This seems a point in history when we are focused on the role of money in politics as never before.  The floodgates of corporate money were opened in 2010 when the US Supreme Court in the Citizens United case held that free speech included the right of corporations to finance candidates.  But more recent developments have put a sharper point on the issue:

*Editorial pages have suggested some cap on this corporate right to fund, lest our democracy suffer

*Today the press reports a suspicious funding path by which a short-lived corporation with seemingly no business purpose pumped large sums of money into the nascent Romney presidential campaign

*Two days ago a group of ten of our leading legal scholars in business law, led by Harvard’s Lucien Bebchuk (darling of the shareholder rights movement and holding no less a distinguished platform than as both Friendman Professor of Law, Economics and Finance at Harvard and Director of that Law School’s Program on Corporate Governance) petitioned the SEC to adopt a new disclosure rule requiring public companies to report to their shareholders their political contributions.

This latter point is fascinating.

First, the idea that the SEC these days doesn’t have enough on its plate is ludicrous; Dodd-Frank has imposed impossible burdens, the whistleblower regime just launched will further stress Commission capacity, and just the other day the SEC delayed some of its regulations on executive compensation (concerning pay for performance, ratio of median employee comp to CEO comp, clawbacks for executive officers) until next year.

Second, although the Bebchuk petitioners noted that the Court in Citizens relied upon the pressure of shareholder scrutiny to control corporate political spending and thus suggested that an SEC disclosure rule on contributions was consistent with judicial mandate, the petitioners also noted that almost 60% of all S&P 100 companies already in fact make such disclosure on a voluntary basis.

Third, while one might concur that corporate political giving draws us ever closer to oligarchy (no doubt many would argue strongly the other way, of course), it is hard to believe that what the US economy needs in its time of great pressure and loss of leadership and entrepreneurial primacy to foreign markets is yet another governmental requirement.