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The
Weekly Standard
The
‘Transparency’ Agenda
It’s a murky business.
Last
September, Ronald Robins Jr., a senior
vice president at Abercrombie & Fitch, received a letter urging
the company
“to join with over a hundred major companies and make political
spending
disclosure and accountability a corporate practice.” The Ohio-based
clothing
retailer isn’t particularly political. It doesn’t have a political
action
committee, nor is it a member of the more politically involved trade
groups
like the Chamber of Commerce. Any politics they have lean slightly
left. In
2012, the company spent a bit more than $5,000 in donations, to Barack
Obama,
Ohio Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, Ohio Republican congressman Pat
Tiberi,
and others. The previous year, Abercrombie spent a measly $120,000 on
lobbying,
less than 0.1 percent of its operating budget that year. What’s more,
all that
information is public under current disclosure laws.
Nevertheless,
the letter informed Robins that
companies like his “face increasing pressure” to support political
groups and
candidates that “threaten corporate reputation, bottom line and
shareholder
value.” This “secret political spending,” the letter continued,
“threatens not
only the health of our democracy but also the reputation and integrity
of
companies.” Half the companies on the S&P 100 stock market
index, the
letter said, have “recognized the dangers” and have “demonstrated
leadership by
disclosing the details of and implementing board oversight of their
spending.”
The signers added that they “hope” Abercrombie will follow the lead of
these
exemplary companies.
None
too subtle, the message was: Disclose, or
we can make things very difficult for you.
Hundreds
of executives at corporations like
Abercrombie received letters like this one last year. They were signed
by
various people, many with titles like “director of shareholder
advocacy” at
left-leaning investment funds. But like the letter to Robins, all were
signed
first by the same man, Bruce F. Freed.
Freed
may be the most important figure in
American business you’ve never heard of. He isn’t a businessman or CEO,
an
innovator or entrepreneur or even investor. In fact, he has little
business
experience beyond a few years owning his own Washington, D.C.-based
public
affairs consulting firm.
A
former journalist and Democratic
congressional staffer, Freed (who declined to reveal his age) is the
founder
and president of the Center for Political Accountability, a nonprofit,
“nonpartisan organization . . .
formed to address the secrecy that cloaks
much of the political activity engaged in by companies and the risks
this poses
to shareholder value.” Since it began in 2003, CPA has received $1.2
million in
seed money from the Open Society Foundations, funded by left-wing
billionaire
George Soros. In collaboration with other Soros-backed groups like
MoveOn.org,
Common Cause, and Media Matters for America, as well as the large
unions, CPA
is leading a coordinated effort to get some of the country’s biggest
and most
profitable publicly traded corporations to disclose all spending
related even
tangentially to politics. Freed has the attention of these companies’
executives—and he’s trying to convince (some might say force) them to
get out
of politics entirely. Take it from Freed himself…
Read
the rest of the article at The Weekly
Standard
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