This is the first in a series of articles exposing little known information about the inner financial workings of our opposition – the liberal left. In this initial post, Pesky Truth will present four of the most influential individuals among those who fund the leftist groups. There are more to be sure, but these men are among the “heavy hitters” when it comes to enabling liberal candidates and causes.
The next article will highlight several of the most active liberal organizations, how they are funded, and relationships with other groups.
Remember that the players are highlighted in bold RED, the funds, organizations, or groups are highlighted in bold BLUE, and big bucks they throw around are in bold GREEN.
George Soros
George Soros is one of the most powerful men on earth, and one of the most reliably liberal. A New York hedge fund manager, he has amassed a personal fortune estimated By Forbes (March, 2009) at about $11 billion, placing him as the 29th richest among the world’s billionaires. His management company controls billions more in investor assets.
George Soros was born on August 12, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary. His father, Teodoro Schwartz, was an Orthodox Jew who, in 1936, changed the family surname from Schwartz to Soros in order to enable his family to conceal its Jewish identity. In 1947 Soros' family relocated from Hungary to England. Five years later, George graduated from the London School of Economics.
Since 1979, his foundation network - whose flagship is the Open Society Institute (OSI) - has dispensed an estimated $5,000,000,000 (billion) dollars to a multitude of organizations whose objectives are consistent with those of Soros.
According to the European Foundation Center (EFC), OSI had assets of $1.319 billion as of February, 2009. OSI alone donates scores of millions of dollars annually to various groups, whose major agendas cover all of the usual liberal causes. OSI currently has operations in 29 countries.
Following is a partial list of organizations funded directly by Soros and OSI. A more comprehensive list will be found under the OSI group in the upcoming Groups article.
A key funder of the open borders movement, OSI also supports:
In addition to funding by Soros and his friends, between 1998 and 2003, OSI received more than $30 million from U.S. government agencies.
OSI was a signatory to a November 1, 2001 document characterizing the 9/11 attacks as a legal matter to be addressed by criminal-justice procedures rather than military retribution. Suggesting that the hijackers were motivated chiefly by a desire to point out global injustices perpetrated by the United States.
A strong advocate of gun control, OSI funds the Network on Small Arms, which has lobbied the United Nations to pass a measure outlawing private gun ownership and effectively overturning the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.
OSI funded the multi-year United Nations Millennium Development Project. In 2005 this Project culminated in a recommendation for a massive wealth-redistribution, foreign-aid program whose provisions, if adopted, would impose more than $150 billion in annual costs on Americans.
On August 16, 2005, OSI (in collaboration with the Center for American Progress, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, AFSCME, and the United Steelworkers Union) launched a new organization called the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN). Led by Democratic activists David Sirota and Steve Doherty, PLAN’s mission is to seed state legislatures with prewritten "model" legislation reflecting leftist visions of justice.
In the presidential election of 2004 alone, Soros donated $23,831,000 to various 527 groups dedicated to defeating President Bush. Imagine his chagrin when Bush won anyway.
"527s" are referred to by the IRS Code section that defines them, and dedicated to promoting political candidates and agendas, 527 groups are, by definition, private, nonprofit groups that are less regulated and require less disclosure than other types of nonprofit groups engaged in electioneering. They need not register with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as "political organizations." Consequently, they need not observe the FEC's strict limits on political contributions. The 527 committees may collect as much "soft money" as they like from individuals or corporations.
Soros Fund Management also gave $3,515,000 to 527s in 2006 and $5,250,000 in 2008.
Soros and his friend Peter Lewis (Progressive Insurance) each gave $10 million to Americans Coming Together (ACT) and Soros also contributed:
$3 million to the Center for American Progress
$5 million to MoveOn.org.
And finally, take note of this:
In a November 2008 interview with Spiegel, Soros made the following comments that accurately outlined precisely the course that President Obama's administration is pursuing in 2009:
"I think we need a large stimulus package which will provide funds for state and local government to maintain their budgets -- because they are not allowed by the constitution to run a deficit. For such a program to be successful, the federal government would need to provide hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition, another infrastructure program is necessary. In total, the cost would be in the $300 to $600 billion dollar range [in addition to the $700 billion bailout which the government already had given to the financial industry]…. I think this is a great opportunity to finally deal with global warming and energy dependence. The U.S. needs a cap and trade system with auctioning of licenses for emissions rights. I would use the revenues from these auctions to launch a new, environmentally friendly energy policy. That would be yet another federal program that could help us to overcome the current stagnation."
The interviewer then said: "Your proposal would be dismissed on Wall Street as 'big government.' Republicans might call it European-style 'socialism.'" Soros replied:
"That is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful -- but also very harmful to our society…. I think it is better to have a government that wants to provide good government than a government that doesn't believe in government…. At times of recession, running a budget deficit is highly desirable. Once the economy begins to recover, you have to balance the budget. In 2010, the Bush tax cuts will expire and we should not extend them. But we will also need additional revenues."
George Soros is a man that can exert considerable influence on life in our United States. He uses his fortune to fund groups that support his extreme liberal views and encourages his wealthy friends to contribute to them as well.
When George’s money talks, people (especially politicians) listen.
Peter Lewis
Lewis was born in 1933 and graduated from Princeton University in 1955. A decade later, he took over the reins of Progressive Insurance from his father. Overseeing 100 employees and $6 million in revenues when he began, Lewis eventually grew the company to the point where it employed 14,000 people and boasted sales in excess of $4.8 billion annually. Progressive is now the third largest auto insurance company in the U.S.
According to Forbes magazine, Peter Lewis today possesses a fortune worth an estimated $1.1 billion. A strong supporter of the Democratic Party and its agendas, Lewis first became active in politics when he served as the Ohio finance chairman for George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. Over the years, Lewis has used his immense wealth to fund a host of leftist political campaigns, organizations, and causes.
In February 2008, Lewis contributed money to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. He is also a close friend of Billionaire Financier George Soros and Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy.
Lewis’ Peter B. Lewis/Progressive Corp. foundation contributed $22,645,000 to 527 organizations in 2004 and only $1,624,375 in 2006. An amount for 2008 was not listed.
In addition to lesser amounts to other groups, Lewis contributed:
$5 million to the American Civil Liberties Union
$16 million to the Joint Victory Campaign
$10 million to America Coming Together
$2.5 million to Move On.Org
Along with George Soros, Lewis is a key financial supporter of Democracy Alliance and Media Matters for America.
Drummond Pike
Born in San Rafael, California in 1948, Drummond Pike has served as a leading official of a number of leftwing philanthropic organizations, most notably the Tides Network, which he founded in 1976. Today he is Tides’ chief executive officer.
Pike earned a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a master’s degree in that same field from the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University. During his college years, he gained notoriety as an anti-Vietnam War protester.
In 1970 Pike was associate director of the Youth Project (YP). Initially organized by activists from the Center for Community Change, YP was a funding group through which wealthy donors could finance the activities of young activists engaging in anti-business community organizing.
Pike and Arca Foundation president Jane Bagley Lehman co-created the Tides Foundation as a public charity that could facilitate the anonymous transfer of funds to leftwing recipients.
Pike also heads the Tides Center, which was created in 1996 by the Tides Foundation. The Tides Center functions as a legal firewall insulating the Tides Foundation from potential lawsuits.
The Tides Center distributed nearly $66 million in grants in 2002 alone. In all, Tides has distributed more than $300 million for the Left. These funds went to rabid antiwar demonstrators, anti-trade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorists legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and open borders advocates.
In addition to his duties with Tides, Pike serves as a director of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and as a board member of such activist groups as: Democracy Alliance; the Solidago Foundation; the Institute for Policy Studies; the Endswell Foundation, an environmental group in British Columbia; and Working Assets. Other organizations in which Pike has held leadership positions include Island Press, Network for Good, the Sage Centre, the Threshold Foundation, the Charity Projects Entertainment Fund, the Social Venture Network, the Sierra Fund, and America’s Charities.
Pike founded the website Egrants.org (now Groundspring.org) to facilitate online charitable contributions to leftwing causes. He also created the Tsunami fund, an anti-capitalist, anti-gun ownership lobbying group. Both organizations have strong ties to the Tides Foundation.
Viewing the United States as a nation infested with "structural racism" that limits opportunities for nonwhites, Pike favors a highly progressive tax structure (i.e., one that taxes the rich at much higher rates than the poor) as a necessary means of redistributing wealth. Pike also supports socialized medicine.
Later in 2008, Pike's close ties to the community organization ACORN surfaced after it was learned that Dale Rathke, the brother of ex-ACORN president Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million from ACORN and its affiliated groups in 1999 and 2000.
Drummond Pike personally repaid the embezzled amount to ACORN for Dale Rathke.
Pike is a great admirer of ACORN's founder and longtime leader Wade Rathke, who has been a Tides Foundation director since its inception.
Wade Rathke
Wade Rathke founded the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), for which he served as Chief Organizer from 1970 to 2008. He is also the co-founder and Chairman of the Tides Center; a Board member of the Tides Foundation; an Executive Board member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); and Chairman of the AFL-CIO’s Organizers Forum. Rathke describes himself as someone who is dedicated to “winning social justice, workers' rights, and a democracy where ‘the people shall rule’”; i.e., socialism.
The Service Employees International Union (Rathke is an Executive Board member) gave $53,315,273 to 527 groups in 2004, $32,929,734 in 2006, and $34,534,324 in 2008.
Rathke hails from a family of prosperous orange ranchers in Orange County, California. During the late 1960s he attended Williams College in Massachusetts but dropped out before graduating. He thereafter became a draft-resistance organizer for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and an organizer for George Wiley’s National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO). He is a proponent of the “Cloward-Piven Strategy.”
In 1970, Rathke formed a new organization called Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). He enlisted civil rights workers and trained them in a program (at Syracuse University) patterned after Saul Alinsky’s activist tactics. The group’s name was later changed to Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, but the acronym ACORN remained the same.
Rathke and ACORN thereafter pushed into high gear their efforts to help Democrat candidates win political elections at any cost. Toward that end, ACORN's mass campaigns of voter-registration fraud would reach unprecedented heights in subsequent election cycles. ACORN’s paid workers, tasked with registering as many pro-Democrat voters as possible, submitted many tens of thousands of fraudulent voter-registration cards in key voting districts around the United States. By 2008, federal authorities were investigating voter fraud by ACORN in 15 separate states.
On June 2, 2008, Rathke stepped down from his role as ACORN’s President.
A month after his departure, the organization publicly acknowledged that Dale Rathke -- Wade’s brother -- had embezzled nearly $1 million from ACORN and its affiliated groups in 1999 and 2000. Tides Foundation founder and president Drummond Pike personally repaid the embezzled amount toACORN.
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According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks 527 data, liberal organizations have out-solicited their conservative counterparts by a factor of TEN; nearly TEN TIMES more donations going to liberal organizations than to conservative groups in 2004.
Groups are categorized as 527s for the section of tax code that regulates them. Even though the 2004 data noted above is five years old, it still points out the disparity between the democrats and the Republicans when it comes to utilizing the 527 groups.
Overall, 527 groups received over $250,000,000 in contributions in 2004, over $80,000,000 in 2006, and over $100,000,000 in 2008.
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Be on the lookout for the next article in the series that begins to explore some of the organizations that are doing their best to transform our United States into a European-style Socialistic society. You'll find organizations mentioned in this post presented in more detail in "Connecting The Dots - (2) The Funds."
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Most of the preceding information was gathered from Discover the Networks – a website that has the most comprehensive gathering of information imaginable about people and organizations that promote liberal causes. Check them out.
[updated 6/30/2009]