and the RATS, take another one in the..............................HA ha!!!
Posted on 12/11/2009 1:46:53 PM PST by Starman417
In one fell swoop, the ACLU lost 25% of it's funding with the loss of a single donor. Another large recipient from the same donor, the Sierra Club, has also been advised of their funding cuts.
David Gelbaum, a wealthy conservationist out of California, has donated about $389 million to the ACLU, the Sierra Club, as well as an organization that provides services to military personnel from 2005 to 2009.
David Gelbaum, a major donor to the Sierra Club Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and an organization that provides services to military personnel, said he would cut donations next year because investments in alternative-energy firms have "placed me in a highly illiquid position."
~~~Mr. Gelbaum had been an anonymous donor to the groups but said in the letter he publicly identified himself so recipients of his funding "may ask others to step forward to help sustain them in the future." The letter signaling cuts to the ACLU was first reported by the New York Times. [Hotline added by Mata]
Mr. Gelbaum, a major donor to the Democratic Party, didn't identify the clean-energy investments, but Quercus Trust, the fund that Mr. Gelbaum runs, was down almost 57% over the 18 months to late November, according to PlacementTracker.
A full quote from the afore linked Fox News article notes that his personal business loss stems primarily from his "green" investments from Quercus Trust.
"For a number of years, your organization has received very substantial charitable contributions from me," Gelbaum said in a statement. "My investments in alternative, clean energy companies have placed me in a highly illiquid position as a result of the general credit crisis in the American and world financial systems."
Mr. Gelbaum, the single largest anonymous donor to the ACLU, noted he was indefinitely stopping the contributions to the ACLU, and hoped others would step up to the plate to fill the financial void.
Mr. Gelbaum's Quercus Trust was the subject of a Nov 2007 article in Greentech Media, and is comprised of at least 34 companies that have made more green investments than any other venture capital firm. The article has a list of the specific companies, ranging from solar technologies and ethanol plants to LED and tidal power start ups.
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net ...
“wealthy conservationist” = elitist enviro-nazi . Good news. I didn’t realize that de-funding these commie groups would only require re-educating a few Soros-type oligarchs.
How quiet is Southern California’s Quercus Trust, the greentech VC and investment firm funded by David Gelbaum? If you visit Quercus.com: You see a picture of acorns. Quercus means oak in Latin. Quercustrust.com, registered to a Southern California address, redirects back to Google. Other URLs lead to blind alleys. Calls to associated VC firms and law firms lead to “No comment.”
Someone needs to audit the government and see how many checks went to this Trust.
Why are American Jews such big leftists?
He got "re-educated" by the market, investing in green energy deals that nobody wants and are commercially foolish. Serves him right.
Not Me!
I just feel so bad for the ACLU and the Sierra Club. Not to worry. I’m sure B O will give both organizations tax payer money from his slush funds better known as his “stash”
An article from five years ago:
Math whiz donates hundreds of millions
Conservation causes benefit
Kenneth R. Weiss, Los Angeles Times
Sunday, November 7, 2004
He has given more money to conservation causes in California than anyone else. His gifts have helped protect 1,179 square miles of mountain and desert landscapes, an area the size of Yosemite National Park.
His donations to wilderness education programs have made it possible for 437,000 inner-city schoolchildren to visit the mountains, the desert or the beach — often for the first time.
Over a decade of steadily growing contributions — including more than $100 million to the Sierra Club — this mathematician turned financial angel has taken great pains to remain anonymous.
In manner and appearance, David Gelbaum has maintained a low profile for someone who can afford to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.
At age 55, retired from the rarefied world of Wall Street hedge funds, he lives in Newport Beach (Orange County) with his wife and two of his four children in a large home where visitors on occasion have mistaken him for the gardener. Bespectacled, 5-foot-5 and slightly built, he speaks softly, barely above a hoarse whisper. He drives a Honda Civic hybrid, wears jeans and T- shirts to business meetings and helps the kids clean up at the wilderness camp- outs he sponsors.
Those who know him say he is never more uncomfortable than when asked to talk about his wealth or how much of it he has given away.
His donations, which according to public records and other sources total at least $250 million, have preserved hundreds of miles of wildlife corridors across mountains and deserts, tying together once-isolated national parks and wilderness areas. One conservation deal, land trust experts say, is the largest single purchase of private land ever handed over to the U.S. government for one purpose: to leave it alone.
He has given more than $20 million to schools in Orange County and handed over 108 rolling acres in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains for use as an outdoor-education camp.
He has contributed $3.5 million to Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona’s foundation to help the poorest children attend the camp’s wilderness programs. Carona is both grateful and a bit mystified by the benefactor.
“He’s one of these strange guys who doesn’t want any publicity but wants to take care of kids and the community,” Carona said. “When you look him in the eye and say, ‘You’ve made a positive change in these kids’ lives,’ he does not want to take any credit for it. He’s almost embarrassed when you say thank you to him.”
(A federal grand jury recently subpoenaed financial records of Carona’s foundation. Federal officials have not disclosed why they want the documents.)
Gelbaum, a native of Minnesota who moved to California as a teen, was a math prodigy who parlayed his talents into a highly lucrative three-decade career using mathematical formulas to pick stocks and bonds for wealthy investors in hedge funds.
He won’t say how much he made. He started giving his money away in ever- larger amounts in 1994.
“Most wealthy people spend their lives trying to make more and more money rather than give it away,” Gelbaum said during a series of interviews that he agreed to only reluctantly. “They wait too long. They are depriving themselves of a lot of joy. I’m doing what I want to do. It’s not like it’s money that I or my family will ever need.
“It’s a joy to see this land preserved and opening these kids’ eyes to the natural world. It’s not like burning the money. It goes into the land or into the kids’ experiences. Both last forever.’’
Gelbaum said his interest in land conservation was inspired by camping trips he took with his father and brothers to lakes in northern Minnesota, as well as Yellowstone National Park and Mount Whitney. ‘’Those were the happiest memories of my childhood.’’
It isn’t enough, he said, ‘’to protect wilderness just for people who can afford to go to it. I think bringing kids out to the wild is unquestionably the right thing to do. These kids have pretty tough lives. It opens their eyes to the world outside of their neighborhood. Some of the kids will grow up to protect the land they learn to love. You could look at it as an investment into the environment.’’
When making donations, Gelbaum usually insists that his identity not be revealed — out of concern, he says, for his family’s security.
Besides, he said, ‘’I don’t think that if you have a lot of money and you give away a lot of money, you should get a lot of recognition. You shouldn’t be able to buy that.’’
Gelbaum has made his largest contributions to the 10-year-old Wildlands Conservancy, an Oak Glen, San Bernardino County, group that he co-founded with David Myers, who has remained the group’s executive director.
Myers, an ardent environmentalist, wanted to sell 640 acres of desert land he owned near Yucca Valley and use most of the proceeds for other conservation projects. In 1994, he placed a newspaper ad seeking ‘’a conservation-minded donor’’ who would buy, but not develop, the land. Gelbaum answered the ad. They have been working together ever since.
Gelbaum now acknowledges that he has been the biggest benefactor of the conservancy and its sister organization, the Wildlands Endowment Fund, which has taken in $157.8 million for land preservation, outdoor education and related programs.
But for the last decade, Myers avoided revealing the identity of his reclusive angel, despite growing curiosity about who was bankrolling this obscure conservation organization that was buying and swapping real estate with the gusto of a 19th century land baron.
Born in Minneapolis, the second of four sons, Gelbaum moved to California when his father, Bernard Gelbaum, became founding chairman of the UC Irvine math department.
David Gelbaum showed early prowess in math, taking calculus at UC Irvine while still in high school. Months before he graduated from UC Irvine in 1972, he was hired by math Professor Edward Thorp to help with a business that needed a math researcher.
Thorp, who wrote ‘’Beat the Dealer,’’ about how to count cards and win at blackjack, was applying mathematical wizardry to the largest craps game in the world: Wall Street.
His formulas, which later appeared in his book ‘’Beat the Market,’’ led him to launch the nation’s first market-neutral hedge fund — one intended to make money for investors whether the market goes up or down. From 1970 to 1989, the fund never had a losing quarter and increased investors’ money more than 13-fold.
Gelbaum was one of his first math researchers hired to track and exploit the price discrepancies between a company’s stocks and its options, warrants and convertible bonds.
‘’He was smart. He was idiosyncratic. He was always looking for more,’’ Thorp said.
The firm, called Princeton-Newport Partners, came to an abrupt end in 1989 when five of the firm’s stockbrokers in Princeton, N.J., were convicted of scheming to create illegitimate tax losses. The convictions were overturned on appeal. Neither Thorp nor Gelbaum was implicated in the scandal.
Gelbaum emerged from the wreckage as a principal in a new investment firm, operating a new hedge fund using math formulas pioneered by Thorp.
Gelbaum declined to talk about the firm, Sierra Enterprises Group, from which he retired a few years ago. His business success, he said, ‘’was all a matter of chance. It certainly wasn’t because I worked 5,000 times as hard as the average person or was 5,000 times smarter than the average person.’’
He was more forthcoming about his foray into the cattle business. In the mid-1990s, he bought a pair of ranches to run in an environmentally sensitive manner.
The Kane and Two-Mile ranches are in northern Arizona, a place Gelbaum learned about in a college ecology class. This is where Theodore Roosevelt once hunted mountain lions to reduce predators and increase the deer herd. The deer population soared and then starved in what became a textbook case of disrupting nature’s balance chronicled by America’s foremost ecologist, Aldo Leopold, in ‘’A Sand County Almanac.’’
‘’It caught my imagination,’’ Gelbaum said. So he bought the ranches and arrived with a message. ‘’I told people when I came to Arizona I wanted to be good to the land and good to the people.’’
He won praise for removing cattle from wilderness areas and for raising wages of the cowboys and providing them housing and health care. He recently agreed to sell the ranches to the Grand Canyon Trust, a conservation group, for $4.5 million.
The ranches cover about 1,000 acres and control grazing rights on 900,000 acres of surrounding federal land.
Four years ago, President Bill Clinton turned a large swath of these grazing lands into the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, and Gelbaum won the admiration of then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
Babbitt’s plan provoked the ire of local ranchers, who complained that it would run ranchers off good grazing land. At the height of the protests, Gelbaum’s ranch manager stood up in a packed meeting hall and explained that his boss controlled all of the grazing rights in the area and considered the monument perfectly compatible with his ranching operations.
The speech hushed the protesters and allowed the monument to go forward.
‘’I half-thought about recommending to the president to name the national monument after David Gelbaum,’’ Babbitt said. ‘’Without David Gelbaum, it might well not have happened.’’
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/07/BAGN19MGV11.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle
ACLU and Sierra Club. Enemies of America. I hope Gelbaum was the first of many to end their funding.
He is just waiting for the Al Gore gravity train to pan out.
Keep on investing in that Green crap that doesnt work dipstick.
------
The Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund (IADIF) was created in 2006 to provide funding to nonprofit organizations that offer direct services and other forms of assistance to American military personnel and/or their families who have been impacted by deployment to Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
A special initiative of the California Community Foundation, IADIF grants were administered independently and grant proposals are by invitation only. In the spring of 2009, all of the IADIF funds were allocated, and further applications for funding are not being accepted.
Read Supporting Our Troops, Veterans and Their Families, a CCF report about the lessons learned and future opportunities for philanthropy. Read the abridged version.
Read the Invisible Wounds of War, a report released in April 2008 by the RAND Corporation and funded by a grant from the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund. The study focuses on the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and traumatic brain injury on military personnel of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). For more information about the RAND report, contact the RAND Corporation at (703) 413-1100.
-------------
So, a little bit of good, perhaps, and a whole lot of lefty bullshit.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.