During the Bush Inaugural festivities, some of the media tried to make a big story out of the large sums of money that a few big corporations had donated to underwrite the costly Inaugural events (most of which, incidentally, were free to the public an put on at no cost to the taxpayers). The impression given by these news stories reinforced the old stereotypes that business – Republican and that rich – conservative.
Actually, those stereotypes have been false for as long as memory runneth. George Bush could not have been elected by a constituency that was all or even largely “business,” “Republican,” or “rich.” His electoral majority was rolled up by the millions of ordinary working Americans who are fed up with Uncle Sam picking their pockets and with Willie Horton prowling their neighborhoods.
Although the American people voted decisively last November to trounce liberalism, the left continues to exert tremendous power and influence. The major reasons for this are that the big wealthy Political Action Committees give twice as much money to Democrats as to Republicans, the big wealthy universities finance the radical activists faculty and student groups, and the big, wealthy corporations finance the chic left.
This peculiar predilection of the corporations has now been documented for the second straight year by the Capital Research Center. This Washington-based group monitors trends in philanthropy and recently released its annual listing of U.S. corporations that are financing anti-business lobbying and advocacy groups.
This useful volume is called Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy: Public Affairs Giving and the Forbes 250. It is a compendium of useful information about how money interfaces with public policymaking.
Topping the list of corporations that donate to groups working against the private enterprise system are the Minneapolis-based retail chain called Dayton Hudson Corporation, the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, General Mills, Inc. of Minneapolis, the Pillsbury Company of Minneapolis, and Chemical Banking Corporation of New York.
Following close behind in this annual “Index of Corporate Misgiving” are Aetna Life & Casualty of Hartford, Atlantic Richfield Company of Los Angeles, American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) of New York, J. P. Morgan & Company of New York, and Citicorp of New York. Each of the above ten “corporate misgivers” gave $250,000 or more in 1986 to public policy groups, most of which advocate policies hostile to corporate interests.
What Capital Research Center did was to retain two scholars, Dr. Roger E. Meiners and Dr. David N. Laband, to assemble the records on the so-called charitable grants made by the corporations listed in the Forbes 250. Their report was based on the 122 corporations that cooperated in providing the necessary information, the remainder preferring to keep their grants secret even from their own stockholders.
Then the scholars developed a profile on the recipient organizations. Many of them aggressively advocate more government regulation of business, argue for increased business taxes, and use the courts to harass corporations. Generally, they view modern technology as the cause of problems rather than as their solution.
Some of these leftist, anti-business recipients include the Center for Community Change, the Children’s Defense fund, Food Research and Action Center, Feminist Press, Greenpeace, Joint Center for Political Studies, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Ms. Foundation for Women, National Council of La Raze, NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH, Women’s Equity Action League, and the American Friends Service Committee.
The Children’s Defense Fund, for example, is a leftwing activist lobby group that is leading the current drive to bring about federal financing and regulation of daycare and the increased institutionalization of preschool children, hardly an objective that U.S. businesses should be promoting. Yet, the Children’s Defense Fund received five-figure donations from J. P. Morgan, ARCO, General Mills, St. Paul Companies, and Xerox.
The authors of the study assigned an index number to each corporation based on the amount of money it donated to groups with a specific public policy focus. The authors used the following scale: 1 – radical left; 2 – left; 3 – liberal; 4 – center left; 5 – center; 6 – center right; 7 – conservative; 8 – classical liberal; 9 – radical right.
On this scale, for example, Coca-Cola came up with a ranking of 2.62 and AT&T 3.21. Overall, 60 percent of the funds donated by big business went to liberal or leftist groups.
The president of Capital Research Center, Willa Ann Johnson, noted that “a careful review of their activities shows contempt, and sometimes open hostility, toward the American enterprise system which makes social progress possible.” William E. Simon, author of the best-seller A Time for Truth, commented in the preface that, “What is going on here is that the leaders of the American free enterprise system are financing the destruction of their own system and ultimately of our free society.”
