One thing I think people miss when political donations by company are listed like this is that it’s not the company itself making donations, it’s their individual employees.
Ever made a political donation? Remember when it asked for your employer on the form? Well this figure is from people who put IBM there on their form.
So when you read a stat like this that tells you one company overwhelmingly donated one way or the other, it’s really telling you nothing about the company itself, and more about the employees who work there - primarily the low level employees, who likely vastly outnumber everyone else.
Similarly, it means nothing as far as corruption is concerned when you look into a specific candidate’s political donations and see that, for example, oil companies overwhelmingly donated to them. It doesn’t mean oil companies literally donated to them, it means people who work at oil companies did.
It might be useful for gauging a company’s general culture, but even then I’d be cautious since the bulk of political donations for most companies is probably dominated by their low level employees.
Before superPACs, a way to get around campaign finance limitations was to coerce your employees to donate to your political candidate of choice. If the law limits you to a five thousand dollar donation individually, but you have five thousand employees to whom you can give a hundred dollar bonus each and you can force to donate it to your candidate, that’s five million you can try to sneaky around the campaign finance laws. That’s why they ask for your employer.
Yeah, corporate executives aren’t filling out a donation form with their corporation listed on it.
They’re sending their donations anonymously and privately to PACs for both parties so they can be owed favors when it’s time to either A) get a huge tax break or B) choose which one or two senators will block the promised attempt to increase their taxes.
Aside from that, they don’t care about the poor man’s squabbles about racism or fascism or rights or dignity or whatever else we plebs think is important. Literally nothing matters to them except making and keeping profit. They make sure they can do that whichever way an election goes. That’s the whole point of “dark money” - so apps like this can’t make candidates blush.
how is IBM of all companies so progressive in terms of donations but is extremely shortsighted when it comes to user/customer support???
- Redhat enshitification (controversial anti-RHEL downstreaming)
I REALLY didn’t expect an 89% from IBM
See above comment about this not being donations from the company but the employees.
Also, in surprised IBM owns lenovoo - never saw that coming
IBM doesn’t own Lenovo or Sony or Cray or Acer. Those are other related brands.
IBM used to own ThinkPad which was sold to Lenovo.
Thanks for confirming I’m still a dumbass :)
Here is an another reason ibm should’ve kept the Thinkpad line. They donate 3% more democrat in their contributions.
