Teresa Heinz Kerry's Radical Gifts

By Ben JohnsonFrontPageMagazine.com 3/27/2009 The following is the full text of the new book by FrontPage Magazine Managing Editor Ben Johnson, Teresa Heinz Kerry's Radical Gifts. The 115-page book is available from the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore in paperback for $9.95. -- The Editors.ForewordFour years ago, I wrote the book-length expose 57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Charitable Giving. At that time, Teresa Heinz had momentarily adopted her second husband’s surname, delivered a rambling speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and would shortly come within a few hundred thousand votes of becoming the nation’s First Lady. Along the way she denounced the Bush administration as “un-American,” revealed she paid a lower percentage of her income in taxes than the average middle class worker, and announced that she did not consider motherhood “a real job.” While her grating personality has become familiar, the substance of her public life has remained in the shadows: her role as a board member or chair of tax-exempt foundations that awarded more than $140 million in grants annually, and her abuse of her authority in channeling funds to overtly political, far-Left organizations. This issue took on added importance when Heinz Kerry pledged to continue her role as head of the Heinz Endowments if she became First Lady.1The nation did not have to endure the ordeal of Heinz doling out grants from the East Wing (a fact she ascribed to voter fraud: “Two brothers own 80 percent of the [voting] machines used in the United States,” Heinz told a Seattle fundraiser in March 2005, and it is “very easy to hack into the mother machines.”)2 Her husband bowed out of a second run for the presidential nomination after a January 2007 quip that people who do not “make an effort to be smart” get “stuck in Iraq.”3 Now both lead lives in less exposed niches: he as a U.S. Senator, and she as chair of the Heinz Endowments. My previous report covered her “charitable” donations during the years 1998-2003; this installment covers grants made from 2004-2007, the last year for which information is available. During much of this latter cycle, John Kerry was running for president or planning a second campaign – and the influence shows in the Heinz Endowments’ grant recipients. Most alarmingly, Teresa gave a quarter-of-a-million dollars to sponsor the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where she made her debut before a national audience and her second husband was nominated for president. Although Teresa has continued to finance radical leftist organizations, in the years since our last report, she awarded a hefty number of grants to political organizations openly devoted to increasing voter turnout among core Democratic constituencies. Such political use of tax-exempt dollars is not in keeping with the spirit of the laws governing charitable foundations.Nothing in this report should be construed as suggesting that the Heinz Endowments are only political organizations or engage in no philanthropic gestures. There is no sinister agenda behind the checks given to the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, the YMCA, or Imani Christian Academy. However, such actions do not negate the substantial abuse of funds entrusted to her care, the personal benefit she and her family members have derived from it, nor the expenditure of such funds to promote ideological causes that have nothing to do with promoting the general welfare as charitable foundations are supposed to do.
THE LIFEBLOOD OF POLITICSChapter 1: Partisan to the Core: Financing the 2004 Democratic National Convention
Then here’s to the City of Boston,The home of the bean and the cod,Where the Lodges speak only to the Cabots,And the Cabots speak only to God.Aside from giving money directly to a campaign or political party, one would be hard-pressed to think of a more clearly partisan expenditure than financing a party’s presidential nominating convention. These events receive several nights of uninterrupted television coverage, allowing candidates to bring their message directly into the homes of potential voters. The parties treat these carefully scripted proceedings as an opportunity to present their most agreeable, demographically appealing, focus-group-tested messages to a captive audience. For decades, national conventions have almost inevitably produced a significant “bounce” for the candidate nominated and launched other participants to national prominence. The attendees at national conventions comprise the nation’s elites: politicians, industry lobbyists, fat cat donors, and activists eager to move up the party’s ladder. They are chauffeured via limousine from their five star hotels to the grand convention center, where they are pampered by every level of party officials.They are the last people one would consider needy – not to mention worthy – of charity.Yet Teresa Heinz Kerry steered a quarter-of-a-million dollars in tax-exempt funds from the Heinz Family Foundation to underwrite the 2004 Democratic National Convention. This represents, not merely a partisan effort well outside the appearance of impropriety, but also a conflict of interest. In her capacity as chair/CEO of the Heinz Family Foundation, Heinz financed a convention from which she and her family reaped undeniable rewards. By nature, conventions promote the candidacy of their nominee. In this case, a successful campaign would have made her husband the most powerful man in the world, with her by his side as his most intimate adviser. Additionally, Teresa demanded, and received, a prime time speech introducing herself to the world. Teresa’s grant came at a crucial juncture in the fortunes of the 2004 convention. In 2002, Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino had secured $20 million in funding and convinced the 2004 Democratic National Convention to come to Boston. However, the promised funding was not forthcoming. Kennedy and Menino raised only $3 million over the next year. Only communications giant AT&T qualified as a “gold benefactor,” a donor who gave between $500,000 and one million dollars. And only one qualified as a “silver benefactor”: the Heinz Family Foundation, chaired by the party’s presumptive first lady.4 The early Heinz grant went, not to the DNC, but to a group called Boston 2004, located at Three Copley Place in Boston’s historic Back Bay district. Boston 2004 had but one agenda: the group referred to itself as “the host committee for the Democratic National Convention.”5 Elsewhere, it acknowledged, “Boston 2004, Incorporated, is the single purpose, not-for-profit organizing entity for the convention.”6 It was explicitly political, boasting, “We have recruited over 13,500 people of all ages, backgrounds, and from all of Boston’s diverse neighborhoods to volunteer during the 2004 Democratic National Convention.”7 Recruits ranged in age “from 15 to 86 years old.”8 The vast majority of volunteers interviewed cited their interest in politics and/or dedication to the Democratic Party as their motivation.9 The organization also helped individuals become credentialed delegates.10Most of the 13,500 had a less visible function: to pamper party fat cats. Boston 2004 described their future, saying, “Volunteers will serve in a variety of roles, including leadership positions, providing hospitality services, assisting with special events, transporting VIP’s and elected officials, and staffing the volunteer headquarters.” The group further explained the dignity awaiting its staff: “Each visiting delegation will be assigned a Beantown Buddy, a full-time volunteer…Beantown Buddies have an insider’s knowledge of Boston, its unique neighborhoods and attractions, and will be available to assist delegation members throughout their stay.”11Boston 2004 spared few expenses to please high-dollar donors. A 1,249-page financial disclosure revealed the group spent $20,000 on coffee and java; $3,000 on valet parking; $10,000 on T-shirts; and gave away $174,000 worth of “Lion King” tickets. Million dollar donors enjoyed a private reception. Some perks went only to donors, such as “a $45,000 reception at the Boston Harbor Hotel, $30,000 in tickets to a Red-Sox Yankees game, and a $50,000 Fenway [Park] reception.”12 Staff members similarly fared well. Some made as much as $100,000, and many had access to a fleet of 75 Cadillacs donated by General Motors.13 Not all were happy, though. According to an analysis conducted by The Boston Globe, the committee directed a piddling $1.6 million in contracts to minority or women-owned contractors. The Globe quoted one disgruntled elitist: “The convention ‘gave nothing to the little people,’ said Jane Adams, president of Ambiance Limousines in Holliston, who had hopes of winning a contract to chauffeur Democratic bigwigs.”14Limousine liberals: the forgotten constituency.Heinz was able to underwrite a political convention via grant due to a July 2003 decision from the Federal Election Commission. The FEC unanimously allowed soft money donations to finance political conventions, saying the McCain-Feingold Act did not regulate these activities.15 The FEC assumed entities giving money to conventions must be “motivated by a desire to promote the convention city and not by political considerations.”16 FEC Chairwoman Ellen Weintraub added, “Host committee supporters are not raising dollars for partisan purposes, but in the spirit of promoting cities.”17 Curiously, the feds simultaneously lifted a stipulation that all donors had to have some connection to the host city.18 Boston 2004 soon highlighted the ruling on its webpage,19 and its coffers received an influx of cash from influence-seekers. How much stemmed from Boston pride is difficult to know, but insiders declaim more sinister purposes. Former DNC Chair Donnie Fowler revealed, “Some of the best lobbying in the world is done at these conventions.”20 Steve Weissman of the Campaign Finance Institute surmised, “This is Kerry’s people doing the fundraising, going to the typical Democratic donors of the past.” Some $2.25 million poured in during the last days blitz from Big Labor, including unions like SEIU, AFSCME, IBEW, and the American Federation of Teachers.21 Ultimately, the only things that dampened the convention were John Kerry’s public flirtation with skipping it for his own financial reasons,22 and the lackluster performance of its speakers, which gave his campaign no bounce.23None of these things, save her own embarrassing speech, could be blamed on Teresa Heinz. She steered a large, early donation to the committee and watched others follow her lead. The FEC’s assurances notwithstanding, there seems little likelihood her donation was inspired by civic pride and “not by political considerations.” She made no comparable donation to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, when her husband was not the nominee.24 That such a donation had been made from the family funds of a deceased Republican U.S. senator redefines the term hubris. At a minimum, her actions violate the spirit both of non-partisan philanthropy and the FEC’s rationale for allowing such donations to take place. Teresa Heinz donated $250,000 to underwrite the traditional springboard of any presidential campaign, benefit her husband’s electoral chances, and give herself a national launch on prime time television by using tax-exempt funds from a Republican family – and got away without as much as a media investigation.Chapter 2: Rewarding Kerry ’04 Donors and VolunteersFollowing his loss in 2004, John Kerry returned to the Capitol, like another Massachusetts senator, with “high hopes.” This JFK hoped scoring the second-highest vote total in presidential history would entitle him to a post as the Democratic Party’s new spokesman, a position he could parlay into a second bid in four years. However, his loss left his former campaign workers in political limbo. Additionally, 2004 was the year leftist websites flexed their political muscle. Sites such as The DailyKos acted as an alternate media for the far-Left, while MoveOn.org raised millions of dollars from small donors who were not “maxed out” and could give repeatedly. Kerry won the nomination only because the netroots’ preferred candidate, Howard Dean, self-destructed. Having enthusiastic, tech savvy activists in one’s back pocket could only help an ambitious Democrat. The Heinz Endowments soon moved to make this a reality.In 2005, the Teresa & H. John Heinz III Fund of the Heinz Family Foundation gave $25,000 to a new left-wing start-up called the Democracy Cell Project. The new website formed in the days after the 2004 presidential election had a unique shared history:
The people who have come together to share this site with you have been through a unique experience in American politics: they were moderators and volunteers of John Kerry’s blog, the first presidential general election campaign blog that was open for comment from the public…We had hoped to be working on these problems under a Kerry presidency. But within days of the election, we agreed that we wanted to keep fighting, and to take what we had learned to others on the net.25Not all the posters were new acquaintances to the Heinz-Kerrys. Editor-in-Chief Richard Bell noted he had known John Kerry for three decades, meeting him through another ultra-leftist Kerry admirer. “The first time I ever met John Kerry was through [radical leftist historian] Howard Zinn,” Bell wrote. “The time was 1972, and I was helping to organize a teach-in about the Vietnam War. Howard said to me, ‘Why don’t you get in touch with this fellow John Kerry.’”26 Bell is no mere rank-and-file Democrat, either. He “launched the first national political party website at the DNC.” That is, he’s an official Democratic Party hack.27Others at the blog referred to their personal interactions with Kerry’s better half. Fe Bongolan, a San Francisco-based thespian now with DCP, wrote glowingly of her meeting with Teresa Heinz at a Kerry house party in December 2003:
When Teresa Heinz-Kerry arrived, she handed me a pin that read in the center: “Asses of Evil” with “Bush”, “Cheney”, “Rumsfeld” and “Ashcroft” surrounding it. She met, greeted and talked to a jam-packed room of Kerry supporters and others who came for the MoveOn documentary [Uncovered, featuring serial liar Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson]…Thanks to Teresa, we kept the party going on, and she helped us here at East Bay for Kerry, throw the Mother of All House Parties.28This story further demonstrates the blurring of Teresa Heinz’s personal/political life and her “philanthropic” one. Not all Democracy Cell Project writers describe personal encounters with the candidates. Some exercise other means of communication. Matthew Carnicelli of Brooklyn, for instance, is listed on DCP’s website merely as a “librarian.”29 In fact he is much more -- a trained astrologer.30 And not a good one. He wrote in 2000, “Bush’s natal Mars is not angular in Iraq – so direct military action may not be likely (but convert CIA-inspired activity might).”31Psychic powers aside, John Kerry is the DCP’s real guiding star. In its earliest days, the blog ran numerous entries claiming the 2004 election was stolen.32 Its “Historical Documents and Speeches” section – divided by era, from Continental Congress through the present – houses writings by Jefferson, Lincoln, the People’s Party (Populists), and Franklin Roosevelt. The only Republican speech deemed worthy of inclusion after the Lincoln administration is Eisenhower’s misinterpreted warning about the “Military Industrial Complex.” The archive contains nothing from Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, or either President Bush but contains no fewer than five speeches by Senator John Forbes Kerry,33 and a loopy article Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote for Rolling Stone claiming the 2004 election was stolen.34 Other than its star-worship, the Heinz-financed website hews to the leftist party line. Its “Newslinks” suggests readers get their information from Al-Jazeera, Alternet, The (UK) Guardian, After Downing Street, Media Matter’s blog (Altercations), Media Matters itself, The Nation’s blog (The Notion), Andrew Sullivan’s blog, DailyKos, The Huffington Post, TalkLeft, Talking Points Memo, The American Prospect’s Blog (Tapped), Think Progress, Jonathan Alter, Sidney Blumenthal, Maureen Dowd, E.J. Dionne, Frank Rich, and others. And three token conservative sites.35The Democracy Cell Project is not limited merely to a two-dimensional screen. DCP produced the 75-minute docudrama FEAR UP: Stories from Baghdad and Guantanamo, a “searing tale of torture and abuse and the ferocious resilience of the human spirit.”36 The live performance consists of readings from “transcripts” taken in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq – horror stories all.37 The interrogators come in for particularly harsh treatment, because, as the DCP website proclaims in pique, “THEY MEAN TO WIN”!38 In case the message was lost on anyone, following the program, DCP held a discussion panel of petty leftists – including Kurdish antiwar activist Houzan Mahmoud, who had also taken part in the performance. In the discussion, Mahmoud “spoke of the brutality of both the invaders and the insurgents against women and children.”39 Mahmoud has accused U.S. and Coalition troops of conducting a systematic campaign of rape against Iraqi women – which should hardly surprise, as “rape and violent attitudes have always been part of the culture of the imperialist army whenever they have been invading any country.”40 The play’s bias shone through so clearly that radical anti war divas Medea Benjamin and Cindy Sheehan attended.41 Yet even its supporters noted the production “drags on as a monotonous timeline of the war and repetition of the daily commentary on the quagmire, including comparisons to Vietnam.” Although billed as non-fiction, the writers introduced various “cheap shots aimed at the Bush administration,” such as “suggesting a new reality television show that places 14 Bush supporters in Faluja” [sic.], the violent terrorist stronghold of Muqtada al-Sadr.42 Evidently the dozens of U.S. soldiers who died in that city, including four who were mutilated and burned, are the Democracy Cell Project’s idea of a great joke.Critical rejection did not get the performers down. At its D.C. premier, they learned their hero-worship was requited. The website recounted, before the play, “Ronald Nelson read a statement from John Kerry, in support of the Fear Up project and what we are trying to do.”43 Houzan Mahmoud’s extreme assessments of American evil in Iraq were no more harsh than Kerry’s December 2005 allegation that “young American soldiers [are] going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, you know, women, breaking…the historical customs, religious customs.”44 Both statements profoundly demoralized our troops in the midst of a war, Kerry’s the more so, as it came from a higher source who was nearly elected commander-in-chief. Yet both anti-troop statements were supported with Teresa Heinz’s money.Finally, on September 12, 2007, the Heinz Awards selected Susan S. Seacrest of Lincoln, Nebraska, as co-recipient of its Environment Award. Seacrest founded The Groundwater Foundation, which the Heinz Awards’ website lauds for its “non-political advocacy.”45 The website omits the fact that Seacrest donated $1,000 to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.46At a minimum, this blurring of political and “philanthropic” is unseemly – but not as unseemly as the websites, anti-American propaganda, and glowing left-wing biographies Heinz has funded.Chapter 3: Motivating the Core, Mobilizing the TroopsDespite being a problematic candidate, John Kerry garnered the second-highest number of votes in presidential history due to the efforts of 527 groups such as Americans Coming Together (ACT) waging an unprecedented ground war on his behalf: mailing campaign literature, making telemarketing calls, and turning out the Democratic vote from coast-to-coast. As noted, Kerry hoped to convert this turnout from a general anti-Bush movement into his personal political base over the next four years. The Boston Globe reported, “The senator had worked hard to prepare for another run, logging more miles and spreading more money than any other Democrat in the last election cycle.”47 Teresa Heinz complemented his work, spreading “charitable” funds to energize a future get out the vote movement for the Democratic Party’s core constituencies.As chair of the Heinz Family Foundation, Teresa tried to kill two birds with one stone. The HFF explains its “Democracy Project began as an effort by the Heinz Family Foundation to examine how environmental issues could be used to propel more young people to vote.” Environmentalists are a bastion of leftist support. However, as pollsters have long known and the foundation’s study noted, so are young people. Heinz began polling this in November 1996, and found Generation X leaned left at that time. “In 1996, this generation was Democratic: 54% voted for Clinton, 53% voted for a Democratic congressional candidate, and 47% called themselves Democrats.” Unsatisfied to see these Democratic-leaning voters sit at home, the report continued, “The next step is to transform this compelling portrait of young American voters into a plan for action – a plan that combines new ways of thinking about political communication, about leadership, and about voter registration, and mobilization activities. We look forward to leading the way.”48 Part of this leadership has been focusing on young women. The Teresa & H. John Heinz III Fund of Heinz Family Foundation awarded $50,000 to the organization “Women Voices. Women Vote” for “general operating support.” Curiously, its website demonstrates an almost exclusive focus on unmarried women. Its website hosts more than a dozen articles on single women.49 Its “Outline of Unmarried America, 2007,” for instance, states their top priorities are ending the war in Iraq and health care costs. Moreover, “On most issues pertaining to government policy, unmarried female voters take a more progressive viewpoint than their male counterparts and see a larger role for government in helping to solve the challenges they face.”50This is nothing Teresa did not know. As a 1996 Heinz Family Foundation study noted, for the electorate as a whole, “women in this generation were more Democratic than men: 57% of women voted for Bill Clinton, 59% voted for a Democrat for Congress, and 51% identified themselves as Democrats in November.”51 This was borne out the fall before this grant was awarded. John Kerry very narrowly carried women against Bush in 2004, according to exit polls (51-48, within the margin of error). However, he carried unmarried members of both sexes by a whopping 18 percent.52 Unmarried women account for 26 percent of the 2008 electorate, and two-thirds (exactly 66 percent) pledged to vote for a Democrat in 2008.53 If Kerry had been the nominee, this would have proven a rich return on investment.Nor did Teresa Heinz neglect other unmarried constituencies: gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender individuals. The Heinz Family Foundation awarded $25,000 in 2005 to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Foundation (now the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund).54 The GLVF proclaims itself the “nation’s largest LGBT political action committee,” and “the only national organization dedicated to increasing the number of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender elected officials at all levels of government.” As such, it openly endorses candidates – almost all leftists – for office.55 Gays and lesbians are a ripe constituency for the Democrats for a number of reasons: large amounts of disposable income, free time to campaign, and generally left-wing views. Though the GLVF may get its constituency to the polls to vote for a candidate running for a lesser office, the voters could hardly be expected to restrict themselves to voting for those individuals, especially in a forthcoming presidential election. This is all the more true after the landslide victories marriage protection amendments enjoyed in 2004. Many believe the values voters who turned out to support ballot initiatives protecting traditional marriage from judicial fiat inflated President Bush’s margin of victory in 2004. The overwhelming support of homosexuals for the Democratic Party is a lesser known story. CNN exit polls found fully 77 percent of self-identified gays and bisexuals voted for Kerry, though 53 percent of heterosexuals voted for Bush in 2004.56 Even a slight increase in turnout among such a lopsided constituency could tip the balance in a closely contested election.Similarly, Heinz donated $25,000 to the Pennsylvania Conservation Voters Education League in 2004 “to support the Grassroots Voter Education Project.” The grant would generously allow the PCVEL time to gin up support for candidates in that November’s election. The following year, Heinz doubled the grant to $50,000 “to promote collaboration among unions and environmentalists.” This move would help reconcile two pillars of the Democratic Party.In each instance, Teresa Heinz disbursed tax-exempt monies earned by her late Republican husband’s family to increase the voter turnout of the Democratic Party base at the same time that her second husband hoped to regain that party’s presidential nomination. The confluence seems more than fortuitously concomitant. Taken with her underwriting of her husband’s political convention (and her own foray onto the national stage) and her funding for political allies she had met in person, it seems a systematic attempt to recruit foot soldiers for the Democratic Party.Chapter 4: The Left’s JanissariesEddie Cochran quoted a stereotypical Congressman in his 1958 hit “Summertime Blues” telling a teenager, “I’d love to help you, Son, but you’re too young to vote.” The Left long ago learned the errors of that sentiment. Beyond serving as congenial props in photo opportunities, children can serve a number of functions in the Struggle. Cindy Sheehan exploited her dead son (who supported the Iraq war) to advance her increasingly irrational and self-centered campaign – but her implosion proves the point: children make better messengers than adults. They are easily indoctrinated, and once motivated make innocent (and earnest) lobbyists who naturally elicit the media’s attention and their listener’s sympathy. They are not as readily derided as kooks as Sheehan and her ilk. The Left is ever cognizant that these minors will ultimately become the activists and voters of tomorrow. Recognizing this, Teresa Heinz has financed a number of initiatives to indoctrinate schoolchildren in left-wing politics, then use the youngsters as pawns in the political process: the Left’s janissaries.The process began with a single, leftist school but has expanded greatly. In 2005, Heinz gave the Kingsley Association $10,000 “to support the Kingsley-Lincoln Freedom School.” If the words “Freedom School” conjure up images of the radical 1960s, it is not without reason. According to its history, “The Kingsley House was named for Christian Socialist and Oxford University student Charles Kingsley.”57 The Freedom Schools were created in part by black activist Sanjulo Ber, the Western Pennsylvania President of the Black Radical Congress and a member of Black Voices for Peace. According to his obituary, Ber “helped create Freedom Schools to teach black history and civil rights philosophy.”58 The Kingsley Association maintains ties to the racialist and radical Left. The association’s Malik Bankston helped organize the June 23, 2007, “Day of Solidarity” with Rashad Byrdsong of the Community Empowerment Association and Yusef Ali, who was described by local media as the “emir”of Masjid al-Mumin Mosque. Byrdsong told the media he organized the rally, because “We’re under attack – it’s a war in the Black community.”59 Ali is also on the Executive Committee of the Pennsylvania chapter of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.60 Other extremists spoke at the rally. “Please don’t be mistaken – we are here to take back our communities,” said a scheduled speaker named “Majestic” of the Nation of Gods and Earths.61 (That group – an offshoot of the Nation of Islam – believes only five percent of humanity perceives the hidden mysteries of the universe6 and teaches “the blackman [sic.] is god and his proper name is ALLAH. Arm, Leg, Leg, Arm, Head.”)63 Kevin Amos, a member of the Kingsley Association board of managers, was hired in July 2007 as the communications director of the Thomas Merton Center.64 (See below.)The New Pittsburgh Courier described the Freedom School as “a six-week program held in conjunction with Lincoln Elementary School. Freedom School teaches third-, fourth- and fifth-graders Black culture and self-worth, and encourages them to live a positive, healthy life.”65 But racially conscious teaching is not the only component of these schools. Freedom-School Project Director Tamanika Howze adds, “Each year Freedom Schools engage in a day of social action.”66The schools are now put on by the Children’s Defense Fund, though the Kingsley Association still host it.67 This past year, the CDF notes:
On July 18, 2007, CDF Freedom Schools® sites across the country participated in the CDF Freedom Schools Social Action Day. The social action and civic engagement component of the CDF Freedom Schools model teaches youth to engage in community service and social justice advocacy. This year, with Congress considering funding reauthorization for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), CDF Freedom Schools participants urged their elected officials to provide health coverage for all children through a variety of actions including visiting their elected officials, writing letters to elected officials, joining together for marches and rallies and leading awareness activities. More than 8,000 youth from CDF Freedom Schools sites across the country participated in the Social Action Day.68 (Emphasis in original.)The 2007 move to expand state-run health care coverage went well beyond those in poverty, as a first step to socialized medicine. In 2008, Heinz gave the Kingsley Association a grant for $120,000. (As we shall see below, Teresa has a long history of funding the CDF.)After seeing the policy involvement a small, economically disadvantaged school might produce, Teresa Heinz expanded funding for children’s political advocacy. In 2007, the Heinz Endowments gave $140,000 to Earth Force, Inc. “to incorporate Earth Force into the curriculum of the Pittsburgh Public Schools.” The “Earth Force After School” program describes itself this way: “Youth explore their environment and work with community leaders to create long-term improvements to the world around them.”6 This is to say, Earth Force incorporates young children into the political advocacy of left-wing environmentalist groups, using the public schools as a recruiting ground for its partisan agenda. Its “Educational Philosophy” begins:
Earth Force believes that engaging students in authentic civic action is the most effective way to give them the knowledge, skills, and predispositions they need to participate in public life. By authentic, we mean two things: students address issues that matter to them, and projects involve genuine efforts to affect the issue through either policy advocacy or community education. Discussing issues, taking and defending positions, and talking about policy change are necessary but not sufficient; students need to try to effect changes in existing policies and community habits. (Emphases added.)As this statement makes explicit, students are told to lobby their elected officials on behalf of a partisan cause. EF attempts to justify drafting young children into the environmentalist movement using academic language: “Earth Force students are civic actors (social studies) addressing environmental problems (science) by promoting changes in policies and practices (language arts).”The environmentalists do not leave the young children to study and act on their own; they are often assigned to official movement minders. “Successful partnerships begin with the discovery of similar interests between schools and community based organizations (CBOs)…CBOs may have hundreds of jobs for teenagers.” What sorts of jobs would these local Green organizations have? “Verbally-inclined students may write the persuasive letters or survey questions…Those with ability in relationship building may take group leadership roles…Using the right sequence of preparation, experience, and reflection, students as young as age 10 can take part in Earth Force projects that result in genuine community improvement.” Earth Force is open about the political nature of its undertakings: “Surveys indicate a concern about the environment in the US that is widely held and consistent. EE aims to convert that concern into informed action, preferably around structural issues such as sustainable development, human health, and the relationship between economics and the environment.” Earth Force often brings children into this lobbyist role during school time. “Students often work on school-sponsored community service projects at lunch, during study halls and club meetings, or after school.”70 Heinz increased funding for Earth Force’s activities to $175,000 in the election year of 2008. Once grown, the indoctrinated are channeled into full political service. The Heinz Family Philanthropies established a Senate Fellowship Program for adults interested in the field of aging. Of 14 recipients since 1993, only two have worked for Capitol Hill Republicans. Instead, Heinz fellows worked for such U.S. senators as Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ron Wyden, Christopher Dodd, Barbara Boxer, James Jeffords, Jay Rockefeller, Debbie Stabenow, Blanche Lincoln, Jeff Bingaman, and George Mitchell.71Thus, Teresa Heinz expended the tax-exempt funds of the Heinz Endowments on political, often openly partisan organizations that promote the Democratic National Convention, benefit former Kerry campaign activists, get Democratic Party base voters to the polls, recruit aides for John Kerry’s Senate colleagues, and, in the last case, draft school-aged children into policy advocacy on behalf of the Democratic Party’s agenda. But Teresa Heinz has not merely spent her money turning out individuals already committed to the Democratic Party. She has invested in more intellectual endeavors.Chapter 5: The Echo ChamberOf all political battlefields, it is the heart and mind that are most profitable. True dominance comes when one captures the affections or intellectual allegiance of a broad mass, as FDR and Ronald Reagan did, yet greater opportunities exist today for affecting the citizenry. The 24-hour news media, voraciously hungry for information, hungers for the testimony of “experts” or passionate advocates who provide a compelling narrative. Organizations that can provide one or the other receive the opportunity to speak directly to millions of Americans and attempt to sway them. As a good general, Teresa Heinz has not left this field of battle desolate. Instead, she has spent millions of dollars financing groups that parrot Democratic or radical talking points. Her beneficiaries include organizations that oppose toppling the Taliban, accuse President Bush of committing nearly a thousand acts of deception en route to the Iraq war, call for disarmament and a supine foreign policy, clamor for welfare state entitlements, hail Cuba as an island paradise, and seek to raise gasoline taxes.Among the most radical of the widely covered national organizations to receive Heinz funding is PAX Christi USA. Teresa Heinz gave the leftist Catholic organization $100,000 in 2005 “for general operating support.” This far-Left group opposed every aspect of American self-defense against Islamic jihad, including our military strike against al-Qaeda. Following 9/11, Pax Christi (PCUSA) damned the U.S. war to topple the Taliban as “unjust” and the War on Terror “unconscionable,” a set of policies that “violate basic human rights and threaten irreparable harm to the planet.” It instead called for the government to bring terrorists before “an appropriate international tribunal.” The Left then blamed the victim, exhorting Americans “to educate ourselves and our communities about the underlying causes of the attacks on September 11” and to examine “the conscience of this nation about the role we have played in bringing about these violent events.”72In July 2002, a favorable media source reported Pax Christi leaders believed “U.S. policy in the region is too driven by its interest in capturing Osama bin-Laden and destroying the Al-Quaeda [sic.] terrorist network.”73 The only favorable light PCUSA espied was a “hopeful sign in the establishment of the International Criminal Court despite U.S. objections.”74 Later in 2002, as war approached in Iraq, the Catholic fringe called for a “lifting of the sanctions” against Baghdad, although unbeknownst to them, these sanctions had broken down through Saddam Hussein’s abuse of the Oil-for-Food program. The cloister’s antiwar screed concludes by advancing a number of practical steps, including taking a “Pledge of Resistance” against the U.S. government and heeding the call “to be one of hundreds of human shields who would travel to Iraq in the event that the United States declares war and invades that country.”75 (PCUSA would later disingenuously claim its delegation never sought to act as human shields.)76 The year it received this funding, PCUSA denounced “the war in Iraq” as “a war based on lies and deception,” decrying “the abominable practice of torture by our own government in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”77 In this, it echoed the popular stance of Democratic leaders like Ted Kennedy – and John Kerry. After the photos of doings at Abu Ghraib, Ted Kennedy seethed, “Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management: U.S. management.”78 Kerry would soon call for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign over the matter.79 Such positions are only bolstered if someone convinces the American people torture has taken place – and Pax Christi USA filled the gap. In June 2004, PCUSA called “on the U.S. to stop all forms of torture and abuse against detainees.”80However, the fringe group is not confined to condemning anti-terrorism; it brands U.S. foreign policy as terrorism. In March 2004, PCUSA described the overthrow of Haiti’s socialist president Jean Bertrand Aristide as “nothing less than a US supported coup d’etat by terrorists.”81 The group is composed of pacifists who long for “a new Catholic paradigm to replace the Just War Theory,”82the philosophy of warfare that has guided the Roman Catholic communion since it was first articulated by St. Augustine of Hippo more than a millennium ago. Similarly, the group denounces capitalism as the “misguided and ultimately disastrous machinations of neo-liberal policies foisted by the strong upon the weak.”83The organization sees the United States conceived in the all-pervasive iniquity of racism. PCUSA Vice-Chair Beatrice Parwatikar thundered, “Law in the U.S. protects white skin privilege because White male landowners created the laws to protect their rights, their culture and their wealth.”84 Teresa Heinz’s grants benefited groups that espoused the Democratic Party/radical Left foreign policy line – even when they were groups that putatively had little or nothing to do with foreign policy. For instance, the Center for Public Integrity measures the influence of campaign contributions and lobbyists on federal policy. This usually involves such things as tax breaks, no-bid contracts, and regulatory oversight. In 2007, Heinz awarded $100,000 “to support the ‘Mining Influence’ project.” Presumably, this is CPI’s record of mining companies’ political donations – which likely costs less than $100,000 to maintain. The relationship with the Center seems odd from a woman who, to date, has refused to release her full tax information. However, CPI’s mission involves much more than tracing mining checks. CPI made headlines in January 2008 by releasing “Iraq: The War Card.” The report claimed the Bush administration told 935 lies before the war in Iraq. CPI’s website states, “In a widely reported study of orchestrated deception, the Center found that President Bush and seven top officials made 935 false statements leading-up to the Iraq war – and offer them in a database for all to see.”85 John Perazzo of DiscoverTheNetworks.org noted a number of conspicuous donors to the Center: George Soros’s Open Society Institute “in 2002 and 2003 alone…gave more than $1.62 million to the Center for Public Integrity… Between 2002 and 2006 [the] Ford [Foundation] gave the Center some $3.25 million in grants…Between 2002 and 2007, [the Carnegie Corporation of New York] gave some $1.59 million to the Center for Public Integrity…Between 2002 and 2004, [The Joyce Foundation] funneled $350,000 in grants to the Center for Public Integrity. A notable recent member of the Joyce Foundation’s Board of Directors was Barack Obama.” Similarly, Bill Moyers’ The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy has given generously to the organization.86 Another domestic policy organization to weigh in on foreign policy is the Children’s Defense Fund. Teresa Heinz has a long history of funding CDF. In 1999, while Heinz sat on its board, the Carnegie Corporation of New York gave CDF $700,000. (See my previous book, 57 Varieties of Radical Causes for more.) On her own, she donated $1,000 “for the 2003 Celebration of the 30th Anniversary” to praise this bastion of social welfare policy. Headed by Marion Wright Edelman, who received the Heinz Award for the “Human Condition” in 1995, it was chaired by an upwardly mobile barrister named Hillary Rodham from 1986-1992.As noted in our previous chapter, Edelman learned early on the importance of using images of innocence to promote an unpopular economic message. She revealed, “I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change.” Barbara Olson noted in her book Hell to Pay:
Edelman’s great insight was to put children squarely in front of almost every domestic policy debate. This is central to the CDF’s mission and a marvelous marketing tool...The CDF has browbeaten lawmakers for such programs as Head Start or the nutrition program for Women, Infants and Children, as well as expanding welfare and public housing programs, guaranteed employment, and higher minimum wages...When critics argued that America’s welfare program was subsidizing illegitimacy and creating a culture of government-dependent poverty and victimhood, the CDF counteredthat any attempt to reduce the welfare state was a direct assault on children.87With the children as her shield, Edelman crusades for European socialist policies. CDF supports socialized medicine, the ineffective Head Start program, government-funded daycare, government-funded afterschool activities, and a wide variety of government programs – “to help families get the financial resources they need to support their children,” of course. These include “jobs that pay livable wages; education to help parents compete for better jobs; tax benefits to help support their children and lift themselves out of poverty;” (that is, a redistribution of wealth by tax rebate), and “cash assistance, food stamps, and low-cost housing.” For the CDF, as well, America is an inherently racist nation. In 2000, CDF Chairman David Hornbeck said: “Politics in this country is when…five white guys get in a room and cut up the pie. Rage is the right word. Until we boil over in controlled ways, this is not going to change.”88Edelman views national defense, not as a necessary protection for the collectivist Utopia she wishes to build, but a piggy bank to be raided in order to finance it. In her 1989 book Families in Peril Edelman wrote, “We must curb the fanatical military weasel and keep it in balance with competing national needs.”89 Five years earlier, she provided additional details of her vision: “For each missile we cancel, we could eliminate poverty for a year in 92,000 families headed by females. If we cancelled the whole program, we could eliminate poverty for all children in the U.S. twice over and have enough left to send all female heads of low-income families to college for a year!”90 In 1996, she presented her counter-proposal to Jim Wallis’ leftist religious group Call to Renewal: “Let’s guarantee a job. Let’s guarantee health care and children care. [sic.] Let’s turn this welfare repeal into real welfare reform.”91 It came as little surprise when, in 2003, the year of Heinz’s celebratory grant, CDF joined Not in Our Name, the AFL-CIO, and a wide variety of far-Left and Islamist organizations in condemning the Iraq war.92Another Heinz hero took a similar approach. Robert Greenstein won the 2008 Heinz Award for Public Policy “for his sometimes solitary voice advocating for America’s low-income families.”93 A former administrator of the food stamp program under Jimmy Carter, he is now Executive Director of the left-wing Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, which masks a left-leaning economic agenda in the mantle of “working families.” The Washington Post quotes Ron Haskins, a former Republican House staffer, as saying, “They are simply the most effective lobbyists on social issues in Washington, no question about it.” Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-Harlem, glowed, “They’ve given low-income people a seat at the table.” The Post observed the CBPP – now funded by such leftist powerhouses as the Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur Foundations – had been responsible for tremendous increases in government spending. “[T]hanks largely to the center’s work, programs like food stamps, nutrition for mothers and children, and the in domestic programs.” Like Edelman, Greenstein’s group opposed President Clinton’s signing the Republican welfare reform act to assure his reelection – for working families, of course.94Others present their objections under the guise of science. Teresa Heinz gave the Union of Concerned Scientists an unrestricted grant of $1,000 in 2005. The primary “concern” of the UCS seemed to be the Republican administration in Washington. The group had just publicly faulted President Bush in 2004 for an alleged “misuse of science.” Among other worries, the group feared the Bush administration too greatly favored abstinence education.95 In May 2005, the Union became concerned about a singularly unscientific matter: its members attended a protest opposing the appointment of John Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations.96 By this author’s incomplete count, the current board members of the UCS had given tens of thousands of dollars to John Kerry’s presidential campaign or to national leftist causes (like MoveOn.org) during the 2004 election cycle.Concerned scientists were joined by bleeding-heart physicians in opposing the U.S. War on Terror. Teresa Heinz gave $5,000 to a special project of the group Physicians for Social Responsibility.97 Founded by the notoriously pro-Soviet Helen Caldicott, the PSR has a longstanding relationship with Heinz, as this author documented in his previous book, 57 Varieties of Radical Causes. The organization advocates complete nuclear disarmament and lobbies Congress not to purchase any new nuclear warheads. PSR has endorsed Democratic Rep. Lynne Woolsey’s “SMART Security plan.” Aside from asking for a UN permission slip to deploy American troops, the most important plank in the SMART program is increasing “funding for humanitarian programs, which address the root causes of instability and terrorism, like hunger, illiteracy and unemployment.” The most important element of Physicians for Social Responsibility’s prescription to end the threat of Islamofascist terror is as follows: “America needs to invest more at home – on health care for all Americans, rebuilding our schools and education system, creating jobs, and stopping pollution of our air, land and water.”98 Whatever the profession, Teresa Heinz has prepared a grant for its colleagues to condemn her husband’s electoral rival. Among the most organized of all professions are those subjected to compulsory membership in a labor union. Heinz made sure the blue collar received a share of the green. In 2008, she bequeathed $25,000 to the Steelworkers Charitable and Educational Organization, run by the United Steelworkers. The purpose of this money was “to support the ‘Get the Lead Out’ project, a lead-testing kit designed to educate consumers about environmental health risks associated with unregulated foreign imports.” The Heinz website added this information in September 2008, linking to the United Steelworkers website. At that time, the USW homepage contained a large photo of its endorsement of Obama/Biden, information on how to help Democrats get elected nationwide, and a prominent ad for the film Battle in Seattle, an R-rated drama in which stars Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, and Ray Liotta glorify the violent 1999 Seattle anti-World Trade Organization riots. But the “Get the Lead Out” project is not simply a testing kit; according to its website it is but “one tool in our effort to draw attention to the dangers posed by an unregulated, unfair trade system.”99 Its online petition states, “We need tougher trade laws that not only safeguard consumers but protect our jobs.”100 Its ultimate goal is to renegotiate NAFTA and GATT – part of what it derides as “a failed experiment in free trade” – just as John Edwards argued in 2004.101 The website thoughtfully contains form letters to send to one’s elected representatives.102
****“I don’t belong to an organized political party,” Will Rogers used to say, “I’m a Democrat.” The Democratic Party is less a big tent than a patchwork quilt – a coalition of interest groups stitched together by common history, convenience, and a general desire for larger government. Such a party consists of more than just labor and peaceniks: it also contains hyphenated-American groups, feminists, environmentalists, and technocratic dullards. All these patches have been stitched together with tax-exempt “charitable” giving in the last five years.Preserving the status quo of reverse racism has been at the core of the Democratic Party since the Reagan administration. Teresa Heinz brought the Affirmative Action lobby on board in 2005 with a $200,000 to Public Interest Projects Inc., “to support the Western Pennsylvania Fulfilling the Dream Fund.”
Dream Fund grantees are developing new communication tools and messages, creating a body of knowledge on the impact of anti-affirmative action initiatives and creating new, innovative approaches to continuing diversity. With Dream Fund support, Firelight Media developed an affirmative action digital toolkit (www.affirmativeactionadvocacy.com) which serves as a resource for grantees and activists in the field. Arise, a documentary exploring the consequences of the California ban on affirmative action and the value of race and gender diversity in national life, is also available on the website.103Such a nationwide support for employment and educational discrimination cannot operate on a shoestring. Its website explains, “The Dream Fund was established in 2004 with a $10 million pledged by the Ford Foundation.” In addition to Ford, major national donors include George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Carnegie Corporation, the Marguerite Casey Foundation, Falk Foundation, and the C.S. Mott Foundation. The Fund, in turn, writes checks of its own. “As of April 2007, the Dream Fund has invested more than $6 million in grants made to 43 organizations nationwide.” Recipients include the ACLU, the Gamaliel Foundation, the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, Montana People’s Action, and the “University of Pittsburgh- Center on Race and Social Problems,” among many others. The Fund currently has projects in 13 states. In southwestern Pennsylvania, this group has donated money to the Education Law Center, which suggests its advocates “respond to attacks on the right of undocumented [read: illegal] children to attend school. Responses can include contacting legislators…writing letters to the editor; and publicizing the contributions made by immigrant families and children.”104 Another recipient, the Education Policy and Leadership Center – which also received direct Heinz funding in 2006 to the tune of $25,000 – operates “School Board Candidate Workshops” around the region.105Feminists, too, have a place at Heinz’s big table. In 2005, Heinz gave the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania $10,000 through the Vira I. Heinz Endowment “for general operating support.” WGFSWPA seems dedicated to two ends: getting women appointed to government positions and ending alleged wage inequality; however, it works most at the latter end. During its “Will Work for Equality” event, the group claimed, “women earn 69 cents per dollar [that a man makes].”106 It fails to mention wage disparity is largely a function of women taking years off work following childbirth, and accounting for this wages balance out. Yet like the Dream Fund, WGFSWPA also funds other organizations for agitation on behalf of feminist causes. Its website explains, “Through a combination of public advocacy, coalition building and grantmaking, WGF seeds, supports, and strengthens women’s and girls’ efforts to achieve social and economic justice in Southwest Pennsylvania.”107 In 2004 and 2005 alone, the group boasted of “planting the seeds for social change, economic justice, and girls futures” with funds that “totaled nearly $100,000.”108 Most recently, the group financed the “Primetime Misogyny 2007 Media Survey,” conducted by the Thomas Merton Center, a Pittsburgh-area consortium of radical leftists.109 (See below.) As with any ideological movement, its leaders do not wish for its followers to go away without drinking in more of its views. Under its “Feminist News” section, its website recommends activists read the socialist rag In These Times. Under “Political,” it links to the ACLU, MoveOn.org, the Alliance for Justice, EMILY’s List, League of Women Voters and other far-leftists.110Think tank policy wonks, of the sort that populate ivory towers because they could find employment nowhere else, take up another constituency. Heinz awarded $10,000 to the Council on Foreign Relations for a program to recognize the group’s “most generous donors.”111 Although the “CFR” is hardly the conspiratorial powerhouse described by paranoid right-wingers, and by no means do all its members share a common viewpoint, the general thrust of its members’ thought could fairly be described as both liberal and internationalist.As such, the group has made pointed attacks on the Bush Doctrine.Domestic policy wonks received yet more funding. In 2008 alone, Heinz gave the Brookings Institution $150,000 “for support of the Metropolitan Policy Program.”112 Its founding director, Bruce Katz, received the 2006 Heinz Award for Public Policy. A longtime proponent of “smart growth” policies and an opponent of “suburban sprawl,” Katz favors packing people tightly within inner cities and urban areas.113 In his acceptance speech, he stated: “A world undergoing global warming demands new sustainable approaches to human settlement. I believe we can build a very different America than the one that took root in the aftermath of the Second World War, one that is competitive and prosperous, but also sustainable and inconclusive.”114 This new future very much resembles the old New Deal approach. In a 2000 op-ed, he suggested the best way to help minimum wage workers find “decent housing” included “[i]ncreasing the minimum wage, expanding the earned income tax credit, and increasing the number of new housing vouchers.”115 Katz is a major proponent of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which subsidizes families earning (in 2002) up to $33,000 a year. It gives funds to minimum wage workers equal to approximately 40 percent of their earned income. By his own statistics, 15 million people, or three-quarters of all recipients, are not in poverty to begin with. Katz encouraged state and local versions of the EITC.116 To solve the economic dislocation 9/11 brought to New York City, he suggested Michael Bloomberg implement a make-work program.117 Perhaps by coincidence, the Brookings Institution Bernard Baruch lauded John Kerry at the eve of the 2004 election cycle. In August 2004, Katz compared George W. Bush to John Kerry. Katz declaimed that while “it’s clear that Bush’s policies have exacerbated the troubles of many Midwestern cities,” by contrast Kerry “lays out a solid agenda.”118 Teresa Heinz was, and is, a member of the Brookings Institution board of directors, creating yet another potential conflict of interest. Ironically, Brookings is known for its pursuit of campaign finance reform legislation, to expose the ties between contributions and political favors.No modern collection of leftists or Democrats would be complete without the constituency dearest to Teresa Heinz’s heart: environmentalists. She met her second husband at the 1992 Earth Summit, and she has shoehorned an unfathomable amount of grant money into Green causes of one sort or another. Between designing “Green buildings” and creating “sustainable” technology on every conceivable front, she has underwritten more than her share of environmentalist propaganda.Chief among this lot is a radio program produced by the Pittsburgh Community Broadcasting Corporation known as “The Allegheny Front.” Heinz has donated upwards of $100,000 a year one of multiple grants to underwrite this “environmental radio program.” Currently a half-hour weekly show,119 the program has questioned the validity of laws against violent eco-terrorists and sung the praises of Castro’s Cuba. On August 23, 2006, the AFR presented “Life in Cuba: An Audio Postcard.” However, reporter Ann Murray presented instead an audio love letter. “The scarcity of things has not dampened the Cuban spirit,” she said. Her friend Jane, born in Vietnam, told her, “When people don’t own much, they redirect their focus. They congregate. They commune.” The “reporter” informs her audience the Castro regime has “lovingly breathed life back” into the island gulag’s cities. Better yet, “Conservation is a way of life in Cuba...[T]oilet paper is handed out by the square in public bathrooms.” Yet this rationing is only the beginning:
Cuba offers much to love. The pesky signs of commercialism don’t exist. Only placards celebrating Revolution punctuate the landscape. Everywhere the uplifted face of Ché Guevara gazes into the island’s future. But there is little romance in poverty. If the U.S. embargo were lifted today, would Cubans embrace our life? Would they stop meeting in public squares and watch TV? ...Would kids demand name-brand toys? Would farmers spray their crops with chemicals?120Indeed, neither do any pesky signs of dissent exist: things like independent newspapers, political parties, and discussion groups. Their last practitioners were wiped out in the manner taught and practiced by Ché Guevara. Guevara taught “unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”121 Yet from this sloppy kiss to Fidel, one would assume the worst thing that could befall a free people was that thousands of them no longer had to flee on leaky rafts to experience freedom.The broadcasters cast aspersions on those who wish to punish domestic terrorists, as well. AF broadcasters alert the audience that the reason for Pennsylvania’s new ecoterrorism law is “[o]stensibly, a rash of very serious acts of vandalism,” but “there were calls for an eco-terrorism law before these acts of vandalism happened” from “a legislator in the northwestern part of Pennsylvania where there is a great deal of logging.” Additionally, “The ACLU has objected to the law because the group believes it interferes with the First Amendment.” Besides, “Some people have said this new law is overkill.”122 The general impression left is that the logging companies have run roughshod over the individual’s right to protest, when the bill actually bans violence. When an opponent cannot be demonized, the Allegheny Front is happy to lampoon them. Discussing Al Gore’s pseudo-documentary An Inconvenient Truth, reporter Jason Witmer derides the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s commercials opposing the film’s inaccuracies. According to Witmer, the ads are “a bit like something you might see on Saturday Night Live. But they’re real, and they’re airing because reducing carbon dioxide emissions could mean a cutback on the use of fossil fuels. The producers of the commercial receive some of their funding from EXXON mobile. Gore says misinformation has deluded the American public.” After painting the CEI as a willing servant of evil petrodollars, Witmer argues the film is not a fair and balanced documentary – but this is apparently excusable, because it gets people’s attention. “The film is surprisingly captivating and informative. And who knows, maybe Global Warming will become the most crucial issue of our time.”123 If it does, however, it will not be due to Gore’s argument. Gore, who once equated failure to recycle with the Holocaust, flubs his way throughout the film so badly that Mario Lewis Jr. of the Competitive Enterprise Institute listed 10 pages of the film’s falsehoods, exaggerations, distortions, or ignored evidence – and later released a book-length response.124The program engaged in another pet cause of Teresa’s, too: the canonization of environmentalist author Rachel Carson. As in years past, Heinz gifted multiple grants to the Rachel Carson Homestead, awarding the pilgrimage site four grants between 2005-2007 totaling $260,000. The monies served both to glorify Carson and continue environmental education programs conducted by the homestead. The April 26, 2006, episode of the Allegheny Front featured a glowing biography of Rachel Carson and a reading from Silent Spring.125 The journalist who reported on Carson’s life – once again Ann Murray – told her audience, “Nearly 40 years [after Carson’s death], pollution and chemical use still abound, but [Carson biographer Linda] Lear says Rachel Carson’s legacy has made an indelible difference.” The piece ends with the words of Lear: “Without Rachel Carson, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”126Sadly, truer words were never spoken. Before the appearance of Silent Spring, the use of DDT pesticides had eradicated malaria worldwide. Four decades later, the ban has resulted in a pan-African genocide. Two-to-three million people die needlessly from malaria every year, all of them in Third World countries-most in the Indian subcontinent and Africa.127 The World Health Organization reports 2,500 children under the age of five die of malaria every day.128 In all, the DDT ban has threshed a deadly harvest of 50-90 million African lives.129 Nearly half-a-billion people contracted malaria in 1999 alone, 90 percent of them in Africa. Young people are among the most susceptible, both to malaria and to Green propaganda.So pleased was Heinz with the Allegheny Front that she has tried to duplicate it in the Old Dominion. In 2005, the Vira I. Heinz Endowment gave a $150,000 grant to the Virginia Organizing Project “to produce an environmental health public radio program.” Aside from the Green radio, the VOP seeks to abolish death penalty and racial profiling, and pass a “living wage.”130Another Green goal is increasing taxes on gasoline and fossil fuels, in a belief the emissions cause Global Warming. To that end, Teresa Heinz Kerry gave $50,000 to The Natural Step. In 2005 “for general operating support.” This is the U.S. affiliate of a movement begun by oncologist Dr. Karl-Henrick Robèrt in Sweden (where it is known as Det Naturaliga Steget). In essence, its message is environmentalists should stop entertaining scientific queries about whether they are right about the man-made element of global warming, instead shifting to public activism on behalf of Green politics. The U.S. affiliate is now housed at the Thoreau Center in San Francisco. One of its partisans, Paul Hawken,131 has written that they have big steps in mind for transforming the nation: “When you read The Natural Step documents or attend its seminars, it becomes evident that what we can all agree on is far more radical than that which we disagree on. We do not have to get into intricate levels of complexity or resolve scientific contradictions to understand how the whole system works, and therefore, what forces work against it.” He notes one of the fruits of the movement: “The Swedish oil company is lobbying in favor of increased gas taxes to finance research into alcohol fuels.”132 The goal is to move the world toward four pillars of “sustainability.” The fourth pillar sounds suspiciously socialist: “In a sustainable society, people are not subject to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs.”133 The Natural Step’s founder encourages his followers not to worry about the cost to the economy. “No temporary trade balances, illusory bank accounts, or pseudo-scientific disputes can save us from the consequences: The only thing that can is the restoration of cyclical processes. To argue about the cost of that restoration borders on the absurd. The question is not how much it will cost, but rather how much it will cost to hide in ignorance and wait for the problem to become even bigger.”134 This sounds, not like the scientific method, but a form of religious faith, a trust in a false god.In her most recent, largest “philanthropic” endeavor, Teresa Heinz has allocated more than $10.3 million of tax-exempt money to finance the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. The center, named after he late Republican husband, is billed as a venue of “broad nonpartisan support and strong scientific basis [that will] allow decision-makers to focus on the best course of action – rather than spending time debating the condition of the nation’s environment.”135 Another grant’s wording is slightly more specific: “to create a new, independent institution that will do applied research on environmental issues and communicate the results to the policy making community & general public.” In other words, Teresa is setting up a think tank in her late husband’s name that will tell the public and the nation’s elected leaders the debate on global warming is over – and now we must implement the Green Left’s neo-Luddite agenda. The Center has yet to get off the ground, but if it does, it will be sure to play a leading role in convincing politicians and ordinary Americans to sign off on the environmentalist Left’s partisan agenda. Such partisan use of grant money is unsettling. But Heinz funds have financed much more disturbing content.
THE RADICALS ATMChapter 6: “Change, Not Charity!”Although Teresa Heinz devoted substantial amounts of tax-exempt grants to organizations that would aid her husband’s presidential campaign, not all her political largesse funneled into the hands of limousine liberals. In the election year of 2004, grant money under the trusteeship of Teresa Heinz financed a motley crew of pro-terrorist lawyers, Black Panther enthusiasts, and “radical queers.” These grantees protested the 2004 Republican National Convention and brought in violent rioters to train Pennsylvania activists in the art of angry demonstration. True, some recipients brought leftist voters to the polls in 2004, but they also aided adults transporting minors across state lines to get an abortion. In 2004, the Heinz gave $100,000 to the Three Rivers Community Fund “to support the work of grassroots organizations actively engaged in promoting social, racial and economic justice.” As noted in 57 Varieties, she made an identical grant in 2002. The Three Rivers Community Fund (or Foundation) distributes monies to a wide variety of far-Left radicals. TRCF may be more honest than Heinz; its motto is, “Change, Not Charity!”136 Recent TRCF grant recipients include:137
Allegheny County Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). “ACORN used their grant money to support their work in organizing voters in low-income communities, by doing voter education and registration. They also developed community leadership in the low-income areas, who then conducted campaigns to educate and inform the general public of the community issues faced by low-income and elderly people in their neighborhoods. The community leaders also met with their state and city officials to discuss pressing issues.” Aside from its overtly socialist agenda, ACORN has distinguished itself through involvement in a number of alleged voter fraud operations. In July 2007, Secretary of State Sam Reed held a press conference accusing seven ACORN workers of “the worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history of the state of Washington. There has been nothing comparable to this.”138 In Ohio, a canvasser was paid in crack cocaine; among those registered were “Mary Poppins” and “Jive Turkey.”139 In Missouri alone, ACORN reportedly submitted 20,000 questionable names as new voters, including one individual registered under three separate Social Security numbers.140 ACORN’s 2004 voter drive alone was “marred by allegations of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams,” including registering felons in states where they were ineligible.141
Veterans for Peace, Inc. “VFP used TRCF funds to distribute 625 copies of the book Addicted to War to libraries and teachers in the inner city and other economically deprived public school in the Pittsburgh area. They also simultaneously offer veterans as guest speakers. The books will help students to critically think and better weigh a military recruiter’s efforts, which heavily target economically depreived [sic.] students.” According to its website, the 77-page Addicted to War has been endorsed by far-Left radicals like Howard Zinn, “Susan Sarandon, Noam Chomsky, Ron Kovic, Martin Sheen, Cindy Sheehan, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Ramsey Clark, Ed Asner, Patch Adams, Medea Benjamin, Woody Harrelson, Kathy Kelly, Kris Kristofferson, S. Brian Willson, Michael Parenti, Fernando Suarez, Father Roy Bourgeois, William Blum, Blase Bonpane and many others.” Moreover, it is “being used as a history textbook in hundreds of high schools and colleges.”142 This poorly drawn comic book informs students within the first two pages, “The costs of being a military superpower and waging wars around the world are high…Foreign wars also bring bloody retaliation against the U.S. – such as the terrorist attacks that took the lives of thousands of people at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.”143 (Emphasis in original.) The remainder of the book presents America as a racist imperial power; even in World War II Americans “had imperial ambitions of their own.” Although the book does not mention John Kerry by name, it reports, “In April 1971, more than a thousand Vietnam veterans gathered at the Capitol Building in Washington and threw back the medals they had received in the war.” (Emphasis in original.) Teresa Heinz’s grant money helped assure that Pennsylvania schoolchildren were taught that al-Qaeda Islamic fanatics engaged in mere “retaliation”; they gave America what she had coming. And military recruiters are “the most dangerous characters of all.”144 It concludes with a list of far-Left organizations students should contact to fight the U.S. military. “Depreived” students deserve an education, not an injection of leftist bile.
Stop the FTAA Campaign. “TRCF funds were used to bring the Ruckus Society to Pittsburgh for a weekend of intensive training to help local activists develop the skills they need to organize most effectively around local issues.” (Emphasis added.) The Ruckus Society is best known for its involvement in the riotous Seattle World Trade Center riots, and its Action Planning Training Manual advocates the destruction of private (and public) property as a means of protest.145 At the 2000 Republican National Convention, Philadelphia police halted Ruckus protesters and “seized improvised weapons, gasoline-soaked rags, and piano wire that the protesters intended to string across streets to trip police horses. In the melee 23 police cars were damaged and 15 officers were injured.”146 On October 25-26, 2003, Heinz grants, funneled through TRCF, brought Ruckus in for a two-day seminar teaching local anti-trade activists “Direct Action Training Strategies.”147 Less than a year later, Ruckus would again bring its disruptive tactics to bear at the 2004 Republican National Convention – a common thread among Heinz grant recipients, as we shall see.148
Committee to Support the Center for Constitutional Rights. The CCR is one of the foremost pillars of the Legal Left. Founded by William Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy, legal radicals who drafted a memo in 1969 to form a new “Communist party,”149 the organization has labored since 9/11 to present the United States as a totalitarian country, undermine Homeland Security, and secure constitutional rights for non-citizen terrorists.150 “TRCF funds were used to host a speaking session with Jules Lobel, a Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh, as the keynote speaker.” Jules Lobel is CCR vice president. In Dellums and 55 other members of Congress” who sued President Bush to prevent the first Gulf War.151 Two weeks after 9/11, he and Michael Ratner, a lifelong admirer of Ché Guevara,152 wrote an article wherein they described themselves as “lawyers who have spent our professional lives trying to make the U.S. accountable for its crimes,” and concluded “the use of military force” against al-Qaeda “is inadvisable.” Instead, the duo suggested calling a UN tribunal to try those responsible for 9/11, suggesting the UN Security Council “could apply sanctions” if Afghanistan refused to extradite Osama bin Laden.153 Lobel was party to the CCR’s Rasul v. Bush case,154 a landmark decision in which the Supreme Court granted habeas corpus rights to non-citizen detainees captured while on foreign battlefields.155 CCR promptly sued to gain non-uniformed, non-citizen detainees access to the U.S. court system.156
Pittsburgh Bill of Rights Defense Campaign. As TRCF explained, “This group is working towards repealing all or portions of the USA PATRIOT Act. A two-part project, they intend to first persuade Pittsburgh City Council to pass a resolution against the Act, and then to do a public education campaign about the Act and what it entails.” The first part was, indeed, successful, and the nation is less safe as a result.
Pittsburgh Committee for Black Radical Congress. “Funding went to host a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day program on the Black Farmer in America. Speakers also touched on topics such as reparations, political prisoners, and prisoners of war.” (Emphasis added.) The BRC’s “Freedom Agenda” vows “to eliminate the deliberate trafficking in drugs and weapons in our communities by organized crime, and by institutions of the state such as the Central Intelligence Agency,” an action BRC calls “state terrorism.” It adds: “We will fight to advance beyond capitalism…We will fight for reparations.” (Emphasis in original.) Moreover, “We seek amnesty for, and the release of, all political prisoners.” In many Black Power organizations, cop-killers are considered “political prisoners.”157 Its website states, “We cannot limit ourselves to electoral politics – we must identify multiple sites of struggles” – ominous words containing the implicit threat of violence.158 The BRC has been willing to link arms with Louis Farrakhan’s anti-American extremists. Its website carries an article from hate poet Amiri Baraka, quoting Vladimir Lenin, to argue that black radicals should be involved in the Nation of Islam’s “Millions More Movement” in 2005. Baraka wrote incoherently, “as Lenin and other teachers have said, in the absence of the ‘Advanced’, the Revolutionaries, the Communists, the gesture of opposition to monopoly, national oppression, all reaction is more usual than actual movement.”159
Rights and Responsibilities. “TRCF supported Part II of this organization’s Africana Human Rights Film Project, which entailed presenting the film ‘All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party and Beyond,’ bringing in the photo exhibit ‘Black Panthers 1968’ for a two-month run, and presenting speakers.”
Blacks United Against the War. “TRCF funds went to a teach-in about the political and economic impact of the war in Iraq on the black community. The teach-in also examined the escalation of racial profiling and the growing threats to civil liberties that the war has produced.”
Conscience Pittsburgh. As noted in 57 Varieties, this organization puts its resources at the disposal of those in the armed forces who wish to declare themselves conscientious objectors. One of the Left’s leitmotifs has revolved around convincing enough soldiers to leave the forces so the war could not continue.
American Friends Service Cmte. “The [AFSC] National Guard Listening Project will use dialogue and listening to raise awareness of the economic and human cost of deploying the National Guard in Iraq, and will be part of a state-wide project to bring home the National Guard. A group of trained listeners will interview members of the National Guard and their families and communities, and document the concerns and issues around serving overseas. The report generated will be used to raise awareness of the cost of war.”
Students in Solidarity. “The University of Pittsburgh group used funds for operational support and for their various organizing campaigns on campus and in the Pittsburgh community.” SIS publicly protested against the war.160
Pittsburgh Campaign for Democracy Now. “This group is working towards getting the daily radio program called ‘Democracy Now,’ hosted by radical commentator Amy Goodman, to be carried on a Pittsburgh radio station.” Democracy Now! combines all the excitement of NPR with the political objectivity of Pravda.
Palestinian Solidarity Committee. “This organization used TRCF funds to host a Palestinian Film Festival featuring documentaries, shorts, and films giving the Palestinian story, all followed by facilitated discussions.”
Prevention Point Pittsburgh. As noted in 57 Varieties, PPP hands out needles to Pittsburgh junkies.
Western Pennsylvania Coalition to Close the School of the Americas. “TRCF funds helped representatives of the coalition attend the annual mass protest against SOA at Fort Benning, Georgia, in addition to extending the organization’s reach to areas outside the city of Pittsburgh by hosting educational programs (lectures, films, and concerts) in Southwestern PA.” As noted in 57 Varieties, these often lead to the mass arrest of aging hippies and naïve college students. The Left’s pretext is that the School of the Americas (since renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) teaches Third World dictators torture methods. However, as one analyst aptly put it: “Fifteen years ago, the school’s so-called “torture” manuals were exposed…[and only] two dozen mostly ambiguous phrases were deemed offensive. One phrase suggested that a drunken insurgent is more likely to talk. Another mentioned the possibility of hypnotism or a ‘truth serum.’ Still another spoke about mailing threatening anonymous letters to insurgents. Threats to arrest relatives were cited as one form of potential intimidation. The closest endorsement of torture was a phrase that referred vaguely to ‘information obtained involuntarily from insurgents who have been captured.’ More typical in the manuals is a warning that an interrogator should not: ‘be rude, or impolite... make fun of the interrogee...Lose his temper...Use profane language...[or] Argue.’”161
Women’s Law Project. This feminist legal entity distinguished itself for the wrong reasons, not least for seemingly encouraging Pennsylvanians to transport minors across state lines for an abortion, in violation of state law. Its own words state: “It is legal for teenaged women to cross state lines to get an abortion. However, if you are under 14 and if an adult takes you across Pennsylvania state lines for an abortion without your parent’s consent, the adult may risk a charge of interfering with the custody of a minor. Adults who are accompanying young women under 14 to out-of-state abortion providers should contact a lawyer or the Women’s Law Project.”162 (Emphasis added.) They were pointedly not asked to merely obey the law, as that would challenge the WLP’s near-worship of abortion. “The Women’s Law Project has provided repeated amicus support to challenges to state and federal “partial birth” abortion restrictions,” represented Planned Parenthood before the Supreme Court,163 and lobbied the FDA to approve over-the-counter sales of the “Morning After Pill.”164 Abortion aside, as far as the WLP is concerned, the more women the merrier: it opposed state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.165 The feminist group opposes all-boys charter schools, though they are designed to give minority males a strong male role model as a counterweight to gang camaraderie.166 Finally, the project boasts of its prowess in acquiring government funds for drug dealers: “In response to WLP advocacy, in December, 2004, the Pennsylvania legislature acted to restore TANF cash assistance and food stamps to impoverished people who had been permanently banned from receiving these benefits because of a felony drug conviction in their past.”167
NARAL-PA Foundation, Western Pennsylvania Campaign. “TRCF provided funds to help increase Western Pennsylvania constituent involvement in the pro-choice movement through campus organizing, the Campaign for Contraceptive Coverage, the TORCH (Teens Organizing for Reproductive Choice) program, the crisis pregnancy initiative, and coalition efforts.”
People Against Police Violence. In March 2003, PAPV held a rally where participants carried signs with statements like, “Stand Up Against Police Terror”; “Racism At Home, Racism Abroad”; and “Shoot a Child in the Back? I Thought They Did That In Iraq!”168
Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. In addition to the indirect TRCF grant, this event received $9,000 from the Heinz Endowments in the year 2006. (See below.)
Pittsburgh Playwright Theatre Company, which used the grant to underwrite one-act plays on GLBT themes during the Pittsburgh Pride Theatre Festival.
Pittsburgh Transsexual Support Group, which funded “a day-long conference on transgender issues” and “the Pittsburgh Transgender Day of Remembrance Ceremony.”
Voices for a New Tomorrow. “TRCF funds were used to contract with a community organizer/facilitator to complete the work of defining goals and objectives for Voices.” The group is a “spiritual” resource for GLBTs claiming, “Coming out is a courageous and spiritual act.” The group also advocated gay “marriage.”169
K’vetsh Pittsburgh. “K’vetsh used TRCF funds to cover the expenses for their monthly ‘all-queer, allgenderopen mic cabaret.’”
Book ‘Em is a non-profit that gives books to prison inmates and had plans to “produce and publish educational booklets for prisoners in Pennsylvania dealing with law, how to start your own business, and how to write grants.” The group’s founder, who goes by the clever monicker Etta Cetera, declared the project was not merely about educating prisoners but condemning the racist state that sent so many to prison. This nation’s “massive prison expansion is fueled not by an actual increase in crime rates, but by harsh drug laws and wholesale criminalization of people of color, poor people and youth.”170
Mon Valley Media, Inc. TRCF money was used “to produce a one-hour documentary entitled, ‘Death Watch,’ about innocent people serving time on death row in Pennsylvania.”Like ACORN, other TRCF activities were more exclusively partisan in nature:
The League of Women Voters. “The LWV in Westmoreland County worked to build strong coalitions to empower neglected, disenfranchised populations. They targeted three main populations: individuals with developmental disabilities, aging individuals, and students who would be soon votingfor the first time.”
League of Young Voters Education Fund. “The League of Young Voters utilized its funding to enhance their all-encompassing voter engagement strategy, including registration, education, mobilization, and election protection. Their most recent grant used funds to create promotional materials and to send outreach workers to the Allegheny County Jail and targeted communities. The materials helped potential voters learn about judicial candidates and raise their awareness of social justice issues.” (Emphasis added.)
Coalition of Concerned Citizens. “The Coalition of Concerned Citizens works for voter registration, education, and mobilization of ex-offenders in Allegheny County. They aim to increase ex-offenders’ political and civic involvement by hiring ex-offenders as outreach workers to go into their communities and encourage other ex-offenders to get involved in the political process.” (Emphasis added.) As if there weren’t enough crooks in politics.
People for the American Way Foundation. “ThePFAWF used its funding for its Western Pennsylvania Democracy Campaign, aiming to increase civic participation in the region’s African-American, Hispanic, and other disenfranchised communities in addition to building public awareness and engagement about the need for a fair and working election system.”
Pittsburgh United. “The funds received allowed them to include voter registration and engagement to their ongoing grassroots organizing. Activities included door-to-door canvassing, mass meetings, phone banking, and collaborations.”
Greater Pittsburgh Student Voices. “GPSV aims to use their funds to enhance their voter outreach and education drives through more emphasis on high school registration events and a voter educationfocused Civics Fair…They intend the Civics Fair to become an annual event.”
Black Political Empowerment Project. “B-PEP utilized funds to supplement and enhance their operational plan, allowing them to expand their voter registration, education, advocacy, and election protection work, both independently and as a participant in coalitions. They also surveyed voters to find out what their experience was like, and their attitudes toward voting. They also sponsored or co-sponsored candidate forums.”One of the largest single recipients of TRCF funds has been the Thomas Merton Center. Despite its name, the gentle Roman Catholic monk had nothing to do with its founding. The wide-ranging radicalism of TMC was covered in 57 Varieties and remains true. In this case, TRCF grants to TMC promoted mobilizing the radical Left. “The center is a widely used resource to groups working for environmental, economic, racial and social justice in Pittsburgh. Projects supported by TRCF include a series of forums on racism; distribution of the Peace, Justice and Ecology Directory, the Citizens Budget Campaign; hosting speakers on various social justice causes; and the Youth Arts and Advocacy Project, making connections between advocacy, art and activism.” The Heinz Endowments directly financed the Thomas Merton Center with a grant of $10,000 “for funding to complete the documentary ‘Enough is ENOUGH: The Death of Jonny [sic.] Gammage.” The documentary was narrated by black screen star Danny Glover and interviewed such intellectual heavyweights as “Louis Farrakhan, Johnnie Cochran, Al Sharpton and many others.”171 On its “What You Can Do to Help” page,172 after viewing the film, it suggests joining a number of organizations:
Refuse & Resist! R&R is headed by C. Clark Kissinger, the head of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist splinter group so extreme even other Marxists shun it. R&R’s homepage currently calls for freeing cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and terror attorney Lynne Stewart.173 A major player in the antiwar movement, R&R is openly hostile to the United States and has sought mass amnesty for anyone involved in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, including those who savagely beat truck driver Reginald Denny.174
The League of Young Voters. See above.
The October 22 Coalition to stop police brutality, which is allied with the New Black Panther Party, Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, NY Free Mumia Coalition, Republic of New Afrika, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Cindy Sheehan, Lynne Stewart, and World Can’t Wait, among many others.175
Stolen Lives, a joint project of and the National Lawyers Guild, The Anthony Baez Foundation, and The October 22nd Coalition.176TMC’s radicalism is hardly limited to participating in the extremism of others. Its publication, The New People, has run articles supporting the right of Iraqi terrorists to murder U.S. soldiers. Wrote one stout soul:
Iraqis have a right to resist the violence and brutality directed against them. When they have protested peacefully they have been arrested, tortured, fired upon, and killed. The Iraqis have increasingly begun to use whatever means exist at their disposal to resist, including force. This would be true of any people subjected to these circumstances.On a global scale, the force most effectively preventing the United States government from achieving its imperial aims is the armed resistance in Iraq…The most powerful military machine in human history has been checked – and even more death and destruction has been prevented – because a large number of Iraqis have chosen to fight the occupation of their country.The writer closed with a poignant question. After recounting a list of perceived American evils, he asked, “Whose side are we on?”177TMC also opposed the Academic Freedom hearings mandated by the Pennsylvania Select Committee on Academic Freedom from September 2005-June 2006, the first hearings of their kind held to investigate academic bias on campus in hiring and grading. The center’s newsletter, The New People, recounted protests against basic academic fairness: “As the Select Committee’s hearings got underway, members of Pitt’s ISO [International Socialist Organization] and their supporters stood outside the doors holding posters that read, ‘No to McCarthyism,’ ‘Keep out the thought police’ and ‘HUAC hearings this way.’” The article takes particular aim at David Horowitz and the “extreme right-wing website www.frontpagemag.com.”178Perhaps the Thomas Merton Center’s greatest service to Teresa Heinz, though, had little to do with any of these “philanthropic” concerns. In 2004, TMC took a contingent of protesters to disrupt the Republican National Convention in New York City. As noted in 57 Varieties, the group began planning in February with a remarkably open goal: “to physically disrupt to the maximum extent possible the functioning of the RNC.”179 A subsequent issue of The New People celebrated their incursion into active combat, listing the number of arrests at each protest but noting many events had too many to count. Ironically, they “heckle[d] RNC delegates as they attended Broadway shows,” while other Heinz grants may have paid for such tickets at the 2004 DNC. Among other illegal actions listed:
“Activists wearing nothing but the words ‘Stop AIDS’ and ‘Drop the Debt’ stenciled on their bodies block traffic at 33rd St. & 8th Ave.”;
“Occupy intersections and block delegates’ buses”;
“Two women are dragged off the convention floor during Bush’s speech”;
“Two women interrupt Dick Cheney’s speech”;
“One infiltrator raises his ‘Bush Lied. My Son Died.’ sign in front of Laura Bush. CodePink’s Medea Benjamin unfurls a banner during Arnold [Schwarzenegger]’s speech.”;
“Disrupting the speech of White House Chief of Staff”;
A “mass protest panty flash”; and
A “flash mob.”180Following the election, TMC held a “Post-Election Perspectives Forum,” and “asked important questions such as: What went wrong? How did Bush win? How do progressive people react? etc.” Apparently Teresa Heinz’s money did the trick, as the article confirms these radicals voted for Kerry in the swing state of Pennsylvania, which he ultimately won. But their votes left them hollow. “A contentious point surrounding the support of an extremely centrist candidate like John Kerry was touched upon numerous times. Many progressives and radicals seemed to regret their vote against their own conscience for a pro-war, anti-gay marriage, imperialist and ultimately being defeated anyway.”181 But they did not object too much to cash Teresa Heinz’s checks.The Thomas Merton Center engaged in these illegal actions in 2004; one year later, Teresa Heinz rewarded them with cash. Had Laura Bush underwritten a violent radical group’s protest of the Democratic National Convention, it is impossible to imagine it would have been ignored. Yet Teresa Heinz financed both her husband’s (and her own) national political convention and those protesting her opponent’s – and aside from this report, the fact has disappeared down the memory hole.Chapter 7: America’s “Slave and Empire Form of Governance”Radicals inhabit a different world from the rest of us. They rage when the United States, which has given its citizens unprecedented opportunity, does well. They protest when this nation protects itself from totalitarian foes, whether international Communism or radical Islam. They bewail censorship while holding rallies with a city-issued permit, screaming things that would get their entire families tortured and killed in the nations they look to as role models. But their political misperceptions are neither transient nor shallow. The roots of their anti-Americanism go back to our birth as a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Not content merely to radicalize the present, they first falsify the past.A case in point is the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, based in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In 2004, the Heinz Endowments issued CELDF a grant totaling $25,000 “for support of the Grassroots Litigation Support Program.” According to its self-description, the Grassroots Litigation Support program works to provide free or low-cost lawyers to leftist groups involved in environmentalist lawsuits throughout the eastern U.S. They have a team of lawyers who are willing to work pro bono or at a discount to accomplish its modest stated goal: “Eliminate Corporate Rights.”182 This is accomplished through legal harassment, filing lawsuits questioning environmental impact statements, challenging permits issued by the Department of Environmental Protection, and attempting to revoke corporate charters altogether.183The center made a few headlines in October 1999, when the CELDF grassroots litigation support program filed a brief before the U.S. Supreme Court against the Bedford County (PA) Board of Elections, arguing that Pennsylvania’s closed primary, stiff requirements of third parties, and the fact that independents are not placed on the ballot during primaries for political parties they do not belong to, “disenfranchise” the state’s voters.184 Coincidentally, CELDF co-founder Thomas Linzey’s official biography states he “has served as an independent candidate for Attorney General.”185For CELDF, the exploitation of workers/resources and the disenfranchisement of voters represents the key to all of American history. These are not steps out of keeping with our tradition but a necessary outgrowth of the U.S. Constitution, which Richard Grossman, CELDF Director of Education, Training and Development, calls the “history of racism codified in law.”186187 Grossman refers to himself as a “historian in search of our hidden history.” He exposes these occult facts while running the organization’s Daniel Pennock Democracy School, which “teaches a new organizing strategy for communities, by first uncovering the hidden history of the usurpation of people’s decision-making authority.”188The school currently holds intensive training sessions at 23 sites around the country.189 There attendees will be indoctrinated with the CELDF’s most outlandish bias. In an introductory video for the school posted on YouTube, Thomas Linzey explains: “People think that our own governmental institutions are working for us. This is about revealing, from camouflage, and illustrating that governmental institutions are not ours.” Grossman wholeheartedly endorses these conspiratorial ravings. “A relative handful of people historically have taken control of the reigns of government, have written the law, have written the Constitution…it’s this set of people through every generation.”Linzey begins this warped history lesson by explaining, “In the beginning, the colonies were private property. They were given to people to vacuum out resources. That was the point of the colonies.” Another presenter chimes in that America owes much to “England as a slave and global empire which forms the basis for our American legal and Constitutional traditions.”190 Behind him is a piece of paper outlining his speech, which reads: “Part I: Of the Few, For the Few, By the Few – the Constitution’s Replication of a Slave and Empire form of Governance.”In his sell for the indoctrination, Linzey explains, “we mix the hidden histories in with people’s movements.” “People’s movements” is often used in leftist parlance to refer to socialist uprisings, and CELDF proves this is no exception. Grossman grouses, “We have a situation in this country, not only do the workers have no constitutional rights at work, you know, it is the culture and the law, that they have no say in production.”191Such a complaint lies at the heart of Marxism. It served as the underlying assumption of Karl Marx’s theory of “alienated labor,” and in a footnote to The Communist Manifesto his comrade, Friedrich Engels, defined the proletariat as “modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order to live.”192Therefore, it is hardly surprising to find that Karl Marx is quoted literally from the first history lesson. According to the center’s online inventory of the weekend’s curriculum,193 Marx is quoted favorably in an article used in the first lesson with the paranoid title “Introduction to ‘The Many-Headed Hydra’ by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Redicker.”194 This Marxist analysis of American history is further fleshed out by its section, “From Slave State to Corporate State,” which begins, “The United States was founded as a Slave Empire; its economy and culture was based on a legal system that not only allowed, but upheld and defended the ownership of one class of people – as property – by another. The Second Constitution guaranteed the legal protection of the slave system, and the privileged class of white property owning males, North and South, nurtured itself on a slave economy.”195 Grossman also makes an idiotic case that the Anti-Federalists were leftists who “sound very much like today’s critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement...and of corporate domination in general,” quoting Howard Zinn in the process.196The CELDF organizers believe the U.S. Constitution had yet another grave defect: it grants no inalienable rights to animals. Thomas Linzey whines, “trees and forests and streams and cougars and bears – they have no rights under our structure of governance. They are property under the law.”197 Smokey the Bear v. the USA. Such are the clear-headed, non-partisan legal minds Teresa Heinz has empowered with her in-laws’ money.Chapter 8: Pedophilia, Politics, Porn, Blasphemy, and “Art”As I showed earlier in 57 Varieties of Radical Causes, financing the Left is hardly new to Teresa Heinz. However, that philanthropy took a turn a marked turn for the worse since 2003. In the last five years, the Heinz Endowments have been responsible for the display of a wide variety of politically radical or offensive “art.” The projects include glowing biopics of Al Franken and Rosie O’Donnell, a cartoon/puppet display themed around Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, multiple films portraying pedophilia (both homosexual and heterosexual), antiwar films portraying Americans as heartless torturers, hardcore homosexual pornography, and a wide variety of sex-soaked gay propaganda.In 2005, the Teresa & H. John Heinz III Fund of the Heinz Family Foundation awarded $5,000 to the Nantucket Film Foundation to sponsor its annual film festival. Its political thrust can best be encapsulated in this: the event kicked off on Wednesday, June 14, with the premier screening of Al Franken: God Spoke, a laudatory documentary covering a two-year swath of the Air America host’s far-Left political career (2003-5).198 Shot by Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob, who produced the 1992 Clinton campaign documentary The War Room, even the far-Left magazine Mother Jones stated this “film swerves occasionally toward hero worship.” Doob told Mother Jones, “If you believe in the people that you are filming it is not hard.” Doob concluded the interview by saying, “if there is anything that Al’s about, it’s making the world a better place.”199The festival also rolled out The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends, a film that accuses the military of “dehumanizing” its recruits, whom its website refers to as “killers.”200 According to this film, recruiters lure their prey through “outright lying,” then ship them to boot camp, where “personalities are broken down and reconstructed through systematic humiliation, deprivation and depersonalization.” Once in the combat theater, soldiers are “encouraged by senior officers not to distinguish between civilians and the enemy”201 The film’s website states the picture “takes an unflinching look at the training and dehumanization of U.S. soldiers, and how they struggle to come to terms with it when they come back home…The film gives us glimpses into a Marine Corps boot camp that allows us to comprehend how a man or woman can kill as part of their [sic.] job. We get hit with more understanding of our soldiers’ dehumanization by seeing Iraq combat footage that shows routine indiscriminate killing.” These patriotic murderers’ “confusion, guilt and shame” are the “tip of the iceberg” of their suffering, which the military ignores. The director, Patricia Foulkrod, acknowledged the political thrust of her film in a special Director’s Statement, saying, “I tried to create a film that might blow the yellow ribbons off the trees and encouragepeople to really wrap their arms around our soldiers and their families.”202 (Emphasis added.) The New York Times, in an otherwise sympathetic review, ultimately calls the movie “a scattershot antiwar polemic that doesn’t bolster its arguments with any historical perspective or statistical evidence.” The Times notes that the film was “made in association with several antiwar veterans organizations,”203 and on the film’s “solution” webpage, the film’s producers encourage viewers to get involved with organizations such as:204
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the organization that propelled a young John Kerry to national prominence. VVAW conducted the infamous 1971 Winter Soldier Investigations, which became the basis for Kerry’s testimony that U.S. troops “had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”205 But as it turned out, those who testified lied about their experience or were never enlisted.206 VVAW still exists, and The Ground Truth seems to smear Iraqi veterans with the same kind of allegations.
Gold Star Families for Peace, the organization founded by Cindy Sheehan. Sheehan is remembered for calling Iraqi terrorists, who murdered U.S. soldiers, “freedom fighters.” She praised terror attorney Lynne Stewart and mugged with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez in 2006, along with leaders of Code Pink.207 Sheehan joined another international Code Pink delegation in August 2006 to Iraq, where members met with Iraqi politicians such as Sheikh Ahmad al-Kubaysi, a Baghdad-based cleric who said: “These young men who came here from other Muslim countries to defend Iraq are very brave…These Mujahideen are guaranteed paradise.”208 Al-Kubaysi is believed to have given $50 million to the terrorist leader Muqtada al-Sadr.209 Upon returning, Sheehan, et. al., pledged to spread these Iraqis’ views through the U.S. media.
Veterans for Peace, an organization founded in 1985 to support the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.210 VFP, with Military Families Speak Out, and GFSP, are members of the United For Peace and Justice steering committee (as is the Communist Party USA). At their joint protest of the 2004 Republican National Convention, the New York Sun found 67 percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement, “Iraqi attacks on American troops occupying Iraq are legitimate resistance.”211
Military Families Speak Out, a group of antiwar activists who claim to have relatives in the service, demands immediate withdrawal and opposes funding for troops already in harm’s way.212 In October 2003, MFSO spokesman Robert Smith tried to incite anti-American fervor on foreign soil. Speaking to a gathering in Tokyo, Smith pronounced: “The so-called democratization of the Middle East is only thinly veiled American imperialism…The U.S. has become, not the world’s policeman, but the world’s bully. The only way to control a bully is to unite against him.”213 The same year, MFSO received a $29,000 grant from George Soros.214
Iraq Veterans Against the War, imitating the VVAW, held a new round of “Winter Soldier” hearings on March 13-16, 2008. These conferences accused the U.S. military of “routine abuse and atrocities” in those two nations.215 In addition to its numerous protests against the war, IVAW member Adam Kokesh targeted fellow students of George Washington University, forging a flyer for the upcoming “Islamofascism Awareness Week” with the headline: “Hate Muslims? So Do We!” The flyer, allegedly an act of satire, was attributed to Young America’s Foundation, the student organization hosting the GWU event. YAF leader Sergio Gor faced intimidation from the PC campus community, only to be exonerated when Kokesh and six other leftists admitted culpability.216 During the week, GWU officials allowed Kokesh to hold a counterprotest entitled “American Fascism Awareness Day,” and the administration never took any serious disciplinary measures against the seven intellectual dwarves.217The Heinz-underwritten Nantucket Film Festival programmed the film Home Front the same day as The Ground Truth. This story follows Jeremy Feldbusch, a 23-year-old Army Ranger who had shrapnel lodge in his brain in Iraq in 2003. “Home Front gets behind the often-sanitized myth of war to reveal its true complications and the film’s director, Richard Hankin, described his work as “fundamentally antiwar” – but he wanted to bury the message. “There’s a whole school of films out there preaching to the converted. We didn’t want to make one of those.”218 The rest of the festival’s films covered other areas but never ventured off the plantation of leftism. Director Barbara Ettinger says she responded to 9/11 by shooting the film Two Square Miles, a film about how small town America can unite – against capitalism. The documentary concerns the community of Hudson, New York, which is allegedly ruled by a corrupt mayor practicing “back-door politics.” The enemy is a “Swiss multinational corporation trying to build a polluting cement plant on the edge of Hudson River,” while the heroes unite to keep industry (and jobs) out of the area. At the same time, “Quentin Cross, a young black Alderman, defends the rights of a largely low-income population. Drag Queen Dini Lamot (a.k.a. Musty Chiffon) challenges the town’s traditional values with weekly cabaret shows.” This is the future the Left envisions for flyover country.Wrestling with Angels is a fawning biopic of Tony Kushner, the author of the play Angels in America. Film festival PR indicates that Kushner “has achieved great acclaim in the theatrical world, but he is also a vocal and committed political activist. The film covers a rich three-year period in Kushner’s life, from 9/11 to the 2004 presidential election...This deeply personal film explores Kushner’s struggle to express fundamental truths through the power of live theater, and to open a national dialogue on some of our most pressing social concerns, including AIDS awareness, social and economic justice, gender equality and global responsibility.”Political “documentaries” rolled on, as the NFF screened In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Burst, which it billed as “the latest hard-hitting documentary from Danny Schechter (director of the acclaimed WMD, Weapons of Mass Deception, NFF 2004).” This movie “investigates why we as a nation are being strangled by debt” via “Financialization the powerful emergence of a debt-and-credit industrial complex.” Expert testimony comes from former Republican pollster turned left-wing shiller Kevin Phillips. The film warns of a more ominous undercurrent to America’s debt crisis: “power is shifting into fewer hands…with frightening consequences.” This was followed by a viewing of The Chances of the World Changing, “a poetic documentary about the passion of a lone environmental warrior and his fight to save endangered turtles.” Rounding out the “factual” pics was Black Gold, “a timely documentary about our national obsession with coffee and the consequences this demand has on coffee farmers…The film follows the courageous man-on-a-mission Tadesse Meskela as he fights to save Ethiopian coffee farmers from bankruptcy – taking on not just the coffee industry, but the world trading system, revealing the dark side of the WTO [World Trade Organization] and so-called Fair Trade.”NFF’s chosen dramatic films include the then-nine-year-old movie Citizen Ruth, which viciously lampoons pro-life Christians while presenting the guard of an abortion clinic as a hero and the title character’s defender. Quinceañera is the touching tale of the teenage daughter of a Mexican-American storefront preacher who becomes pregnant just before her 15th birthday. Her father kicks her out, so she moves in with her compassionate gay uncle, also disowned by their hard-hearted religious family.The film festival also featured a number of short films, which unlike the longer films, lacked an overtly political focus: they share other disturbing similarities. Among the honored shorts, one could take in:
What Remains, a cinematic celebration of photographer Sally Mann. The film refers to her 1992 gallery Immediate Family as a “complex and enigmatic series of portraits”; it omits that these were naked photos of her underage children. The film festival’s PR, underwritten by Heinz, referred to this as “a vibrant, indelible portrait of an artist-at-work”;
Undressing My Mother, in which Ken Wardrop films his mother undressing and discusses her aging body;219
loudQUIETloud [sic.], a documentary about alternative band The Pixies. As one account notes, “References to mental instability, violent Biblical imagery, physical injury, and incest feature in many of the band’s songs”;220
Moosecock, a short which defines itself as “A movie about a moose’s penis. Sort of”;221
F*CK, a self-described “challenging and provocative documentary [that] takes an amusing look at this infamous curse word.” It includes “a clever guide to proper usage.” The film description ends, “F*CK is guaranteed to offend a few, but will entertain and enlighten the open-minded many”; and
Fourteen, a short film about a girl who is forced to marry (presumably a fundamentalist polygamist minister) upon that birthday.222If one detects an obsession with or celebration of pedophilia in that lineup, the focus became explicit in another Heinz-financed motion picture gala: the 21st Annual Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, held from October 20-29, 2006. The Heinz Endowments wrote a $9,000 check for the festivities, not only for the PILGFF but to transform the annual event into “a year round presence.”223 That is much to be regretted, as PILGFF films depict pedophilia, incestuous situations, and, in some cases, full hardcore gay pornography.Two feature films concern pedophilia between a teacher and an underage student: one geared to the male audience and one to the female. The movie Whole New Thing is the tale of a 13-year-old boy heretofore homeschooled by hippie parents. (In one scene, his father explains that masturbation is better than having wet dreams, because “too much laundry is bad for the environment.”)224 The film’s crisis arrives as the boy must attend public school for the first time – where he promptly develops a crush on his English teacher. The film festival’s PR explains, “Mr. Grant’s not sexually shy, (he passes the long Nova Scotia winters by cruising the local rest stop) but with a 13-year-old student…yikes!”225 In one scene, in a sauna, the pubescent barely-teen tries to kiss Mr. Grant, but Grant pulls back just as their lips are about to touch.226Such restraint is notably absent from the most talked about film of the festival: Loving Annabelle. Advertized as “the newest addition to the lesbian cult classic canon,” the pedophilia chic flick centers around Annabelle, “the defiant daughter of a senator” sent to a Catholic boarding school to straighten her out. She has had sex with other girls but does not consider herself a lesbian. After refusing to surrender her Buddhist prayer beads to a hateful Mother Emaculata, she sets out to seduce her poetry teacher, Simone. One reviewer describes what happens next:
She [Annabelle] aggressively makes her move in class, dissecting e.e. cummings’ poetry of sexual innuendos and sending Simone’s heart fluttering. The teacher desperately tries to conceal her lust not only because she is an educator, but also because she is suppressing her lesbian past! On a holiday weekend, the student and teacher are the only two remaining on campus. This time they cannot stop their wildest desires. In one moment their sweltering, uninhibited passion illuminates the screen…[The actresses’] chemistry is mesmerizing, expressing their characters’ deepening attraction with stolen glances and the subsequent revelations of their relationship’s emotional consequences.227Others have defended this graphic depiction of lesbian statutory rape, claiming: “Though legally a minor, Annabelle is mature for her age and in many ways the more sexually experienced of the two. She relentlessly pursues Simone, not just out of sexual desire, but also out of love.” So, it’s OK; the minor wanted it.Asked about her motivation for this incitement to student molestation, writer-director, Katherine Brooks, wrote, “Truth be known, I wanted to make a lesbian film that had great sexual tension with a good sex scene and was realistic to the situation. And I was tired of watching movies where they build up the sexual tension only to give me a KISS and nothing more.”228Both films portray the underage student as the willing protagonist, begging for sex from a member of the same sex in a position of authority. Both enjoy the sexual contact they receive and are not essentially harmed by the statutory rape they petition or endure. Each film serves to validate teaching profession in the process. The message of both films is clear: children are sexual beings pining to be deflowered by whoever chances upon them. The real psychological scarring underage statutory rape causes is not depicted, because it is not titillating. That Teresa Heinz could underwrite the promotion of such films is unconscionable.Incest figures into the short film Man Seeking Man, a Finnish production about a 50-something man who places a gay personal ad; at the same time, his estranged twentysomething son decides to meet his father for the first time in decades. Not acquainted with the son, the father assumes he is a random individual answering the advertisement. When the son hugs him, his daddy grabs his ass. Father Goose then goes into another room, fully undresses, and caresses his son’s neck from behind, until the boy turns around, stunned to see his father naked. The director managed to squeeze full frontal and full rear nudity into this nine-minute, 47-secondlongfilm.229Though other films thankfully lacked the pedophilia promotion of Loving Annabelle and Whole New Thing, several were more explicit: more than one contained hardcore pornography, including man-on-man rape. The festival’s “LGBT Avante Garde Retrospective” included Kenneth Anger’s 1947 short film Fireworks. One reviewer describes it thus:
A landmark of both experimental and gay cinema, Kenneth Anger’s film is a bizarre, disturbing dreamscape of violation, rape, and homoerotic sadomasochism. The film opens with Anger awaking from a troubled dream and leaving his house to go on a stroll. He is confronted by a band of buff sailors who proceed to beat, manhandle, and molest him.230Fast-forwarding 47 years, Curt McDowell’s 1994 film Loads shows his encounter with six “heterosexual” men, whom he proceeds to masturbate or fellate to climax on camera. Again, this author’s words cannot do the film justice; its admirers’ will:
The film narrates the filmmaker’s encounter with each of them, on the street or in parks, his offer to film them jerking off. They all consented…and the six intermingled episodes/vignettes of the film are built from the resultant posing and sex sessions in McDowell’s studio. Suddenly spectators find themselves embarrassed voyeurs both of McDowell’s tricks with the six men, and of the men’s tricks with the camera. The men strut about defensively, as if taunting the camera, or they lie back invitingly, staring vulnerably, trustingly into the lens. They undress and caress themselves, or allow the filmmaker to help. The camera sometimes embodies McDowell’s point of view, crawling across the floor in submission for the blow, trembling as if in echo of the spectators excitation. Or else it remains aloof on its tripod for a breather with the pretense of immediacy temporarily dropped. At other times when McDowell needs both hands, one of the subjects holds the camera, adding the frisson of subjective angle to the palpability of micro-closeups of flesh. This is participatory camera taken as far as it will go, filmmaking as fellatio.231Nudity and homosexual sex form the ever-present focus of many, many other features. Boy Culture is based on a novel by Matthew Rettenmund (whose other works include Hillary Duff: All Access and Encyclopedia Madonnica). Rettenmund himself dismissed his novel as “sexy fluff.” It’s also richly blasphemous. The lead character, known as “X,” is a male prostitute with “regular clients – whom he refers to as his ‘12 disciples.’” But the homosexual community (if offended at all), forgives, because the director “knows what a gay audience wants to see – plenty of sex, naked asses and bare chests.”232So, too, does John Cameron Mitchell, whose film Shortbus aired at the festival. The film, described as “a toe-curling sexploration,” takes place at a New York City sex boutique, where the only enemy is the stifling of any sexual impulse. “Shortbus is the Crash of self-discovery through sex-discovery where control is the ultimate happiness buzz kill…Could opening ourselves up to our suppressed emotional and sexual feelings lead us to the answer of our existence that we’re all searching for?” Psychological and self-actualization pretensions aside, the reviewer admits the film is all about flesh. “Shortbus’s overloaded sex scenes are too in your face to leave room for interpretations beyond sex discovery.”233One may not be surprised to find sex plays a prominent role in a film entitled Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds. From the people who brought you Porno Valley and Camp Michael Jackson comes a film so sex-laden that a positive reviewer notes its cast of characters “includes ‘Marc’s Trick,’ ‘Hot Shirtless Guy’ and ‘Hot Clothed Guy.’” What one may not expect is the film’s ever-present derision of Jesus Christ and those former homosexuals who have committed their lives to a new faith. “In this cheerful but one-note low-budget farce, gay men pretend to be straight, straight or bisexual men pretend to be gay, lesbians pretend to be bigoted heterosexuals, and a homophobic ex-gay support group proves to be full of backsliders and hypocrites who keep getting caught out of the closet.”234 One of its subplots involves “outing Jacob, the closeted leader of [an] ex-gay ministry, to his mother by tricking him to have sex with Octavio in a port-o-potty on wheels.”235 The Queer Beacon states:
The movie does have a lot of man-on-man action, that’s certainly the major attraction. No doubt…The movie is always making fun of the ex-gay movement. “Who would Jesus do?” reads one post just outside one of the ex-gay meetings…Two of the hottest guys go full frontal…And you’ll be glad they did.236Unimpressed by said genitalia, the industry Bible, Variety,panned the film, calling it “so sloppy” whose cast members“confuse reciting lines with acting.”237 But as the festival’s film selection proves, acting is hardly the point:
The Gymnast is a story of a middle aged woman who falls for her trapeze partner. Reviewer Bruce Fetzer begins his review: “The staggeringly athletic bodies of the two lead s are a constant source of visual spectacle in The Gymnast.”238
El Calientito is a Spanish film set in Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s regime. “Straight-laced Sarah discovers more than just refuge from her oppressive mother in this night-club – there’s sex, drugs and a girl band call La Sioux. After a big night out, Sarah awakens to find herself in one of the band members’ beds, and that she is the latest addition to the group.”239 This rocking combo is “fronted by Joan Jett look-alike Carmen, who happens to be a lesbian, and Leo,who is always in some state of undress so her breasts can run free.”240
Dave & Stu is described on the festival’s website tersely: “Two Scottish boys meet in a bog, let the sexual tension begin.”241
Open is a women’s short feature, in which “an open relationship turn the lives of three women into a bizarre whirlwind of betrayal, bingo & sex toys.”242
Mom is “the year’s quintessential dyke buddy movie!”243
Jollies, a Sadie Benning short, “details Benning’s early sexual experiences and experimentation with both boys and girls until, eventually losing her virginity to a girl, she embraces her coming-out and her queer identity.”244
Long Term Relationship is about two men who meet via the personal ads…and how, with time and patience, Glenn learns to love Adam, even though he’s a Republican and bad in bed.245Though less political than its counterpart in Nantucket, the Pitt piffle is not devoid of political sloganeering and vapid bloviation. The film Saving Marriage details left-wing homosexuals’ efforts to support the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s judicial activism when it unilaterally demanded the state institute gay marriage. According to the fest, “On November 18, 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in favor of a same-sex couple’s right to marry, and from that day forward gay rights activists worked ceaselessly to protect the ruling from right-wing attacks.” The PLGFS website concludes, “Change happens – and this film shows us how.” The film’s official website lists among its “Co-community sponsors” the ACLU and Marriage Equality USA.246 As noted, ballot initiatives to ban gay marriage helped defeat John Kerry in 2004.Cruel and Unusual, according to its film distributor, is a documentary about “pre-op, transgender women [who] are placed in men’s correctional facilities, where they find themselves vulnerable and preyed upon.” Among its heroes/heroines is Anna, who “loses not only four years of hormone treatment but also custody of her only son.”247 Similarly, 20 Centimeters is a Spanish musical whose title refers to the length of the main character’s penis – which (s)he would like removed. Marieta/Adolfo is “a narcoleptic, pre-op transsexual prostitute who longs to get rid of eight inches of equipment that separates her from being the glamorous person she longs to be.”248 Barbara Hammer’s Superdyke follows what happened when Hammer “armed a platoon of vagina warriors with Amazon shields in an attempt to overthrow San Francisco. They marched through City Hall, usurped the bus lines, demythologized the consumer mentality at Macy’s.”Despite the festival’s aversion to and distaste for religion, not all films were hostile to the Deity…provided His representatives are also gay. Camp Out is about a supportive religious camp for gays and lesbians. “In between spiritual activities and sing-alongs with Pastors Brad and Jay, the kids get up to more typical gay teen camp activities – like Truth or Dare.”249Cultural events also make an appearance. Pick Up the Mic is a documentary about “Homohop,” or “Queer hip-hop.” The film is supposedly an “electrifying documentary” that deftly “breaks down stereotypes and dissects the subversive ideas and social consciousness of gay artists.”250 More ephemeral celebrities are celebrated in biopics, too. All Aboard! Rosie’s Family Cruise tells the story of a Caribbean cruise Rosie O’Donnell sponsored for gays and lesbians as part of her new cruise line, R Family Vacations, which she launched with “spouse” Kelli Carpenter O’Donnell and Greg Kaminsky. Though not in the spotlight for decades, The Life of Reilly is an autobiographical film starring Seventies game show maven Charles Nelson Reilly.Pedophilia chic, gay porn, full frontal nudity, “naked asses and bare chests,” a how-to for gay marriage (which Teresa Heinz supports),251 a vicious caricature of Christianity, and an infomercial for Rosie O’Donnell’s cruise line. All in all, it’s a Hell of a way to invest nine grand.Heinz invested a great deal more money in the Pittsburgh Film-Makers, Inc. In 2005 alone, the Heinz Endowments issued a $222,900 grant “for three year operating support” and a $6,000 “to support Two Working Girls project ‘Trappings’.” According to its website: “Trappings is an artwork that explores the meaning and expression of power by presenting women’s responses to the question: what do you wear that makes you feel powerful?”252The feminist fashion powerhouse excepted, this year’s productions seem to rotate around a familiar theme. This June 6, the group screened the film Standard Operating Procedure, a “documentary” directed by Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Fog of War) that depicts the sheer evil of American GIs in Iraq, inviting his audience to speculate – even fabricating atrocities where the reality was not salacious enough for him. Morris “challenges the charges of abuse by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, and he also challenges the very medium of photography.” We should, the group declaims, wonder what acts of torture were not caught on camera. “What did we not see in those infamous photos? As always, Morris uses re-creations suggesting what might have happened.”253 A few days later, it viewed Land of Confusion. “The film captures never-seen-before footage of the secretive Iraq Survey Group searching the countryside [for Saddam Hussein’s WMDs], and offers an extraordinary perspective from soldiers on the ground in Iraq. Candid moments with US soldiers and Iraqi civilians combine with beautifully edited images to create a riveting portrait of this increasingly unpopular war.”254 On June 20-26, the group featured Alexandra, a Russian film with subtitles, described by the group’s website as a “compelling anti-war film.”255 Uniting this to its counterpart across town, on June 22, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender short films ran “on continuous loop.”256Film is not the only medium through which to communicate a political message. In 2005, Heinz gave $7,000 to City Theatre Company Inc. of Pittsburgh to underwrite a residency for playwright Tammy Ryan. Ryan is known for a number of plays, not least of which being The Boundary, which she first produced in 2004, the year before her residency was underwritten. Perhaps not coincidentally, it also deals with the fallout of the Iraq war – the first Gulf war of 1990. Its modest thesis is that all concern about terrorism is irrational, illusory, and ultimately self-destructive. Set during Operation Desert Storm, the main character is the unemployed patriarch of a family, who fills his empty days by watching war coverage on his television. He begins to see Arab terrorists everywhere, leaving bombs in his home. His growing paranoia alienates him from his family. “Worried about terrorist attacks, he sees Arab men regularly enter his home and leave ticking suitcases. As he slowly loses everyone he has ever cared about, he retreats further into the reality of his own making.” One reviewer got the message: “Given our country’s current situation, one can’t help but wonder what boundaries the second Iraqi war has created and whether or not we’ll be able to overcome them, both as individuals and as a nation.”257Teresa Heinz’s philanthropy extends beyond antiwar nonsense, though: at least one piece of her beneficence seems intended to finance a swipe at the Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) . She awarded $9,000 to the Bricolage Production Company “to support artist fees for the production of David Turkel’s ‘Key To The Field.’” Turkel originally set out to write a play “about a teacher who upsets his students’ parents by talking politics in class.” The small-minded, intolerant town became so exercised by his classroom political indoctrination that the policeman sent to investigate when someone threw a brick through his window takes him hostage.258 However, the propaganda nature of the undertaking did not get his juices flowing. Turkel ultimately produced a psychotic tale involving multiple realities – one of which involves a teacher who offends his town by discussing politics in class and has a brick chucked through his window, and who is kidnapped by the investigating police officer. However, Turkel rewrote this turkey prior to the Bricolage staging with a few modifications. In one, “Turkel replaced 10 pages of dialogue with one character’s single, self-destructive act”: the teacher’s baby inexplicably explodes (according to the stage directions) “into a million pieces, like a clock.”259 The surrealist nature of the event muted the political ramifications of the play, but gave Heinz more bang for the buck.Perhaps to compensate, the Heinz Endowments doled out $7,500 to Artists Upstairs “for support of the INSIDE OUT series.” In fall 2008, the center is plugging an upcoming “Exhibit/Installation/Performance” featuring political cartoonist Mike Konopacki and puppeteer Amy Trompetter. Its centerpiece is the work A People’s History of American Empire, a “graphic history” that presents Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States in a (more) dumbed-down way.260However, Teresa realizes the soul’s rational faculties must feed upon more than just performance art. Thus, in 2005 she gave a prestigious Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities to sculptor Mark Di Suvero. His platitudinous acceptance speech stated: “We, the people of the world who believe in peace and harmony, in health, in symbiosis must act to build a network of peace that is beyond party or nation in order to keep human life on this planet.” He longs for “a united world…We must unify the world.” And he groans, “The possible destruction of democracy exists in the rise of mediocracy. And the mediocracy is more susceptible to lies than to the truth.”261 Whatever could DiSuvero have in mind? Less than one month after his acceptance speech, Di Suvero told an interviewer:
This colonial war with Iraq is a racist war, a war that depends on a president who lied about the reason for war and does not admit that he lied. This president has killed many more children than were killed in Columbine and is not being held responsible. They’re Iraqi children. One of the horrors of American politics is that this kindof colonial war has become acceptable. DiSuvero explained how he became an expatriate. “I had left the United States because of the Vietnam War, after prison, demonstrations, stuff like that.”262 Reinvigorated with Heinz funds, he promptly fixed his creative energies on protesting the Iraq war. This award winner could come up with nothing original, so he revived a previous sculpture: the Peace Tower. “The Peace Tower was originally created in 1966 in Los Angeles as a response to the Vietnam War, with 400 artists participating in the project. It was later re-created in 2006 for the Whitney Biennal in New York City as a response to the war in Iraq.”263 Planning began in 2005…as he received the Heinz Award,264 though a causal relationship is unknown. Once again, DiSuvero invited people to add panels to hisPeace Tower, protesting the new war. More than 200 artists,265 including Yoko Ono,266 did so. Aldo Tambellini’s black-and-white-and-red image likens U.S. soldiers to Nazis, under the words “Obey-Conform.”Tom Doyle’s panel shows dismembered bodies. Kim Abeles likewise shows disembodied hands, feet, and bones, calling them “Lost Limbs of War.” Hans Haacke’s shows the stars fallen from the American flag. Lenny Contino’s crosses the words “War” and “Lie.” James Wines’ shows George W. Bush’s face dripping blood, surrounded by the phrase, “STOP BUSHONOMICS. NO MORE BLOOD FOR OIL!” Vincent Arcilesi took the unusual approach of showing a female angel playing violin in front of the White House, featuring her full frontal nudity. Leon Golub warned, “We Can Disappear You.” Celeste Roberge’s panel proclaimed, “Exit Mesopotamia Now” surrounded by black, red, and flesh colored penis-shaped dildos. Richard Heipp’s panel states, “They Are Watching Us.” Lance D. Warren’s showed a picture of George W. Bush with the words, “um…er…look…shiny…” Jacqueline Bishop shows a tower of shoes, a conscious, though unconscionable, reference to the Holocaust. One Peace Tower addition consciously referenced socialism. Nedko Solakov merely adorned his red panel with the words, “Being part of this (somewhat official) action makes me feel as if I am again living back in socialist Bulgaria, which is nice.”Some had truly irrelevant messages, such as “In a Milk Drinking Contest, It Is OK If One Chooses to Drink Chocolate Milk”; and “Love Is Blonde.”267Lest one think all Heinz-financed artistry is political, she did donate $40,000 to the Artists Image Resource Inc. to support a Creative Heights residency with visual artist Patricia Villalobos Echeverria from Summer 2005 to Fall 2006. Echeverria described her unique artistry by saying, “I am particularly interested in how the questions posed by the discourse of (post)humanity and de(materialization) redefine both body and site.”268Psychobabble, modern art towers decrying U.S. foreign policy – what could be more worthy of support?Chapter 9: The Shape of Things to Come?
“No life is completely useless. It can always serve as a bad example.” – Anonymous.As noted earlier, radicals inhabit a different reality than the average person, but not altogether different. Each person, consciously or unconsciously, idolizes or idealizes someone as a personal role model. Leftists, too, need saints and heroes to illumine the dark demonology they paint of the United States and the West. For normal people, the hero may be a baseball player, a performer, an encouraging adult, or even a literary figure. For radicals, the figure is one who has succeeded in planning, discussing, or creating a smaller version of Utopia (or, failing that, who succeeded in destroying society). One figure from the last five years of Teresa Heinz’s charitable giving appears to be, not merely a kindred spirit, but perhaps a role model and ideal to guide the rest of her own “philanthropic” activities: Richard N. Goldman of San Francisco, California.In 2006, the Heinz Awards selected Goldman to receive the Chairman’s Medal. Like Teresa, Goldman distributes tens of millions of dollars in tax-exempt money each year. Like Teresa, he is a trailblazing environmentalist. More importantly, he has spent years financing radical leftists – and is trying to make a permanent impact on the public policy debate through academia. Goldman may be the closest thing to a living exemplar of what Teresa Heinz hopes to accomplish with her in-laws’ money.If so, he offers a most distressing blueprint. As the Heinz Awards press release stated, Richard Goldman “is president of both the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund and the Goldman Environmental Foundation.” Through these entities, he donates some $40 million in tax-exempt grants each year. An heir of Levi Strauss, he inherited privilege and made more money yet after founding Goldman Insurance Services in San Francisco. “In 1990, Mr. Goldman and his late wife established the Goldman Environmental Prize, dubbed the ‘Green Nobel Prize.’ The individual $125,000 awards are presented annually to recipients living in each of six geographic areas: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America and South and Central America.”269 Teresa Heinz established the Heinz Awards in 1993; she now gives out cash awards of $250,000 in one of six categories, including the environment.270A glance at Goldman’s “philanthropy” will show the similarities do not end here. The Goldman Fund has funded271 a familiar panoply of far-Left organizations. Among these is the Tides Foundation/Tides Center. From 2004-2006, Goldman steered 11 grants through Tides totaling $332,000. Tides figured prominently in this author’s earlier book on Teresa Heinz, 57 Varieties of Radical Causes, as Teresa donated more than $8.1 million to Tides and established a branch in western Pennsylvania. Tides can accept donations and pass them on to anonymous third parties, or it can administer grants between giver and receiver. In either case, Tides keeps up to ten percent of the transaction as its fee, and from this largesse it finances such radicals as the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Tides also operates the Institute for Global Communications, which hooked Castro’s Cuba up to the internet in 1991.272 Another Tides project financed by the Goldman Fund is Grantmakers Without Borders, a grant-making organization dedicated to “global social change philanthropy.” When President Bush signed an executive order banning philanthropic grants from going to terrorist organizations, GWB complained the regulation was “daunting,” “unrealistic and expensive,” and potentially “insurmountable.”273Goldman’s charitable beneficiaries are, if anything, less restrained than Teresa Heinz’s. Goldman has donated to:
ACORN;
MoveOn.org ($100,000 in 2002);
Children’s Defense Fund ($50,000 in 2005);
Union of Concerned Scientists ($100,000 in 2001);
People for the American Way Foundation ($50,000 in 2005 for the “Save the Filibuster Campaign”);
The Carter Center ($100,000 from 1999-2002);
Amnesty International ($15,000 in 2001);
Southern Poverty Law Center ($500,000 from 2000-03, during which time the SPLC denounced David Horowitz as a racist and FrontPage Magazine as a hate group);274
National Women’s Health Network (which “supports socialized medicine and taxpayer-funded abortionon- demand”);275 and
Independent Media Institute (which trains far leftists media skills; among those trained are representatives from ACORN, the American Friends Service Committee, NOW, the Ruckus Society, Physician for Social Responsibility, Refuse and Resist!, Earthjustice, and many others).276In these and many other grants, there is a strange confluence of overlapping grants between Goldman and George Soros. Goldman’s partisan giving leaves few ideological stones unturned. He has financed the far-Left side of the environment, gun control, Affirmative Action, abortion, economic, and foreign policy debates. According to the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund annual report for 2001, Goldman donated a hefty $4.3 million to the 1999 Million Mom March.277 The march, which featured such intellectual heavyweights as Rosie O’Donnell, aimed at creating stiffer gun control laws. Lacking the restraint of Heinz or Goldman, MMM’s website seemed engaged in an overt violation of its 501(c)3 status by advocating on behalf of specific legislation and legislators.278Goldman likewise doled out $600,000 in 2001-2003 to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and $375,000 from 2000-2002 to the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. The latter is the sister organization to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and both file litigation to “close loopholes” in gun laws. However, the CSGV’s radicalism can be seen in the fact that its original name was the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.279The California heir took a similarly strident approach to Affirmative Action. In 2001, he granted the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco $20,000. LCCR has attacked California Proposition 209, allowing for a colorblind state; the lawyers’ organization has joined a statewide coalition to bring back Affirmative Action against the will of the people of the Golden State.280 LCCR is well to port on the issue of illegal immigration, as well. In 1989, LCCR wrote the ordinance that made San Francisco a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants – a town in which police were legally forbidden from asking a suspect’s immigration status. In 2007, the group saw to it that city council provided ID cards for illegal immigrants.281 In fact, LCCR has collected more than $640,000 for its clients by suing immigration officers.282 The group’s frequent intellectual collaborator is known as Chinese for Affirmative Action, and CAA received $210,000 from Goldman between 2000 and 2002. In addition to supporting racial preferences, the group endorses candidates for office and has hailed California’s institution of same-sex “marriage.”283Gay unions have as much to do with Chinese advancement as 9/11 did with the polar ice caps, yet Goldman funded organizations that inexplicably tied the two together – and blamed the United States for both. On September 14, 2001, as President Bush addressed the memorial service in the National Cathedral, the Earth Island Institute’s website bore a different greeting: “U.S. Responds to Terrorist Attacks with Self-Righteous Arrogance.”284 Despite this assessment, Goldman awarded the group $30,000 five years later. He made similar overtures to EII’s affiliate, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN). Both felt protesters from organizations such as Greenpeace did not go far enough in direct action. Goldman wrote a $1 million check to RAN in 1997 and one for $125,000 in 2003. The same year, RAN inexplicably protested the Iraq war.285 In 2003, Goldman gave the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund $10,000 to influence the forthcoming election and donated more than a quarter-million dollars to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Yet it was the group Earthjustice, formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, that would receive $350,000. According to the instructions, the money was given “to protect the country’s environmental laws from being undermined by anti-environmental policies, litigation and the judicial nomination process.” Accordingly, EJ would play a key role in opposing the judicial appointment of William Myers to the infamous Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. As a result, EJ was rewarded with $415,000 in 2005. Eventually, a Democratic filibuster killed the appointment, which was withdrawn in January 2007.286On abortion, too, this misanthrope shows himself far outside the American mainstream. He dispersed more than $3.52 million in “population” grants in 2008 alone to such recipients as:
$250,000 to the National Center for Youth Law, to allow minors to have “confidential” abortions;
$125,000 for the ACLU Foundation “In Defense of Abortion, to work at the federal, state and local levels to defend access to abortion through litigation and public education”;
$200,000 to the Feminist Majority Foundation;
$75,000 for the Ms. Foundation for Women;
$125,000 to Americans for UNFPA, for its “One Woman Can Campaign, to mobilize supporters to advocate for the restoration of U.S. funding of the United Nations Population Fund” – that is, to assure U.S. taxpayers fund abortion around the world;287
$85,000 to Abortion Access Project, “to increase the number of rural abortion providers”;
$250,000 to National Women’s Law Center for the “Reproductive Rights and the Presidential Transition, to focus on the imminent changes in the reproductive rights arena during the change in the U.S. Administration”; and
Zero Population Growth, a literally anti-human organization.In all, between 2001-2006, Goldman has given away $14.87 million to pro-abortion “Population” groups. During part of that time, he seemed to have a definite target in mind. In 2001, he awarded Planned Parenthood of Golden Gate $300,000 over two years earmarked specifically for “African-American women in East Oakland.” The same year, he donated $60,000 to the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights Education Fund “[t]o launch a Latino initiative to promote reproductive choice .” In both instances, Goldman’s targeting minority communities for abortion embodies the spirit of Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, in addition to a committed Marxist and eugenicist.288 Her spirit marches on, as a pro-life group released a series of phone transcripts in February 2008 between one of its volunteers and two Planned Parenthood employees in Idaho and Ohio. In each case, the caller wished to make a donation to abort a black baby. He told Autumn Kersey, the vice president of development and marketing for Planned Parenthood of Idaho, “the less black kids out there, the better.” She responded, “Understandable, understandable… Excuse my hesitation, this is the first time I’ve had a donor call and make this kind of request, so I’m excited, and I wanna make sure I don’t leave anything out.”289 What pro-lifers proposed in farce, Goldman accomplished in reality.The Hate America Left’s view of the United States also seems beyond satire. Goldman funded Human Rights Watch, giving the left-leaning group $205,000 in 2001. Since its inception, it has harshly criticized the United States and Israel while exercising a vague moral equivalency between a democracy and its would-be destroyers. But HRW is nothing compared to the Center for Media & Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, which Goldman gave $25,000 in 2001.290 CMD has produced such works as Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, hailed by Noam Chomsky as “A major contribution for those who want to take control of their own future, not be passive subjects of manipulation and control.”291 CMD also wrote Banana Republicans: How the Right-Wing is Turning America into a One-Party State. The introduction devotes approximately 600 words to hammering David Horowitz personally, stating, “In a strange way, he remains a Leninist, right down to his appearance (balding, with a Lenin-like goatee).”292 Keeping with this theme, the organization’s newest work is The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq. The website advertizing the book states this is “More than a book – it’s a call to action,”293 then urges readers to sign a pledge that reads, “I will not vote for or support any candidate for Congress or President who does not make a speedy end to the war in Iraq, and preventing any future war of aggression, a public position in his or her campaign.”294As this booklet has demonstrated, not all anti-American messages come in writing. The Goldman Fund financed San Francisco’s own Center for Investigative Reporting for $25,000. CIR produced “No Place to Hide,” a “documentary” promising an “eye-opening examination took readers, viewers and listeners behind the walls of secrecy to show how we are rushing towards a surveillance society with few rules to guide and protect us.”295 Seymour Hersch and Bill Moyers sit on CIR’s advisory board.296 Again in 2001, Goldman cut a check to the Independent Press Association based in San Francisco, in the amount of $25,000. IPA is the publisher of leftist tabloids around the country. Although it went out of business in 2006, the New York branch survives – which is nearly more than New York did on 9/11. In the days following 9/11, the IPA website linked297 to an article decrying the “patriotic rigour” of American reporting.298 On November 30, the official IPA website ran an article by one of its writers, Mushahid Hussain, entitled, “The Talebanisation [sic.] of the United States.” It noted, “The author is the former information minister of Pakistan.”299 He was, indeed; Hussain worked for Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who imposed Islamic Shari’a law in the Waziristan region of Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden is believed to have found refuge.300 The deputy’s words were spread with help from Goldman and co.Goldman also financed organizations that existed to work with other far-leftists. He gave $45,000 to the Public Media Center, a San Francisco-based non-profit that describes itself as an “advocacy agency working exclusively on behalf of social justice, public interest and environmental causes.” The PMC “grew out of volunteer efforts by progressive media professionals to speed an end to the Vietnam War, challenge the growth of nuclear power and help poor communities fight off their exploiters.”301 Thus, today the PMC works with such leftists as Global Exchange, Public Citizen, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), the Pacifica Foundation, Independent Media Institute, The Florence and William Schumann Foundation (headed by Bill Moyers), the Open Society Institute, the Turner Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Center for Investigative Reporting, U.S. PIRG, Rainforest Action Network, Multinational Monitor, Greenpeace, and the Earth Island Institute.302Some organizations combine nearly all the Left’s talking points – and they, too, were smiled upon by Goldman’s goodwill. The Progressive Jewish Alliance, which opposes the Patriot Act, believes Guantanamo detainees should have access to U.S. courts,303 and maintains that the “PJA is committed to ensuring that America is not again led down the path toward another preemptive war based upon a similar pattern of governmental deceit.”304 However, the group favors pardoning convicted killer Stanley “Tookie” Williams305 and gay marriage.306 This tax-exempt foundation gave the PJA $90,000 in 2003.Goldman has also shown his willingness to support international government and global regulation of capitalism. His $125,000 check to the International Forum on Globalization in 2002 endorsed the concept of a one world economic order. Explaining his rationale, John Cavanagh of IFG opined, “Much of the world is now suffering because there are no checks and balances on the global financial market. The United Nations should act as a check on global corporations.” An IFG report, Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible, looked to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development “as an example of the kind of strengthened roles [international] agencies might play in global economic governance under a new regime.”307 It also called for creating a new “UN Organization for Corporate Accountability,” ceding authority over domestic business practices to an unelected international body.308Goldman wishes to expose the errors of capitalism at home, particularly when he views this as a “corruption” of the nation’s elected leaders. He has given extensively to support campaign finance reform – as have Teresa Heinz and George Soros. He has given $250,000 to Common Cause in 2001 to “educate” the public about the need for campaign finance reform;309 given $450,000 to the Center for Public Integrity; handed over a cool $20,000 to a group called Research for the Rest of Us, “to deepen public support for campaign finance reform”; awarded $600,000 to Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen Foundation between 2002-2004; and financed Democracy Matters, which advocates public financing of political campaigns.310 Ironically, for one so concerned about money in politics, Goldman has donated a massive amount of money to politicians and political endeavors – some through tax-exempt grants, but some through political contributions.311 In 2004, he gave John Kerry $5,000. The same year, he financed Hillary Rodham Clinton, Wesley Clark, Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Nancy Pelosi, Jim Jeffords (the former Republican whose defection tipped the U.S. Senate to the Democrats), and Americans Coming Together. He donated $12,500 to the Democratic National Committee in 1996 alone. One wonders how Goldman reconciles his own life as a high dollar donor, with access to the levers of power, with his crusading philanthropic stance.As with Teresa Heinz, Goldman’s grants do not simply go to one side. In 2005, he made a few grants to genuinely conservative groups: the Hoover Institution ($10,000 for general support), the American Justice Partnership ($50,000 to “reduce frivolous lawsuits”), and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies ($20,000). But these are a drop in the bucket by comparison to any of the individual leftist issues listed above, let alone all combined. However, one action Goldman has taken seem to have had a profound, changing impact upon Teresa Heinz’s charity. In 2006, Goldman “and his wife made a $10 million gift to their alma mater’s graduate school of public policy, which has since been renamed in their honor, and their $1 million donation to San Francisco State University helped endow the school’s first Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility. He also established the Goldman Honors Program on the Environment, Science, Technology and Policy at Stanford University.”312 This initial seed money founded the Richard & Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.313 Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, an economic far-leftist, is currently on faculty,314 and he may be the staff conservative.As noted above, Teresa Heinz has followed in Goldman’s footsteps. She gave exactly $10 million to establish the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. She did this recognizing the important role academics play in the global warming debate and the appetite media have for information, in hopes of affecting the nation’s environmental policies. Nonetheless, this establishment helped win Teresa Heinz wide acclaim. Just as Goldman’s acts won him a Heinz Award, Heinz’s actions won her a Carnegie. The Carnegie family of institutions singled out the founding of this new environmental center and awarded the Heinz family the 2007 Andrew Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, which Teresa accepted on the family’s behalf. The CCNY press release did not mention that until February 2001, Teresa Heinz served as a trustee for Carnegie Corporation of New York.315(Update: Additionally, Heinz endowed a Harvard chair for former Berkeley professor and frequent Paul Ehrlich co-author John P. Holdren. Teresa awarded Paul and Anne Ehrlich the Heinz Award the year of its inception; Holdren received a Heinz Award in the award's seventh year. In addition to containing frequently erroneous and alarmist predictions, Holdren's writings endorsed world government, global redistribution of wealth, and compulsory abortion for American women. Holdren now serves as President Barack Obama's science adviser.)At last, here she has found her way. Here she intends to follow in the footsteps of Richard Goldman, tugging at the ears of the powerful, supplying solutions to leaders and the people, making a lasting impact that is recognized both as scholarly (and thus of benefit to the students or professors who attend) and politically consequential even after her death. It appears Goldman blazed the trail, and she is following behind.But as a recap of Goldman’s philanthropy shows, it is an ugly road that she walks.ConclusionFour years ago, as I readied 57 Varieties of Radical Causes for publication, Teresa Heinz (then Teresa Heinz Kerry) poised herself to continue her raging leftist philanthropy from the East Wing. For much of the period covered by this report, she thought a second run was in order; then the dream disappeared, and the number of radical organizations funded by Heinz decreased somewhat (though not nearly enough). Some may wish to argue as a result that Heinz’s funding appears somewhat more mainstream than last time – as though any philanthropy that includes a national party convention, a Hate America history school, and multiple gay porn fests could be considered “mainstream.”In evaluating this false impression, one must take into consideration a number of factors. During the period of the last report, Teresa Heinz sat on the Board of Trustees for the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Now, she does not. By sheer force of mathematics, her grants have decreased because her pool of wealth has decreased. Moreover, her work with the Heinz Endowments during this reporting period shows a more overtly political focus than that of the previous report. This is, in a sense, a greater violation of the tax-exempt status than her continuing alliance with political radicals. While underwriting Hate America organizations is an abuse of authority as a trustee, at least she was financing ideas; financing political mechanisms directly challenges the purpose of tax-exempt regulations. Both forms of abuse beg the question whether much of her giving can be termed “charity.”Finally, one must recognize that Teresa had a “big ticket item” in this reporting period: the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment, with a $10 million price tage. At the same time, the number of politically conservative individuals or causes rewarded by Heinz in this time frame has shrunken almost to non-existence. The raw political potential of grants such as these – to finance one political party’s convention, to disrupt that of another, and to mobilize parts of a political constituency – call into question the proper role of tax-exempt grants, and how abuse of the system can allow the super-rich to have an even more disproportionate impact on our national institutions and the country as a whole.The grants are also more despicable in their overt support for pornographic images, pedophilia, incest, and muted references to terrorism.The Heinz Award recipients are, for the most part, less egregiously left-wing than their predecessors. Some are genuine heroes. However, the majority of nominees continues to share a common political home to the left-of-center. And the selection of Richard N. Goldman suggests not only an accolade but a potential role model for Teresa Heinz herself.If this is true – and unless the Heinz family takes back the reins of its own endowments or the federal government applies additional scrutiny to her actions – there will be many more reports of her continuing misuse of tax-exempt funds.Help us expose the abuse of tax-exempt philanthropy. Order a copy of Teresa Heinz Kerry's Radical Gifts by Ben Johnson from the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore. The 115-page book is available in paperback for $9.95.ENDNOTES:1. Ralph Vartabedian, “Kerry Wife Would Keep Her PhilanthropicRole,” Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2004. http://www.latimes.com/la-na-heinz12apr12,1,4925128.story.2. Joel Connelly. “In the Northwest: Teresa Heinz Kerry Hasn’t LostHer Outspoken Way.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer. March 7, 2005.http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/Connelly/214744_joel07.html.3. Rick Klein. “Charting a Future as Senator Kerry.” BostonGlobe. January 25, 2007. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/01/25/charting_a_future_as_senator_kerry.4. Rick Klein. “Funding Slows for Political Parley.” BostonGlobe. November 11, 2003. http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2003/11/11/funding_slows_for_political_parley.5. http://web.archive.org/web/20040619214025/www.boston04.com/about_the_convention/celebrate_boston.asp.6. http://web.archive.org/web/20040803205931/www.boston04.com/media_center/press_release_detail.asp?id=21.7. http://web.archive.org/web/20040710065913/www.boston04.com/volunteers/how_to_sign_up.asp.8. http://web.archive.org/web/20040803205931/www.boston04.com/media_center/press_release_detail.asp?id=21.9. http://web.archive.org/web/20040713015150/www.boston04.com/volunteers/volunteer_of_the_week_archive.asp.10. http://web.archive.org/web/20040624105755/www.boston04.com/about_your_hosts/contact_us.asp11. http://web.archive.org/web/20040803205931/www.boston04.com/media_center/press_release_detail.asp?id=21.12. Andrea Estes. “Parties and Perks Swelled Democratic ConventionTab.” Boston Globe. September 29, 2004. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/09/29/parties_and_perks_swelled_democratic_convention_tab.13. Estes, “Surplus.”14. Keith Reed. “Convention Inclusion Had Limits.” Boston Globe.October 12, 2004. http://www.boston.com/news/politics/conventions/articles/2004/10/12/convention_inclusion_had_limits?mode=PF.15. Associated Press. “Election Commission Allows CorporateMoney for Party Conventions.” Fox News. July 24, 2003. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,92850,00.html.16. 68 Federal Register 47401-02 (August 8, 2003). Cited: http://www.cfinst.org/pr/prRelease.aspx?ReleaseID=194.17. http://www.cfinst.org/legacy/eGuide/partyconventions/financing/cfistudy_partii.aspx.18. Associated Press. “Election Commission Allows CorporateMoney for Party Conventions.” Fox News. July 24, 2003. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,92850,00.html.19. http://web.archive.org/web/20040803203617/www.boston04.com/media_center/press_release_detail.asp?id=14.20. Jim Drinkard and William M. Welch. “Action in the LobbiesRivals that in the Arena.” USA Today. July 26, 2004. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/2004-07-25-lobbyists_x.htm.21. Rick Klein. “Settlement Helps Host Committee.” BostonGlobe. August 1, 2004. http://www.boston.com/news/politics/conventions/articles/2004/08/01/settlement_helps_host_committee.22. Associated Press. “Kerry Weighs Delaying Nomination.”MSNBC. May 21, 2004. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5032010.23. CNN. “Poll: No ‘Bounce’ for Kerry So Far.” August 1, 2004.http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/08/01/polls.bounce/index.html.24. According to the grants announced on the Heinz Endowmentswebsite as of September 2008; however, the website has omittedgrants in the past. This author has not yet been able to view thefull 990 forms for 2007 or 2008.25. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2004/11/welcome_to_the.html#more26. Richard Bell. “The Optimism of Uncertainty.” Democracy CellProject. November 22, 2004. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2004/11/the_optimism_of.html#more27. http://www.b-streetmedia.com/html/team.html28. Archived online at: http://web.archive.org/web/20040402013408/http://blog.johnkerry.com/blog/archives/000871.html.Also quoted in http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/8/23/153719.shtml.29. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/aboutus.html30. http://www.hpleft.com/mcprofile.htm31. http://www.hpleft.com/aov/highnoon.htm32. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2004/1133. http://www.democracycellproject.net/forum/index.php?showforum=3134. http://www.democracycellproject.net/forum/index.php?s=891b3aee8963825506531f6f27479add&showtopic=111035. The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, and RedState.org. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/newslinks_blogroll.html36. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/fearup.html37. David Montgomery. “Peace by Pieces.” The Washington Post.September22, 2005. C1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/21/AR2005092102122_5.html.38. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2006/03/fear_up_all_ove.html39. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2006/04/london_update.html40. Houzan Mahmoud. “Untold Stories of the Rape Scandal in Abo-Ghraib Prison in Iraq.” Allegedly written March 6, 2004. http://houzanmahmoud.blogspot.com/2006/03/untold-stories-of-rapescandal-in-abo.html.41. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2006/07/fear_up_preview.html42. Megan Nesbith. Review. High 5. http://www.highfivetix.org/aspx/Buzz/MeganFearUp.aspx.43. http://www.democracycellproject.net/blog/archives/2006/07/fear_up_preview.html44. “Face the Nation.” December 4, 2005. CBS News. Transcriptonline at: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/face_120405.pdf.45. http://www.heinzawards.net/recipients.asp?action=detail&recipientID=100.46. http://www.campaignmoney.com/political/contributions/susanseacrest.asp?cycle=04.47. Klein, “Charting a Future.”48. http://www.heinzfamily.org/issues/democracy_02.html49. http://www.wvwv.org/research.50. http://www.wvwv.org/assets/2007/10/22/threec.pdf.51. http://www.heinzfamily.org/issues/democracy_02.html52. CNN 2004 Exit Polls. http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html.53. Liz Halloran. “Unmarried Women are the ‘Soccer Moms’ of the2008 Presidential Election.” U.S. News and World Report. http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/campaign-2008/2008/04/15/unmarried-women-are-the-soccer-moms-of-the-2008-presidentialelection.html.54. http://www.victoryfund.org55. “Victory Fund Announces 29 Endorsements for 2008.”http://www.victoryfund.org/news/view/url:victory_fund_announces_29_endorsements_for_2008_256. CNN Exit Polls.57. http://www.kingsleyassociation.org/history.html.58. “In Memoriam: Sanjulo Ber.” The New People. May 2006, p. 9.http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/The_New_People/May%2006.pdf.59. Deborah M. Todd. “Day of Solidarity Brings MenTogether.” New Pittsburgh Courier. June 21, 2007. http://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/articlelive/articles/38060/1/Dayof-Solidarity-brings-men-together/Page1.html.60. http://pa.cair.com/index.php?Page=board&Side=about.61. Deborah M. Todd. “400 March on Day of Solidarity.”New Pittsburgh Courier. June 28, 2007. http://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/articlelive/articles/38111/1/400-march-on-Day-of-Solidarity/Page1.html.62. “Nation of Gods and Earths/Five Percent FAQ.” http://www.blackapologetics.com/fivepercentfaq.html.63. http://www.allahsnation.net/What.html.64. “Amos Named Thomas Merton Center CommunicationsBoss.” New Pittsburgh Courier. July 26, 2007. http://newpittsburghcourieronline.com/articlelive/articles/38316/1/Amos-named-Thomas-Merton-Center-communications-boss/Page1.html.65. Tamara Hall. “Freedom School Teaches Self Pride for BrighterFutures.” New Pittsburgh Courier. December 21, 2003. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-90238797.html.66. Tamanika Howze. “Young College Students Who Dare toMake a Differece: Freedom Schools Report.” The New People.September 2007, p. 11. http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/the_new_people/Sept07.pdf.67. http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Freedom_Schools_find.68. http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Freedom_Schools_sda2007.69. http://earthforce.org/section/programs/afterschool.70. All quotations from the foregoing found in “EducationalPhilosophy.” Earth Force, Inc. http://www.earthforce.org/content/article/detail/843_file_Earth_Force_Ed_Philosophy.pdf.71. The Republicans fellows had worked for were Bill Frist, an M.D.,and Gordon Smith. One merely worked for the Senate FinanceCommittee. http://www.heinzfamily.org/programs/senate_02.html.72. “Toward a New Paradigm of Peacemaking: A Call to Reflectionand Action.” Pentecost 2002. Pax Christi USA. http://www.paxchristiusa.org/pentecost.html.73. “Pax Christi USA questions U.S. policy in Afghanistan.” Salt ofthe Earth. July 2002. http://salt.claretianpubs.org/sjnews/2002/07/sjn0207e.html.74. “Toward a New Paradigm of Peacemaking: A Call to Reflectionand Action.” Pentecost 2002. Pax Christi USA. http://www.paxchristiusa.org/pentecost.html.75. Pax Christi International Newsletter, 104. September 1, 2002.http://storage.paxchristi.net/NL104E02.pdf.76. http://www.paxchristiusa.org/news_events_more.asp?id=395.77. “Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico.Commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the Martyrdom of theFour U.S. Church Women in El Salvador.” Pax Christi USA.December 2, 2005. http://www.paxchristiusa.org/SpecialCAMR.pdf.78. “Senate Condemns Iraqi Prisoner Abuse.” Fox News. May 11,2004. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,119546,00.html.79. Associated Press. “Kerry Renews Call for Rumsfeld to Resign.”New York Times. August 25, 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/25/politics/campaign/25wire-kerry.html?ex=1251172800&en=a666cbaba8cbe651&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland.80. Pax Christi USA. June 26, 2004. http://www.paxchristiusa.org/news_events_more.asp?id=870.81. “Pax Christi USA Denounces U.S. Supported Coup in Haiti.” PaxChristi USA. March 2004. http://www.paxchristiusa.org/news_events_more.asp?id=889.82. “Toward a New Paradism,” Pax Christi USA.83. “Pax Christi USA Denounces U.S. Supported Coup in Haiti.” PaxChristi USA. March 2004. http://www.paxchristiusa.org/news_events_more.asp?id=890.84. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7319.85. http://www.publicintegrity.org/projects/entry/276.86. See John Perazzo’s outstanding work at: http://frontpagemag.com/articles/Read.aspx?GUID=5B137B82-A227-4DEA-BC68-5084EC9607C6.87. Barbara Olson. Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of HillaryRodham Clinton. (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishers, Inc.,1999), pp. 100-101. This author is indebted to John Perazzo forthe citation and portions of this CDF section.88. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6398.89. “Group Headed by Clinton, Shalala Rarely Called Liberal ofAsked Tough Questions,” MediaWatch, Feb. 1993. http://www.mediaresearch.org/MainSearch/dtSearch/dtisapi6.dll?cmd=getdoc&DocId=2252&Index=C%3a%5cInetpub%5cmrc2%5cMainSearch%5cEntireSite2&HitCount=6&hits=1235+1236+1237+1477+1478+1479+&SearchForm=C%3a%5cInetpub%5cMRC2%5cMainSearch%5cSearch%5fform%2ehtml.90. Quoted in Michael Fumento. “The Center for DefenseMisinformation.” The American Spectator. April 1988. Archivedat: http://www.fumento.com/defense.htm.91. “Christian Contradiction,” MediaWatch, October 1996. http://www.mediaresearch.org/MainSearch/dtSearch/dtisapi6.dll?cmd=getdoc&DocId=2296&Index=C%3a%5cInetpub%5cmrc2%5cMainSearch%5cEntireSite2&HitCount=3&hits=df6+df7+df8+&SearchForm=C%3a%5cInetpub%5cMRC2%5cMainSearch%5cSearch%5fform%2ehtml.92. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6398.93. http://www.heinzawards.net/recipients/robert-greenstein.94. Steven Pearlstein. “A Powerhouse for the Poor.” The WashingtonPost. May 4, 2007. D1. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/03/AR2007050302036.html.95. Lowell Ponte. “Science Wars.” FrontPage Magazine. February27, 2004. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=12379.96. William R. Hawkins. “UN Apologists Against Bolton. FrontPageMagazine. May 16, 2005. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18075. See also http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6631.97. The specific grant went “for the Children’s Health andEnvironment Project”; however, as this author will argue below,every dollar given to a far-Left organization frees up additionalrevenue for its other projects.98. http://psr.igc.org/hhpsi-smart-security.htm.99. http://www.stoptoxicimports.org/lead_talking_points.asp.100. http://www.stoptoxicimports.org/sitetools/petition.asp.101. “The Toxic Trade Crisis.” StopToxicImports.org. Spring 2008, p.5. http://www.stoptoxicimports.org/uploads/The%20Toxic%20Truth%20FINAL(3).pdf.102. http://www.stoptoxicimports.org/online_toolkit.asp.103. 103. All information in this paragraph, unless otherwisenoted, comes from http://www.publicinterestprojects.org/FulfillingtheDreamFund.pdf.104. 104. Len Rieser. “English Language Learnersin Pennsylvania Schools: Legal Issues and AdvocacyOpportunities.” Education Law Center. November 2006, p. 4.Online at: http://www.elc-pa.org/pubs/downloads/english/ell-Current%20issues%20Nov%202006.pdf.105. http://www.eplc.org/schoolboardworkshop.html.106. http://www.wgfswpa.org/section_activities/catapult.htm.107. http://www.wgfswpa.org/section_home/aboutUs.htm.108. http://www.wgfswpa.org/section_activities/grantmaking.htm.109. http://www.wgfswpa.org/section_grantmaking/index.htm.110. http://www.wgfswpa.org/section_home/resources.htm.111. http://www.cfr.org/content/about/annual_report/ar_2006/2_letterfrom-the-chairman_008-009.pdf.112. This author noted the Brookings Institutions’ foreign policycriticisms of President Bush, as well as Ms. Heinz’s conflict ofinterest as a Brookings board member, in 57 Varieties.113. http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/1997/0621metropolitanpolicy_katz.aspx.114. http://www.heinzawards.net/speechDetail.asp?speechID=79&source=recipient.115. http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2000/0823metropolitanpolicy_katz.aspx.116. http://www.brookings.edu/speeches/2003/0223childrenfamilies_katz.aspx.117. http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2002/0122metropolitanpolicy_katz.aspx.118. http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2004/0808metropolitanpolicy_katz.aspx.119. http://www.alleghenyfront.org/aboutus.html.120. http://download-v5.streamload.com/22513d17-0419-49f4-9b07-bd80b94e24bd/alleghenyfront/Hosted/AF082306_LifeInCuba.mp3.121. Paul Berman. “Should We Love Che Guevara?” Slate. September24, 2004. http://www.slate.com/id/2107100.122. http://www.alleghenyfront.org/transcript.html?storyid=200605021834080.11456.123. http://www.alleghenyfront.org/transcript.html?storyid=200606141101230.0914045.124. http://cei.org/pdf/5539.pdf.125. http://www.alleghenyfront.org/story.html?storyid=200604242122410.962098.126. http://www.alleghenyfront.org/transcript.html?storyid=200604242128030.341316.127. Jamie Glazov’s interview with Paul Driessen, “Black Power,Green Death,” FrontPage Magazine, January 30, 2004. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11989.128. “Africa Confronts Malaria,” April 25, 2000, BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/724445.stm.129. Glazov-Driessen. “Black Power.”130. http://www.virginia-organizing.org.131. http://www.ortns.org/framework.htm.132. http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC41/Hawken2.htm.133. http://www.ortns.org/framework.htm.134. http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC28/Robert.htm.135. http://www.heinzctr.org/ecosystems/index.shtml.136. http://www.trcf.net.137. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this section are takenfrom http://www.trcf.net/past.html.138. Keith Ervin. “Felony charges filed against 7 in state’s biggestcase of voter-registration fraud.” Seattle Times. July 26, 2007.http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003806904_webvotefraud26m.html.139. “The Acorn Indictments.” Wall Street Journal. November3, 2006. http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009189.140. Terrence Scanlon. “Is Acorn Disenfranchising the Process Itself?”The (Washington, D.C.) Examiner. November 6, 2006. http://www.examiner.com/a-381567~Terrence_Scanlon__Is_ACORN_disenfranchising_the_process_itself_.html.141. See ACORN’s complete profile online at http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6968.142. http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html.143. The entire book can be read online at http://www.addictedtowar.com/atw2b.html.144. The book actually puts them below “drug dealers, pimps, andother dangerous characters.” Joel Andreas. Addicted to War, p. 54.145. See its profile at http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6714.146. Lowell Ponte. “Ruckus at the Republican Convention.” August27, 2004. FrontPageMag.com. http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=AFE05BF5-4C79-44F8-BF26-31E2209F4FDF.147. http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2003/10/9459.php.148. Ponte, “Ruckus.”149. David Horowitz. “Free the FBI.” June 3, 2002.FrontPageMag.com. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=4D9B0465-00D5-4DBC-A81D-C8B6A302FF29.150. See its profile http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6148.151. “Success Without Victory: Lost Legal Battles and the Long Roadto Justice in America.” Democracy Now. Transcript December11, 2003. http://www.democracynow.org/2003/12/11/success_without_victory_lost_legal_battles.152. Rocco DiPippo. “The Man Behind the Attack onGuantanamo.” June 16, 2005. FrontPageMag.com. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/The%20Man%20Behind%20the%20Attack%20on%20Guantanamo.htm.153. Michael Ratner and Jules Lobel. “Illegal War, or Legal Capture?”AlterNet. September 28, 2001. http://www.alternet.org/story/11604.154. “U.S. War Crimes in Fallujah.” Democracy Now transcript.November 19, 2004. http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/19/u_s_war_crimes_in_fallujah.155. See Henry Mark Holzer. “Habeas Dangerous.” FrontPageMagazine. July 20, 2004. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=B605291A-B98D-4DF9-A5F4-FB18E322C37B.156. Particularly the Odah case. See http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.aspx?GUID=00C0D93A-2A3C-4715-A97D-90E2783C427E.157. http://www.blackradicalcongress.org/agenda.html.158. http://www.blackradicalcongress.org/unity.html.159. Amiri Baraka. “The Left and the Millions More Movement.”Black Radical Congress. http://www.blackradicalcongress.org/ABaraka.html.160. Rob Markowski. “Peaceful Surroundings.” Pitt. Summer 2005.http://www.pittmag.pitt.edu/summer2005/commonsroom.html.161. Mark D. Tooley. “The ‘School of the Assassins’ Fiction.”December 12, 2006. FrontPageMag.com. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=13FB0AAA-9972-4C2B-9AE8-DA738EDE1F21.162. http://www.womenslawproject.org/pages/issue_youngwomen.htm.163. http://www.womenslawproject.org/pages/issue_abortion_restrict.htm.164. http://www.womenslawproject.org/pages/issue_emergencycontra.htm.165. http://www.womenslawproject.org/pages/issue_adoption.htm.166. http://www.womenslawproject.org/pages/issue_education.htm.167. http://www.womenslawproject.org/pages/issue_welfare.htm.168. Dan Kyle. “Pictures from People Against Police Violence March.”Pittsburgh Indymedia. March 22, 2003. http://www.indypgh.org/news/2003/03/3140_comment.php.169. http://rainbowsendpress.com/voices.170. “Project Profile: Book ‘Em.” The New People. October 2005,p. 23. http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/the_new_people/Oct05.pdf.171. http://www.nommoproductions.com172. http://www.nommoproductions.com/action.html173. http://www.refuseandresist.org/altindex.php.174. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6165.175. http://october22-ny.org/index2.html.176. http://www.stolenlives.org.177. Stuart Easterling. “The U.S. Anti-War Movement and the IraqiResistance.” The New People. July-August 2005. http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/the_new_people/February2004/July-August2005.pdf.178. David Meieran. “Hearings on ‘Liberal Bias’ Held at Pitt.”The New People. December 2005, p. 4. http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/the_new_people/Dec 05.pdf.179. “Massive protests planned for the Republican NationalConvention in NYC.” The New People. February 2004. http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/the_new_people/February2004/rnc.htm.180. http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/The_New_People/Oct2004/rnc_2004_mobilization.htm.181. Jeremy Shenk. “N6: Post-Election Perspectives Forum.” TheNew People. December 2004, p. 7. Online at http://www.thomasmertoncenter.org/the_new_people/December 04.pdf.182. http://www.celdf.org/ProgramAreas/CorporationsDemocracy/ModelBrieftoEliminateCorporateRights/tabid/167/Default.aspx.183. http://www.celdf.org/ProgramAreas/GrassrootsLitigationSupport/tabid/64/ctl/Edit/mid/375/AboutthisProgram/tabid/57/Default.aspx.184. http://www.celdf.org/ProgramAreas/GrassrootsLitigationSupport/tabid/64/ctl/Edit/mid/375/DefendingBallotAccessBrief/tabid/75/Default.aspx .185. http://www.celdf.org/SpeakersBureau/ListofCELDFSpeakers/tabid/117/Default.aspx.186. Video “Introduction to the Democracy School,” accessed April 2,2008. http://youtube.com/watch?v=o_Nx9VxW0IA.187. Video, “Introduction.”188. http://www.celdf.org189. http://www.celdf.org/CalendarofEvents/DemocracySchoolbyState/tabid/359/Default.aspx.190. He is unidentified in the video but looks like Ben Price, projectdirector of CELDF’s Corporations and Democracy Program.191. Video, “Introduction.”192. See Marx’s essay “Alienated Labor,” as well as Marx, Engels.Manifesto of the Communist Party. (Chicago: Charles H. Kerrand Co., 1906), p. 12.193. “An Outline of the Weekend Curriculum” http://www.celdf.org/DemocracySchool/tabid/60/ctl/Edit/mid/419/DanielPennockDemocracySchool/AnOutlineoftheWeekendCurriculum/tabid/105/Default.aspx.194. http://www.celdf.org/Portals/0/PDF/The%20Many%20Headed%20Hydra%20-%20Introduction.pdf.195. http://www.celdf.org/DemocracySchool/AnOutlineoftheWeekendCurriculum/FromSlaveStatetoCorporateState/tabid/248/Default.aspx.196. See Grossman, “Anti-Federalists Speak: Property vs. Democracyin 1787.” By What Authority? Vol. 2, No. 1. Fall 1999. http://www.celdf.org/portals/0/pdf/Anti-Federalists%20Speak%20-%20Property%20vs.%20Democracy.pdf197. “Introduction to Democracy School” video.198. Unless otherwise noted, all film descriptions are taken from http://filmguide.nantucketfilmfestival.org/tixSYS/2006/filmguide/schedule-list.php199. Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell. “Focusing on Franken.” MotherJones. October 11, 2006. http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2006/10/focusing_on_franken.html.200. http://www.thegroundtruth.org/film.html.201. Stephen Holden. “The Ground Truth.” New York Times.September 15, 2006. http://movies.nytimes.com/2006/09/15/movies/15trut.html.202. All information on the film thus far has been taken from http://www.thegroundtruth.org/film.html.203. Stephen Holden. “The Ground Truth.”204. http://www.thegroundtruth.org/solution.html.205. Michael Kranish. “With Antiwar Role, High Visibility.” BostonGlobe. June 17, 2003. http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061703.shtml.206. Scott Swett. “L.A. Times Cover-Up?” FrontPage Magazine.March 13, 2008 . http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=5D74268B-C69A-47A9-A037-EE17D3C29E1E.207. For a fuller overview of Sheehan’s activities, see http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2031.208. Steven Stalinsky. “Arab and Muslim Jihad Fighters in Iraq.”Middle East Media Research Institute. July 27, 2003. http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Area=sr&ID=SR1903.209. Eric Davis. “Iraqi Sunni Clergy Enter the Fray.” Religion inthe News. Spring 2003. http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RINVol7No3/IraqiSunnisJoinFray.htm.210. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6244.211. The Sun surveyed 257 demonstrators; these may have includedmembers of the Thomas Merton Center. “Cindy Sheehan’sCrowd.” New York Sun. August 11, 2005. http://www.nysun.com/editorials/cindy-sheehans-crowd/18436.212. “Frequently Asked Questions About Filibustering War Funding.”http://www.mfso.org/article.php?id=1179.213. Robert Smith. “Lies That Aren’t Lies, Mistakes That Aren’tMistakes, and Hypocrisy That Isn’t Hypocrisy: Taming theAmerican Bully.” Military Families Speak Out. October 19. 2003.http://www.mfso.org/article.php?id=78.214. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7071.215. “Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.” IVAW. http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier.216. See the full account in Ben Johnson. “Who’s Behind theCensorship of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week?” FrontPageMagazine. October 10, 2007. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=8C1F85EE-1AC2-43B8-BDB6-5FE4951035B4.217. In the interest of full disclosure, this author is employed by theparent organization that launched Islamofascism Awareness Week.Ishmael Vera. “Who Hates Americans?” FrontPage Magazine.October 15, 2007. http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=7169C0C2-D529-4B93-B83A-8C9ECEB455D5.218. Jeremy Gettleman. “Blinded Soldier Builds New Life HelpingOthers to See.” New York Times. May 4, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/us/04blind.html?fta=y.219. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0450518/plotsummary220. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixies accessed January 30, 2008.221. http://www.moosecockmovie.com.222. http://www.atomfilms.com/film/fourteen.jsp223. http://www.pilgff.org/aboutus_publicrelations.htm. For a filmlisting, see http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06277/727494-254.stm and http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06278/727400-254.stm.224. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0461613/usercomments.225. http://www.plgfs.org/films_wholenewthing.htm.226. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0461613/board/nest/73284498.227. http://www.plgfs.org/films_lovingannabelle.htm.228. http://www.afterellen.com/Movies/2006/5/annabelle.html.229. This author regrets having watched the film online on May 24,2008, at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx3fO7fI35E&feature=related.230. www.subcin.com/anger.html.231. http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC30folder/PornWaugh2.html.232. http://www.gay.com/entertainment/movies/reviews/?sernum=64305.233. http://gaylife.about.com/od/moviestheatre/fr/shortbusmovie.htm.234. http://chicago.metromix.com/movies/review/movie-revieweating-out/162946/content.235. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_Out_2:_Sloppy_Seconds.236. http://queerbeacon.typepad.com/queer_beacon/2006/11/eating_out_2_20.html.237. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117931156.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&nid=2562.238. http://www.amazon.com/Gymnast-Dreya-Weber/dp/B000SUKPL6.239. http://www.queerscreen.com.au/j/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=265&extmode=view&extid=72.240. http://www.plgfs.org/films_elcalentito.htm.241. http://www.plgfs.org/films_mensshorts.htm.242. http://www.plgfs.org/films_womensshorts.htm.243. http://www.plgfs.org/films_mom.htm.244. http://www.plgfs.org/films_lgbtavantgarde.htm.245. http://www.plgfs.org/films_longterm.htm.246. http://www.plgfs.org/films_savingmarriage.htm.247. http://www.outcast-films.com/pressreleases/20070718.html.248. http://www.plgfs.org/films_20Centimeters.htm.249. http://www.plgfs.org/films_campout.htm.250. http://www.plgfs.org/films_picupthemic.htm.251. “Teresa Heinz Kerry: America Will Accept Gay Marriage.”Newsmax. February 27, 2004. http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/2/27/184930.shtml.252. http://www.twogirlsworking.com.253. http://www.pghfilmmakers.org/exhibition/upcoming.html#sop.254. http://www.pghfilmmakers.org/exhibition/upcoming.html#landofconfusion.255. http://www.pghfilmmakers.org/exhibition/upcoming.html#alexandra.256. http://www.pghfilmmakers.org/exhibition/upcoming.html#glbtshorts.257. http://media.www.pittnews.com/media/storage/paper879/news/2005/04/11/Ae/In.Time.Of.War.the.Boundary.Hits.Home-1786904.shtml.258. http://www.thisishappening.com/EventPage.php?eventid=53551.259. http://www.webbricolage.org/index.php/main/index/about/1.php.260. http://www.artup.org/main.htm. Accessed July 1, 2008.261. http://www.heinzawards.net/speechDetail.asp?speechID=71&source=recipient.262. http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag05/june_05/diSuvero/diSuvero.shtml.263. http://www.millenniumpark.org/documents/MicrosoftWord-PressReleaseonMarkdiSuveroWorksandProtest.pdf.264. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_7_44/ai_n26804453/pg_5?tag=artBody;col1.265. http://whitney.org/biennial2006/projects/tower.266. http://www.chicagoartistsresource.org/visual-arts/node/635.267. All panels may be viewed at http://whitney.org/biennial2006/projects/tower.268. http://www.patriciavillalobos.com/shortstatement.htm269. http://www.heinzawards.net/recipients.asp?action=detail&recipientID=87.270. http://www.heinzawards.net/awards.271. Unless otherwise noted, all funding information comes from therelevant IRS 990 forms available from guidestar.org for the years2001-2006.272. See chapter one, “The Truth About Tides.”273. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6491.274. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/splcworldview.html.275. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7182.276. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7349.277. p. 6.278. J.R. Labbe. “Perhaps they need a background check on their taxknowledge.” Knight-Ridder Newspapers. May 10, 2000. http://www.texnews.com/guns.texnews/opin/tax0510.html.279. http://www.guncite.com/journals/senrpt/senrpt.html.280. http://www.lccr.com/race_policy_prop_209.shtml.281. http://www.lccr.com/immigration_policy_access_govt.shtml.282. http://www.lccr.com/immigration_impact_litigation_constitutional_rights.shtml.283. http://www.caasf.org. Accessed October 2, 2008.284. Christopher Horner. “Playing Ketchup.” National Review.January 28, 2004. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/horner200401280900.asp.285. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6904.286. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6970.287. http://www.goldmanfund.org/html/grants/awarded/2008/2008-grants-population.html.288. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1816.289. Sandra Forester. “Response to Caller ‘A Serious Mistake,’ Says Planned Parenthood of Idaho.” Idaho Statesman. February 28,2008. http://www.idahostatesman.com/235/story/308723.html.290. http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7353.291. http://www.prwatch.org/books/wmd.html.292. http://www.bananarepublicans.org/excerpt.html.293. http://www.prwatch.org/tbwe/?q=books/tbwe.294. http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/cmd/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=4992&t=tbwe.dwt.295. 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Ben Johnson is Managing Editor of FrontPage Magazine and co-author, with David Horowitz, of the book Party of Defeat. He is also the author of the book 57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry's Charitable Giving.