Exactly! They sent out regular email to all employees asking for contributions to NETPAC when I was there. But now don't discuss politics among rank-and-file - they just want to control the dialog and power among the execs.
The politics of $RICH_GUY_WHO_WORKS_AT_TECH_IN_THE_WEST_COAST are not secret, I was just laughing at the prospect of a seemingly neutral "project" which is just a way of denouncing companies that use their advertisement power to show how leftist they are (because in this day and age they have no other choice) while, at the same time, they give money to those eeeevil conservatives.
"Pinboard has been keeping track of political donations from big tech companies" does not seem to imply that it's a completely biased report, but yeah, I should have known better :P
Yeah so far from what I've seen all the big tech companies PAC's give with roughly 50/50 distribution of funds between left and right wing politicians. Whether that is good or bad is up to your own judgement. Personally I stopped donating to my company's PAC because I want more control of who my donations go to, but from what I've seen the corporate PAC's are all pretty well balanced.
50/50 doesn't necessarily mean 50/50. If I give to my preferred candidate and give to an opposing candidate that I think would be easy for my candidate to beat, then I'm not really giving 50/50.
The donations are capped by law at $5,000 per candidate+election (so typically a corporate PAC can give $10,000 to a congressional or senate candidate).
The amounts are not as important as the fact that Google's name is attached to them. But I agree with you that the overall figure is tiny, which makes it more mysterious why Google continues to make these donations, which amount to legalized bribery.
IBM and Apple do fine without a corporate PAC. Microsoft suspended its own PAC after strong internal pressure from employees over donations to some of the same terrible people.
