The Tides Foundation
is a tax-exempt charity established in 1976 by antiwar activist Drummond Pike.
It distributes millions of dollars in grants every year to political
organizations identified with leftwing causes. Among these are United for Peace
and Justice, a group led by pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan; the National
Lawyers Guild; the Center for Constitutional Rights; and the Council for
American-Islamic Relations, three of whose executives have been indicted for
terrorist activities.
The Tides Foundation
and its closely allied Tides Center distributed nearly $66 million in grants in
2002 alone. The Tides Center was spun off from the Foundation but is also run
by Drummond Pike. The Tides Center, the Foundation,and two other
entities under the Tides roof collaborate
as partners. There is a technical – but insignificant – separation between the
Tides Foundation and the Tides Center. From 1994 – 2004, the Heinz Endowments, which Teresa Heinz
Kerry heads, have given the Tides entities $8.1 million in grants. Until
February 2001, Kerry was also a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Carnegie has given Tides numerous six-figure grants.
Tides allows donors
to anonymously contribute money to a variety of causes -- and thereby avoid
public accountability for their donations. The donor simply makes the check out
to Tides and instructs the Foundation where to forward the money. Tides does
so, often keeping as much as ten percent of the total amount for “charitable
advisory fees.” This allows high-profile individuals to fund extremist
organizations by “laundering” their money through Tides, leaving no paper trail.
Founder Drummond Pike referred to his organization as “a convenient
vehicle with squeaky clean books.”
The entities the
Tides Foundation has chosen to fund are overwhelmingly leftwing. The so-called
“legal left” (its own referent) has been a prime beneficiary of Tides largesse.
One of its principal beneficiaries, for example, is the National Lawyers Guild
(NLG), which began as a Communist front organization and remains proud of
its lineage. Its national convention in October 2003 featured a keynote address
from Lynne Stewart, a lawyer specializing in defending terrorists who has been
indicted by the Justice Department for providing “material support” to sheik Omar
Abdel Rahman, whose organization, known as the Islamic Group, bombed the World
Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than a thousand.
Stewart is on record
supporting terrorism against defenders of “capitalism” and “racism.” “I
don’t believe in anarchist violence but in directed violence,” she told the New
York Times in 1995. “That would be violence directed at the institutions
which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the
appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support.” In her National Lawyers Guild keynote address,
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, Ché Guevara…Our quests like theirs are to shake the very foundations of the continents.”
More recently, the
NLG has endorsed the “March 20 [2004] call to End Colonial Occupation from Iraq
to Palestine & Everywhere” organized by International ANSWER (a Stalinist
front group), and the NLG website has posted a legal petition for
“Post-Conviction Relief” for convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Along with George
Soros and the Ford Foundation, Tides has also funneled tens of thousands of
dollars to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), an organization
established by Sixties radicals William Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy. Prior to
creating the Center, the two floated a plan to establish a new “Communist
Party.” Not surprisingly, the old Communist Party has enjoyed a close
relationship with the Center. In 1999, the party publication People’s Weekly
World honored CCR Executive Director Ron Daniels alongside a member of the
CPUSA national committee. Daniels, who was Deputy Campaign Manager for Jesse
Jackson’s 1988 presidential run and the 1992 presidential candidate of the
Peace and Freedom Party, has a longstanding cordial relationship with racist,
anti-Semitic “poet laureate” Amiri Baraka.
Echoing Tides’
mission statement, the Center claims it is “committed to the creative use of
law as a positive force for social change.” Since 9/11, the CCR has channeled
its efforts into fighting the Bush administration’s every Homeland Security
measure. The Center’s lawyers opposed increasing the government’s ability to
wiretap Islamists suspected of plotting terrorism and bemoaned the sequestering
of terrorist detainees at Guantanamo Bay as an inexcusable form of “racial
profiling.” CCR President Michael Ratner has portrayed American foreign policy
as the real cause of 9/11, because it allegedly provoked the terrorists. The
CCR has also defended Lynne Stewart’s “innocence” in aiding Sheikh Rahman’s
Islamic Group and filed an amicus brief on her behalf.
Immediately after 9/11, Tides formed a “9/11 Fund” to advocate a “peaceful national response” to the opening salvos of war. The Foundation replaced the 9/11 Fund with the “Democratic Justice Fund,” which was established with the aid of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. (Soros, a currency speculator and drug legalization advocate, is a major contributor to Tides, having donated more than $7 million.)
Tides has also given grant money to the
Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Ostensibly a “Muslim civil
rights group,” CAIR is in fact one of the leading anti-anti-terrorism
organizations in the United States. CAIR regularly opposes American efforts to
fight terrorism, claiming 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 terrorist
organizations. CAIR Executive Director Nihad
Awad openly stated in 1994, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.” Community
Affairs Director Bassem K. Khafagi pleaded guilty to charges of visa and bank
fraud in connection with terrorist support activities. 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
violent anti-American jihad. CAIR has defended
terrorist “charities” shut down by the Bush administration. CAIR’s abysmal
record led Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to observe that its leaders have
“intimate links with Hamas…we know CAIR has ties to terrorism.”
Tides established an Iraq Peace Fund and a Peace Strategies Fund to finance the antiwar movement. These projects fueled MoveOn.org, the website that featured two separate commercials portraying President Bush as Adolf Hitler. The antiwar movement often boasted that MoveOn.org and the 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.
Tides also runs another “alternative media source,” the Institute for Global Communications, which describes itself as “a project of the Tides Center, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization.” The IGC was the leading provider of web technology to the radical left during the 1990s. With Tides money, the IGC’s Canadian affiliate used an undersea cable to connect Castro’s Cuba to the Internet in 1991.
The IGC’s website
links to such “recommended sites” as that of the War Resisters League, a group
that focuses on non-payment of taxes as a form of protest, and the American
Friends Service Committee. It also links to Ramsey Clark’s International Action
Center (IAC), a front for the Workers World Party, which is a Marxist-Leninist
vanguard that supports 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 in the days before Operation Iraqi Freedom.
When ANSWER was
outed as a Communist organization in the fall of 2002, Tides beneficiary United for Peace and Justice was
created as its “moderate” alternative. UFPJ was created in the offices of People for the American Way, an a
organization also funded by Tides at its inception. UFPJ was
headed by longtime Communist Party member and pro-Castro activist Leslie Cagan who maintained her membership in the Party
after the fall of the Berlin Wall. UFPJ co-founder Medea Benjamin also made the
pilgrimage to Castro’s island gulag, saying the contrast with her own country
“made it seem like I died and went to heaven.” The Tides-funded “A Better Way
Project,” has also coordinated efforts of United for Peace and Justice and the Win
Without War Coalition, another radical group.
The confluence of PAW, Win Without War, George Soros and Tides is a typical example of well-financed, overlapping radical causes uniting to oppose a Republican president. Tides-funded groups have even specifically targeted the Republican National Convention in New York City for violence. Since 1999, the Tides Foundation has donated $150,000 in grants to the Ruckus Society, a violent anarchist group. Along with Medea Benjamin’s Global Exchange, Ruckus wreaked havoc on Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, causing thousands of dollars in property damage through “direct action.” Executive Director John Sellers defended his actions in the pages of Mother Jones, saying, “I think you can be destructive, you can use vandalism strategically.” Ruckus now teaches these techniques to other “activists.” Among the topics taught at Ruckus boot camps are “street blockades,” “police confrontation strategies” and “using the media to your advantage.” Its most recent project is protesting the Republican Party’s 2004 convention.
The Tides Center describes its political agenda in this way:
“For more than twenty years, Tides
Center has been working with new and emerging charitable organizations who
share our mission of striving for positive social change.” (This is very
similar to the Center for Constitutional Rights’ mission statement.) The Tides
Foundation defines this as “strengthening…the
progressive movement through innovative grantmaking.”
Teresa Heinz Kerry’s
palpable support literally put Tides on the map in Pennsylvania. As part of the
$8.1 million that Ms. Kerry has bequeathed to Tides over the last ten years,
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,
allowing the San Francisco-based Tides Center to set up shop in Pittsburgh.
Tides employees saw this windfall “as a great opportunity to encourage a progressive social agenda,” said Jo DeBolt, director of the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania. Although any non-profit group can apply for Tides’ services, DeBolt says, “We look at mission fit as the No. 1 cut.”
In a field with as much oversight as philanthropy, every grant is weighed with careful deliberation, every associated project plotted with exacting care. The Tides Center is dedicated to funding the political left.