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

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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.

...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.

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.)

"Undue Influence" by Ron Arnold is an excellent must have reference book for anyone attempting to stay current with what is happening with land control actions by government agencies. This book is about the flow of money and influence between the government agencies, Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and wealthy non-profit foundations. Information in "Undue Influence" will help you understand that environmentalism is not about the environment. It is all about power.

Arnold follows the money used by mega foundations to fund this special interest community. Urban versus rural is happening. Urban based greenies driving their SUVs with little concern and less action for urban pollution are damaging the livlihood and lives of rural American. Driving force are organizations like the Nature Conservancy with over $1 billion in assets who position themselves as concerned about ecology. Concern is about control...their control of public and private land. Get this book.

Ron Arnold's book, "Undue Influence: Wealthy Foundations, Grant-Driven Environmental Groups, and Zealous Bureaucrats That Control Your Future," reminds one of another exquisitely researched book from the early 1980s. It was entitled "The Coercive Utopians: Social Deception by America's Power Players," by Rael Isaac and Erich Isaac. The Isaacs revealed a critical part of the command-and-control agenda of that time, and Ron Arnold has done the same for us in 2000. The political world of the environmental elitists changed dramatically a few years ago, when certain government-knows-best types figured out that a well-endowed foundation could set the environmental agenda for the nation. They do this by funding environmental groups who do their bidding. Now, these two entities, wealthy foundations and the environmental groups, happen to have good friends in government. That's where, Arnold makes clear, undue influence comes in. The author provides some pointed quotes about how this "iron triangle" of foundations, environmentalists and bureaucrats manipulate public opinion. Part of the energy of this book is that it enthusiastically pulls back the curtain, like Toto in the Wizard of Oz. We should pay more attention to the man behind the curtain. As Arnold points out, the person behind the curtain may head a multi-million dollar foundation, run a famous environmental group, or even be a prominent American politician.

HUH! Some of these one star commenters have NOT read the same book.
This book was worthwhile just for the fact that I learned that The Nature Conservancy board of Governors had a lot of CFR/Illuminati members like Joel E Cohen from Rockefeller(Illuminati)University and the evil Henri(Hank)Paulson jr just to name a few.

Whether it's a global corporates or charities or foundations, most of them are linked somehow to "The Evil Powers that be" and have only one goal in mind: World domination through market manipulation and illegal wars.

Bottom line, do not give your hard earned money to ANY global organisations. Support your local mom and pop businesses if there's any left. Do volonteer work at the local shelters. Give them goods instead of money.

As an oil and gas explorer, I am well acquainted with the amazing seemingly irrational bureaucratic impediments invented nearly daily to halt oil and gas development. I used to think that it was just ignorance on the part of the offended, and did my best to educate them that we develop non-invasive methods to reduce the number of wells we drill (and increase profits), and our efforts towards being good stewards of the lands we lease or own. I see now why it has been to no avail. It never made sense to me that I could get sued by a dozen groups I had never heard of (and, in fact, had not even really existed) while the population in general did not seem as fanatic. Now I realize that those dozen groups are, in fact, one coordinated effort by a few power players trying to kill my industry, and make us all more energy insecure. It is madness. Perhaps huge inheritance taxes are NOT such a bad thing if the alternative is that my children end up being the hate driven monsters that administer the trusts of today. How ironic that the fortunes of great Americans who created these trusts from their hard work and risk taking, are now being used to attack capitalism AND humanity.

As a professional scientist working in a biological discipline, I can assure you that this book is neither accurate nor even logical at times. Facts are grossly inaccurate or intentionally misleading, and not surprizingly, it's the facts which are left out that are most glaringly obvious... This is just another radical and paranoid account of this subject matter. A great read if you want insight into the psychology of the fearful and delusional.

Ron's right, there are a few instances where the enviro-nuts have gone overboard and just don't make sense. But one truly has to dig through the rest of his hysterical and nonsensical paranoia to find them. Otherwise, Ron makes no sense at all. Rush would be proud of this.