Wet corporate fingers - Capital Research Center's monitoring of corporations that contribute to leftist charities to avoid public relations embarrassments - Editorial

FAR FROM carrying the banner for free markets and private property, corporate America generally tries to accommodate to the prevailing intellectual and political winds. Thus the latest edition of Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy, published by the Capital Research Center (CRC): "Wet fingers held high in the air, they make 'safe' contributions to politically correct organizations they think can help them avoid the opprobrium of adverse media attention."

But, says the Center (which studies Washington's myriad 501(c)3 influence peddlers and think tanks), corporations that fund Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense Fund, Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, and the rest "compound social and economic problems by aiding and abetting special-interest groups that contrive to expand government control over matters traditionally settled in private markets." Executives engage in such "opportunistic philanthropy" almost surreptitiously, the report says, as if they fear shareholders' knowing the extent which their resources fund the Left. Over 90 per cent of the 250 largest corporations stonewalled the Center's requests for information, so it had to rely on their filings with the IRS.

CRC grades the various influence peddlers on a scale of 1 to 8 according to their respect for property rights and free markets, then grades companies according to the weighted average of their grants. Major corporate supporters of the hard Left include American Express, Capital Cities/ABC, Martin Marietta, Sara Lee, Walt Disney, Humana, May's Department Stores, U.S. West, BankAmerica,

Federal National Mortgage Corp, Pacific Telesis, Fleet/Norstar Financial, Primerica, Ryder, Baxter, Security Pacific, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. Call it the treason of the sharks.