You hear it a lot: this company supports right-wing causes. That company gives to the Bush campaign. What does it mean, exactly?
As far as I can tell, it's a misnomer that's causing a lot of people to pull the trigger on companies that don't necessarily deserve it. People seem to base their opinions on numbers like the ones listed on
Open Secrets, where you can get a very detailed list of all donations made by organizations, broken down into Democrat and Republican for your convenience.
There's a disclaimer at the top that no one seems to pay attention to: The donations listed may be made by individuals associated with the organization as well as by the organization itself. This is an important distinction--you need to be sure that you're not judging a company by donations from its employees, something over which it has no control.
Let's use an example of a well-known company: eBay. According to Open Secrets, in the 2001-2002 cycle eBay gave $32,000 to Democrats (31%) and $71,050 to Republicans (69%). Makes it sound like eBay's a Republican donor, right? Not when you dig into the details. Follow the link above and you'll see what I mean--not a single donation was made by the company. They're made by individuals who listed eBay as their occupation/organization. Leaving out Half.com, which eBay bought in 2000, the big individual donors are:
Jeffrey Skoll (President, eBay): 10,000 to Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte (D)
Brian Swette (Senior VP of Marketing, eBay): $25,000 to National Republican Senatorial Cmte (R)
Steven Westly (General Manager of Premium Services, eBay): $12,000 to Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte, $10,000 to Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte (D)
Margarent Whitman (CEO, eBay): $25,000 to 2001 President's Dinner Cmte (R)
$50k to Republicans, 32k to Democrats, and both from high-level executives, with the President giving to Dems and the CEO giving to Repubs. I just don't see how you can read this as "eBay" being a donor to right-wing causes.
I deliberately picked eBay for an example because it's a well-known company with a very short list that's easily dissected. It's easy to look at a company like Microsoft, glance at the raw numbers ($996,792 to Dems, $1,318,384 to Repubs), and decry it as a big-money GOP donor without wading through pages of numbers to figure out how many of those donations were from Microsoft itself, and how many were simply from Microsoft employees--donating as individuals--who listed it as their occupation. It's also irresponsible. Let's try and remember this the next time we do a quick search on Open Secrets or some other site and pull the trigger on some company just because the summary line says they gave big to the GOP.
(Note: that's not to say that some of these companies don't support the right-wing agenda--just that we need to be responsible and do our homework instead of jumping the gun based on the raw numbers)