Corporate Cash for Collectivist Causes

November 2006 -- Because our April cover story chronicled the Enron debacle, we ran the following quotation from Ayn Rand on our table of contents page:

As a group, businessmen have been…disarmed by the deadly combination of altruism and Pragmatism…Today, the last group one can expect to fight for capitalism is the capitalists.

I had cause to recall Rand’s comment when I read the August issue of Foundation Watch, a publication that I used to edit for the Capital Research Center. It carried a report by my former colleague David Hogberg and research intern Sarah Haney, titled, “Funding Liberalism with Blue-Chip Profits: Fortune 100 Foundations Back Leftist Causes.” (Available online at www.capitalresearch.org .)

Hogberg and Haney checked the most recently available IRS tax filings from Fortune 100 companies (mostly from 2003 and 2004). They focused on the 53 companies with nonprofit charitable foundations that donate to political groups. They then distinguished the political recipients of this largesse along conventional ideological lines. “Right-wing” groups tended to favor lower taxes, less government regulation, less government spending on social programs, a stronger national defense, tougher criminal penalties, the “right to bear arms,” immigration restrictions, and “traditional values.” “Left-wing” groups took the opposite stands.

Their findings? Contrary to the claims of leftist ideologues and political demagogues, it turns out that Big Business does not finance what Hillary Clinton infamously labeled “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”

“The results are the exact opposite of the common perception,” Hogberg and Haney report. “In fact, the grantmaking was lopsided: The political left received nearly $59 million, while the political right received only about $4 million, a ratio of 14.5 to 1.” Even subtracting a huge grant by the Goldman Sachs Foundation to the liberal Wildlife Conservation Society, “donations to the left still outstrip those to the right by a ratio of 5.8 to 1.”

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This orgy of corporate philanthropy is a multi-million-dollar ritual of atonement for the sin of seeking profits.Specifics are telling. The JP Morgan Chase Foundation donated nearly $1.2 million to leftist causes, most of it to the radical left group ACORN—but not a penny to groups on the right. The Citigroup Foundation gave over a million bucks to groups on the left, but only $55,000 to their right-wing counterparts. Ford Motor’s foundation shelled out over $6 million to the left, and only $1,000 to the right.

Even big timber companies such as Weyerhaeuser, attacked savagely by environmentalists, donated $673,300 to the left—mostly to environmentalist groups—and only $53,500 to groups on the right. Similarly, Dow Chemical has been under constant assault from liberals and environmentalists; but when parceling out cash, its foundation gave $193,300 to the left, and not a single dollar to the right.

Exceptions to this pattern were rare. Exxon gave $2.7 million to the right, and about $1.2 million to the left. Wellpoint and Wells Fargo, which give much more modestly to political causes, gave more to starboard-leaning groups, and Verizon’s contributions were fairly balanced. But they were exceptions.

More typical was General Motors, whose foundation heaped $1.4 million upon collectivist causes, but just $227,500 into conservative coffers. If GM still believes the slogan that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the U.S.A.,” then the U.S.A. is in big trouble.

“Why do they do it?” the authors of the study wonder. They note, correctly, that “businesses are not inherently ‘pro-market.’ Indeed, some business leaders may support tax increases and more government regulation because they believe it gives them an advantage over competitors. Many are not averse to more government spending if it boosts their profits.”

That’s true, of course. Many big corporations want to use the coercive power of government to obtain legal and economic advantages over smaller rivals, and that is surely one motive as to why they donate to leftist groups and causes. Hogberg and Haney note that this isn’t the only reason why corporations are prone to fund their philosophical enemies. They cite additional motives, such as ignorance of the nature of such groups, corporate attempts to appease and “buy off” ideological adversaries, and their policy of giving matching grants for charitable donations made by employees.

Such explanations are unsatisfactory, however. For example, ignorance and matching grants ought to cut both ways, resulting in the equal funding of leftist and rightist groups. But it doesn’t. Hogberg and Haney get closer to the mark when they point to the “personal political preference” of corporate executives, and their goals of “keeping employees happy, or creating good public relations.” Yet all of this still begs a number of questions.

Why are leading businessmen sympathetic to left-of-center groups and politicians?

Why are they intimidated by their leftist foes?

Why would their employees be “happy” about gifts and matching donations specifically to left-wing causes?

And why would donations by capitalists to anti-capitalist causes be considered “good” public relations?

This last question gets us to the fundamental reason underlying the whole suicidal spectacle of corporate funding of the left: Capitalists feel guilty about being capitalists—and feel morally inferior to anti-capitalists.

What we are witnessing in this orgy of corporate “philanthropy” is nothing less than a multi-million-dollar ritual of atonement for the sin of seeking profits.

The conventional ethics, summarized by the Sermon on the Mount, extols self-sacrifice as the moral ideal; it damns as “selfish” the pursuit of wealth, personal pleasure, and material comfort; it warns that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven; it counsels one to surrender his possessions for the sake of the poor.

But this traditional ethos of self-denial clashes fundamentally with capitalism, a social system based upon private property, and the pursuit of economic profits and personal happiness. In fact, the “ideal” of self-sacrifice clashes fundamentally with human nature, and with the requirements of successful living on earth.

What, then, is the ambitious and successful person to do? Every part of him craves fulfillment, material well-being, and physical comfort. Yet the ascetic moral “ideal” pounded into his skull from childhood tells him that such desires are base and ignoble. For such a man, the higher up the corporate ladder he climbs, the greater the burden of moral anxiety he must assuage.

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The traditional ethos of self-denial clashes with capitalism, which is based upon the pursuit of profits and personal happiness.So, he decides to do “good.” Not wishing to surrender all the perks of business success, but anxious to tamp down his feelings of moral uneasiness, he tries to expiate the alleged sin of selfish success through acts of charity. And because he believes, deep down, that the rewards he’s achieved during his capitalist career are morally tainted, how better to reclaim his lost moral stature than by donating at least some of his “ill-gotten gains” to anti-capitalists?

This, then, becomes the pragmaticcompromise for the man who wishes to live well, yet not feel so guilty about it.

This is the “deadly combination of altruism and Pragmatism” about which Rand warned—a combination that has morally disarmed the greatest and most productive of men in this, the greatest and most productive of nations.

This is the reason that the hard-earned wealth of America is being channeled into the coffers and causes of its would-be destroyers…here, and around the globe.

This suicidal process will end only on the day when Americans come to grasp that the moral code of self-sacrifice means exactly that—and thus is utterly incompatible with capitalism, and with human life itself. It will end only on the day when America’s greatest exemplars—the productive achievers of the business world—repudiate that code, and its ugly corollary: that they deserve to be morally damned merely because they strive to live well.

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