Hillary Advocated Free Health Care , What Will Teresa Urge Kerry To Do?[my title]

CHICAGO - Pittsburgh is home to a new liberal funding organization that lists its priorities as the local environment, land use and "sustainability." However, its affiliations raise questions about its real purpose.

Known as the Tides Center for Pennsylvania, formerly the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, it is a creation of the Tides Foundation and Center, headquartered in San Francisco, and two Pennsylvania-based foundations -- the Vira Heinz Endowment and the Howard Heinz Endowment-- chaired by Teresa Heinz Kerry, heir to the Heinz food company fortune and wife of Democrat presidential contender Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

What makes the pairing with Tides troubling is that organization's secretive funneling of cash from private foundations -- such as Heinz, the Pew Charitable Trusts and many others -- to extreme left-wing activist groups whose interests include exclusion of humans from both public and private lands, anti-war protests, opposition to free trade, banning of firearms, abolition of the death penalty, unlimited abortion rights, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender advocacy, as well as and environmental extremism.

Tides works like this: When a high-profile donor wants to give money to a group with an extreme agenda but doesn't want its fingerprints on the donation, it simply gives the money to The Tides Foundation in the form of a "donor- advised donation." Tides then passes that money on to the desired recipient, masking the real source of the cash. As anti-war activist Drummond Pike (who set up the Tides Foundation in 1976 for the express purpose of keeping donors' identities unknown) told the Chronicle of Philanthropy, a publication for the nonprofit world, "Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with."

And, the amount of "hidden money" handled by the Tides Foundation is considerable. Since its founding, the relatively little-known foundation has made over $300 million in grants. In 2002 it amassed assets of $139 million and had an income of $59.3 million. Between 1995 and 2001, $4.3 million of that money came from the Howard Heinz Endowment. In 2002, it and the Vira Heinz Endowment blessed The Tides Center, a San Francisco spin-off of the Tides Foundation, with another $190,000 while the two endowments gave $1.6 million to the new Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania.

If all this movement of money between the Tides Foundation, Tides Center, two Heinz Endowments and Pittsburgh's new Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania has you shaking your head, let's talk about your money. You, the taxpayer.

Nearly $8 million in taxpayer money flowed into the Tides Center in the form of federal grants made by eight different agencies between 1997 and 2001. They include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy. Does this mean your tax dollars also are going to fund the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, a creation of the Howard Heinz Endowment, which in 2001 was worth a breathtaking $788.6 million in 2001? With the Tides Center for a partner, we will likely never know.

What we do know is that, with Tides as a partner, the Heinz Endowments now keep interesting company.

The Tides Center also manages the Youth Gender Project whose goal is to "empower and support transgender, gender-variant, intersexed and gender-questioning youth and young adults." I freely admit, not all of these terms are in my spell-checker.

Grant recipients also include the Iraq Peace Fund that has so far granted $489,000 to 27 groups to promote anti-war marches and their coverage by the news media, as well as the mission of one of those groups, MoveOn.org, whose purpose is to defeat George W. Bush.

While groups such as these and dozens of others organized and/or financed by the Tides Foundation and Center are relatively recent in their origin and transient in their nature, many are more established and pervasive in their influence.

The Ruckus Society, which received over $200,000 in Tides money between 1999 and 2002, was begun in 1995 to train activists in violent protest against biotechnology, globalization and the World Bank. It incited property destruction in the Seattle riots of 1999 and Washington, D.C., the following year. However, Ruckus director John Sellers didn't see the wanton destruction of property as being violent at all. He told Mother Jones magazine, " I make a distinction between violence and destruction of property. Violence to me is against living things. But inanimate objects? I think you can be destructive, you can use vandalism strategically. It may be violence under the law but I just don't think it's violence."

The Natural Resources Defense Council, another Tides project, destroyed many apple farmers in Washington state with its phony Alar pesticide scare. It "leaked" a false report that Alar, used by the state's apple growers there, caused cancer, particularly in children. Even movie stars signed onto the hoax, testifying before Congress about Alar's dangers. Sales of apples plummeted before the hoax could be debunked.

Finally, the American Medical Association concluded, "The Alar scare of three years ago shows what can happen when science is taken out of context or the risks of a product are blown out of proportion." Unfortunately, that conclusion came too late to save the livelihoods of many growers.

Unfortunately, too, it came too late to prevent NRDC from cashing in to the tune of $700,000 from a book on the bogus scare.

But that seems to be what Tides and its dozens of its related organizations are about: money, a flagrant disregard for the truth, and even disdain for the law.

Those capitalistic old American entrepreneurs Howard and Vira must be spinning in their graves.

Tom Randall is a senior partner with the consulting firm Winningreen LLC. A longer version of this commentary was published by Capital Research Center and is available at www.capitalresearch.org

Thanks to kattracks....

When voters are asked to evaluate their choices for president next November, they will have to weigh carefully the temperament, judgment and instincts of the candidate. Nowhere will these qualities be of greater consequence than in the execution of his duties as commander in chief.

Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry's long record of extremely liberal Senate votes on national security-related matters offers ample grounds for concerns on all three scores.

Unfortunately for Mr. Kerry, those concerns will only grow as the electorate learns more over the coming months about the temperament, judgment and instincts his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, brings to such matters, as reflected in her choices during years of multimillion-dollar philanthropy.

Of particular concern is one of the beneficiaries of substantial largess from foundations controlled by the would-be first lady: The San Francisco-based Tides Foundation and a spinoff called the Tides Center. These entities in turn help distribute funds to and operate as clearinghouses for policy-networking and coordination between a veritable Who's Who of radical leftist organizations.

The recipients share a hostility to what most Americans understand to be our country's security interests and the capabilities needed to protect them.

According to publicly available information, in recent years Mrs. Heinz Kerry's foundations have given at least $5.9 million to these entities. While a Kerry campaign spokesman insists such funds were earmarked for environmental causes, as the New York Post observed in a caustic editorial on Tuesday about Teresa's philanthropy, "money is fungible."

And money entrusted to the Tides organizations for distribution routinely found its way into the hands of people pursuing more than merely hard-line "green" agendas.

For example, as Ben Johnson observed in an article last month in FrontPageMagazine.com titled "Teresa Heinz Kerry: bag lady for the radical left," beneficiaries of some $300 million distributed over the years by the Tides' operations include:

"Rabid antiwar demonstrators, antitrade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorists legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and open-borders advocates."

More troubling still is that the investment by Mrs. Heinz Kerry in organizations providing large sums — and, in some cases, probably life-support — to such groups is paying off for her husband's campaign.

Notably, when President Bush unveiled his opening salvo of political advertisements containing fleeting images of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a Tides-associated outfit called "September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows" led a caucus of press-amplified denunciations of their exploitative "insensitivity" to the victims.

The political impact was all the more extraordinary since, as The Post reported March 9, "[Peaceful Tomorrows] admits [it] has only a few dozen members and represents relatives of no more than 1 percent of the 9/11 victims."

When the Soviets ran left-wing influence operations, they called such things "active measures" — a term that described the spectrum from low-level propaganda and disinformation to covert operations, all designed to subvert opponents and advance one's own agenda.

Themes that benefit Candidate Kerry's run for the White House also have been promoted by far more sophisticated, visible and better-funded active measures campaigns run by Tides-supported operations like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER, two of the prime-movers behind opposition to President Bush's War on Terror.

This is not to say Mr. Kerry or even his wife are directly running the operations supported by one of her favorite charities. Yet, as Ben Johnson trenchantly observes, "The grant-making institutions of the left and their feverish recipients ultimately form an amorphous, leftist entity.

"One never needs to search very far to find connections between a leftist foundation and extreme advocacy groups. Teresa Heinz Kerry,
George Soros,
Bill Moyers and the Ford Foundation fund
the Tides Foundation/Center;
Tides funds the National Lawyers Guild,
the Council on American Islamic Relations, MoveOn.org
and United for Peace and Justice;
those organizations then unite in fluid coalitions to protest against their common political enemies (Republicans).

"Ultimately, their representatives end up on Bill Moyers' PBS programs or active within the Democratic campaigns of their fund-raisers. Between now and the election, these organizations will run constant interference for the Democratic presidential nominee. ... :

They will march en masse against the Bush administration again and again; they will file more lawsuits against the administration's Homeland Security measures, decry any effective response to terrorism, claim the United States is guilty of slaughtering Iraqi civilians and petition leftist judges to open America's borders to Islamist terrorists.

"After they help his election, President Kerry will be indebted to them. And then they will insist he begin implementing their political agenda."

Unless and until Mr. Kerry formally disassociates himself from radical leftist groups and agendas like those supported by his wife, it is not unreasonable to conclude his public record on defense and foreign policy matters is only part of the problem with his bid to become commander in chief.

For such a renunciation to be credible, however, it should come now — not toward the end of a campaign influenced by the active measures of his wife's political allies and philanthropic beneficiaries.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The Washington Times.

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.