Duke Energy Shows Why Corporations Should Not Contribute to Politics

And to RedStateVT's complaint that it is necessary to offset union campaign contributions, I would make those illegal too because what Duke Energy gets away with in North Carolina is outrageous.

We in NY don't always appreciate how tight corporations can be with legislatures and regulators in various states because (i) we are equal opportunity soakers when it comes to state taxes and (ii) all the bad money in politics seems to come from NYC real estate developers who are LLP's.

But to N.C. politicians, Duke Energy is everything.  They employ a lot of people, they provide a common good, they are regulated, and they produce pollution on an unimaginable scale, that they have to manage.

So N.C. politicians get a lot of money from both Duke Energy and Duke Energy employees.  Specifically, N.C. politicians with a firm hand on the regulation of electricity and the pollution that comes from it.  Voters like cheap electricity and cleaning up pollution drives up electricity rates.

So there has to be a happy medium between keeping the water and air clean and the cost of power.

But Coal Ash is nasty stuff (arsenic, cadmium, iron, manganese, and other stuff) and Duke Energy had a lot of coal powered electricity.  They have less now as other forms of heating water to create steam are more economic, but they still have 100 years of coal ash sitting in ponds that leach into ground water and streams (i.e. drinking water) and no plans to clean this all up.  After one pond put 35,000 tons of coal ash in a river (that is Duke Energy's estimate), Duke Energy is still "studying" the issue.  And the politicians are not putting the heat on the company because they get a lot of money from Duke, even when the citizens pretty clearly want clean water.

So, there is Exhibit 1 on why it is bad policy to allow corporations to contribute money directly to political campaigns.  Corporations are not people.  They employ people.  Corporations rights can be restricted if all are treated the same and the law doing so is deemed Constitutional, like antitrust laws have been.

I don't want Bernie Sanders as my President but he is the only one campaigning on this issue.