Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?
 In its August 25 edition, the Washington Post published a graphic showing how various corporations, unions and other organizations that are supporting the national party conventions rank in terms of spending on campaigns for federal elected office. The chart showed that the IBEW spent $70.2 million since 2005 in federal contributions, defined as support for candidates running for Congress or the Presidency.
The International Office staff immediately tried to figure out how the Post could possibly have come up with the number.
The Post’s staff misread a chart compiled by the Campaign Finance Institute. A careful reading of the chart shows that the figures for all the organizations cited were multiplied by ten by the Post, and thus the correct figure for the IBEW from the Institute’s chart should have been $7 million. The newspaper has said it will run a correction and has fixed it on its Web site.
And for the record, this money represents voluntary contributions made by individual members to IBEW-PAC. The members obviously think that kicking in something from their hard-earned pay to the Brotherhood’s political action fund multiplies the power of their political voices and is a wise investment in their future.
But in terms of overall political influence, we are greatly outspent by large companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Kraft Foods. The five companies with the highest federal lobbying expenditures spent more than $243 million combined in the last four years. By comparison, our total lobbying expenditures from 2005 through 2008 were about $3.6 million – a small percentage of the massive amounts spent by major corporations.
So thanks to the Washington Post for giving us an extra $63 million credit in political and financial clout, but we thought it was important to set the record straight.
Home page photo used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user garrisonpao.
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