[IPSM] Very Important Article: "Too Good to be True"

[Macdonald Stainsby]

the Pew Charitable Trust-- founded by Sunoco, who were among the 
founders of the tarsands and many more oil schemes-- funds nearly every 
"official" green organization out there. Find out if that includes your 
favourite, and if so encourage them to dump this oil money.

Macdonald


Too Good to Be True
Certain organizations--Pew is one--are routinely treated as benign and 
neutral, beyond partisan politics. They're not.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006499
BY MARTIN MORSE WOOSTER
Friday, April 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

It was one of those "gaffe" moments when a truth long hidden--but long 
suspected--is finally spoken out loud. At a recent conference in 
California, Sean Treglia, a former program officer at the Pew Charitable 
Trusts, stated that the "mass movement" demanding campaign-finance 
reform, culminating in 2002's McCain-Feingold bill, was orchestrated by 
Pew and other like-minded foundations, including the Ford Foundation, 
the Carnegie Corp. of New York and the Open Society Institute.

In a tape obtained by Ryan Sager of the New York Post--who broke the 
story--Mr. Treglia was heard to admit that his foundation's lavish 
support of such groups as Common Cause and the Center for Public 
Integrity was designed to convince Congress that there was widespread 
public demand for campaign-finance reform when, in fact, there wasn't. 
Campaign-finance partisans, according to Mr. Treglia, had lost 
legitimacy in Washington, lacking "a constituency that would punish 
Congress if they didn't vote for reform." So, "to convey the impression 
that this was something coming naturally from outside the Beltway, I 
felt it best that Pew stay in the background."

What is striking about this confession has less to do with 
campaign-finance reform--a bust anyway--than with the stealth politics 
of Pew and foundations like it. There are certain do-good entities, and 
Pew is one of them, that enjoy a charmed life: On NPR and in David 
Broder columns, to take a couple of leading indicators, they are treated 
as benign truth-tellers, so high-minded as to be beyond politics. But 
they are, naturally, as partisan as any "special interest" could be.

Campaign-finance reform hasn't been Pew's only grasp at political 
influence. In 2004, the charity poured $9 million into the New Voters 
Project to register 18- to 24-year-old voters in six "battleground 
states." Though the drive was allegedly nonpartisan, the project was a 
joint venture of George Washington University and the Nader-created 
State Public Interest Research Groups, a nonprofit openly hostile to the 
GOP. It is safe to say that few of the project's boosters expected those 
new young voters to favor Mr. Bush.

Which leads to a deeper question: What, exactly, is Pew's agenda? Its 
founders derived their wealth from Sun Oil and were all Republicans. 
"When I speak of the free enterprise system," J. Howard Pew said in 
1938, "I mean when it is entirely free--free from monopoly, private or 
governmental." (It is easy to imagine how he would feel about 
restricting speech in electoral campaigns.) Howard's brother Joseph in 
1940 called the New Deal "a gigantic scheme to raze U.S businesses to a 
dead level and debase the citizenry into a mass of ballot-casting serfs."

The Pews' philanthropy increased in the 1940s and '50s when they created 
several new charities. The J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust, founded in 1957, 
had the most decisive charter. J. Howard instructed that it be used to 
acquaint the American people with "the evils of bureaucracy" and "the 
values of a free market" and "to inform our people of the struggle, 
persecution, hardship, sacrifice and death by which freedom of the 
individual was won."

But by 1980 all the founders of the Pew trusts were dead, and Pew 
philanthropy drifted away from its donors' intent. The drift became a 
purposeful rush when Rebecca Rimel became Pew's executive director in 1988.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported in 1992 that Pew grants going to 
local organizations--a tradition of the Philadelphia-based family--fell 
to 23% of all giving in 1991 from 56% in 1980, with organizations long 
favored by the family cut off. More important, Pew moved left. The 
"political ghosts" of the Pews "were gone," Ms. Rimel told Foundation 
News in 1991. That year she told Town & Country: "If we could reinfuse 
the idealism of the Sixties into our work, it could get the country out 
of this morass that problems are insoluble."

It has been the Summer of Love at Pew headquarters ever since. Ms. Rimel 
put it more nobly in a statement last year, declaring that Pew does 
"independent, nonpartisan research on key topics and trends. On issues 
where the facts are clear, we are a forceful advocate for policy 
solutions and positive change." But Pew's politics are about as 
nonpartisan as Hillary Clinton's. Its assumption is that if voters only 
understood how much "positive change" government can bring about, they 
would want more of it. And if the right and the left got together and 
talked about America's problems, compromises would be reached and the 
country would move forward, as the cliché goes.

Pew expresses this woolly faith in many ways. Between 1991 and 2001, it 
pumped $12 million into the "civic journalism" movement, which argued 
that newspapers need to run many series about the inner workings of city 
and state bureaucracies, the better for us to care about what they do 
and could, supposedly, do better. (J. Howard Pew's resistance to the 
"evils of bureaucracy" had nothing to do with it.) Pew eventually 
dropped the project--there were too many complaints about a private 
foundation setting the agenda of for-profit publishers. But it still 
tries to influence the press through publishing polls and hectoring 
newspapers to send more reporters to state capitols.

Pew also loves to create commissions. One such thinks that we ought to 
save more for retirement. Another wants more government funding of 
preschool education. National conferences are a favorite, too. About a 
pointless 1997 Pew conference on "voluntarism," Philadelphia mayor Ed 
Rendell remarked that Pew might as well have thrown its $1.4 million 
"out on Market Street." Pew has held conferences in Hershey, Pa., to 
teach members of Congress to be nice to each other--to overcome 
"partisanship." So far, no luck.

For more than a decade, Pew has tried to bring America's 
environmentalists into a centralized hierarchy under the command of 
longtime Pew environmental czar Joshua Richert. Not that 
environmentalists have always cheered. "I don't think you make social 
change happen on the basis of paid staff in Washington and paid ads 
anywhere," Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope told the New York 
Times in 2001. Beth Daley, of the liberal National Committee for 
Responsive Philanthropy, had earlier told National Journal: "Some of us 
were joking that we should have a Pew liberation front committed to 
getting environmental organizations off the Pew dole."

Pew's most recent evolution makes explicit what was long implicit: In 
2004, it transformed itself from a foundation into a giant nonprofit. It 
can now use 20% of its budget for lobbying. Last fall, Pew combined 
seven of its public-policy shops into the Pew Research 
Center--Washington's third-largest liberal think tank, after Brookings 
and the Center for American Progress. Clearly Pew intends to be a major 
player in Washington political debates, even as it pretends to 
nonpartisanship.

There is no reason that Pew should not do all it can to encourage the 
castor-oil liberalism that it so loves. But it might help if the rest of 
us took note of Mr. Treglia's belated honesty and treated Pew as 
something other than neutrality incarnate. And it might help if, out of 
simple fairness, the trust dropped the name Pew in the same way it has 
dropped the principles that guided its founders.

Mr. Wooster, a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center, is the 
author of "The Great Philanthropists and the Problem of Donor Intent."

-- 
Macdonald Stainsby
Coordinator, http://oilsandstruth.org
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In the contradiction lies the hope.
    --Bertholt Brecht.