Google is not a group of people who decided to associate based on their shared values. That was always bullshit, and I'm unsure why anyone took it seriously. If you fell for it, that's on you.<p>Google should never have talked about "pride" or "our shared values". It's very clear that they inherited that stuff from universities, where garbled nonsense about "safety," "this is our home," and "no place for hate" have become institutionalized. Mature companies led by adults know to avoid this minefield.<p>All of that aside, the attitude evinced by this post is counterproductive. Politics is about persuasion. If you want to persuade (and not just preach to the converted), you have to understand the other perspective. If all you can do is dismiss people as "indefensible," you don't understand them, and you won't convince them. You'll come off as nasty, entitled, arrogant, and ideological. You know, the kind of person who commits code to push their political agenda, spies on their coworkers, or spams some lawyer they disapprove of with emails.
I've been doing Twitter threads of Google's political giving for a while; they donate to a large number of terrible people. I try to single out politicians with records that are antithetical to basic values Google employees share, or that the company advertises (like its ostentatious committment to #pride), not just things I politically disagree with.<p>To head off some comments that always come up:<p>1. Like most corporate PACs, Google gives fairly evenly to politicians in both parties. I don't think donations to Democrats "cancel out" donations to indefensible figures like Scalise, or Nunes, any more than giving money to the NAACP cancels out a donation to the KKK.<p>2. Google's giving is not indiscriminate, but tactical and highly targeted. In particular, they don't just give to everyone across the board like the sugar lobby.<p>3. The dollar figures are small because they are capped by statute. At most, Google can give one politician $10,000 in an election cycle. This is absolutely dwarfed in size by Google's D.C. lobbying operation, which can't contribute directly to campaigns but finds many ways to be influential.<p>4. This money is donated by employees who opt in, but is allocated by the company. Googlers have no input into the targeting and timing of these donations; it's decided by the office of public policy.<p>5. An American corporation can do fine without a PAC. Apple and IBM don't have one. Microsoft won a giant Pentagon cloud computing contract while its political giving was suspended.<p>With that said, some further threads:<p>November 2019:
<a href="https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1197253535735267328" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1197253535735267328</a><p>August 2019: <a href="https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1164031478897901573" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1164031478897901573</a><p>June 2019:
<a href="https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1152245502361997314" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1152245502361997314</a><p>April 2019:
<a href="https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1119751992597835776" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1119751992597835776</a>
What else does this senator stand for? Does it even matter? Honestly, I'm not really sure if Google should be basing their donations on just one issue.
$2,500 hardly seems a large donation from a behemoth like Google. It’s fairly common practice in the Fortune 50s to donate to any politician who might even have a glance at any potential legislation that could affect them.<p>This would be more impactful if Google was one of the only large companies that donated.
Who cares? Google and every other large corporation donate to all the candidates covering the entire spectrum of politics.<p>It's a hedge bet strategy focused in risk management: the hope is to have influence over whoever so happens to be politically popular at any given time.