rainesco
Tides Foundation and Alternet.org (cont'd)
Sun Aug 31 13:12:41 2003
67.30.96.212

"The depth and financial implications of the Tides/Fenton connection is truly impressive, if not surprising. After all, long-time Fenton partner and recently-departed Environmental Media Services chief Arlie Schardt has sat on the board of the Tides Center/Tides Foundation complex since the very beginning. At present, the Fenton Communications client list includes at least 36 Tides grantees, as well as 10 big-money foundations that use Tides as a pass-through funding vehicle just about every year. In some cases, the Tides Foundation has been used to funnel money from one Fenton client to another.

"Even taking into account the peculiar relationship between Tides and its in-house projects, Tides only spends about 40% of its money on these organizations. The rest goes to other left-leaning grantees, many of which have managers or board members that are connected to Tides in other ways.

"For instance, the Tides Center's corporate registration documents on file in Minnesota show that Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy[10] (IATP) president Mark Ritchie[11] is its registered agent. This might explain why the Tides Foundation has paid over $20,000 to a commercial corporation owned by Ritchie and his brother (Niel Ritchie[12]). It's a sustainable coffee company called Headwaters Inc., which does business with the public using the name Peace Coffee. The Ritchie brothers run this for-profit venture out of the same offices of their nonprofit (IATP), which just happens to advocate society's total conversion to Peace Coffee's main product. It's a clever bit of flim-flammery, and the Tides Foundation has been helping to foot the bill.

"This is business as usual for Mark Ritchie, though. He is the mastermind behind several other food-scare and health-scare organizations, all of which get appreciable funding through his Tides connection. A Tides Center project called the Trade Research Consortium lists its purpose as 'research that illuminates the links between trade, environmental, and social justice.' Ritchie is its only discernable contact person. Similarly, Ritchie's IATP runs the organic-only food advocacy group Sustain, but has taken great pains to hide this relationship (the group's Internet domain listing was altered just hours after the connection was noted in an on-line discussion group in 2001). Ritchie also started the Consumer's Choice Council, a Tides grantee that lobbies for eco-labels on everything from soybeans to coffee.

"Tides also maintains an interesting relationship with the multi-billion-dollar Pew Charitable Trusts. Since 1993 Pew has used the Tides Foundation and/or Tides Center to manage three high-profile journalism initiatives: the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, and the Pew Center for the People and the Press. These Pew Centers are set up as for-profit media companies, which means that Pew (as a private foundation) is legally prohibited from funding them directly. Tides has no such hurdle, so it has gladly raked in over $95 million from Pew since 1990 -- taking the standard 8 percent as pure profit.

"In practice, the social reformers at the helm of the Pew Charitable Trusts use these media entities to run public opinion polling; to indoctrinate young reporters in reporting techniques that are consistent with Pew's social goals; and to promote (read: subsidize) actual reporting and story preparation that meets Pew's definition of civic journalism. Civic journalism, by the way, is defined as reporting that mobilizes Americans behind issues that Pew considers important.

*Officers and Other Supporters

==========

[[where I found the link above -- more listings of major foundations]]
Funders
From Disinfopedia, the encyclopedia of propaganda.
List of Funders
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Funders&printable=yes