Have you wondered how the leftwing seems to have so much money for high-powered public relations and lobbying campaigns? The answer is that they not only have their own money but they have generous donations from big corporations, too.
We are indebted to University of Texas professor Marvin Olasky for producing an original piece of research called “Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy.” Using information from the corporations which chose to cooperate, plus Internal Revenue Service Forms 990-PF for 1985 (the most recent year available), he has documented the thesis that the left is funded by big business.
Planned Parenthood had plenty of ready cash to take out full-page newspaper ads attacking Judge Robert Bork. In 1985 six corporations alone — AT&T, Citicorp, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Standard Oil, Dayton Hudson, and Union Pacific — gave $132,000 to Planned Parenthood.
Radical feminist organizations received a total of $472,000 in 1985 donations from 19 of the Forbes “Top 25” corporations. Yet, these feminist groups are all somewhere to the left of Mondale-Ferraro, and they lobby, litigate and agitate for goals that are reliably anti-private-enterprise.
The Forbes “Top 25” gave $71,500 to the National Organization for Women (one of the nastiest opponents of Reagan’s Supreme Court nominees and other conservative candidates), $50,000 to the Ms. Foundation (founded by Gloria Steinem), and $61,000 to the Women’s Action Alliance (also founded by Gloria Steinem). The feminists are adept at setting up many organizations with the same goals so they can receive donations under different names.
The National Organization for Women (NOW) boasted that “In 1985 the corporate community helped the Fund to make important advances.”
Enthusiastically expressing her appreciation, chairperson Muriel Fox wrote, “In partnership with American corporations, we are focusing on crucial enablement issues for the 1980s, the 90s and beyond, and thanks to this partnership with the corporate sector we already see results.”
One of NOW’s “crucial” issues is Comparable Worth, a way-out plan to set up governmental commissions stacked with feminists who would then set wages on the basis of what THEY think jobs are WORTH rather than on what the free market would determine.
The Ms. Foundation, another beneficiary of corporate giving, is a funding mechanism for groups supporting Comparable Worth, voter registration of specially targeted groups, unrestricted abortion, and other radical feminist goals. Corporate grants from Aetna, Allied Stores, AT&T, Atlantic Richfield, Dayton Hudson, Exxon, General Motors, RCA, and Westinghouse helped the Ms. Foundation to support these goals, as well as to donate to other feminist groups such as the Women’s Center for Social Change and the Lesbian Resource Center.
The same leftward drift is apparent in other fields. In national security/foreign policy issues, organizations favoring detente and disarmament received almost twice as much funding from corporations as those favoring American military strength and skepticism about U.S.-Soviet deals.
In the energy/environmental area, the regulation-oriented groups received twice as much corporate funding as those oriented toward the free market. In the area of minorities, corporate giving shows virtually a total sweep for groups with state-oriented, highly politicized projects as opposed to innovative or free-market approaches.
Four-fifths of the leading corporations ban or restrict giving to religious groups. But they seem to have no difficulty supporting the Center for Humanism or People for the American Way.
Why do corporations fund the left? The reason seems to be afoot that the corporations think that donations will defang the left from some of their virulent attacks on the private enterprise system.
There is no evidence that this happens; the donations just encourage the left to carry on their activities.
The bottom line looks like this. The Forbes Top 25 gave more than twice as much to 52 center-to-left groups as to the 48 center-to-right groups. In cash, the hard contrast was $7 million to $3 million.
While the amounts may not seem large to billion-dollar corporations, the amounts are extremely significant to the recipient organizations. These donations may be the difference between survival and demise.
It’s time for stockholders to speak up and redirect corporate philanthropy if they care about preserving the economic system that enables corporations to pay dividends.
