a few years ago there was national outrage and an attempt to boycott an entire chocolate company. not for unethical cocoa sourcing (whittakers makes an active effort to source all its cocoa beans 100% ethically). not for anything actually worth boycotting. nope! the outrage was over ONE special edition block of chocolate that was written in te reo māori instead of english. the main complaint from pākehā online? "we don't understand what it says! how are we supposed to know what we're buying!!!" I don't know man. I truly don't know how to help you if you can't understand that this is milk chocolate. no hope for you at all

[image description: the gold packaging of a chocolate bar. From top to bottom, it reads:

“Trust yourself. You have survived a lot. And you will survive whatever is coming.”

Most people I talk with assume that the only way to stop corporate and dark money in American politics is either to wait for the Supreme Court to undo Citizens United (we could wait a very long time) or amend the U.S. Constitution (this is extraordinarily difficult). But there’s another way! It will be on the ballot next November in Montana. Maybe you can get it on the ballot in your state, too. Here’s the thing: Individual states have the authority to limit corporate political activity and dark money spending, because they determine what powers corporations have. In American law, corporations are creatures of state laws. For more than two centuries, the power to define their form, limits, and privilege has belonged only to the states. States don’t have to grant corporations the power to spend in politics. In fact, they could decide not to give corporations that power. This isn’t about corporate rights, as the Supreme Court determined in Citizens United. It’s about corporate powers. When a state exercises its authority to define corporations as entities without the power to spend in politics, it will no longer be relevant whether corporations have a right to spend in politics — because without the power to do so, the right to do so has no meaning. Delaware’s corporation code already declines to grant private foundations the power to spend in elections. Importantly, a state that no longer grants its corporations the power to spend in elections also denies that power to corporations chartered in the other 49 states, if they wish to do business in that state. All a state would need to do is enact a law with a provision something like this: “Every corporation operating under the laws of this state has all the corporate powers it held previously, except that nothing in this statute grants or recognizes any power to engage in election activity or ballot-issue activity.” Sound farfetched? Not at all. In Montana, local organizers have drafted and submitted a constitutional initiative for voters to consider in 2026 — the first step in a movement built to spread nationwide. It would decline to grant to all corporations the power to spend in elections.