From Apple To Xbox, Tech Companies Lean Left 685
Velcroman1 writes "Only a week to election time! How does tech feel about politics? If you guessed liberal, you're right: Big Tech leans left. 'They're dominated by coastal people who tend to be more liberal,' says Jim Taylor, a management consultant who writes about the business of psychology. 'Also, those in Big Tech tend to be educated in the better schools, which lean left. Big Tech skews younger and hipper [and favors] social and environmental issues. Their political values trump financial concerns at the organizational culture level and the missions of many firms, especially those that are new media.' For example, Marissa Mayer, known as 'the face of Google,' gave $30,400 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2009. In fact, of the top 10 contributions made by Google in 2009, only one — by CEO Eric Schmidt — was to the Republican National Committee. Facebook has donated almost exclusively to Democratic candidates, according to Transparency Data, including $1,000 to California Sen. Barbara Boxer a year ago, and more recently, almost $5,000 to Richard Blumenthal, who is running for senator in Connecticut."
More obvious stories (Score:2, Insightful)
Next thing you know, they'll be telling us that energy companies leans to the right.
Tech companies (Score:4, Insightful)
They tend to hire youth, and they are often based out of California. Youth tend to lean liberal, and Calfornia is often seen as the most liberal state. This is a shocking correlation!
Retest (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority in tech I know lean more towards the libertarian side of things. These kind of tests, due to their flaws of being linear, usually fail to capture that. ("Left" comes up more commonly than "right" for many libertarians because of how self-extreming "right" has become lately.)
democrat != left (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously -in the US we have two parties. The far right party, and the psychopathic kill-and-censor-everyone-in-the-name-of-patriotism party.
In practical terms, we have no left. This article is BS.
Re:Retest (Score:5, Insightful)
This idea of left and right is so screwed up that no wonder most young people don't even vote.
can you mark an entire article TROLL? (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on editors, i know you desperately want to talk about american politics, but isn't that what the poll to the right is for?
Who needs a big stupid flamewar? No one but Ralph Nader leans LEFT in the usa ANYWAYS!
Re:democrat != left (Score:4, Insightful)
We have not had a true left in this country since the Kennedy assassination. Johnson was a corporate whore, and since him, Democrats have been pro business all the way down. You can not be pro business interests AND pro labor. If you dump labor rights and issues then you are not a left leaning people.... at this point it is a fight between libertarianism values (those are indipendant of left or right leaning) and how responsible we should be with our taxing and spending (more borrowing or less borrowing)
As has been said, reality has a liberal bias. (Score:5, Insightful)
Note I said "liberal", not "progressive", not "Democratic Party", not either libertarian or "Libertarian".
The problem is that too many people confuse "fiscal responsibility" with "conservatism". Fiscal policy is separate from "liberal" and "conservative". I am *EXTREMELY* fiscally 'conservative'. But I'm also *EXTREMELY* liberal.
In fact, one could even argue that fiscal responsibility is, itself, liberal by definition.
Re:As has been said, reality has a liberal bias. (Score:2, Insightful)
A Europe currently struggling with how to deal with its unintegrated immigrants and with no comfortable resolution in sight begs to differ.
Re:More obvious stories (Score:3, Insightful)
Exxon donated more to Obama than any other person in office, so that isn't true either, and that tidbit just chafes the leftwing mantra.
Corporations read the tea leaves and buy influence accordingly. (D) and (R) are just prostitutes who peddle influence to the highest bidder.
Re:Big Tech employees (Score:5, Insightful)
Big Corp wants nothing to do with capitalism or free markets.
Big Corp wants Big Government around to regulate their competitors out of existence and bail them out when they get into trouble.
A few months of actual free market capitalism would destroy most of the big corporations.
Note that, rhetoric to the contrary, neither major party has done anything to shrink the government in at least the last quarter century.
Re:More obvious stories (Score:1, Insightful)
The best part was when he assumed Obama is a "leftist".
Re:Retest (Score:3, Insightful)
What do you think you're doing? They need you to keep voting to preserve the illusion of consent.
False premise (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Retest (Score:3, Insightful)
Go ahead, vote for a third party, it might not mean much but it will go into a tally of people who said "fuck you" to the republicrats. If you don't like either candidate for local office make up something for the write in spot.
You might not be able to change the system, you might not be able to make a huge impact, but at the very least you will have your vote as "none of the above" registered.
If enough people started doing this rather than either voting for the "lesser evil" or staying home, perhaps the nation would wake up and pass some electoral reforms.
They all learned from Bill Gates (Score:1, Insightful)
Bill Gates never used to give anything to candidates. He figured, rather naively, that there was no reason to do that.
Then, a little company called Sun that gave a lot of money to the Democrats made a few phone calls and got some anti-trust action going.
So yeah. Pay up or else!
Liar. (Score:5, Insightful)
So far in 2010, the oil and gas industries have contributed $12.8 million to all candidates, with 71% of that money going to Republicans. During the 2008 election cycle, 77% of the industry's $35.6 million in contributions went to Republicans, and in the 2008 presidential contest, Republican candidate Sen. John McCain received more than twice as much money from the oil and gas industries as Obama: McCain collected $2.4 million; Obama, $898,000.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_05/023945.php [washingtonmonthly.com]
Sure, you can single out Exxon and Obama in 2008, because that's the exception to the rule you're pretending doesn't exist.
Let's see, smarter, better educated = more liberal (Score:4, Insightful)
People complain that our universities, urban elite, etc. 'lean left'. Now let's see, the smarter and better educated you are, the more liberal you are. What does that suggest to you?
It suggests to me that we have too many ignoramuses, who lack the education and experience to learn to deal with different kinds of people, to understand how progress is made, and to be informed or to deal with complicated policy issues like global warming. And those ignoramuses are called "conservatives".
Re:Retest (Score:4, Insightful)
If you think the Democrats are anywhere near communist you are a total nutcase. They are as far to the right as the republicans these days, all of them are a bunch of fucking corporatists.
Re:Retest (Score:4, Insightful)
But really, saying that you didn't vote then complaining is just as silly as saying you are hungry but you didn't even make an effort to find food.
Re:Liberal (Score:5, Insightful)
Our "leftists" could not even manage a public option for insurance coverage so that takes your first point right out, and our right-wingers support jailing people for victimless crimes so there goes the other.
Re:Retest (Score:4, Insightful)
I didn't vote for a third party candidate because not voting is just as effective.
That is absolutely not true.
The more people who vote for 3rd parties, the more the two ruling parties have to worry about bringing voters back. One way to bring voters back is to co-opt the most popular policies of the 3rd parties. There are a bunch of other underhanded ways to bring voters back, but incorporating parts of 3rd party platforms is common enough to make it worth while.
You won't vote for a winner, but politics isn't a sport - there's no value to voters for being "on the winning team" - what matters is if the policies you care about get implemented the way you want.
Re:More obvious stories (Score:5, Insightful)
In case you have any doubt, remember that it was a Democrat president who signed the DMCA into law, it is Democrats who are pushing for ever stronger copyrights, and that like the Republicans, Democrats continue to push forward an agenda of "corporate interests first," and continue to try to spread that agenda to other countries. As for the media, well, when a left wing group wanted to pay NBC to run an advertisement that encouraged people to spend no money for just one day, as part of a general anti-corporation campaign, NBC refused to air the ad -- despite the fact that the group was willing to pay the same price as every other advertiser -- because the ad ran counter to US economic policy.
Not that any of this should come as a surprise. After all, corporations exist for the purpose of realizing profits, so why would a corporation ever support a political party or movement that works against the system that has allowed corporations to become as big, powerful, and profitable as they are today?
Re:Retest (Score:5, Insightful)
While the "two dimensional" Nolan chart makes a nice recruiting tool for the Libertarian Party, it's not much more realistic than the two party approach. It completely ignores libertarian socialism [blackened.net] for example -- and since the Libertarians pretty much outright stole their name from this movement, perhaps that's no accident.
Deregulating big business and handing power to corporate plutocracy is not "more freedom in economic matters", it actually lets powerful interests decrease your freedom.
There are at least five big questions in politics:
That's not even counting the one big issue in American politics today: are you part of the reality-based community, or not? More and more, dialog on the conservative side is dominated by out-and-out nutcases: birthers, creationists, climate science deniers, homophobes, et cetera. Sure, on the left you have the occasional truther or Maoist, but they're not generally being promoted as serious candidates for office. The GOP's been leaving rationality behind since the Reagan era.
That being the case, it's no wonder that the tech sector -- generally more educated folks -- leans left. If and when rational conservatives come back into dominance in the GOP, you might see more techies tilt less to the left.
Re:can you mark an entire article TROLL? (Score:3, Insightful)
No one but Ralph Nader leans LEFT in the usa ANYWAYS!
You forgot Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich.
Re:More obvious stories (Score:5, Insightful)
Not terribly insightful, Exxon is prohibited by law from donating money directly to the candidates or parties but can give unlimited funds to 501(c)4 and 501(c)3 groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or Americans for Prosperity without needing to disclose such contributions
FTFY. HTH. HAND.
Re:Retest (Score:5, Insightful)
There are far more than two degrees. I tend to want fiscal conservatism in terms of government spending (which does not mean "cut everything", but rather "fund responsibly"), social liberalism in terms of personal freedoms, but increased restriction of corporations, and no deregulation. Put another way, in my view, personal freedom applies to a person acting as a person. As soon as you have the corporate veil protecting you from personal responsibility for your actions, the corporation should cease to have those same rights.
Here are a few of the higher level axes, each of which contains several areas that fall under it.
And those are just some of the many areas that people disagree about. And although many people will have the same leaning about most of the things in each of the larger groups, that still gives you a minimum of four political axes instead of just one or even two.
Re:Want to get money out of federal politics? (Score:4, Insightful)
Want to get money and influence peddling out of the hands of feds?
Yeah - and put it right back into the hands of corrupt state and local business owners where it belongs. If I were going to waste my time on Constitutional Amendments that wouldn't pass, I think I'd either go with requirements for proportional voting or public financing of campaigns. Both would have a better impact on elections.
Re:democrat != left (Score:4, Insightful)
"Buy health insurance or we'll punish you" is pretty leftist. It's lack of freedom
So, in your world, everyone on the "left" desires an end to freedom, and everyone on the "right" desires more freedom, and never the two shall mix. So left vs. right is all about non-freedom vs. freedom, people who hate their country and want to destroy it vs. people who love their country and want to protect it. You sound like a Glenn Beck viewer.
If you think a single person living in the US and involved in politics actually desires to harm this country, then you're a moron and shouldn't be allowed to vote. You've bought into the partisan bullshit and now your vote is a liability. This country needs 3, 4, 5 etc political parties, this 2-boxes bullshit that everyone is supposed to fit into stopped being productive decades ago. The control by the two major parties over the presidential debate committee needs to end.
Thanks! From your Republican and Democrat friends (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't vote for a third party candidate because not voting is just as effective.
And the Republicans and Democrats both thank you for continuing to prevent any competition.
I'm always amazed at people who believe the "voting for a 3rd party is like throwing your vote away". Are you really saying that because your particular candidate didn't win, that you wasted your vote?
I had a conversation with a co-worker about our recent vote. I said that I had voted Libertarian (Bob Barr) for president. He laughed and claimed that I wasted my vote. I then asked him who HE had voted for. He then stopped laughing and quietly mumbled, "John McCain". I then proceeded to laugh, as we live in California, and Barr and McCain had roughly the same chances of winning the state (about 0% chance). Was his vote for McCain a "wasted vote", simply because McCain didn't win? Or was his vote OK, since it fell into your acceptable category of being a (R) or a (D)?
Re:democrat != left (Score:1, Insightful)
It is interesting that "leftist" and "lack of freedom" mean the same thing to to you.
I suspect you've received a lot of confirmation of that idea through the years, and it's pretty entrenched into your personal outlook and mindset.
But if you want to grow as a person, you should reexamine that idea. Labeling everything left, liberal, or progressive as "lack of freedom" can do nothing but act as an artificial brakes on your intellectual curiosity. You're doing yourself a great disservice by perpetuating this idea onto yourself.
Reality Has a Well Known Liberal Bias (Score:3, Insightful)
This "psychologist" can't see that people at these companies are more liberal than average simply because they're smart. Not just any kind of smart, but the kind of smart that knows how to communicate with lots of other people, even if just in the abstract, technologically, not just with their hillbilly brother-cousins. Which is why they leave those hillbilly hollows to go places where companies like Apple and Microsoft can function. Back in hillbillyland they'd be burned as witches, or worse as homosexuals.
"Reality has a well-known liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert
Re:More obvious stories (Score:4, Insightful)
Certainly nothing in the US. Note that to the outside world, the D and R parties seem indistinguishable.
Re:Moderate/Conservatives are the quiet majority (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Americans need *no* political party. They should legislate and govern on a per issue bases. It's the fact that we have "big politco's" that I think is the problem.
You see, I've come to believe that many Americans simply pick a party based on one or two beliefs they hold most strongly and then vote for that party, regardless of all the other beliefs they may or may not agree with.
An example: An LGBT person probably supports LGBT rights. This might, in fact, be the one issue they really care about. Because of this they might vote Democratic because they're known for supporting popular LGBT "gay" rights like marriage. This can be in spite of the fact that they might not support any other issues the party supports.
I'd rather see the whole system stripped down to "the issues"(tm) and not "the party". Of course, there's also the fact that Representatives simply don't Represent anymore. Instead, they get elected and then vote THEIR beliefs (which often include their belief to keep their job by voting how the party wants them to vote so they can fund their next re-election campaign with all the bull-shit and spin that includes). That leads to simply trying to vote for someone who's "most likely to vote how I would vote" and that's too bad.
And this isn't to excuse the voters either. Very few people actually speak up and call/write their Reps. Though, that's not to say if they do, they'll listen. There's been some cases where it's been clear that Reps. are Rep-ing and we'll see them with a new job in a few weeks. (I won't say they'll be unemployed because ex-congress-people end up becoming consultants / lobbyists for special interests because they know how things work and who to talk to, so they'll still be making boat loads of money).
Of course, the whole thing is far more complex than just that, but that's just my recent thoughts.
Things have just gotten too "sporty" in terms of politics. It's like you have to support your "team" no matter what, and you can't agree the other team has some good ideas, simply because it's the other team. This shit isn't suppose to be a fucking competition. We're all suppose to be on the same team here.
Re:As has been said, reality has a liberal bias. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, just for Muslims. There are plenty of others who don't integrate.
Muslims are disproportionally highly represented among those who don't integrate. So what if there are a few odd other folk? They don't make a difference, just as they never did. But mass immigration into Europe these days is mostly Muslim, and it's the "mass" part that causes problems in conjunction with "non-integration" part. Separately, neither is really a problem.
Re:Moderate/Conservatives are the quiet majority (Score:0, Insightful)
100% correct. The labels tossed on people nowadays and I've done it too are incorrect.
The controlling Democrats are not the Democrats of 50 years ago, they are Progressive x 10. And Progressives, my friends, are not freedom lovers, they are control freaks. "We know better than you because we're elite & smarter." You want to talk about a "Class" system, Progressivism is it!
The Republicans are shills for whomever will vote for them. Very FEW actually live up to what they promise....
Re:Reality Has a Well Known Liberal Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Left is right and right is right... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do Europeans get to set the standard on who's right and who's left? Because from here, it seems all Europeans are just ultra-liberal. How is our viewpoint more wrong than theirs? Seems rather chauvinist.
Re:More obvious stories (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it was Exxon employees who donated more to Obama.
Exxon, being a corporation, was forbidden by law from donating to any candidate for public office. The law is still in effect, by the way. Corporate donations to candidates are forbidden by law.
You might want to contact the person who sent you the mass email telling you that Exxon gave more to Obama than any other candidate and let them know that they're full of shit. And of course, you need to stop believing mass emails.
Re:More obvious stories (Score:1, Insightful)
You can't confuse a fiduciary duty with a political stance; lobbying for profits is neither right or left anyhow.
Wanting profits at all costs is a political stance. For example there exist companies which have a majority of owners who don't want to cause damage to society for profit. I'd call those people left. They are putting social values ahead of pure capitalism. Shareholders can and do request companies do things other than purely for profit. It's a total myth that companies are required to put profit first. I guess it's because people don't want to feel guilty for the damage they do.
Re:Thanks! From your Republican and Democrat frien (Score:2, Insightful)
To be fair, if you voted Obama you pretty much wasted your vote too.
Re:Big Tech employees (Score:3, Insightful)
All you've pointed out here is that there are different yardsticks for measuring the size of government.
One could just as easily define the size of government as the number of volumes in the Library of Congress, or the total mass of all elected officials.
Number of people who get a paycheck directly from the US Treasury is as decent a measure as any other. Which means military cuts indeed reduce the size of the government.
If you'd prefer another yardstick, feel free to propose one.
Re:More obvious stories (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, all large corporations lean to the right. Americans wouldn't recognize a real left winger if it blindfolded them, lined them up against a wall, and shot them for crimes against the proletariat.
Re:Tech companies (Score:3, Insightful)
That views the options though as one where interfering with business isn't *protecting* your freedom from the private sector.
I don't view the government as large of a threat to my liberty as a corporation like Google.
Re:That explains why Obama doesn't have a problem. (Score:3, Insightful)
If Google is earning that money from investments overseas and spending it overseas, then there really is no problem.
The problem is companies that pretend to do that, but are really expatriating domestic profits, or failing to repatriate revenues on domestic products.
Change the rule to allow taxation on foreign investment, and you will simply kill multinational corporations in America. They'll all split into subsidiaries of a foreign holding company. There will be a Google America and a Google Everywhere Else.
Re:More obvious stories (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More obvious stories (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Retest (Score:2, Insightful)
Except that the tea-party isn't really a 3rd party.
Most of their candidates competed in republican primaries.
For what my opinion is worth, I have my doubts that the tea-party will have any real policy impact on the republicans (or the democrats). There is a heck of lot of chatter about small government, but hardly any serious policy discussion. The part of the regular republican party that seems to be responding to the tea-partiers is even more vague about what parts of government they would really cut. There's hand-waving that "everything is on the table" but I haven't seen anything more concrete than that.
"Conservatives are not neccessarily stupid... (Score:3, Insightful)
Note, I'm "Right Wing" by international standards, the USA's main two parties are Right, and Ultra Right, why can you not simply have Centre Left and Centre Right like the rest of the world? And also colour them correctly, Red is for "left wing", Blue for "right wing"! You know, like, "The Reds are invading..."?
Things America needs to change reason #42 the Metric System....
Re:democrat != left (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>apparently you fail to see the fascism that is rampant with those you elect on the right.
You mean the Republicans. Yeah I see it, but it's far far worse on the left (D) of US politics. After all it was the Democrats who met with Insurance Companies, struck a deal to help the companies boost their bottom line, and then passed this "you must buy insurance" law. It doesn't get any more fascist (corporatist) then that. The insurance companies threw a party.
Now the democrats are colluding with Google, Microsoft, ATT to kill free television and lock it up behind paywalls. (Yes I know you're skeptical but do the research; it's happening.) I could go on and on, but I'll leave you to absorb that first.
Re:As a hillbilly from a desert island, I have to (Score:3, Insightful)
I understand you're just being a dick here (what leftwingers do best)
GP is engaging in parody, which is part of the arsenal of weapons available with free speech, something that rightwingers always say is important when defending murderous racism, sexism and homophobia, but get pissy about when used against them.
Re:As a hillbilly from a desert island, I have to (Score:3, Insightful)
it is nice to see that some put their money where they believe, and not just on the bottom line
That depends on what factors influence the bottom line. Under Republican policies, which I've been assured many times are extremely "business friendly," we deregulated banks and finance companies and allowed the lines between them to blur (some of this was supported by President Clinton). Under President Bush we also depopulated the SEC, which was charged with the oversight of these businesses. In other words, we did exactly what banks and financial institutions were asking us to do. And it turns out that doing exactly what these businesses wanted was not as "business friendly" as we'd imagined, as the crash of 2008 demonstrates. It turns out that if we'd kept post-Depression era policies in place, all of the companies that lobbied for deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s would have been much better off, millions of jobless Americans wouldn't be jobless, and a lot of the tech companies that TFA mentions would be selling more cloud services and shiny devices than they currently are. The bottom line suffered tremendously for our "business friendly" policies. So these people are putting their money not just behind what they believe, but also on the bottom line.
Re:Retest (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't ask don't tell is being repealed, its happening. Just slower than you;d have liked.
http://www.peoplesworld.org/obama-administration-ends-bush-abstinence-only-sex-education-policy/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-05-11-abstinence-only_N.htm
Obama ended abstinence only sex education.
The huge corporate gain was caused through the supreme court anyways. Nothing really has changed in the IP field at all...
Republicans/Mccain would have been worse.
But the upcoming election isn't dems vs mccain style republicans. It is dems versus the TEA PARTY. I don't think people realize how scary that really is. And how important it is to vote. A bunch of religious nutjobs that believe fox news is the place to learn about the world and that sarah palin is an overwhelmingly good candidate.
You may not like Obama and the dems. But not voting gives power to people as stupid as Sarah Palin. As childish as Glenn Beck and as terrifying as Ann Coulter or Michael Savage. With ideas as foolish as Rand Paul's (the guy wants to abolish the dept of education and the NSF).
You might think its bad now but it could be much much worse.