The Enemies List
Page 10
Training them to duck, we hope.
And, finally, Ms. Dennis sends us an issue of the Roundtable’s quarterly publication, Philanthropy, in which the United Way scandal is analyzed and the abuses of its former president William Aramony are shown to be “simply the most visible manifestation of the organization’s growing immoderation and ambition.” The article’s author, chairman of the Philanthropy Roundtable Michael S. Joyce, goes on to say:
United Way of America ... provides staff training and development, promotes United Way nationally, and lobbies federal and state lawmakers to support public policy initiatives on literacy, homelessness, drug abuse, and other social issues. [Donors may wonder why their contributions are being used to lobby the government to supply the services United Way is meant to render.] To the extent United Way controls the flow of multitudinous individual donations, groups are forced to meet the agency’s specifications in order to maintain their funding. If United Way says it will only support the Boy Scouts if it allows girls or homosexuals or atheists to be members, the Boy Scouts either have to comply or lose access to the masses of donations that are channeled through the agency.
Our second Enemies List megasource is Willa Ann Johnson, founder and chairman of the Capital Research Center (1612 K St., NW, Suite 704, Washington, DC 20006). This fine organization, in Ms. Johnson’s own words,
was formed to provide positive new alternatives to the hitherto-dominant culture of philanthropy in America. By challenging the progressive ideology of the public interest culture, Capital Research is helping the philanthropic community rediscover the bedrock principles of individual initiative and responsibility in a free society.
Ms. Johnson writes us a letter saying:
I have learned from John Von Kannon that you have begun work on your new “Enemies List.”... I am emboldened to submit the following organizations: The Council on Foundations, Campaign for Human Development, National Organization for Women, Alliance for Justice, AARP, League of Women Voters, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Children’s Defense Fund, and Greenpeace.
She encloses a massive package of research material. Herewith, some extracts.
Of the Council on Foundations, Capital Research Center senior fellow Marvin Olasky writes:
To the Chicago Hilton on April 22 [1991] came 2,000 foundation executives and staff members for the 42nd annual conference of the Council on Foundations.... I have been following the Council on Foundations, and tracking the $3,600,000 in annual giving its 1,200 “members control, since 1985.
Mr. Olasky then details conference sessions and panels on such topics as:
“Task Force on Inclusiveness”—to help COF members adapt to “the new pluralism”
“Reproductive Rights Breakfast Roundtable” [Yum, say the editors.]
“Civil Rights in the 1990s”
“Civil Disobedience in the Civil Society”—with one panelist saying, “We live in a time of terrible somnolence and anesthesia ...”
“Marketing Our Good Work”—“proactively going after media attention”
“Working Group on Funding Lesbian and Gay Issues”
“Culture and Community Empowerment”—led by one Jane Sapp, director of the Center for Cultural Community Development at Springfield College in Massachusetts, who said: “I wish I could have had this conversation back in 1492.... If we had sat down in 1492 and said, ‘How do we begin to find a way for all of us to talk together about who we are,’ we would not have had today’s problems.... The word is domination.... You took away the music... you took away self-esteem ... you made me a consumer.”
Poor Mr. Olasky also attends the conference’s film festival, where he views such artistic triumphs as:
Berkeley in the Sixties
Global Dumping Ground—“America’s dirty secret... export of toxic waste”
Borderline Medicine—praising Canada’s national health insurance
H-2 Worker—substandard living and working conditions in the sugar cane industry
Streetlife: The Invisible Family
Amazonia: Voices from the Rainforest and Chemical Valley—set in West Virginia and funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, etc., and containing such memorable lines as “They killed the Indians, now they’re killing the hillbillies.”
The Campaign for Human Development is one of the Catholic Church’s largest charitable programs. It’s run by the U.S. Catholic Conference under the auspices of the National Conference of Bishops. In 1990 CHD raised $9.82 million. Here’s what some of that money goes for:
Expanding Communications to Empower Indian People of Fort Bethold ($33,000) ... Amnesty Farmworkers Organizing Project ($25,000) ... Build Homes Not Bombs ($20,000)... Virginia Association Against the Death Penalty ($30,000) ... Organizing and Educating for Legislative Advocacy on Welfare Issues ($30,000) ... Parents United for Child Care ($40,000)... Campaign for Accessible Health Care ($40,000) ... and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a product of 1960s radical activism that engages in community organizing to “win the maximum amount of political power possible to be exercised by our constituency and their organization.” The goal: “for low-to-moderate income people to take back what’s rightfully ours,” which, to ACORN, means “everything.” Between 1978 and 1989 CHD funneled better than $1,000,000 to ACORN projects across the United States.
The Alliance for Justice is headed by Nan Aron, formerly of the horrible ACLU. Says the Capital Research Center:
Alliance ... is an amalgam of groups that took a leadership role in lobbying against confirmation of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. It also opposed confirmation of Justice David Souter, spearheaded the successful fight against Judge Kenneth Ryskamp’s nomination to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and was critical of the nomination of Kenneth Starr to be Solicitor General because of his allegedly “restrictive views on the role of the courts” and presumed “insensitivity to the rights of minorities.” ... According to the New York Times, it was officials of the Alliance for Justice who first brought Anita Hill to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s attention.
The League of Women Voters is about as nonpartisan as the House of Representatives. Capital Research Center notes that the League
supports increased welfare spending... while opposing increases in the defense budget....The League says it “will be working to ensure that the federal government has overall responsibility for financing basic income-assistance programs.”... The League opposed “enactment [in 1985] of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act” ... and also opposes both the so-called “line-item veto” (at the federal level) and “a proposed constitutional amendment mandating a balanced budget.” ...
[The League opposed] “efforts to substitute private programs for social security.” The League also “opposes any initiatives that would reduce social security benefits to achieve deficit reductions.”
... The League supports “clean-air” legislation that would “institute a tough acid-rain control program.” ...
The League of Women Voters is listed in the “peace” movement-oriented Peace Resource Book: A Comprehensive Guide to Issues, Groups, and Literature, 1986, which describes the League as a women’s “Activist Group” which “lobbies against the MX [missile], Star Wars, and increased military spending.” ...
A statement of the League’s position on U.S. relations with developing countries announced ... that “U.S. policies toward developing countries should not be based on maintaining U.S. preeminence for fighting communism.”
And—E-Listers take note—“the League condemns the so-called ‘witch-hunt’ period of the early fifties.”
The Center for Science in the Public Interest is a Naderite front group. Capital Research points out that CSPI is
pro-government, pro-tax, pro-regulation, and anti-business.... It wants the Department of Agriculture’s labeling regulations for meat and poultry, as
well as its policy on health claims, to conform to those of the Food and Drug Administration.... CSPI’s promotion of tougher labeling laws... is part of a much larger campaign against the very notion of marketing.
The federal government, says CSPI Director of Legal Affairs Bruce Silver-glade, must “put a stop to this marketplace free-for-all.” Funding for these nasty little fascists of the supermarket aisles comes from:
S. H. Cowell Foundation ($37,500)
C. S.Fund ($30,000)
Glen Eagles Foundation ($20,000)
George Gund Foundation ($20,000)
Ruth Mott Fund ($50,000)
Wallace Genetic Foundation ($15,000)
The Children’s Defense Fund is another lovely charity, dear to the heart of Hillary Clinton, no doubt. CDF cares, cares, cares about kids—though not enough to defend them in a war. The Capital Research Center tells us:
At least since the Vietnam War, there has been a growing emphasis within the political left on so-called “economic conversion”: taking tax dollars traditionally allocated to national defense and using them instead to underwrite expanded federal involvement in such domestic areas as the environment, health care, and welfare. The Children’s Defense Fund, widely perceived simply as a Washington-based children’s advocacy group, is a significant part of this movement.
CRC further notes that the 1986 Peace Resource Book “describes CDF as a ‘Lobby Group’ focused on ‘Military Spending.’” Among the self-described altruists sponsoring this nonsense:
Ford Foundation (total of $1,000,000)
General Mills Foundation ($10,000)
Prudential Foundation ($10,000)
Rockefeller Foundation ($500,000)
Helena Rubenstein Foundation (total of $55,000)
We have no room here to do justice to the Capital Research Center’s work on Greenpeace. Let us simply quote from a Greenpeace brochure—“Humanity is not the center of life on the planet. Ecology has taught us that the whole earth is part of our ‘body’”—and leave it to the imagination what part of that body Greenpeace has its head up.
Ms. Johnson also sends us a book, Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy, by the afore-cited Marvin Olasky with the assistance of Daniel T. Oliver and Robert V. Pambianco. Patterns is a detailed account of U.S. corporate charity, and in its pages we find the Dayton Hudson Corporation giving money to the Ms. Foundation for Women and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund; General Mills giving to the Gray Panthers Project Fund, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union Foundation; American Express giving to the Children’s Defense Fund and the Women’s Action Alliance; and J. P. Morgan and Company, of all people, giving to the ACLU. Lenin believed that capitalists would sell him the rope they’d be hanged with. Wrong. They want to give it away free.
Besides the white knights at the Capital Research Center and the Philanthropy Roundtable, countless other readers have been responding to our call to “Arms Not Alms.” We can mention only a few score of these patriots.
An anonymous (and, let us hope, unincarcerated) correspondent sends us a note saying: “The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation is the most active foundation in prison reform. Only their reforms—not!” He or she encloses a Clark Foundation brochure containing such gems as: “Fear of crime, rather than crime itself, seems to be fueling the nation’s rising incarceration rates.”
Frank J. O’Neill of Dunlap, California, writes:
If you have the nerve to join me I would like to nominate one of America’s most sacred cows—the American Association of Retired Persons. This organization has an operating budget of over $300 million a year, and its policies and lobbying positions go virtually unchallenged by anyone. I submit that there are millions of Americans (many or most of them elderly) that are being subjected to the liberal line of propaganda through Modern Maturity magazine and the AARP Bulletin.
He sends along a copy of the July-August 1992 AARP Bulletin, with a lead article showing how well pink and gray go together:
No sooner did Lovola Burgess take over as AARP’s new president than she vigorously defended older Americans against charges they are diverting resources away from children in need.
“To think, as some people do, that programs like Social Security and Medicare are the cause of the growing rate of poverty among children is wrong,” Burgess said. “Utterly wrong.”
“The issue isn’t old versus young,” she added. “It’s the ‘haves’ versus the ‘have nots’ in our society.”
Mark A. Siefert of Muskego, Wisconsin, says what he’d like to do to comsymps is nail their bleeding hearts to the door of every college building in the U.S. “But, since we have laws, religion, and morality, we have to make do with the New Enemies List.” He proposes for effigy portal-spiking:
Esprit de Corps, for its “What would you do to change the world” ads, which glorify gun control, abortion, and Afrocentrism
Levi Strauss, for cutting donations to the Boy Scouts because the scouts will not let homosexuals, atheists, and (strangely enough) girls join
MTV, for three reasons: (1) For not letting Rush H. Limbaugh III be a VJ on their music network because he’s a conservative; (2) for letting Bill Clinton on their other, and more popular, music network because he’s not a conservative; (3) for letting PETA, Greenpeace, and Magic Johnson on their children’s network, Nickelodeon, to make sure that children don’t become conservatives.
Time-Warner, for distributing Ice-T’s CD Cop Killer
McDonald’s, for its new environmental policy on fast-food containers
Turner Broadcasting, for the disgusting and hypocritical union of monopolistic company owner Ted Turner and known Communist Jane Fonda, and for the conception and birth of their loathsome bastard offspring, Captain Planet and the Planeteers
Orion Pictures, for creating Wayne’s World and the Bill and Ted movies.
Any motion picture company that makes movies, TV shows, etc., about two teenagers with their own cable TV show. Or about two teenagers who go joyriding through time, screwing up history, with the help of hippie comedians from the future.
The New York School System, for doling out condoms to kids
Fox Television, for doling out condoms to kids (on Beverly Hills, 91202484249457969715465)
The Christie Institute, for investigating President Bush and his family at the request of Ross Perot. (The Christic Institute has appeared in past E-Lists. This should disprove the myth that Ross Perot is a conservative.)
Planned Parenthood, for out-Hitlering Hitler, out-Stalining Stalin, and accepting contributions from Ross Perot
“You asked for groups?” Mr. Siefert continues. “I’ll give you groups (rock, that is)”:
Nirvana, for putting child pornography on their CD covers
Red Hot Chili Peppers, for trying to put ordinary pornography on their CD covers
Guns N’ Roses, for putting vocal pornography in their CDs
Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, for flag-burning and Bush-bashing
Paxton Helms of Atlanta, Georgia, writes from Europe to condemn:
Any company that takes out a full-page ad in the European Times to announce that it “[lends] only to companies we believe to be as sound ethically as they are financially.” The ethics, of course, are things like testing cosmetics on dummy rabbits.
And he sends us an example from some hapless Lancaster, England, financial institution called The Co-operative Bank, which probably doesn’t have anything but moldy carrots to lend anyway.
Rich Hardcastle of Terre Haute, Indiana, rails against:
The Eugene V. Debs Foundation, for giving out awards to further the work of leftist “visionaries” such as Ed Asner, Jesse Jackson, and Peter, Paul and Mary. The foundation is dedicated to keeping socialism on the respirator long enough to revive it when capitalism is discredited.
The Indiana State University Student Government, for funding Native American powwows and other such guilt trips
ISU’s Ho
using Now! chapter, for funding marches against Desert Storm
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, for actually calling a student government vice-presidential candidate a “murderer” because he joked about his love of red meat
Patrick Mathias of Manville, New Jersey, takes umbrage at:
Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason, television producers. The Thomasons are vocal supporters of Bill Clinton [N.B. And produced his sickening “bad stepfather” home movie for the Democratic convention—Ed.] and have his brother on their payroll as a production assistant (Spy, July-August 1992). Following the Clarence Thomas hearings, the Thomasons rushed into production an episode of Designing Women that may rank as the crudest piece of agitprop since the last PBS documentary about ACT UP. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason subsequently called the Larry King show on CNN to denounce the revelations about Clinton’s sex life as nothing more than Republican smear tactics. According to former cast member (and, perhaps not coincidentally, Republican) Delta Burke, the Thomasons also sent strongly worded letters to their cast and crew asking for donations to Clinton’s campaign.
Another O’Neill, one N. J. of Tracy, California, tells us: “Imagine my surprise when I found this marvelous collection of enemies (with the possible exception of the Pediatric AIDS Foundation) on the back of the latest B-52’s CD. I therefore nominate the B-52’s to serve on the Enemies List for their support of these organizations.” The jacket text reads, in part:
STOP! READ BEFORE OPENING
The B-52’s support these organizations, which are
among the many working to make the quality
of life better on this planet.
The B-52’s encourage you to check out these
worthwhile organizations as well as your local direct action
groups, since we all need to participate to bring about
positive change. We have tried to eliminate the use
of the long box, but where that was not possible,