Corporations are getting more political power and their use is not transparent

Source: The Economist

The Robert Zicklin Centre for Corporate Integrity at Baruch College has created The Baruch Index of Corporate Political Disclosure to measure "a company's willingness to disclose and be transparent about its corporate political activity:

• Ease with which someone can find the relevant materials on the corporate website; 
• What policies, procedures, and corporate governance structures are in place and disclosed; and
• What the corporation says about who and what it gives to, and how those donations are made.

The graph above from The Economist shows that many of our industries are categorized as opaque and many more fall in the weak classification. Since the Supreme Court in its wisdom has decided that corporations have the same rights as individual people to make donations to political parties and politicians, the lack of transparency is really worrisome!