The Heinz Endowments:
By Tom Randall
Sunday, December 14, 2003
CHICAGO - Pittsburgh is home to a new liberal funding organization
that lists its priorities as the local environment, land use and
"sustainability." However, its affiliations raise questions
about its real purpose.
Known as the Tides Center for Pennsylvania, formerly the Tides Center
for Western Pennsylvania, it is a creation of the Tides Foundation and
Center, headquartered in San Francisco, and two Pennsylvania-based
foundations -- the Vira Heinz Endowment and the Howard Heinz Endowment--
chaired by Teresa Heinz Kerry, heir to the Heinz food company fortune
and wife of Democrat presidential contender Sen. John Kerry of
Massachusetts.
What makes the pairing with Tides troubling is that organization's
secretive funneling of cash from private foundations -- such as Heinz,
the Pew Charitable Trusts and many others -- to extreme left-wing
activist groups whose interests include exclusion of humans from both
public and private lands, anti-war protests, opposition to free trade,
banning of firearms, abolition of the death penalty, unlimited abortion
rights, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy, as well as and
environmental extremism.
How it's done
Tides works like this: When a high-profile donor wants to give money
to a group with an extreme agenda but doesn't want its fingerprints on
the donation, it simply gives the money to The Tides Foundation in the
form of a "donor- advised donation." Tides then passes that
money on to the desired recipient, masking the real source of the cash.
As anti-war activist Drummond Pike (who set up the Tides Foundation in
1976 for the express purpose of keeping donors' identities unknown) told
the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a publication for the nonprofit world,
"Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work
with."
And, the amount of "hidden money" handled by the Tides
Foundation is considerable. Since its founding, the relatively
little-known foundation has made over $300 million in grants. In 2002 it
amassed assets of $139 million and had an income of $59.3 million.
Between 1995 and 2001, $4.3 million of that money came from the Howard
Heinz Endowment. In 2002, it and the Vira Heinz Endowment blessed The
Tides Center, a San Francisco spin-off of the Tides Foundation, with
another $190,000 while the two endowments gave $1.6 million to the new
Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania.
If all this movement of money between the Tides Foundation, Tides
Center, two Heinz Endowments and Pittsburgh's new Tides Center for
Western Pennsylvania has you shaking your head, let's talk about your
money. You, the taxpayer.
Public underwriting
Nearly $8 million in taxpayer money flowed into the Tides Center in
the form of federal grants made by eight different agencies between 1997
and 2001. They include the Environmental Protection Agency, the
Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of
Agriculture and the Department of Energy. Does this mean your tax
dollars also are going to fund the Tides Center for Western
Pennsylvania, a creation of the Howard Heinz Endowment, which in 2001
was worth a breathtaking $788.6 million in 2001? With the Tides Center
for a partner, we will likely never know.
What we do know is that, with Tides as a partner, the Heinz
Endowments now keep interesting company.
Friends of Heinz
The Tides Center also manages the Youth Gender Project whose goal is
to "empower and support transgender, gender-variant, intersexed and
gender-questioning youth and young adults." I freely admit, not all
of these terms are in my spell-checker.
Grant recipients also include the Iraq Peace Fund that has so far
granted $489,000 to 27 groups to promote anti-war marches and their
coverage by the news media, as well as the mission of one of those
groups, MoveOn.org, whose purpose is to defeat George W. Bush.
While groups such as these and dozens of others organized and/or
financed by the Tides Foundation and Center are relatively recent in
their origin and transient in their nature, many are more established
and pervasive in their influence.
The Ruckus Society, which received over $200,000 in Tides money
between 1999 and 2002, was begun in 1995 to train activists in violent
protest against biotechnology, globalization and the World Bank. It
incited property destruction in the Seattle riots of 1999 and
Washington, D.C., the following year. However, Ruckus director John
Sellers didn't see the wanton destruction of property as being violent
at all. He told Mother Jones magazine, " I make a distinction
between violence and destruction of property. Violence to me is against
living things. But inanimate objects? I think you can be destructive,
you can use vandalism strategically. It may be violence under the law
but I just don't think it's violence."
The Natural Resources Defense Council, another Tides project,
destroyed many apple farmers in Washington state with its phony Alar
pesticide scare. It "leaked" a false report that Alar, used by
the state's apple growers there, caused cancer, particularly in
children. Even movie stars signed onto the hoax, testifying before
Congress about Alar's dangers. Sales of apples plummeted before the hoax
could be debunked.
Finally, the American Medical Association concluded, "The Alar
scare of three years ago shows what can happen when science is taken out
of context or the risks of a product are blown out of proportion."
Unfortunately, that conclusion came too late to save the livelihoods of
many growers.
Unfortunately, too, it came too late to prevent NRDC from cashing in
to the tune of $700,000 from a book on the bogus scare.
But that seems to be what Tides and its dozens of its related
organizations are about: money, a flagrant disregard for the truth, and
even disdain for the law.
Those capitalistic old American entrepreneurs Howard and Vira must be
spinning in their graves.
Tom Randall is a senior partner with the consulting firm
Winningreen LLC. A longer version of this commentary was published by
Capital Research Center and is available at www.capitalresearch.org
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