BuyPartisan App Lets You Put Your Dollars Where Your Politics Are

A new app, BuyPartisan, allows you to determine the political allegiances of manufacturers or distributors by scanning barcodes. Worried that your purchases might be indirectly benefitting the Democratic Party? Get BuyPartisan and you can see which manufacturer of groceries is giving political donations to the DNC. Wanting to divert your spending away from the Republicans? BuyPartisan will tell you everything you need to know:

BuyPartisan looks at campaign finance data from top Fortune 500 companies, and the averages are computed after looking at the donation histories of the CEO, board of directors, employees, and affiliated political action committees. For example, by using that data, BuyPartisan found that Procter & Gamble scores an average of 70.25 percent Republican, while Celestial Seasonings is 91 percent Democratic.

I don’t know what I think about this app. Should our daily spending be based on political ideology? What if DNC supporters just happen to make the best and cheapest deoderant? I understand the desire to support causes with our dollars, but won’t this just politicize the market even more? Business and politics are already far too connected in my opinion. If BuyPartisan takes off, it will become much more likely that businesses start to partner with politicians to increase their brand loyalty. Will politicians start to wear company logos on their suit jackets, like NASCAR drivers?

And BuyPartisan really is bipartisan. It continues to reinforce a two-party system that may not be in the best interests of the country. It doesn’t matter much to me if a company gives more to Republicans than Democrats. I don’t care for either party. The BuyPartisan app may have been great back when Republicans and Democrats actually stood for substantially different things, but nowadays, they’re both advocates of big government. And big government is all about serving its own financial interests. This seems to play right into that.

It might be better to try to buy from companies that don’t even show up on the Fortune 500 radar. They’re about the only companies you can trust not to have lobbyists working to  bend the civil government to their corporate will. If you want to make a difference in politics, teach people the truth. And vote.

Leave a Reply