[Peace-discuss] Ruling elite

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From the excellent weekly City Pages in Minneapolis/St. Paul. 
It's unfortunate that that the C-U weeklies purposely exclude
politics and public affairs. --CGE]


Wal-Mart and Target: The color of their money

After the last presidential election, the conventional wisdom
held that the American body politic was nearly evenly split
between Red and Blue. Like much conventional wisdom, there was
some truth to it.

But of course the endless pontifications about the "polarized
public" misssed the main point. The political opinions of the
hoi polloi aren't nearly so significant as those of the
nation's ruling elite: in other words, the business establishment.

With that dispiriting reality in mind, some left-leaning
numbers crunchers built a website called BuyBlue.org.
Essentially a giant database, BuyBlue aggregates the political
contributions to candidates for federal office from the top
executives of America's largest corporations and their
affiliated political action committees.

Drawing mainly on data from the Federal Elections Commission
and the invaluable Center for Responsive Politics, the site
aims to give consumers a better idea about the political
leanings of the companies where they spend their money. Put
another way, BuyBlue tells you where big box bigwigs lie on
the red-blue continuum. The ratings run from zero (the "deep
red" designation) to 100 (the "deep blue" designation).

Not surprisingly, BuyBlue found that Wal-Mart executives and
its PACs contributed heavily to Republican causes and
candidates. This earned the world's largest corporation a
"light red" rating of 22 percent.

Now take a peek at the ratings of some of the better known
Minnesota companies. Given the North Star state's lingering
reputation as bastion of progressive politics, you might
imagine that the hometown retail behometh, Target, would be
"bluer" than Wal-Mart. You would be wrong. According to
BuyBlue, Target earns a "deep red" rating of 17 percent,
thanks in large part to the largesse of CEO and Chairman of
the board, Robert Ulrich. The company has also spread its
money to other conservative causes not mentioned in the
BuyBlue database, such as a $20,000 grant to the
Minneapolis-based Center of the American Experiment.

Target, however, is a veritable Bolshevik sleeper cell
compared to the Richfield-based electronics retailer Best Buy.
According to BuyBlue, Best Buy's top executives contributed
exlusively to Republican candidates in the 2003-04 election
cycle, earning the company the deepest of the deep red
ratings: zero...