LOD: Corporate Disclosure Index

Which companies are doing the best job of disclosing their political spending to their stockholders and the public? For several years, the Center for Political Accountability has led a growing campaign to make the biggest publicly traded companies see the wisdom in opening their books and lowering their exposure to the kind of attack that hit Target after its blundering donations to a regressive politician. Institutional pension funds, religious agencies, unions and other large stockholders have sided with CPA on disclosure resolutions at stockholder meetings, and key corporate leaders are jumping on the bandwagon to jawbone their peers, as this NPR segment reports. Now CPA has teamed up with academics to produce an Index of Corporate Political Disclosure and Accountability. At the top of the list are Colgate-Palmolive, IBM and Merck; companies at the bottom include Lowe’s Cos., Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart, and Halliburton.