Foundation Watch

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation: Subverting democracy and balkanizing America

By Kirk MacDonald (Foundation Watch, May 2013) (PDF here)

Summary: Founded in 1930 by breakfast cereal tycoon W.K. Kellogg with the goal of improving the lives of impoverished children, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation today funds a great deal of left-wing activism, especially attacks on so-called “white privilege” and “structural racism.”

Americans who insist that elections should be honest, fair, and free from undemocratic vote-rigging, and who believe it’s not unreasonable to require voters to provide valid photo ID before they mark a ballot, received a rude awakening last year. Advocates of honest voting were smeared as Jim Crow-era racists, and worse, by the Applied Research Center (ARC), a New York-based “racial justice think tank that uses media, research and activism to promote solutions.”
ARC produced a steady stream of vicious propaganda aimed at conservative and Tea Party groups like True the Vote through its www.ColorLines.com website. The site currently includes a collection of left-wing articles that promote organic food and vegetarianism, and blast proposed budget cuts, guns, anti-illegal immigration groups, and even singer Justin Timberlake, who is supposedly “appropriating black music.” ARC executive director Rinku Sen claimed that efforts such as implementing state level ID laws, and monitoring polling stations amounted to “attempts to deny the vote to communities of color.” (ARC was profiled in the March 2013 Foundation Watch.)

The think tank worked closely with the far-left Nation magazine in its campaign against so-called “voter suppression” and “voter intimidation,” and it has accepted grants from the Service Employees International Union for “consulting” ($200,000 in 2011), as well as the Tides Foundation ($1.1 million), and George Soros’s Open Society Institute ($715,000).

These donations were certainly generous, but they pale in comparison to the incredible $5.2 million in grants that were provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan, between 2010 and September 2012.
Writing in these pages six years ago, Capital Research Center senior fellow Martin Morse Wooster noted that the Kellogg Foundation “does not take the lead role in any of the areas it funds” and is “the most obscure—and least significant—of the big foundations,” and yet its funding represents a “reflexive, deeply entrenched liberalism.” Since that time, Kellogg launched an Orwellian-sounding, 5-year, $75 million “American Healing” initiative in 2010 that amounts to throwing money at radical activists and academics to combat so-called “structural racism” and “white privilege.”

Read all »

The Carnegie Corporation of New York: From building libraries to undermining American society

By Kirk MacDonald, Foundation Watch, April 2013 (PDF here)

Summary: The Carnegie Corporation is the largest single philanthropy created by Andrew Carnegie, whose own life is a tribute to the possibilities of the American dream. Yet thanks to the lack of guidance Carnegie gave the Corporation, it soon betrayed his own views and began eroding the very system that made his success possible.

Famed steel entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911. The enterprise was such a labor of love for the self-made man that one of his trustees, Henry S. Pritchett, later joked that Carnegie had “simply incorporated himself.” Though called a corporation, it was a grant-making institution that today would be called a foundation.

Its total assets as of Sept. 30, 2011, were $2.5 billion, and that fiscal year it made a total of 258 grants worth $93.2 million, according to the latest financial information available at www.carnegie.org. From its original endowment of $135 million (roughly $2 billion in current U.S. dollars), the Corporation has provided grants totaling over $1.4 billion.

The Carnegie Corporation’s current president is Vartan Gregorian, who previously served as president of the New York Public Library and of Brown University. In 2010, WND.com reported that while at Brown, Gregorian served on the selection committee of the Annenberg Foundation, which funded activist Bill Ayers’s Chicago Annenberg Challenge with a $49.2 million, two-to-one matching challenge grant over five years. WND also reported Gregorian was “central” in Ayers’s recruitment of Barack Obama to serve as the project’s first chairman. In 2009, President Obama named Gregorian to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. Gregorian has received honors and awards from Obama’s predecessors, too, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush.

Read all »

The Structural Racism Racket: Using Anti-Racist Rhetoric To Fight Left-Wing Battles

By W. James Antle III, Foundation Watch, March 2013 (PDF here)

Summary: The Applied Research Center has a benign-sounding name, but this community organizing group is a scrappy leader among new groups that use anti-racist rhetoric to advance the Left’s agenda.

A battle raged during the last election cycle that was bigger than any of the individual races for public office, even the presidential contest. Multiple state legislatures took up bills designed to verify the identity of voters and eliminate election fraud. Seemingly uncontroversial, these laws sparked an extensive debate likely to reverberate over the next several years.

On one side were people who believe measures like voter ID laws are essential to preserve the integrity of our electoral system. On the other side were groups dedicated to the proposition that voter fraud is a fairy tale. The real motive behind voter ID laws, these organizations insisted, is voter suppression: a racist, discriminatory attempt to keep elderly, minority, and young voters—especially those likely to cast ballots for Democrats—from the polls.

The more extreme version of this narrative likened voter ID proposals to the racist caste system of the Jim Crow era, when poll taxes, discriminatory laws, and lynch mobs kept black Americans from exercising their right to vote. In this telling, private groups that monitor polling stations, no matter how peacefully, are at best engaged in acts of intimidation. At worst, they’re lynch mobs.

Read all »

The Gun Ban Lobby and Its Funders

By James Simpson, Foundation Watch, February 2013 (PDF here)

Summary: The gun ban lobby includes not just a few groups like the Brady Center but also the mainstream media as a whole. Its preferred tactics are to use misleading terms and to ignore the actual facts of gun control’s failure. 

The massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, this past December hit home like few other tragedies. Yet again a lunatic commits mass murder, this time slaughtering our most vulnerable and most cherished: our children. Words cannot express the bottomless grief one feels at the mere thought of such loss. Sandy Hook rightfully shook our sensibilities and forced us to reassess what we believe about ourselves and America. Why is this happening? we ask.

As usual, before police cordoned off the crime scene, the Left had its answer ready: not enough gun control. Left-wingers repeated their old refrain: America can no longer defend its “gun culture,” which is responsible for this tragedy, and we must have a national “dialogue” on guns.

In fact, we have been having a “dialogue” about guns for decades, and it has been very one-sided. The Left has often received what it asked for, starting with the 1968 Gun Control Act, the 1993 Brady Law (until the courts found parts of it unconstitutional), and a so-called federal “assault weapons” ban on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines from 1994 to 2004. Yet none of this has affected gun crime or prevented any massacres. The Centers for Disease Control, a federal agency widely seen as favoring gun control, produced a major study in 2003 that admitted, “The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes.”

Prior to the 1968 Gun Control Act, few controls existed on privately owned firearms, with the exception of machine guns—that is, guns that keep firing as long as you hold the trigger—which have been strictly regulated since 1934 under the National Firearms Act. Even children could order rifles through the mail with parental permission. Yet firearms crimes were less frequent, as were the mass shootings that seem to be a regular feature in the news these days.

Activists on the Left don’t really want a dialogue. They want a total ban on guns in private hands, but they rarely admit that. Instead, they mask the issue with misleading language, selective statistics, and a campaign to vilify their political opponents.

Read all »

A  Reaganite Entrepreneur’s Flawed Philanthropy:

An engineering genius didn’t design his foundation to honor his donor intent

By Martin Morse Wooster (Foundation Watch, January 2013 – PDF here)

Summary: This co-founder of a pioneering high-tech firm was a conservative Republican who spent years supporting politicians and public intellectuals on the Right. But the eminent engineer wasn’t careful when designing his own multibillion-dollar foundation, which now follows only those threads of his donor intent that can be woven into fashionable leftism.

Read all »

The Rockefeller Foundation at the Century Mark: Betraying donor intent and harming America

By Kirk MacDonald, Foundation Watch, December 2012 (PDF available here)

Summary: The Rockefeller Foundation was started by a pillar of the Protestant work ethic who knew that giving money away has tremendous potential to harm as well as help. A century later, the leaders of his foundation prove him right every day.

Headquartered in New York City, the Rockefeller Foundation was created in 1913. Its self-described mission is “to promote the well-being of humanity by supporting work that expands opportunity and strengthens resilience to social, economic, health, and environmental challenges.”

But that’s not what the Rockefeller Foundation does. The philanthropy promotes big government solutions at every turn, encourages more regulation of the economy and more dependency on the government, and backs corrupt social engineering schemes aimed at trying to force Americans to be better, i.e., more left-wing, people. It promotes the coercive redistribution of wealth but uses left-wing euphemisms to cover this up. For example, it aspires to make sure that “globalization’s benefits are more widely shared and its challenges are more easily weathered.”

In April of this year, the foundation launched its centennial initiative, appropriately, in Washington, D.C., the beating heart of big government. This celebration that “will run through the end of 2013, marks 100 years since John D. Rockefeller started the Foundation on May 14, 1913, with the goal of ‘improving the well-being of humanity throughout the world.’”

In breathless tones, the foundation views this milestone as “an unprecedented opportunity for the Foundation to engage global audiences to find solutions to complex issues that affect poor or vulnerable populations throughout the world.”
The Rockefeller Foundation’s Centennial occurs at a time of great dynamism, change and uncertainty in the world. The world is more interconnected and challenges are increasingly tackled by new sets of actors. Technology has accelerated these societal changes and altered the way people live. Citizen movements are compelling reforms that were unimaginable only a short time ago. Solutions to today’s challenges involve a complex mix of actors that include governments, nonprofits, foundations, civil society and the business sector in major new ways.

Read all »

The Media vs. America

by James Simpson, Foundation Watch, November 2012, (PDF here)

Summary: Left-wing bias continues to seep into media coverage, worsening by the year and now going so far as to cover up national security scandals. Major donors support efforts by activist groups like CREW, Media Matters for America, and ProPublica to make the problem even worse.

At a recent conference sponsored by Accuracy in Media, Democratic pollster and pundit Pat Caddell said that the media is “the enemy of America.” He wasn’t kidding. While conceding the media’s longstanding liberal bias, Caddell said that media outlets “crossed some lines” recently. He specifically accused them of suppressing critical national security information following the deadly September 11 attack this year in Benghazi, Libya, merely to protect President Obama from embarrassment:

The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power. When they desert those ramparts and decide that they will now become active participants, that their job is not simply to tell you who you may vote for, and who you may not, but, worse—and this is the danger of the last two weeks—what truth that you may know, as an American, and what truth you are not allowed to know, they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people [emphasis added].

The Benghazi episode is only the latest example of media malpractice. There are countless examples stretching back years. Bill Clinton’s end-run around presidential appointee background checks allowed the Communist Chinese widespread access to critical classified military technology, a story the media largely ignored to our great peril (see Bill Gertz’s book Betrayal). Even media preoccupation with Clinton’s sexual scandals sought to downplay them and ridicule his enemies. Suppressed stories from the 2008 elections could fill books, and they have.

Read all »

Taking Down the Tea Party Ten: A Leftist Super PAC Smears Conservatives To Safeguard “Progressive Change” Tea

By Matthew Vadum and Charles Dickenson, Foundation Watch, October 2012 (PDF here)

Summary: Using its for-profit business to generate left-wing political donations, Credo/Working Assets has launched a new campaign aimed at unelecting 11 (not 10) Tea Party members of Congress. Even as the group protested super PACs, it formed a super PAC of its own to accomplish this goal. 

Out-of-control government spending, a crushing national debt, oppressive anti-business regulations, a stagnant economy, the very existence of the country—none of these things are important to Credo Super PAC. The far-left political action committee is focused instead on defeating prominent Congressmen associated with the Tea Party, the grassroots movement that sprang up in opposition to Washington’s socialist juggernaut.

Community organizer Becky Bond, president of Credo Super PAC, described the committee’s mission:

For over 25 years Credo has been involved in progressive politics. We’ve been fighting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich since the mid ’90s, and we’ve been pushing for progressive change. And let me just tell you, in our history we have never seen extremism in the Congress like we’ve seen since the Tea Party wave in 2010 that was funded on just buckets of super PAC money from the Koch brothers and from people like Karl Rove. And we’ve seen a lot of history, and we know this is bad. And as good people of conscience, we’ve decided that we need to strike back, and it’s time to fight back, and we need to take down some of these Tea Party Republicans who are destroying our democracy.

The fact that the super PAC retained a corrupt Marxist in Chicago as a consultant says a lot about the organization. The committee paid $50,417 to Strategic Consulting Group, the firm of convicted swindler and tax cheat Robert Creamer. An admitted fan of radical godfather Saul Alinsky, Creamer has reportedly visited the Obama White House nearly 60 times since he was let out of the hoosegow. In prison he wrote a book widely hailed by leftists that later served as a blueprint for Obamacare. Creamer, who is married to far-left Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), also used to be a lobbyist for George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

At the beginning of this year Credo Super PAC added the initial eight Tea Party lawmakers (all Republicans) to its list. They were Allen West (Fla.), Steve King (Iowa), Dan Lungren (Calif.), Mike Fitzpatrick (Penn.), Joe Walsh (Ill.), Frank Guinta (N.H.), Sean Duffy (Wisc.), and Chip Cravaack (Minn.).

Read all »

The Bloomberg Family Foundation

By Maryan Escarfullett, Foundation Watch, September 2012 (PDF here)

Summary:  The Bloomberg Family Foundation is one of the largest private charities in the United States. It is funded for the most part by mayor of New York and financial entrepreneur Michael Bloomberg. As Bloomberg’s third and final term as mayor of New York winds down, many look at his foundation for clues as to what the mayor’s political future may hold.

The Bloomberg Family Foundation is one of the largest and most visible private charities in the United States. According to tax statements, in 2010 its assets were worth $2.7 billion, which made it the 22nd largest foundation in the nation. Like many other organizations founded by America’s modern billionaires, the Foundation funds social causes supported by its very liberal benefactor: Michael Bloomberg. At first glance the foundation’s grantmaking may seem praiseworthy, but a closer examination reveals that it often serves a not-so-noble statist, left-wing agenda.

Bloomberg Family Foundation divides its giving into five areas: the arts, education, the environment, government innovation, and public health. Some of the programs funded by the Bloomberg Family Foundation promote good causes such as the Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Hospital, constructed by Michael Bloomberg’s alma mater, Johns Hopkins University.

Some causes the foundation funds seem more or less ideologically neutral, such as the World Lung Foundation ($165,408,450 from 2007 to 2010), the Centers for Disease Control-affiliated CDC Foundation ($9,315, 000 in 2010), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation collaborations ($16,286,280 from 2008 to 2010), and Cities of Service ($2,000,000 in 2010).

Bloomberg has donated so much money to private and public foundations that the Chronicle of Philanthropy consistently ranks Bloomberg in the top 50, if not top three, most charitable American philanthropists.

But the Bloomberg Family Foundation and the mayor are increasingly turning to port with their philanthropy.

Read all »

Foundations, Nonprofits and the War on U.S. Sovereignty

By Neil Maghami, Foundation Watch, August 2012, (PDF)

Summary:  Using a brilliantly effective YouTube video, a little-known American nonprofit has focused world attention on a murderous African warlord. Although various critics have complained about the group’s understanding of African affairs, almost no attention has been paid to the group’s dubious understanding of American sovereignty, which explains why it has received financial and political support from left-wing groups.

A previously obscure American nonprofit group published a video online March 5 that became a worldwide hit – accumulating 50 million views by March 8, and reaching more than 90 million views on YouTube as of press time. Through clever use of social media and endorsements by celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, the nonprofit Invisible Children was able to bypass the regular media to spread the word about its video, which calls on the U.S. government to do more to bring the African warlord Joseph Kony before the International Criminal Court (ICC).

And by March 21, the Associated Press reported that Invisible Children’s call had made it all the way to the U.S. Senate. On that day, a “bipartisan group of 34 senators introduced a resolution … condemning Joseph Kony and his ruthless guerrilla group for a 26-year campaign of terror in central Africa that has been marked by child abductions and widespread killings.”
Months after the release of the now-famous “Kony 2012” video, questions continue to swirl about Invisible Children (IC). Everyone agrees that Kony is a deplorable warlord, but IC’s work has been criticized as misleading or worse by critics across the political spectrum. Some critics object that IC has received funding from center-right institutions like the National Christian Foundation; others criticize the group’s links to George Soros, chief patron of nearly all radical causes.

This issue of Foundation Watch will make visible some previously hidden facts regarding Invisible Children and focus on the group’s understanding of American sovereignty. But first, we need to place the now-famous video within the wider context of foreign policy ideas that various nonprofits and foundations are attempting to popularize – ideas dramatically at odds with the principles on which the United States was founded and destructive to American independence.

Read all »