After a marketing gimmick that turned out to be a colossal fail (asking twitter users to retweet the Bing hash-tag in exchange for a $1.00 contribution), Microsoft, sitting on $4 billion in cash, has pledged $250,000 to relief work in Japan, plus in-kind contributions up to a combined $2 million.
GE, the company that supplied Fukushima's reactor #1, was a bit more generous with a $5,000,000 commitment from its $78.4 Billion piggy bank.
Bank of America has cash reserves of $131 Billion. This isn't assets, mind you (they have nearly $1 trillion of those), but cash and securities quickly convertible to cash. BOFA has committed to $1.22 million, half of it in cash, the other half unspecified. If corporations are people, (and the Supreme Court said they are), percentage wise their contribution is the equivalent of an individual with $1.3 million in his bank account writing a check for $12.00.
To their credit, both Microsoft and BOFA have employee match programs.
Impoverished Alcoa has only $1.54 billion cash on hand. They are in for $50,000 (I wonder how much they pay lobbyists each year).
Caterpillar ($3.6 billion cash), who recently opened two factories in China, is contributing $1 million from Caterpillar Foundation, $1 million from Caterpillar Japan, and is matching employee contributions.
Exxon, with a mere $12.25 billion cash, is coughing up $1 million on top of an employee match program.
American Express has $12.56 billion laying around. They are coming through with a whopping $100,000, plus employee match.
Our friends at Goldman Sachs, with $40 billion tucked under their mattress, topped everyone with a pledge of $6.1 million.
I could go on, but you get the idea. It suppose it is a little unfair to belittle these contributions because these are the companies I could find data on. Many corporations have pledged nothing.
Is anyone else surprised at how flush these companies are? (I picked them more or less at random). If only there weren't so many taxes and regulations and w-9's to fill out, they'd probably invest it in a way that would create jobs in America.