Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant Driven Environmental Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your Future

...Like the journalists of the Progressive era in the early 1900s, he aims to show how the rich and powerful selfishly promote their interests. Like them, he is a reporter whose stories express moral outrage: he wants to describe the tactics of modern-day "malefactors of great wealth" who succeed through manipulation and trickery. But the early Progressives and Arnold appear to have different enemies. The Progressives attacked the producers of oil, steel and beef. Arnold attacks the patrons of environmentalism. Progressives wanted to destroy industrial trusts. He wants to expose those who put legal limits on natural resource production. They targeted John D. Rockefeller. His sights are on the Rockefeller Family Fund.Arnold has scoured web-sites and tracked down IRS Form 990s to identify green grantmakers. More importantly, he explains that many of them do much more than just write checks: these "prescriptive foundations" use the power of the purse to dictate to their grantees. They set up nonprofits and push them into coalitions; they select their tactics, venues and personnel. Foundations of this type are not shy about getting what they want, and if something doesn't exist they use their philanthropic dollars to create it. Arnold reminds us that the Ford Foundation provided the start-up money to establish the litigious National Resources Defense Council. The Rockefeller Family Fund organized the Environmental Grantmakers Association and put Donald Ross, a Fund retainer, at the head of it. With some 180 members, the EGA helps funders combine their dollars to advance common strategies that they then push, take-it-or-leave-it, onto green groups. The Pew Charitable Trusts and other foundations put up million[s] to create a new public relations group, now called the National Environmental Trust, to mobilize activists and shape public opinion. Lately it's been promoting global warming. Teresa Heinz, widow of one U.S. senator and wife of another, has used the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Heinz Family Foundation to endow several new environmental think-tanks and research centers. And then there's the Tides Foundation, which itself takes money from Pew and the Alton Jones Foundation. It provides financial oversight and management training for 260 (!) green projects that it funds. It also gives many of them office space in a former military base, San Francisco's lush and historic Presidio. Come again? Arnold recalls that Congress had declared the beautiful park-like base, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean's entrance into San Francisco Bay, to be surplus military property. It was then turned over to the National Park Service, and subsequently set up as a public-private trust whose board members are appointed by President Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Fortunately for Tides, the trust was pleased to lease them the Presidio's historic buildings.One of the strengths of Undue Influence is that Arnold is a good detective and story-teller. He ap

In what may be his best work yet, in his book "Undue Influence", Ron Arnold exposes the most powerful forces in Washington, DC. Unregulated, unelected and accountable to no-one, a handful of well-positioned elitists control billions of dollars held by the nations most wealthy foundations and environmental groups. Routinely sculpting studies to show public opinion as they wish it shown, and able to afford the votes they need or otherwise do an end-run around Congress in order to get laws passed or policies enacted, these pretenders have become skilled masters of using the environment as a cover for their own special interests. For rural Americans or anyone who really wonders who the real power brokers are, and why their rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States are being trashed by Washington's politicians, "Undue Influence" is a must read.

"Undue Influence" by Ron Arnold is an excellent must have reference book for anyone attempting to stay current with what is happening with land control actions by government agencies. This book is about the flow of money and influence between the government agencies, Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and wealthy non-profit foundations. Information in "Undue Influence" will help you understand that environmentalism is not about the environment. It is all about power.

Ron Arnold has completed the circle or, in his example, the triangle in his brilliantly researched masterpiece, "Undue Influence". The first two books in the series, "Trashing the Economy" and "Ecoterrorism" laid the groundwork. This third book completes documentation of the "Iron Triangle" consisting of "wealthy foundations, grant-driven green groups and zealous bureaucrats". The book meticulously details the process the iron trangle uses for deindustrializing America, depopulating rural America and shutting down family farms. Anyone concerned about future job prospects, desiring to live in rural America or depending on a resource based industry would do well to read all three of Mr. Arnold's books. His term, "rural cleansing" is particularly salient. It is happening in Maine, just as it happened in the Northwest. (Look for Neo-Druids and Luddites to pan this book.)

Arnold follows the money used by mega foundations to fund this special interest community. Urban versus rural is happening. Urban based greenies driving their SUVs with little concern and less action for urban pollution are damaging the livlihood and lives of rural American. Driving force are organizations like the Nature Conservancy with over $1 billion in assets who position themselves as concerned about ecology. Concern is about control...their control of public and private land. Get this book.