kerry heinz funding...long

Teresa Heinz Kerry: Bag Lady for the Radical Left
By Ben Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | February 13, 2004


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) 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. Drummond Pike told The Chronicle of
Philanthropy, “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we
work with.” That becomes understandable when one views the list of
Tides grant recipients. And who are the beneficiaries of this money?



The Antiwar Movement


Senator John F. Kerry has gone far with his 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 fueled 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 the radical
website Indymedia provided them “alternate media coverage.” Indymedia,
an enormous news and events bulletin board with local pages in most of
the world’s major cities, provided a vital link for radical activists
often with violent agendas to coordinate their protests. Indymedia
received $376,000 from the Tides Foundation.



The Institute for Global Communications is another leftist
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. When ANSWER was outed as a Communist organization,
United for Peace and Justice, headed by longtime Communist Party
member Leslie Cagan was created as a "moderate" alternative. 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. Ostensibly a “Muslim civil rights group,” CAIR is in fact
one of the leading anti-anti-terrorism organizations within the
Wahhabi Lobby, with links to Hamas. 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,
which began as a Commnist front organization and is proud of its
lineage. At its recent convention last October, the concluding speaker
was Lynne Stewart, an indicted terrorist NLG lawyer arrested for
helping her client – convicted 1993 World Trade Center bombing
mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman – communicate with his terrorist
cells in Egypt. In her speech, 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 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 Michael 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
anarchist 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.



Tides money has also squashed free speech. Thanks to complaints
generated by the Tides-funded Environmental Working Group, ABC
cancelled a John Stossel piece exposing the misleading nature of
environmental advocacy in public elementary schools.



Greenpeace is a well-known Tides grant recipient. Greenpeace is best
known for its illegal actions, endangering humans in order to make a
point about the environment. Tides gave Greenpeace a quarter of a
million dollars over ten years.



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 has recently
endorsed John Kerry’s presidential campaign. The Heinz Family
Foundation gave LCV at least $20,000 and donated almost $250,000 to a
member of the LCV board.



Perhaps this circular rotation of cash and endorsements should not
surprise anyone. The grant-making institutions of the Left and their
feverish recipients ultimately form an amorphous, leftist entity. One
never needs to search very far to find connections between a leftist
foundation and extreme advocacy groups. Teresa Heinz Kerry, George
Soros, Bill Moyers and the Ford Foundation fund the Tides
Foundation/Center; Tides funds the National Lawyers Guild, CAIR,
MoveOn.org and United for Peace and Justice; those organizations then
unite in fluid coalitions to protest against their common political
enemies (Republicans). Ultimately, their representatives end up on
Bill Moyers' PBS programs or active within the Democratic campaigns of
their fundraisers. Between now and the election, these organizations
will run constant interference for the Democratic presidential nominee
(presumably Kerry himself): they will march en masse against the Bush
administration again and again; they will file more lawsuits against
the administration's Homeland Security measures, decry any effective
response to terrorism, claim the United States is guilty of
slaughtering Iraqi civilians and petition leftist judges to open
America's borders to Islamist terrorists. After they help his
election, President Kerry will be indebted to them. And then they will
insist he begin implementing their political agenda.



Moreover, they will have a close ally in the East Wing of the White
House, an ally more intimately tied to them than she is to her
(second) husband. (She only adopted his last name and political party
registration less than 18 months ago. “Politically, it's going to be
Heinz Kerry,” she recently said. “But I don't give a sh-t, you know?”)
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, in return
for her service, Heinz may demand a place at the table for her pet
causes. Caveat emptor.