New York approved a state budget Sunday that included the Excelsior Scholarship, which will allow students whose families earn less than $125,000 a year to attend state public colleges and universities tuition-free.
We should be done by now with the idea that a corporation is a single thing. Corporations contain a multitude of conflicting interests and are much more like miniature governments with their own governance structures and election systems than is commonly recognized. While these structures are far more hierarchical and undemocratic than we require of our public institutions, Americans should not be resigned that this is the best or the only way the private sector can be structured.
When people talk about corporations spending money in politics, it’s commonly assumed that the corporation is a single thing with a clear position on any given issue. This masks the fact that corporations are complex, state-created entities with their own governance structures and a multitude of conflicting interests.
Occupy Wall Street has, in the words of John Paul Rollert, “come to embody a common sense that something is wrong with American capitalism.” The problem Rollert points to is not with capitalism itself, but with a particular American version that has ceased to work for broad cross-sections of its population. Given America’s Depression-level income inequality and near-record levels of public and private indebtedness, it is extremely tempting to focus on bad outcomes as the problem.
The constitutional challenge to the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) draws much of its rhetorical force not from the Commerce Clause, but from the perception that the insurance mandate infringes on individuals’ private liberties.
Last summer, on her final day as the Chairman of the FDIC, Shelia Bair decried the short-termism that has overtaken both Wall Street and Washington, where “[o]ur financial markets remain too focused on quick profits, and our political process is driven by a two-year election cycle and its relentless demands for fundraising.” This short-termism has taken hold of the reins of our larger political system and increasingly characterizes policy initiatives at every level of government.
The Boston Review recently hosted a forum titled, How Markets Crowd Out Morals, in which Michael Sandel wrote the lead essay, arguing that we as a society should be questioning which institutions we allow to be defined by market norms.
In Citizens United v. FEC, the U.S. Supreme Court held that corporations were free to use money from the corporation’s treasury on political activity.1 Setting aside for a moment the many criticisms of the decision, Citizens United left open a number of questions about who at a corporation should get to decide when a corporation spends money on politics. It has fallen to our system of corporate law to provide an answer.
A corporation is a legal structure that enables individuals to contribute and pool resources, capital, and labor in order to generate a profit. Corporations are created by state law in the state in which they are incorporated.
The corporate legal structure receives a number of advantages and obligations from the state. These laws enable the corporation to overcome the limitations of any one individual—like a human lifespan or limited productive capacity—and to accumulate and distribute profits among the various stakeholders.
Demos strongly supports the Attorney General's proposal to require 501(c)(4) organizations that spend at least $10,000 to influence New York state and local elections to disclose the identity of their donors who have contributed more than $100.
The New York Times ran a front page article this morning titled "As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge around Globe." Nicholas Kulish writes that across the globe, from Spain and Greece to Israel and India, political protests are being motivated not just by rising economic inequality but by a growing feelin
Occupy Wall Street has already accomplished a great deal by shifting public discourse in this country. Instead of focusing on the need for austerity and deficit reduction, attention is rightly being directed at economic disparities and the deep structural problems that the United States faces.
The citizens of Maine will be voting tomorrow whether to keep the same-day registration system that they’ve had for nearly four decades. Since 1973, Maine voters have been able to walk into a polling place or a municipal clerk’s office on Election Day and register to vote.
