A note from Garnet92: all parts of this series of articles are long. It’s unfortunate, but necessary. The posts could easily be much longer since there is that much worthwhile information available. I have tried to pare the voluminous data down to the most salient points, but some will feel that there is simply too much to read and skip these pieces. In that case, So be it. But to those who really want to be informed, you won’t get the complete picture without expending some effort.

This is the second in a series of articles exposing some little known information about the inner workings of our opposition – the liberal left. In the first post, Pesky Truth presented four of the most influential individuals among those who fund the leftist groups.

This piece will highlight four of the organizations that fund liberal causes, the source(s) of their funds, and some of the interrelationships that are designed to insulate donors from the far left causes that they choose to support..

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.

The Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation? That may come as a surprise to you; it did to me. But based on the value of their assets and the value of grants awarded, they dwarf the competition.

The Ford Foundation was chartered on January 15, 1936 by Edsel Ford and two Ford Motor Company executives "to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare."

After the deaths of Edsel Ford in 1943 and his father Henry Ford four years later, Henry Ford II (Edsel's son and Henry's grandson) assumed leadership of the Foundation's Board of Trustees.

When Henry Ford II eventually resigned from the Foundation's Board of Trustees in 1977, he expressed his profound disgust with how the institution and most of its trustees had drifted so radically to the political left over time.

The degree to which the Ford Foundation's values and ideals have continued to move leftward since Henry Ford II wrote his resignation letter is reflected in the objectives and worldviews of the organizations it currently supports.

These objectives and worldviews include:

All are consistently far left positions on the issues.

With Assets of $11,615,906,693 (2005) and grants totaling $511,847,276 (in 2005), the Foundation  contributes to literally hundreds of causes.

A small sampling of Ford Foundation donees include:

Note: not all listings contain hyperlinks

Some notable contributions by the Foundation are $7 million to the ACLU and $25 million to the Mexican American Legal and Education Fund (MALDEF).

The Ford Foundation also gives large sums to fund various projects, programs, and academic departments in universities across the United States. The Foundation contributes funds for studies primarily in the areas of: black history, ethnicity, feminism and women’s studies, Islamic studies, poverty and diversity.

Open Society Institute (OSI)

Established in 1993, the Open Society Institute (OSI) is the most prominent of the numerous foundations belonging to the international billionaire financier George Soros, its founder and Chairman. In the U.S., OSI is set up as a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization. OSI’s assets were reported to be $858,935,162 in 2005.

Claiming to be “a nonpartisan, nonpolitical entity” whose funding agendas are “wholly separate” from “George Soros’s private political activities,” OSI describes itself as “a private operating and grant-making foundation."

In the last twenty-five years, Soros’ foundations have dispensed nearly $7,000,000,000 (billion) dollars to a multitude of organizations whose objectives are consistent with those of Soros. The OSI network of national foundations in 29 countries spent approximately $500 million in 2008 alone to “help people around the world.”

The President of OSI and the Soros Foundation Network is Aryeh Neier, who worked for the American Civil Liberties Union from 1963 to 1978, serving as its Director for the last eight of those years. Then, from 1978 to 1990, he was the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.

OSI’s Director of U.S. Advocacy is Morton Halperin (President of John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, and a longtime affiliate of the Institute for Policy Studies and the National Lawyers Guild).

PBS broadcaster and Schumann Center for Media and Democracy President Bill Moyers is a former trustee of the Open Society Institute.

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 groups whose activities cover all of the usual liberal causes.

OSI supports a wide array of leftist organizations. The following list, although lengthy, is still only a part of the full list:

Note: not all listings contain hyperlinks

·     American Immigration Law Foundation

·         Immigrant Legal Resource Center

·         League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)

·         Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF)

·         National Immigration Law Center

·         National Immigration Forum

·         National Council of La Raza

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 additionto funding by Soros and his friends, between 1998 and 2003, OSI received more than $30 million from U.S.government agencies.

In an effort to present itself in the most positive light to the American people, OSI uses the services of the public relations firm Fenton Communications.

The Tides Foundation

Established in 1976 by California-based activist Drummond Pike, the Tides Foundation was set up as a public charity that receives money from donors and then funnels it to the recipients of their choice. Because many of these recipient groups are quite radical, the donors often prefer not to have their names publicly linked with the donees. By letting the Tides Foundation, in effect, "launder" the money for them and pass it along to the intended beneficiaries, donors can avoid leaving a "paper trail."

Such contributions are called "donor-advised," or donor-directed, funds. Through this legal loophole, nonprofit entities can also create for-profit organizations and then funnel money to them through Tides thereby circumventing the laws that bar nonprofits from directly funding their own for-profit enterprises. 

Pew Charitable Trusts, for instance, set up three for-profit media companies and then proceeded to fund them via donor-advised contributions to Tides, which (for an 8 percent management fee) in turn sent the money to the media companies.

The Tides Foundation promotes a multitude of leftist agendas, as evidenced by its assertion: "We strengthen community-based organizations and the progressive movement by providing an innovative and cost-effective framework for your philanthropy."

Among the crusades to which Tides contributes are:

The Foundation is also a member organization of the International Human Rights Funders Group, a network of more than six-dozen grant-makers dedicated to financing leftwing groups and causes.

Immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Tides formed a "9/11 Fund" to advocate a "peaceful national response." Tides later replaced the 9/11 Fund with the "Democratic Justice Fund," which was financed in large measure by the Open Society Institute of George Soros, who has donated more than $7 million to Tides over the years. Reciprocally, the Tides Foundation is a major funder of the Shadow Party, a George Soros-conceived nationwide network of several dozen unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks whose agendas are ideologically to the left, and which are engaged in campaigning for the Democrats.

Tides and the organizations it supports interact closely with one another on a regular basis. For example, Drummond Pike sits on the Board of the Environmental Working Group along with David Fenton, founder of Fenton Communications.

A selected list of recent recipients of Tides Foundation grants include:

Between 1993 and 2003, more than 91 foundations made grants to the Tides Foundation.

One particularly notable donor to the Tides entities is Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Senator John Kerry. From 1994 to 2004, the Heinz Endowments, which Mrs. Kerry heads, gave the Tides Foundation and Center approximately $8.1 million in grants. Until February 2001, Mrs. Kerry also served as a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which has given Tides numerous six-figure grants.

The Tides Foundation and Tides Center also receive grants from the U.S. federal government. Between 1997 and 2001, these grants included the following:

(Total is $7,670,124)

The Tides Center

In 1996 the Tides Foundation created a separate but closely related entity called the Tides Center, also headed by Drummond Pike. The Foundation funded the Center creation with a $9 million seed grant. The Tides Center functions as a legal firewall insulating the Tides Foundation from potential lawsuits filed by people whose livelihoods or well-being may be harmed by Foundation-funded projects. (These could be, for instance, farmers or loggers who are put out of business by Tides-backed environmentalist groups.) In theory the Foundation's activities are restricted to fundraising and grant-making, while the Center focuses on managing projects and organizations; in practice, however, both entities do essentially the same thing.

The Tides Center's Board Chairman is Wade Rathke, who is also a member of the Tides Foundation Board. Rathke, a protégé of the late George A. Wiley, serves as President of the New Orleans-based Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union, and is the founder and chief organizer of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

Maya Wiley, daughter of George A. Wiley, sits on the Tides Center's Board of Directors.

Chip Berlet sits on the Board of the Campaign to Defend the Constitution, a Tides Center project formed in 2005 to combat "the growing power of the religious right" and to "fight for the separation of church and state." Berlet is a senior analyst for Political Research Associates, and has had affiliations with the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, the Christic Institute, the Socialist Workers Party, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Many recipients of foundation money today are the immensely influential activist organizations popularly known as Section 527 committees. Dedicated to promoting political candidates and agendas, 527s 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.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks 527 data, liberal organizations have amassed nearly $80 million in donations compared to a mere $8 million for their conservative counterparts in 2004. Groups are categorized as 527s for the section of tax code that regulates them. Even though this data is five years old, it points out the disparity between the democrats and the Republicans when it comes to utilizing the 527 groups.

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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. Here’s the link: DiscoverTheNetworks.org.