I like Joel Connelly, but in his coverage this back and forth between the Association of Washington Business and the Inslee campaign, he misses the larger point.
“As you can imagine, accepting $100,000 from a major oil company openly supporting Mr. McKenna leaves the impression that the money is intended for eventual use on behalf of Mr. McKenna against Jay Inslee,” Shimomura wrote to the AWB.
“This raises serious concerns for us, and we imagine it will raise concerns for many viewers and voters as well.” Shimomura urged the Association of Washington Business to “return Tesoro’s contribution.”
One problem: Tesoro and Equilon (Shell) were using the AWB PAC not to support McKenna, but to pass through money to Tim Eyman’s Initiative 1185. Seattlepi.com and Northwest Progressive Institute both posted stories May 11 on the pass-through. Eyman, too, explained the arrangement in a letter to his followers.
Four big oil companies, BP ($100,000), ConocoPhillips ($100,000) Tesoro ($100,000) and Equilon ($50,000) are underwriting the I-1185 signature campaign while Eyman delivers populist sound bites. BP and ConocoPhillips gave directly to the campaign.
Maybe. But I think the larger point is still holy shit, the global warming industry is throwing around how much money, again? The fact that these companies — and they are anti-Inslee companies — freely spend this much money is a huge problem. For huge companies to spend more than what most people make in a year like it’s Monopoly money is a disgrace. I realize Joel covered it before, but for that to be an aside is taking your eye off the ball.
This whole problem could be solved by one federal court ruling that donating money to political campaigns violates corporations’ fiduciary responsibility to make money for their shareholders. The only way a court could not reach such a conclusion is by saying that buying politicians is a legitimate way to increase profits.
I suppose you could argue that $350,000 is creating (temporary) jobs for (paid) signature gatherers …
I am with the pookah on this.
I have a related idea, under the Commerce clause, isn’t it true that Congress could require a federal charter? That charter could then define corps as not having certain powers of an individual … e.g. the vote and buying the vote.
Hell, I do not even like the idea of corps being able to donate money to charities.
Another part of the problem is fungibility.
Even if the oil money is passed along to Eyman, that frees up other funds (which might otherwise have been ticketed for Tim’s crapola) to be available for AWB to throw at McKenna.
Roger @1 and 2; Interestingly yesterdays NYT business section had a story on bribery, concluding that in most circumstances bribery had a net positive contribution to share price and profitability and that the return far outweighed the risk. Buying politicians does reflect well on the fiduciary responsibilities of the corporation. Ray Bradbury would have spun a great yarn with this material.
I would prefer that campaign or political contributions be limited to te following:
Maximum contribution of $1000 per indivdual US citizen per year. No other contributions, monetary or otherwise, are acceptable. Penalty is 10 years in prison, no parole, no acceptions.
Problem solved.