[rayiner]

> (Google has donated to over half of Congress according to OpenSecrets.org, in actual cash donated I think Comcast might still be on top, but the gap's closing fast.)

Corporations can't donate to political campaigns. What OpenSecrets.org misleadingly advertises as "corporate" donations to political campaigns are employee donations to campaigns.[1] Google has 57,000 employees. Unsurprisingly, many of them exercise their rights as members of a democracy and support their favorite political candidates.

[1] Specifically, OpenSecrets lists donations from individual employees and company-sponsored PACs. Corporations are banned from contributing directly to political candidates, or from donating to regular PACs. Only Super PACs can accept money from corporations, but those are banned from donating to candidates.

[ocdtrekkie]

It's not misleading. Many of the donations are from top ranking Googlers like Eric Schmidt who directly interact with these politicians in a business sense. Many of these donors have stock-based compensation with Google.

Unsurprisingly, almost all pro-Google legislation is sponsored by the same Congresspeople who have received the largest donations from Googlers.

So OpenSecrets' format is specifically designed to reveal corruption that would not be obvious with mere donor names alone.

[DannyBee]

"It's not misleading. " Of course it is. People are not the companies they work for. Period.

" Many of the donations are from top ranking Googlers like Eric Schmidt who directly interact with these politicians in a business sense."

"many".

Opensecrets lists 503 unique people identified as googlers donating. I don't believe you have any reasonable argument that there are 503 top ranking googlers who interact directly with these politicians in a business sense. I think you can argue maybe 1-2% of them are.

So 98% of them somehow don't fall into what you consider "many of the donations". That doesn't seem like many to me.

"Unsurprisingly, almost all pro-Google legislation is sponsored by the same Congresspeople who have received the largest donations from Googlers."

What is "pro-google"? Who are "the same congresspeople"?

Can you give specific examples of pro-google legislation and congresspeople who have repeatedly passed them, where there largest donations were from google?

I see a tremendous amount of handwaving in your comment, but pretty much no real data.

[nitrogen]

It's not misleading. " Of course it is. People are not the companies they work for. Period.

Did you read the leaked Sony email where one exec was hounding all the other execs to make large donations to a particular politician?

[DannyBee]

Again, there are 503 donators. There are not 503 execs at Google.

[twoodfin]

To clarify this excellent comment: Corporations can donate to political campaigns and the organizations running them. What they can't do is donate directly to candidates running for office.

[rayiner]

Corporations cannot donate to campaigns either. What they can do is donate to Super PACs that make independent expenditures to support particular candidates.

[twoodfin]

Campaigns for office are a subset of all political campaigns.

Post-Citizens United, corporations can engage in or financially support any political campaigning they like in whatever form, as long as they don't make financial or in-kind contributions to the electoral campaigns of individual candidates. They don't need to form a PAC to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC#Super_P...

[rayiner]

Fair enough. I didn't pick up on your use of "campaign" in the broader sense.