The Tides Foundation and Tides Center continue to build their activist war chest by exacting an 8 to 9 percent “handling fee” on funds that pass through on their way to other activists. Some monies are awarded as “grants” in the traditional fashion (according to “donor-advised” agreements). It’s impossible to know for sure whose money is being spent for which of these grants. Other funds go toward management services to existing activist organizations in return for a percentage of their gross revenues. In still other examples, the Tides Center offers financial and administrative support for start-up advocacy groups.
In this last case, the Tides Center offers a sort of blanket tax-exempt designation for its grantees and projects. The entire foundation (pun intended) on which the Tides Center is built depends on the notion that the law allows one tax-exempt group to “lend” its exemption to another organization.
The legality of this proposition has never been challenged in court, but Tides’ practice of allowing smaller groups to share “piggyback” tax-exempt status could make its own 501(c)(3) status vulnerable.
In 1997 Larry Wright, an officer with the Northern California District of the IRS, told The San Francisco Bay Guardian that “tax-exempt status is not transferable.” A nonprofit like Tides that holds a tax exemption, he said, legally has to prove that the activities of all of its sponsored “projects” satisfy the same exact tax-exempt purpose for which its own exemption was granted. “You can't just set up a clearinghouse,” Wright said. “[Tides] can’t pass along its tax-exempt status.” There ought to be a law. Oops -- there is a law. It should be enforced.
Most foundations exist only because they were allowed as a means of avoiding inheritance taxes through philanthropy. But over the years most of them have been taken over by leftist managers who use them for their own political goals.
I think the foundations should all be broken up and distributed to the descendents of their founders and inheritance taxes eliminated forever.
I agree. And TIDES is out of San Francisco, so someone should contact the congressperson from San Francisco to look into this massive, multi-billion-dollar criminal political conspiracy that exists solely to undermine the freedoms of the Constitution.
What's that? It's Nancy Pelosi's district?
Never mind. Move along.
bookmark
The guy who runs Tides also came to the aid of Dale Rathke so he could pay back the money he embezzled.
Drummond Pike. IIRC he covered about 800K of the theft.
Death to Soros bump.
Teresa Heinz Kerry was, and may still be a big contributor to the Tides Foundation.
The Tides Center funds Earth Day Network; Earth Island Institute; Earthjustice; Environmental Defense; Environmental Media Services; the Environmental Working Group;the National Wildlife Federation; the Natural Resources Defense Council; the Nature Conservancy (of California and of New York); the Sierra Club; the Union of Concerned Scientists; Waterkeeper Alliance; the Wilderness Society; and the World Wildlife Fund.
Research has been done by Ron Arnold’s Cneter for Defense of Free Enterprise http://www.cdfe.org/
He has been researching them for years. Also look at http://activistcash.com/
http://www.responsiblenergy.org/ek.asp
http://www.publicinterestwatch.org/
Also check our Sovereignty International http://www.sovereignty.net/
American Policy Center http://www.americanpolicy.org/
Some of this information looks implausible at first blush, but there is plenty to support what is happening.