Editorial: Corporations keep trying to throw out progressive California laws. Do we need reforms?
by Michelle Malkin
For the past two years the corporate media has been screaming for a sweeping corporate reform act called the Business Opportunity Disclosure Act (BOLD), which would give corporations all the benefits of the public record, without the need to provide full disclosure of their political contributions, business activities, etc. But a couple of weeks ago I wrote about how it’s being rolled out as a new corporate law and, as it turns out, when corporations tried to pass as a new law a number of rules and regulations which had already been enacted as California’s Public Records Act (PRA).
As I wrote on June 11, 2010 and June 14, 2010, the California Legislature created a new public records law that would require corporations to report on the corporate activities they had done in California and required to report whether or not they used California-based lawyers in their Washington, D.C., operations, and whether or not they were subject to a tax in California.
When the California legislature mandated that California-based law firms be listed and reported to the public, it did not give them the choice to disclose their “local” clients, such as clients from Hawaii, or its “local” competitors, such as other California-based law firms.
The corporate reform law I talked about, including its reporting rules, had been the PRA and it was a huge success. According to the California Department of Public Asks, in the last five years, the PRA generated well over 700,000 California-only client files and generated over 1.8 million documents filed in California records.
Unfortunately, the Business Opportunity Disclosure Act (BOLD) is even worse. It’s just like the California PRA but, in addition to not disclosing local clients, California’s only corporate clients who work in-state are corporate clients who have been incorporated in California and are not based in Washington D.C. Like the PRA, the BOLD would allow corporations to report California clients only, including the new new corporate