For the Money

Maybe I'm playing in shark-infested waters a bit here, but I've got a complaint about the company I work for, Target. I want to stress, though, that I am not displeased with the store that I work at or the people I work with. That stuff is fine. It's not fine, however, that the top executives of Target Corp. decided that it's okay to donate a bunch of money to a far-right and severely anti-gay-rights candidate for political office in Minnesota. Now, as big corporations go, Target has a reputation of being fairly benign and moderately progressive, certainly when compared to a company like Wal-Mart. This is a pretty significant misstep, though. I'm not suggesting that Target made this campaign contribution in an effort to anger the gay community and their supporters; I don't know whether or not that factored into the decision. I am sure that it was at least primarily a business decision, since Republican candidates like to do things like give huge tax breaks to billion-dollar corporations.

A lot of people are protesting Target, to the point that there is a boycott in effect against the company. I would suggest that this is misdirected anger. Whether I agree with the company's decision or not is not the point. This is nothing new, big companies have been donating money to political candidates for as long as there have been political candidates, and often those candidates have been much more controversial than this one. Target, and any other company that does so, is merely operating within the confines of the law, since the Supreme Court ruled that corporations can more or less pour as much money into a campaign as they want. That, my friends, is what we should be protesting. Political alignments aside, a corporation is not a person, and should not be allowed to act as one. This is further evidence that the United States is not a government by the people, for the people. Rather, it is by the money, for the money.

Everyone is all up-in-arms about Target's choice of candidates to support, and I think they should have opted for one who is not attempting to deny the rights of a huge group of Americans. What seems to be eluding everyone, however, is that this shouldn't even be an issue, because corporations shouldn't be allowed to act as individual people. We should be protesting the Supreme Court for their flawed decision.