Tag: campaign finance

CEOs, Politics, and Other People’s Money

By James Kwak

I am, on paper, a corporate law professor, because—well, I guess because I used to work for a corporation (two, actually), and the books I write sometimes have corporations in them, and I teach business organizations as part of my day job. (Secret for those looking for a job as a law professor: UConn was looking for someone to teach corporate law, and I wanted the job, so that’s what I said I could do.) But I’ve made it this far writing exactly one corporate law paper (my summary here), and that was actually about corporate political activity—namely, whether and how shareholders can challenge political contributions that they think are not in the corporation’s interests.

It is well known by now that, in Citizens United, Justice Kennedy committed one of the true howlers of recent Supreme Court history:

With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are “‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”

The obvious problem is that there is no disclosure of corporate contributions to 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and 501(c)(6) associations (such as the Chamber of Commerce), and even contributions to 527 Super PACs can be easily laundered through intermediary entities whose owners are secret. The second, slightly less obvious problem is that, under existing standards, there is precious little that shareholders can do to “hold corporations accountable” for political donations. Given the traditional deference that courts show to decisions made by corporate directors and officers, the latter have pretty much free rein to do what they want with their shareholders’ money.

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Candidates Who Matter

By James Kwak

Nine months ago I endorsed Larry Lessig for president because, as I wrote at the time, “If we want real change in the long term, we have to fix the system. That means real equality of political participation, not just the formal equality of one person one vote.” There is no more fundamental issue we face than a political system that is distorted by money from top to bottom. (If you think Donald Trump somehow disproves this idea, consider that fact that, right now, the campaign topic getting the most attention is the Trump campaign’s financial situation, and the strongest evidence that Clinton is likely to win is her financial superiority.)

Larry Lessig’s campaign, unfortunately, never got off the ground, in part because the Democratic establishment bent its own rules to keep him out of the debates. That’s one reason why I’m not giving money to Hillary Clinton or the DSCC or the DCCC—that and, frankly, none of them have prioritized political reform. Sure, I want Clinton to win, but I can’t afford to donate to everyone I’d like to see win. In the long run, what we need are candidates who will put political reform first—not second, or third, or fifteenth.

So here are a two. One is Zephyr Teachout, a law professor better known for embarrassing Andrew Cuomo by winning a third of the vote in the 2014 New York gubernatorial primary despite being outspent by seventy gazillion to one. She’s also an expert on corruption in the political system, having written a serious history of corruption in America. Teachout is running for Congress in New York’s 19th district (which has a primary on Tuesday). She’s already famous, so enough said. (There’s also a documentary about her run against Cuomo that’s raising money on Kickstarter, and could use donations.)

The other is Sean Barney, a classmate of mine at the Yale Law School who is running to be Delaware’s congressional representative. Sean has made political reform his top priority, and he supports a six-for-one public match for small contributions, a new Voting Rights Act, and non-partisan redistricting commissions to end gerrymandering of congressional districts. He’s also been endorsed by Larry Lessig. (And he’s a marine who was almost killed by a sniper in Fallujah before going to law school.)

Running for Congress is hard. Running on a platform of undermining the current system . But if we have a Congress that is wholly dependent on big money, we’re never going to roll back the influence of big money. At the end of the day, whether your big issue is climate change, or workers’ rights, or financial reform, that’s the only thing that matters.

I’m sure there are other candidates out there who are also dedicated to political reform. If you care about the political system, with the June 30 reporting deadline coming up—ironic as it may sound—these are the kinds of people you should consider donating to. So that one day, whether or not you can afford the donation will no longer matter.

The Only Two Things That Matter: Why I’m Supporting Larry Lessig

By James Kwak

We have lots of problems: Expensive yet mediocre health care. Lack of retirement security. Out-of-control megabanks. Inequality of opportunity. And, of course, climate change.

At the end of the day, though, there are only two things that matter: early childhood education and electoral reform.

We need smart, motivated, knowledgeable voters. And we need a political system in which all people have an equal say. Without those ingredients, no amount of well-meaning, reasoned, fact-based argument is going to do much good.

Just think about climate change, for example. It’s abundantly clear that the planet is getting warmer because of our greenhouse gas emissions, the process is irreversible at this point, and the downside risks to billions of people are enormous. Yet, in the country that won World War Two, rebuilt Europe and Japan, won the Cold War, and exported most of the technology that makes the modern world modern, we are incapable of doing anything about climate change. Why?

Because our political system is blocked by the fossil fuel industry, politicians dependent on the fossil fuel industry, and ignorant zealots who oppose a carbon tax because it is a “tax” and a cap-and-trade system because it is “regulation.”

That’s why I’m supporting Larry Lessig for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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Politics: Another Way To Waste Shareholder Money

By James Kwak

I don’t often go to academic conferences. My general opinion is that at their best, sitting in a windowless room all day listening to people talk about their papers is mildly boring—even when the papers themselves are good. And it takes a lot to justify my spending a night away from my family.

Despite that, a little over a year ago I attended a conference at George Washington University on The Political Economy of Financial Regulation. I went partly because my school’s Insurance Law Center was one of the organizers, partly because there was a star-studded lineup (Staney Sporkin, Frank Partnoy, Michael Barr, Anat Admati, Robert Jenkins, Robert Frank, Joe Stiglitz (who ended up not showing), James Cox, and others, not to mention Simon), and partly because I have friends in family in DC whom I could see. It was one of the best conferences I’ve been to, both for the quality of the ideas and the relatively non-soporific nature of the proceedings.

Many of the papers and presentations from the conference are now available in an issue of the North Carolina Banking Institute Journal (not yet on their website), which should be of interest to financial regulation junkies. My own modest contribution was a paper on the issue of corporate political activity. (In a moment of unwarranted self-confidence, I told one of the organizers I could be on any of three different panels, and they put me on the panel on “political accountability, campaign finance, and regulatory reform.”)

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Does Disclosure Help?

By James Kwak

Following up on yesterday’s column about corporate spending, I saw that John Coates (Harvard Law School) and Taylor Lincoln (Public Citizen) have published a study of the relationship between voluntary disclosure of political spending and company value (summary here). In short, after applying a bunch of controls, they find that companies with voluntary disclosure policies have price-to-book values that are 7.5 percent higher than companies that don’t.

Citing earlier research, they also say, “among the S&P 500 – which accounts for 75 percent of the market capitalization of publicly traded companies in the U.S. – firms active in politics, whether through company-controlled political action committees, registered lobbying, or both, had lower price/book ratios than industry peers that were not politically active.”

Of course, the causality could run either way, and Coates and Lincoln are not claiming that voluntary disclosure in itself makes a company more valuable. Disclosure policies make it less likely the CEO will blow company money on her pet political projects, and so it stands to reason that companies that are better governed in general—and hence more valuable—are more likely to have such policies. But it certainly implies that disclosure policies are not going to bankrupt the Great American Corporation.

A Constitutional Amendment?

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United to expand the ability of corporations* to pay for election-related communications, prominent law professor Lawrence Lessig is calling for a constitutional amendment to protect elections from the influence of money. The text of the proposed amendment isn’t done yet, but the goal is to protect Congress from the influence of money.

Lessig’s argument is simple: Congress is fundamentally (though, thanks to the Supreme Court, legally) corrupt, and most people think it is corrupt, which makes it hard for elected majorities to effect change and also undermines people’s faith in their government. Commenting on Citizens United, he said, “The surprise, and in my view, real cause for concern, however, was how little weight the Court gave to the central purpose of any fair election law: the purpose to protect the institutional integrity of the democratic process. That value seemed invisible to this Court, as if we didn’t now live in a democracy in which the vast majority has lost faith in their government.” Since the Court’s preferred stick for blocking campaign finance reform is the First Amendment, the only thing that can stop them is a new amendment.

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