Finally Target! - Now Please Air It

[quasar]

Fair enough, but the individuals accounted for $18,000. This far exceeds the maximum personal donation, so this means that a number of employees at Target took it upon themselves to donate to Bachmann. If a corporation's executives all share that ideology, it reflects the corporation itself.

But is there a means of seeing if it was executives making the donations? It could have been any number of ordinary shop floor employees.

I've said it before, everyone should avail themselves of the facts before following the herd. Most large American companies spread their donations over a broad cross-section of politicians and organisations. There's no talk of boycotting AT&T or ripping out air con, humidifiers or central heating controls (made by Honeywell International) - both of which donated to Michele Bachmann.

Take a look at Coca Cola, AT&T, Sony Pictures and Wal-Mart for example. See which politicians and organisations they donate to. None of them are necessarily without sin. Just saying.

 

[fetaby]

it's company money insofar as the company paid their employee and he did what he wanted with it, but if I took my paycheck and donated it to the Trevor Project, I wouldn't argue that the donation does or should reflect back on my company.

So the boss is now only a mere employee? If the top is not the top what/who is at the top?

Yeah, yeah, business just being business. But at what expense?

 

[healingduck]

Its sort of like apologizing after people have told you you should. It just doesn't have the same meaning it would have had if they would have done it right after, or especially before.

I dunno, it just seems insincere.

 

[quasar]

I think what everyone has to take into account is that gay issues are but a single and (and like it or not) minor issue in the 'big picture' of business politics. Putting gay issues to one side, you'll probably find that donations made to many of these politicians are made based on what they're doing that is good for businesses.

 

[metta]

Target Sales down

"net retail sales for the five weeks ended April 2, 2011 were $5,955 million, a decrease of 4.5 percent from $6,233 million for the five weeks ended April 3, 2010. On this same basis, March comparable-store sales decreased 5.5 percent."

http://investors.target.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=65828&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1547676&highlight

 

[bripatrick]

I love when people just throw a link out and don't even do a smidgen of investigating the authenticity, sources, or validity of it.

"Target Corp" never donated to Michelle Bachman. Individual contributors, including the CEO, contributed to her.

Most upper-level executives in business are Republican. They get to keep more of their money that way. What those executives at Target DO NOT do, which is way more important to this whole debate that Target is somehow anti-gay, is bring their personal politics into how they treat their employees.

Are some upper level execs within Target anti-gay marriage? Yeah, probably. But Target as a corporation, as long as I can remember, has always had a stance of equality in the workplace, and been fairly left-leaning in social issues that deal with race, gender, and sexual orientation. Yet when a CEO makes a private donation, or puts company funds towards a PAC that promises to donate to politicians that will have a company's ability to make money at the forefront of their agenda (and let the company do crazy things like pay my salary...maybe give me a decent cost of living raise), suddenly Target as a whole is anti-gay? What a flawed, overly simplistic conclusion to make.