Campaign Finance Reform

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, U.S. PIRG is supporting bills in a number of states and at the federal level that would force corporations to get approval from their shareholders before spending money in politics, as well as organizing shareholders themselves to vote against political spending by the corporations they own stock in. Today, nearly one of every two American households owns stocks, so when we talk about giving shareholders a say in how their money is spent, we mean the public, not an elite class of investors.

Empowering the people behind the corporations can preventing CEOs and corporate boards from unilaterally making decisions to spend their shareholders' money in politics, and provide an important check in this process.

U.S. PIRG also supports greater disclosure of corporate donors and is in favor of a constitutional amendment to overturn the decision.