How 'rich-world' enviros are hurting rest of globe

If I were to tell you that the Congress of Racial Equality held a teach-in last month, and that among the featured speakers was one of the founders of Greenpeace, what would you suppose was the agenda?

Denouncing the policies of rich-world environmentalists whose policies mean suffering and death for hundreds of millions of destitute people in poor countries, especially in Africa. That's what.

Participants minced no words in their description of the event, and I intend to deliver them to you largely unminced as well, because they know what they are talking about and they've said it better than I ever could.

"We must put humanity back into the environmental debate," said CORE national spokesman Niger Innis. "We all want to protect our planet. But we must stop trying to protect it from bogus or illusory threats - and on the backs, and the graves, of the world's most powerless and impoverished people.

"The green movement imposes the views of mostly wealthy, comfortable Americans and Europeans on mostly poor, desperate Africans, Asians and Latin Americans. It violates their most basic human rights," he said.

Paul Driessen is the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death (and a former member of the Sierra Club and Zero Population Growth). "Eco-imperialism perpetuates poverty and misery," he said. "It's hypocritical and immoral, unethical and socially irresponsible. Worst of all, it's lethal. It simply has to end" (information about the book is available on Driessen's Web site, www.eco-imperial ism.com/html/12.html).

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore said that when he helped create Greenpeace in 1971, "I had no idea it would evolve into a band of scientific illiterates who use Gestapo tactics to silence people who wish to express their views in a civilized forum. I had no idea the movement would oppose genetic engineering and other programs that could benefit mankind - and adopt zero-tolerance policies that so clearly expose its intellectual and moral bankruptcy."

Want some specifics? Golden rice. This is rice that has had a daffodil gene added through genetic engineering, to help alleviate Vitamin A deficiencies that are common in areas where rice is a staple.

According to CORE's press release, "Every year, 500,000 children around the world go blind, as a result of vitamin A deficiency, noted Dr. C.S. Prakash, professor of plant genetics at Tuskegee University and a native of India. Two million die from problems directly related to this simple lack of a common vitamin, often because they are so malnourished they cannot survive the malaria, dysentery and other diseases that also afflict them. If people could eat just 1.5 ounces of 'golden rice' a day, they could eliminate these threats, Dr. Prakash pointed out."

In another article, "Battle for Biotech Progress" (at www.taemag.com/issues/ current_issue.asp), Moore said the tangle of red tape that environmentalists have imposed on any genetically modified crops guarantees that large-scale planting of golden rice will be delayed for at least five years. The cost of avoiding the insignificant risk of "a daffodil gene in a rice paddy" is the certainty that "another 2.5 million children will go blind."

Other examples? Genetically modified strains of soybeans and other crops allow farmers to use less herbicide. They are widely planted in the United States, without ill effect, but have been resisted elsewhere. In September 2003, the government of Brazil authorized the planting of genetically modified soybean seeds, essentially conceding that the thriving black market indicated that farmers considered it a superior product.

In China and India, the planting of Bt cotton, which produces a natural pesticide, allows farmers to reduce their use of chemical pesticides by 70 percent to 80 percent.

Moore believes, and I think he's right, that countering the steady drumbeat of disaster from self-proclaimed environmentalists such as his former colleagues requires much more aggressive campaigning of scientific progress. (Why should the Luddites get to call themselves "progressive"?) "Imagine an advertising campaign that showed graphic images of blind children in Africa, explained Vitamin A deficiency, introduced golden rice, and demonstrating how Greenpeace's actions are preventing the delivery of this cure," he suggests. Or one showing workers in developing countries applying liberal amounts of pesticides with no safety protection.

As it is, he says, "the activists are playing hardball" while the companies and organizations "are trying to project positive, clean and calming thoughts." That's not good enough.

"The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity," Moore said at the CORE teach-in. "The pain and suffering it inflicts on families in developing countries can no longer be tolerated."

If you want to join the opponents of progress, at least be honest about the costs.

One of the major funding organizations of the vile Enviral Anti Human actions is the Tides Foundation, which is controlled by Kerry's wife.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1077277/posts

Teresa Heinz Kerry: Financier of the Radical Left
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | 2/13/04 | Ben Johnson

Posted on 02/13/2004 12:42:05 AM PST by kattracks

With Matt Drudge’s recent revelation that John Kerry is as faithful to his second wife as he was to his old Vietnam “brothers,” the senator’s presidential campaign may depend more than ever on the actions of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. While the mainstream media has thus far overlooked the alleged infidelity, media outlets have also overlooked a far more important story: The former Mrs. John Heinz is also in bed – financially – with the radical Left.

Teresa Heinz Kerry has financed the secretive Tides Foundation to the tune of more than $4 million over the years. The Tides Foundation, a “charity” established in 1976 by antiwar leftist activist Drummond Pike, distributes millions of dollars in grants every year to political organizations advocating far-Left causes. The Tides Foundation and its closely allied Tides Center, which was spun off from the Foundation in 1996 but run by Drummond Pike, distributed nearly $66 million in grants in 2002 alone. In all, Tides has distributed more than $300 million for the Left. These funds went to rabid antiwar demonstrators, anti-trade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorists legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and open borders advocates.

During the years 1995-2001, the Howard Heinz Endowment, which Heinz Kerry chairs, gave Tides more than $4.3 million. The combined Heinz Endowments (composed of the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Vira I. Heinz Endowment, with net assets of more than $1 billion in 2001) donated $1.6 million to establish the Tides Center for Western Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh office of the San Francisco-based Tides Center. Since that time, the local branch has tirelessly pushed an anti-business agenda in the name of “preserving the environment.” However, it is the Tides Foundation’s national organization whose connections are most disconcerting.

The Tides Foundation is a major source of revenue for some of the most extreme groups on the Left. Tides allows donors to anonymously contribute money to a host of causes; the donor simply makes the check out to Tides and instructs the Foundation where to forward the money. Tides does so, for a nominal fee. And who are the beneficiaries of this money?

The Antiwar Movement

Senator John F. Kerry has gone far with his, err, highly nuanced view of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He voted for the war resolution but specified a litany of conditions the Bush administration must meet before he would support combat, then proceeded to vote against funding troops already in harm’s way – then claimed he had always supported the president when Saddam Hussein was captured. The grant recipients of the Tides Foundation, to which Kerry’s wife has steered more than $4 billion in “charitable” funds, understand no such nuance.

Tides established the Iraq Peace Fund and the Peace Strategies Fund to fund the antiwar movement. These projects funded such hysterical protest organizations as MoveOn.org, the website that recently featured two separate commercials portraying George W. Bush as Adolf Hitler. (Howard Dean, not Kerry, won MoveOn.org’s “virtual primary.”)

The antiwar movement often boasted that MoveOn.org and Indymedia provided them “alternate media coverage” from a leftist perspective. Indymedia, an enormous news and events bulletin board with local pages in most of the world’s major cities, provided a vital link for activists to coordinate their activities. Indymedia received $376,000 from the Tides Foundation.

The Institute for Global Communications is another leftists communications facilitator that received Tides grant money. IGC, which during the 1990s was the leading provider of web technology to the radical Left, links to “recommended sites” such as the War Resisters League (a group whose purpose is enabling peaceniks to refuse to pay taxes) and the leftist American Friends Service Committee. Most disturbing is the link to Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, which has supported Slobodan Milosevic and North Korean strongman Kim Jong-Il. The IAC is the force behind International ANSWER, which sponsored the major antiwar (and anti-Bush) rallies before the invasion of Iraq. Once ANSWER was outed as a radical organization, organization of the rallies was given to the newly founded United for Peace and Justice, headed by longtime Communist Party member Leslie Cagan. UFPJ is also a Tides grant recipient.The Tides-funded “A Better Way Project,” which opposed war in Iraq, also coordinated efforts of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War Coalition. The celebrity-laden Win Without War Coalition, along with the Bill Moyers-funded Florence and John Schumann Foundation, ran full-page ads in the New York Times opposing the War on Terrorism. This will not be the last overlapping of far-Left causes.

The Islamist Front

Immediately after 9/11, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response” to the opening salvos of war. Part of the half-million dollars in grants the 9/11 Fund dispersed went to the New York Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project to protect the rights of homosexual Arabs. The Foundation replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was established with the aid of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. (Currency speculator and pro-drug advocate Soros is, like Teresa Heinz Kerry, a major contributor to Tides, having donated more than $7 million.) The Democratic Justice Fund seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration to the United States, particularly from countries designated by the State Department as “terrorist nations.”

Tides has also given grant money to the Council for American Islamic Relations. Purportedly a “Muslim civil rights group,” CAIR is in fact one of the leading anti-anti-terrorism organizations within the Wahhabi Lobby. CAIR regularly opposes and demonizes American efforts to fight terrorism, claiming, for instance, that Homeland Security measures are responsible for an undocumented surge in “hate crimes.”

CAIR officials have reason to fight Bush’s anti-terrorism measures: all too many CAIR officials are on the record supporting terrorism. CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad openly stated in 1994, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.” Community Affairs Director Bassem K. Khafagi has been arrested for visa and bank fraud. Randall Royer, a Communications Specialist and Civil Rights Coordinator at CAIR, was arrested along with a group of Islamic radicals in Virginia for allegedly planning jihad. CAIR has defended terrorist “charities” shut down by the Bush administration. Every few months some CAIR campus official is arrested for aiding and abetting terrorism.

The Legal Matrix

The Tides Foundation has funded a number of the pillars of the radical legal establishment. Chief among these is the National Lawyers Guild. Once described as “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party,” the NLG continued its proud tradition at its most recent convention last October. The concluding speaker was Lynne Stewart, an NLG lawyer who was arrested for helping her client – convicted 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman – communicate with his terrorist cells in Egypt. Stewart said she and her NLG comrades were carrying on a proud tradition of their forebears, past and present:

And modern heroes, dare I mention? Ho and Mao and Lenin, Fidel and Nelson Mandela and John Brown, Che Guevara who reminds us, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents.

More recently, the NLG has endorsed the March 20 call to End Colonial Occupation from Iraq to Palestine & Everywhere” organized by International ANSWER, and has posted a petition for “Post-Conviction Relief” for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Tides’ Peace Strategies Fund has funneled money to the Center for Constitutional Rights. The CCR was stablished by the late Sixties radical William Kunstler, defender of the Chicago 8, and Arthur Kinoy. The two also had plans to establish a new Communist Party. Executive Director Ron Daniels has been honored by the Communist Party USA for his work. Daniels also has a long and cordial relationship with racist, anti-Semitic “poet laureate” Amiri Baraka. Since 9/11, CCR has channeled its efforts into fighting every effective Homeland Security measure. They have opposed increasing the government’s ability to wiretap Islamists suspected of plotting terrorism and moaned the sequestering of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay was an unexcusable form of “racial profiling.” CCR President Marc Ratner has portrayed American soldiers as the offenders, guilty of 9/11 by their Middle East policy and guilty of keeping Islamist killers “shackled, hooded and sedated during the 25 hour flight from Afghanistan.” CCR has also defended Lynne Stewart’s “innocence” in aiding Sheikh Rahman’s Islamic Jihad.

Tides also funds the Alliance for Justice, a group dedicated to stopping Bush judicial appointees (a cause John Kerry can agree wholeheartedly endorse). Other Tides grants have gone to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the Asian Law Caucus.

Environmental Extremism

The Tides Foundation has funded the Ruckus Society, a group of rowdy ultra-Greens who rioted and looted Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization riots. The Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania, established in Pittsburgh with Heinz Family funds, advocates for environmentalist measures that have helped put holes in the Rust Belt’s economy.

Lest one think only Tides’ money is going to radicals, not funds directly controlled by Teresa Heinz Kerry, remember that Heinz money has repeatedly found its way to the Earth Island Institute. On September 14, 2001, the Institute’s website bore the headline “U.S. Responds to Terrorist Attacks with Self-Righteous Arrogance.”

Heinz family philanthropic funds have also had some dubious effects on the presidential race. The League of Conservation Voters, a group financed by Heinz money, has recently endorsed John Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Teresa Heinz Kerry will play a potent role in saving her second husband’s presidential campaign now – as Hillary Clinton did in 1992 and again during her husband’s impeachment. Like Hillary, Heinz may demand a place at the table for her pet causes in return for her service. Consider yourself warned.

Ben Johnson is Associate Editor of FrontPage Magazine.

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