Working Assets, MBNA, and the Bay Guardian

Jody and I have Working Assets as our long-distance provider. We chose them because their rates were decent, they donate a portion of their proceeds to progressive charities, and they were offering a free pint of Ben & Jerry's per month for the first 12 months.

A couple of weeks ago, Jody told me she heard from a friend of a friend that the Bay Guardian had published an exposé on Working Assets--that according to this person's somewhat vague account of the article, it was all some kind of a front and they were really giving money to Republicans.

This was alarming to me, for obvious reasons (I wasn't looking forward to changing providers again), so when I got around to it I looked up the Bay Guardian piece.

It turns out the problem is that Working Assets contracts with MBNA to manage its credit card business, and MBNA donates a lot of money to Republicans. MBNA was also the biggest entity lobbying for the odious bankruptcy bill that passed last year. MBNA has cardholder policies that are grossly unfair.

MBNA, not to put too fine a point on it, is Not Our Friend. And the point of the article is that every time you use your card, you're funding Republicans.

But reading the article made me wonder exactly how bad the problem is. So I ran the numbers myself, to come up with a ballpark guesstimate. The article says that out of every $100 you spend on a Working Assets card, 10 cents goes to charities and $1.75 goes to MBNA. MBNA contributed $3.5 million in 2004, of which 86% (or $3.01 million) went to Republicans. According to their 2004 Annual Report, they had total (gross) revenues of about $12 billion that year. Do the division and multiply by 1.75, and it turns out that if you spend $100, the amount that actually goes to Republican candidates is a whopping 4/100 of a cent (or 1/250 of the amount that goes to progressive charities).

This illustrates one of the reasons why I loathe the Bay Guardian¹: they have no sense of perspective at all. They latch onto the most trivial offenses and treat them as if they were the most vile atrocities. Anyone who failed to read carefully, or read only the headlines, would (like Jody's acquaintance) get the impression that Working Assets was doing something really bad. (This, despite the reporter's acknowledgment that Working Assets doesn't really have much choice, because all of the corporations capable of providing those services donate to Republicans.)

Since its publication in June, the article has been reposted all over the web. It has very likely done real damage to an enterprise that is trying to do some concrete good. The perfect is the enemy of the good; the Bay Guardian is on the side of the perfect.

For my part, though, I'm all for keeping our long-distance service.


¹Another reason is that they are a scab paper; when they tried to unionize 30 years or so ago, Bruce Brugmann fired everybody and hired non-union workers. They remain a non-union shop.

[That's all, folks]