 22 in the only way voters can – one voice per person.

We hope that the California Legislature and the U.S. Congress will hear our collective voices over the loud influence of powerful money from industries.

Not one of the names on this petition refers to corporations such as Bank of America, BP or Morgan Stanley. Any child knows these are not people. And calling their legalized bribes “free speech” is a ridiculous notion that is replaces the “demo” of democracy with the “pluto” of a plutocracy.

Our American revolution was fought to free ourselves not only from the British crown, but also from the overbearing commercial interests of the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson Bay Company and the British East India Company. It was the British East India Company, with its monopoly and duties on imported tea, that led to open rebellion and added the now infamous term “Tea Party” to our lexicon.

Let’s preserve our “demo”-cracy by rebelling against the powerful commercial interests of our day: the Big Oil money that keeps the disastrous Keystone XL pipeline alive in Congress despite widespread opposition. The Wall Street firms that reversed the Glass-Steagall Act, helped cause the 2008 financial crisis and have sought to block effective government regulation of the financial sector after the fact. And, the big insurance and pharmaceutical companies that dictated the terms of the Affordable Care Act.

We the People may be weak in comparison to these powerful interests when standing alone. But, standing together, we represent a strong voice speaking out against corporate rule and in favor of government for and by the people. So, today we’re asking the state Senate to join us in that effort by supporting AJR 22.

Learn more about Public Citizen’s Democracy Is For People Campaign by following @RuleByUs, the hashtag #Democracy4Sale and by visiting www.DemocracyIsForPeople.org

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Flickr photo by watchingfrogsboil

So how are Americans getting duped?

When publicly traded companies spend directly from their treasuries, they are not spending their own money, they’re spending shareholders’ money. And since more than half of American households own stock, chances are high that this election season, a lot of Americans will be supporting causes and candidates they haven’t even heard of, let alone want to support with a political contribution.

For instance, take 3M Corp., a company famous in Minnesota and nation-wide for scotch tape, sandpaper, and Post-its. 3M does not disclose contributions to trade organizations or faux nonprofit organizations like Crossroads GPS that play in elections. In 2010 3M contributed $100,000 from its treasury to MN Forward, a group supporting a candidate for governor who held controversial views on social issues.

Whether or not you agree with those views, corporations are organized to create profit, not to choose governors. Shareholders can choose on their own whether to spend money to support political candidates, but corporations should not be using their money to make the decision for them.

Thankfully, shareholders are rallying around the country to demand transparency from corporations that spend money in politics. Socially responsible investment groups have filed resolutions at hundreds of companies asking them to disclose the money they are spending to influence elections. Investors are gathering at shareholder meetings to support the cause, and in some cases asking companies to go a step further and refrain from spending money altogether.

Furthermore, a proposed SEC rulemaking requiring corporations to disclose political expenditures to shareholders has logged more than 260,000 comments supporting the measure. That’s more than any other SEC rulemaking has ever received.

Investors are not alone in this fight. Securities and Exchange Commissioner Luis Aguilar recently voiced his support for an SEC rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose their spending.

“The view that when corporations are able to obtain favorable conditions through political influence, rather than meritoriously adding value through a better product or service, it distorts the operation of the marketplace…” Aguilar said. “Shareholders require uniform disclosures regarding corporate political expenditures for many reasons, including that it is impossible to have any corporate accountability or oversight without it.”

People are paying attention to this, but it seems not everyone is on board for a transparent democracy.

Critics of corporate disclosure have complained that this movement is trampling on the free speech rights of corporations. They say the Constitution protects the rights of corporations to make political messages, and that disclosure of political expenditures will have a chilling effect on speech.

But what they do not to say is that there is more to free speech than just the right to speak. We also have the right to not be associated with speech we disagree with. Free speech is free speech, but shareholders have a right to be free from that speech as well. And they need disclosure from companies in order to make that choice.

So this election season ask yourself if you want to speak for a cause you believe in, or if you want Corporate America to use your money to speak for a cause IT believes in.

Without disclosure there’s no way of knowing who or what you’re supporting in 2012.

Kelly Ngo works for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. Learn more about @Public_Citizen’s work with the Corporate Reform Coalition by following @CorporateReform. Connect with an expert on this issue by emailing engage [at] citizen dot org.

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The 99% Power coalition, which is playing a key role in this week’s activities, has taken on the outsized corporate influence in America and welded together many different movements calling on corporations to be more accountable to the public and their owners, the shareholders. This very likely means you; if you’ve ever had a pension, attempted to save for your retirement or have a 401K through your employer—you’re a shareholder.

One component of the 99% Power movement is the work that the Corporate Reform Coalition, made up of good-government groups like Public Citizen, institutional investors, academics and others, is doing to expose the high levels of corporate influence in our elections and to foster accountability of corporate political spending.

In conjunction with 99% Power, the Corporate Reform Coalition is supporting first-time ever “political spending” resolutions filed at 3M and Bank of America by helping to organize rallies at 3M’s annual shareholder meeting today and Bank of America’s meeting on Wednesday, May 9. On June 14, the coalition will do the same at Target Corporation’s annual shareholder meeting.

HELP SPREAD THE WORD:  Click here to send a tweet right now!

These rallies are designed to highlight an appalling problem: Thanks to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, any CEO at a major company has free rein to pick up the corporate checkbook and spend, spend, spend to elect the candidate of their choosing. In 2010, for example, 3M gave $100,000 to MN Forward, a group that supported an anti-LGBT gubernatorial candidate, and their company’s political spending didn’t stop there.

The worst part of this newly enabled practice is that the shareholders of the corporations aren’t offered any input in – or even informed of – the political causes that their own money goes to influence. Again, the bulk of Americans are shareholders. Everyone who has a pension or investments in the stock market may be having their investments put into corporation’s secret political war chests—and they are powerless to stop it because they have no voice in the process.

Companies should get out of the political spending game and focus on doing what they were created to do: make a profit for their shareholders. And if they refuse to concede to their investors’ demands to stop spending money in politics, then at the very least, they should disclose their spending so that shareholders can make informed decisions.

What information we have about 3M and Bank of America’s spending is bad enough; what we don’t know but should is an outrage. Last week, this type of outrage set records at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the agency charged with protecting shareholder interests. To date, more than 260,000 people have submitted comments to the SEC demanding that it require corporations to disclosure their political spending. So whether it’s through the SEC or through the sheer determination of shareholders, corporate CEOs are not getting off the hook. The message of the 99% will be heard: It’s our democracy. It’s our money. And we will have the last word.

Lisa Gilbert is Public Citizen Congress Watch deputy director. Follow @CorporateReform for the latest on #corporat3Money.

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The focus of last night’s talk was tools and tips for sending a letter to the editor to a local newspaper. Getting a letter published in the opinion pages of your local paper is a great way to raise awareness in your community about the issues that are important to you.

Download the presentation (PDF) and the sample letter to the editor (PDF).

Letters to the editor are a critical part of any campaign in support of progressive reforms. Here are two big reasons why:

1.) Letters to the editor help newspapers gauge what interests their audience. If the newspaper’s editors know that there are locals (like you) who are interested in the problem of corporate money influencing elections, they’re more likely to devote page space to coverage of that issue. Even if your letter isn’t published, it’s probably having an impact that helps your cause.

2.) Decision-makers pay attention to the local paper’s opinion pages. If your letter to the editor is published, chances are it will be seen by your mayor and other local elected officials, state legislations and members of Congress. If you are trying to get support for reform measures such as the Shareholder Protection Act (H.R. 2517, S. 1360), these published letters can be very persuasive.

Lots of factors inform the newspaper’s decision whether to publish a letter to the editor. The big questions they ask: “Is it timely?”

During last night’s webinar, our team (members of the Corporate Reform Coalition) highlighted upcoming events that will make excellent hooks for a timely letter to the editor: the shareholder meetings of 3M (May 8 in Saint Paul, Minn.), Bank of America (May 9 in Charlotte, N.C.) and Target (June 13 in Chicago).

All three of these corporations have shareholder resolutions that, if adopted, would stop them from spending money to influence elections.

Because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, CEOs can spend shareholder money on political donations to candidates shareholders may not support, without your knowledge. This is a huge problem from the shareholder’s point of view (and that’s most working people with a 401k or similar retirement investments).

View the presentation (PDF) for talking points about shareholder advocacy against corporate money in politics.

Once you’ve written your letter to the editor, send it to action@citizen.org to let us know. Meanwhile, I’ll be looking for letters to the editor that get published online. If you’ve written one that gets published, be sure to let us know so we can share your letters through our social media networks, such as the coalition’s twitter feed: @CorporateReform.

Finally, a special thanks to the folks at People For the American Way, U.S. PIRG and Common Cause (and to our great team here at Public Citizen) who helped make yesterday’s webinar such a success. You know who you are. You are awesome.

Flickr photo by NS Newsflash.

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