Ever wonder which companies donate to political parties? Now there's an app for that, cleverly called, 'BuyPartisan.' It's free and is one more way for the public to find out where their consumer dollars are going - and they can discover this while they are shopping.
I already know Lifelock, Blinds.com, iHeart, Gold Bond, and Dish Network sponsor Rush Limbaugh. Those products are off my list. And Angie's List stayed with Limbaugh too long, so they're crossed off as well.
Angel Soft, Northern Tissue and all Georgia Pacific paper products will stay on the shelves as I walk buy with my grocery cart. They are products of the Koch Brothers who represent everything that's wrong in this country today. My money will go to their competitors.
And now thanks to the Spending Consciously, we can find out, for free, what many corporations would rather we not know: Are they Red or are they Blue? The BuyPartisan app is available on iTunes. Here is Apple's description:
BuyPartisan works like a nutritional label for your political values. Simply use your phone to scan a product's barcode, or just search by individual company or product, and you can quickly see the political contributions of each company's CEO, Board of Directors, political action committees and employees. Simply put, BuyPartisan empowers consumers with awareness of the true impact of the campaign spending by the companies behind the products we all buy every day.
Will this new app affect the sales/profits of companies? As elections grow nearer, perhaps so. The BuyPartisan creator, Matt Colbert, believes the users will be delighted:
"It is a Eureka moment: So you go, 'Oh my God, I wasn't aware of that!'"
Colbert gives
a couple of examples. General Mills (which makes Cheerios) gave 63.5% of it's political donations to Republicans. On the other hand, the CEO of
Seventh Generation natural cleaning products, gave 100% of his donations to the Democratic Party.
I hate to hear about Cheerios. Many of us watched our kids snack on them in their highchairs. Alas, I can still cherish the memory. I will start buying Seventh Generation products, because I'd love nothing more than to know my consumer dollars are indirectly going to the party of my choice. The fact that they sell natural products is icing on the cake.Yes, I'm eager to know who supports what (though I may peer through my fingers like a child, before finding out the app results of some of my favorite brands).
You can find out more about BuyPartisan on Facebook.