Funding the usual suspects.

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Now that Nelson Mandela is free, is it permissible for multinationals who pulled out under pressure to resume doing business in South Africa? This is the kind of issue that worries corporate philanthropic officers, for they fear to find themselves given a failing grade in the Council on Economic Priorities' left-leaning annual "Rating of America's Corporate Conscience." Indeed, the men who dole out big business's big bucks can be counted on to ladle out the corporate boodle even to those groups openly advocating political and economic policies that threaten the firm's long-term survival.

That was the finding of the Capital Research Center (CRC). For the past three years CRC has charted the giving policies of the top 250 American corporations with respect to public affairs in an annual study called "Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy: Ideas, Advocacy, and the Corporation." These studies show that the overwhelming majority of such contributions go to liberal organizations.

Much of this is unintentional. Companies like to give to what they perceive as "mainstream" public-interest groups with a lot of name recognition, and of course the ones mentioned by the press most often are on the Left.

The reaction to CRC's study has not been kind. A few weeks ago, for example, CRC's chairman, Willa Johnson, was giving a speech at the Heritage Foundation when the fire bells went off. As she was walking out of the building, she was accosted by Peter Spina, a representative of Mobil Oil, named as one of CRC's "Top Ten Corporate Misgivers." The man from Mobil started shouting at Johnson, charging that her study was flawed because she didn't have enough information (donations given directly from the corporation do not have to be reported, only money from its foundations). When Johnson said she would be happy to review her conclusions if Mobil would provide a full list of donations, he refused.

The main counterattack, however, came in a Winter 1990 "Special Report on Right-Wing Attacks on Corporate Giving" by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. This 16-page publication alerted corporations to the menace of conservative attacks on their giving policies, noting that "these campaigns are having some success and are being raised as matters of serious concern in local donors' forums and at national philanthropic gatherings." CRC is singled out as a primary force behind these campaigns, and a sidebar, "Partnership for Democracy Gets Gold from Right's Garbage," was devoted to an attack on an NR article by CRC's William Poole [March 10, 1989].

But the direct attacks have been few, due in no small part to the shroud of secrecy covering much of corporate giving. Even shareholders do not have the right to know who their companies fund so long as it is done directly and not through a corporate foundation. Thus most of the feedback has been secondhand. Johnson heard there was some private discussion of the CRC study in Chicago last year at the annual meeting of the Conference Board, a group of more than one thousand American corporations, and the Council on Foundations will hold a debate based on the report "Corporate Contributions: Friend or Foe of the Free-Enterprise System?" in Boston this April.

At least in public, the corporations so named simply pooh-pooh the charges. "If we insisted that the leadership of every group we support had to agree with Aetna's position on every matter of public policy we'd find ourselves with few truly meaningful grant-making opportunities," wrote the executive director of the Aetna Foundation, Sanford Cloud Jr., in the Camden, New Jersey, Courier Post last year. Aetna, significantly, took the eighth spot in the most recent Top Ten Corporate Misgivers.

The number two Misgiver, Dayton Hudson, goes even further. CRC had rated that group for its contributions to the National Organization for Women's Legal Defense Fund. "It's a list we're not ashamed to be on," says its vice president for public relations, Ann Barkelew, of the CRC study.

Given this reaction, it's not surprising to find that some of the same corporate philanthropy officers who resent the CRC's attempt to categorize their companies according to the ideology of the special-interest groups they fund are downright friendly when discussing "Rating America's Corporate Conscience," a somewhat similar assessment of corporate practices from a left-wing perspective. "It's a whole different kind of thing," explains Lance Buhl, Corporate Contributions Manager for BP America (formerly Standard Oil). This book says, "here are the values that have been adopted by this country. How are you guys doing on those things?" The result of such an approach is that we find oil companies giving to environmental activists who want to stop offshore drilling, an insurance company contributing to a feminist group that wants to end the use of actuarial tables to set insurance rates, an automaker funding a group seeking higher automobile emissions standards, and so on.

As the responses indicate, U.S. corporations have grown themselves a parasitic culture of political philanthropy often hostile to the values and practices of the businesses whose profits they spend. "We're not surprised by the hostile reception to our study," says Johnson, "because program officers obviously have an interest in defending their giving records. What we'd like to see is more involvement by the businessmen themselves in these kind of decisions, and so our next step is to reach the CEOs and boards of directors to see if they really like where their money--and their stockholders' money--is going."