Google skews overwhelmingly Democrat – their genesis as a product of taxpayer funding and academia make that perfectly logical. Google’s Political Action Committee technically gives to both sides but when a VP hosts a fundraiser for one side at her house and Google employees are some of the most generous donors to President Obama’s election campaign, well, being a lobbyist and having to explain that to Republicans is tough.
Hey, I was a paid canvasser for Pennsylvania Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) in the 1980s so having to go into Westinghouse neighborhoods with brochures containing anti-science nonsense like how evil nuclear power was , well, it was a tough sell. But I did it. Conservatives get that we are paid to do a job so there is no sense of entitlement. In my case I conceded there stance on nuclear power was unmitigated, unscientific crap but they had a good idea with a ‘bottle bill’ that would slap a nickel on bottles and keep bloated government out of the recycling industry.
It failed, obviously. To my knowledge, PIRG was the only environmental group not endorsing more bureaucracy and laws to solve a simple problem. Now, instead of having Boy Scouts come by to pick up bottles which a private company recycles, we sort trash uselessly and it sits in landfills for as long as regular garbage while no gains have been made in recycling efficiency because the government does not care about efficiency, but rather just the appearance of action.
That says a thing or two about Google also. “He doesn’t work here anymore!” said Lee Dunn, who works for Google’s federal lobbying team, to a group of conservative bloggers Tuesday at a luncheon at The Heritage Foundation about Doug Edwards, the former executive who asked Pres. Obama for higher tax rates. “It sometimes pains me as a Republican to see ex-Google executives standing up asking for more taxes.”
What Edwards did not do was just voluntarily and without any publicity write a friggin’ check. Nor did Warren Buffet. Instead, it is the usual attention-whoring. No one can gripe about Buffet, though is research on how much money rich people actually paid was apparently conducted by NPR – it certainly wasn’t fact, yet Edwards is more clueless because he doesn’t get that he basically got lucky getting rich. He didn’t climb off of a boat with 15 bucks and work his way up in America, he got lucky to be in Google at the right time – they had a decent product, a search engine, and parleyed that into revenue by buying AdSense technology and exploiting small sites by never telling them how much they are selling the advertising for, just giving a $.35 CPM and telling the peasants to like it.
They’ve done nothing right since but Edwards may still be making money from the stock, yet he doesn’t understand how artificial that is. He doesn’t get that taxes have proven to be nothing but a blockade to wealth and that they impact everything, even if a trumped up class warfare claim says otherwise.
Google, officially, may sense a change is coming in 2012 (hard to say – it looks bad for Obama but if the current crop of Republican candidates in the lead stay in the lead, it looks worse for the GOP) and they don’t want to lose their next anti-trust suit (what? Can’t happen, the president has no control? Tell that to Solyndra, who got better DOE loan rates and a sweetheart deal from the IRS thanks to having a key Obama fundraiser as an investor) so they need lobbyists to Jedi mind trick government officials into believing Google takes no sides.
An anti-trust probe is not going to be called off as easily as the IRS. Nor are donations to MoveOn.org and campaigns to give government more control of the Internet – they seem to believe it would always be a Democrat government but 2008 was a long time ago.