Here are names of deep pockets funding Obama's scheme
Wealthy far-left activists put cash, savvy into goal of transforming U.S.
September 29, 2010
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Wade Rathke, left, with Tides founder Drummond Pike, right, visiting an ACORN leader in Peru. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro are pictured above.
Exposing "the radical left's best kept secret" is the aim of a new report on the Tides Foundation and Tides Center, a network of wealthy political activists with connections to President Obama whose objective is no less than to transform the U.S. into a socialist nation.
"Together they provide tens of millions of dollars annually to some of the most extreme, destructive charities in America," declares the report by Trevor Loudon for the Capital Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan education and research organization.
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Loudon, known for his New Zeal blog which has broken numerous stories about Obama's radical ties, says the "the people of the Tides network are not merely wealthy donors or long-serving political hacks."
"While they transmit large donor contributions to progressive causes, they also transform those causes by re-tooling the mechanisms of 'social change philanthropy' and rebuilding the infrastructure of the political left," he writes.
Read the report, "The Tides Foundation and Center: Brokers of the Revolution"
The Tides Foundation, founded in San Francisco 1976, and its affiliated Tides Center form a network of the leading brokers of the unfolding "Obama Revolution," Loudon writes, that promises "nothing less than the complete transformation of our economy," as Obama expressed it during the 2008 campaign in announcing his energy plan for America.
Tides money flows to thousands of far-left independent public charities, lobby organizations and "projects," including the notorious community organizing group ACORN, David Brock's Media Matters for America and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Anonymity is one key to Tides' success, the report says, noting donors are not required to reveal the recipients of their contributions.
As Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin reported in 2004, Sen. John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, working through the Howard Heinz Endowment, oversaw the donation of more than $4 million to the Tides Foundation between 1995 and 2001.
But what makes the Tides network unique is that it combines the foundation's role as a donor-advised funder with the center's activities, "nurturing and sheltering many of its fledgling groups with legal advice and fundraising assistance," Loudon writes.
The Tides Foundation claims it has distributed $400 million in grants to progressive nonprofits since 2000, but Loudon believes the true amount must be significantly higher.
He notes that according to the respected FoundationSearch. com philanthropy database, the Tides Foundation gave 14,246 grants totaling $630.6 million from 1999 through 2008.
In 2008, Tides gave about $84 million to U.S. nonprofits and about $20 million to foreign nonprofits.
ACORN and some of its spinoffs have received from Tides grants totaling nearly $1.2 million while the left-wing "media watchdog" Media Matters has received $500,000.
The much smaller Tides Center, with net assets in 2008 of $80 million, was set up in 1996 as an affiliate of the Tides Foundation. According to FoundationSearch.com, from 2005 through 2007 it gave 345 grants worth $25.3 million.
The center, Loudon writes, is unique because it acts as a "fiscal sponsor" for some 200 new groups and individuals. Instead of funding the groups, the report says, it helps establish new groups by offering them the shelter of Tides own charitable tax status and Tides health and liability insurance.
Nonprofits that began as Tides "projects" include People for the American Way, Social Venture Network, Women Donors Network and Grantmakers for Effective Organizations.
Noting that the last three groups are themselves organizations that promote effective fundraising, Loudon comments that the "people at Tides understand that the old models of protest politics won't work in modern societies."
"To know the people who run Tides is to know the brokers of leftist political change in America," he writes.
Anti-war roots
The report profiles key Tides' figures, including founder Drummond Pike, who announced this month he will step down after 34 years as CEO.
The Tides Foundation quietly announced Sept. 16 that Pike will be replaced by Melissa Bradley, who has served on the Tides Foundation board and as chairwoman of Tides.
Bradley founded New Capitalist, which Tides describes as "an organization that leverages human, financial, and social capital to create economically profitable and sustainable individuals, businesses and communities." She also worked with Green for All, creating, among other projects, the Green Jobs Award Program. According to Tides, she was selected as a Soros Justice Fellow for her innovation in criminal justice.
Pike, a 1970s anti-war protester and the son of a San Francisco Bay-area investment banker, founded Tides to work with "community-based nonprofit organizations and the progressive movement through innovative grantmaking."
He has been a generous donor to the Democratic Party, funding the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and prominent candidates such as Obama, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.
Pike is also a board member and treasurer of the Democracy Alliance – a network of major left-wing donors that includes billionaire investor George Soros – and chairman of the board of the Environmental Working Group, a green activist group.
Pike has close ties to ACORN and its former chief organizer Wade Rathke, who left after it was discovered he covered up a nearly $1 million embezzlement by his brother Dale, the group's chief financial officer.
Wade Rathke, a former Tides trustee and chairman of the Tides Center, appealed to Pike for help to keep the scandal quiet, Loudon writes. As the scandal grew in 2008, he says, Pike personally contributed about $700,000 to squelch the investigation and keep his donor list secret.
In the wake of the embezzlement scandal, Wade Rathke was fired by ACORN and resigned from his leadership position at Tides.
But Loudon notes Rathke continues to serve as a "senior adviser" to Tides and to several of its project entities, the Paradox Fund and the Frontera Fund.
Rathke also has retained his position of "chief organizer" at SEIU Local 100 – which has recently been disaffiliated from SEIU, the Service Employees International Union – and at ACORN International, now known as Community Organizations International.
The ACORN spinoff is a recipient of Tides Foundation grants and works with many far-left political groups in the U.S. and overseas, Loudon points out.
Other key Tides figures highlighted in the report include Maya Wiley, a member of the Tides Center board of directors and the founder and director of a Tides Center project, the Center for Social Inclusion, which says it helps community groups "dismantle structural racism."
A civil rights attorney who has worked for the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Wiley serves on the board of Wade Rathke's Social Policy magazine, which promotes labor and community organizing.
Left-wing professor and author Noam Chomsky also is a member of the magazine's board, along with Occidental College professor Peter Dreier and Frances Fox Piven, co-originator of the "Cloward-Piven Strategy" which proposes to destroy capitalism by inflating local welfare rolls to the point of state bankruptcy.
The vice-chairman of the Tides Center board of trustees is Larry Litvak, an investment expert who in the 1970s was close to the radical Institute for Policy Studies, which Loudon calls "easily the most influential 'progressive' organization in the U.S. at the time."
The report also profiles China Brotsky, a senior vice president at Tides and managing director of Tides Shared Spaces, a separate organization that serves as a real estate office that rents space to left-wing nonprofits.
Brotsky, Loudon notes, is a close associate of Bay Area activist Ellen Brotsky, a veteran of the Venceremos Brigade, a group of Americans who first went to Cuba in 1969 to show support for Fidel Castro.
Writers of stimulus bill
Another Tides board member, Dan Carol, is a political strategist who co-founded the Apollo Alliance, which helped draft the Obama stimulus package that channels $60 billion into "green/red" causes.
Apollo is an alliance of labor unions and environmental groups organized around the concept of government support for "green jobs."
In 2004, Carol and two former founders of the New Party, a Chicago socialist party with which Barack Obama was affiliated, approached union leaders Leo Gerard, head of the Steelworkers, and then-SEIU President Andy Stern. The alliance, which eventually drew more than 200 supporting organizations, called for a 10-year investment program in a "clean energy, good jobs" economy.
Apollo's board of directors included self-described communist Van Jones, who served as Obama's "green jobs czar" until his radical declarations and affiliations were exposed. |
