Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant Driven Environemental Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your F [Paperback]

Ron Arnold (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1999

The environmental movement has become a center of money, power and politics on a campaign of "rural cleansing"-purging America's natural resource workers. Loggers, miners, ranchers, and farmers are despised and disposable, all because of groups claiming to protect the environment. Grant-driven environmental groups have become the pawns of wealthy foundations bent on "progressive" social change. Foundation bosses design "environmental justice" projects and find-or create-groups to do their bidding. Zealous bureaucrats bend the rules to stop logging, mining and ranching-because they obey the foundations that fund government-employee environmental groups. Undue Influence exposes the biggest deliberate program of social and economic displacement in American history. A handful of wealthy people are redesigning American politics to fulfill their vision of an "environmental society" that gives them all the power and leaves nothing to the average citizen. This book is based on documents leaked by concerned environmentalists.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ron Arnold's new book "Undue Influence" reveals the threat to industrial civilization posed by environmentalism. The amount of money being spent from such an unpublicized direction is cause for alarm by itself. What it's being used for -- dismantling roads, dams, logging, mining, ranching, farming, fishing -- is truly frightening. This book should galvanize the public to action. -- David Ridenour, National Center for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C.

About the Author

Author Ron Arnold is one of the best known critics of organized environmentalism. His early experience in the Sierra Club gave him insights into the workings of the eco-elite. He has appeared on more than 1,000 TV and radio talks shows, including CBS News 60 Minutes, ABC News Nightline, and CNN's Network Earth. He has been covered by most major newspapers from the Washington Post and New York Times to the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. His book EcoTerror is included in the Random House Reader Survey of the 100 Most Important Books of the 20th Century.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: Merril Press (October 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 093957120X
• ISBN-13: 978-0939571208
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,082,275 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Boldly exposes what goes on behind Washington politics!, March 1, 2000

By 

Ted Miller (Gorham, NH) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant Driven Environemental Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your F (Paperback)

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.

37 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Modern Day Muckraker, April 13, 2000

By 

Robert Huberty (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant Driven Environemental Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your F (Paperback)

...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 appreciates tales of outrageous political manuevering -- even when he condemns their outcome. Besides the Tides story, he traces how out-of-state foundations decided to fund a Montana ballot initiative that would have prohibited corporations from making comparable contributions to ballot issue campaigns. He recounts the comeuppance of Vice President Gore who unsuccessfully tried to plant a story with ABC News correspondent Ted Koppel that smeared a respected climate scientist, Fred Singer, who did not accept the vice president's opinions on global warming. And he describes how an ambitious presidential advisor, Kathleen McGinty, talked the Interior Department into having President Clinton invoke the Antiquities Act of 1906 to justify declaring 1.7 million acres of southern Utah as a "national monument" without Congress' approval. (Earlier presidents used the act's grant of executive authority to preserve Indian cliff-dwellings and other precious sites of natural importance.) McGinty then made the land grab legally exempt from a lengthy environmental review by creating a phony paper trail so that it looked like this was the President's initiative, not something she and Interior cooked up. (Arnold's endnotes cite White House e-mails disclosing McGinty's underhanded tactics, but he doesn't reveal how he got them.

One weakness of Undue Influence is Arnold's style of heavy-handed sarcasm. Particularly toward the book's end, Arnold tends to fall back on snorts of derision as he describes yet another foundation or government scheme. But the anger masks a greater sadness. Arnold is reporting what he calls "a silent scandal" affecting rural America. He is outraged that "no one sees, no one cares" about the ranchers and miners, the lumbermen and saw mill operators who are falling victim to the politics of environmentalism. They are living in a suburban leisure-loving, dot.com country that forgets that people like them still earn their living working the land. They are paying a heavy price for their countrymen's indifference to their plight.

31 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece, January 22, 2000

By 

Roger W. Ek "The Northern Maine Land Man" (Maine, United States of America) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant Driven Environemental Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your F (Paperback)

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.)