Google’s recent fundraiser for Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., and a $50,000 donation to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, both well-known climate change skeptics, are hardly shocking. Google has a data center in Oklahoma, and the company has learned the hard way that it pays to pay for influence on both sides of the Congressional trough.
As an ex-Googler, I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed. I’ve donated a lot to progressive causes and seen how money buys access. I once used mine to ask President Barack Obama to raise my taxes. The next day, Google’s lobbyists disavowed me to the conservative Heritage Foundation. I’ve also received a private tour of the Capitol dome.
I hate to see Google, whose executives I deeply respect, get sucked into the world of pay-for-play politics. Not because it’s unusual for a corporation, but because it’s the norm. I helped write the letter in which Larry Page declared Google would not be a conventional company, yet this action puts it in line with every other supplicant in Washington. It confirms that to get things done, you open your wallet.
Tech companies can do the math on how many votes are needed to pass legislation. So brilliant executives hold their noses and donate money to oppose climate change or gay rights so that they can get agreement on network neutrality or H-1B visas.
They weigh the probability that their donations will actually advance causes they oppose, and they conclude that it’s unlikely since, they optimistically assume, the truth is self-evident. They see such donations as trivial, whereas a vote in favor of immigration reform would have a significant positive impact on the U.S. tech industry and, by extension, all Americans.
Google executives and employees tell me with resignation that, yes, such machinations are evil, but that’s how the system works and, shrug, what are you going to do? Google is overall a force for good, and if sometimes you take a step backward to make a giant leap forward, that’s within the range of acceptability.
The real problem is the underlying system of election financing. I’ve had a dozen legislators tell me that they spend half of every single day on the phone asking for money. This is not why we sent them to Washington. It is, however, why I joined the board of Maplight.org, a nonpartisan organization that uses data to show correlations between campaign contributions and Congressional votes. I wanted to quantify the extent of the problem so that solutions could be derived.
In that vein, I propose that corporate executives consider a different way to balance their contributions. It’s to give to organizations like Maplight, the Sunlight Foundation, or CREW, which are fighting to fix the American electoral system.
Consider donations to these groups as ethical offsets, like the carbon ones bought to make up for polluting the environment. Support the New York effort to implement public financing of elections, and lobby for campaign reform. Apply your brains and resources to fixing this fundamental flaw: that money buys influence and candidates always need money.
It’s a messy, complicated problem without easy answers, like improving Internet search or making advertising cost-effective. It’s a challenge that requires smart thinking, persistence and fearlessness about taking on established interests — exactly the commitment you have made so often in the past. The risk of failure is not trivial, but the rewards of success would be immeasurable.
Doug Edwards is co-chair of Maplight’s board and author of “I’m Feeling Lucky: Confessions of Google Employee Number 59.” Before joining Google, he was brand group manager for online products at the Mercury News. He wrote this for this newspaper.
