Media Transparency

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Bill Berkowitz
December 9, 2004

The Capital Research Center at 20

Defunding progressive organizations and scrutinizing the funders that sustain them drives DC-based institute

In April, Foundation Watch, one of the flagship publications of the Capital Research Center (website), managed to stir up a minor election-yearCapital Research Center controversy by raising questions about the philanthropy of Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Democratic Party presidential candidate Senator John Kerry. In a report entitled "The Heinz Foundations and the Kerry campaign – One Has Money, the Other Needs Money", Ron Arnold – one of the godfathers of America's "Wise Use Movement" – examined the relationship between the "foundation's charitable gifts to environmental groups and environmentalist supporters of the Senator's presidential campaign." Arnold raised a red flag over the possible influence environmental organizations might exert should the Senator win the presidency.

In mid-October, the Center's president, Terence Scanlon, launched a pre-emptive strike against ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and its voter registration efforts. Scanlon cast a shadow over ACORN's reports that it had registered over one million new voters. He charged that because of irregularities, the organization was coming under scrutiny by lawmakers "in state after state [where] allegations are surfacing that ACORN activists are padding the registration books."

As a non-profit community-based organizing group, ACORN has been in CRC's radar for several years. According to Scanlon, ACORN, with some 150,000 dues-paying members organized into 65 city chapters, "is better known for public disruption." Its so-called community organizing "has relied on in-your-face confrontation," including a 1995 demonstration targeting then House Speaker Newt Gingrich. "In 2002 it burst into the Heritage Foundation to harangue welfare reform expert Robert Rector. Dozen of city councils and state legislatures have had to face angry ACORN protesters demanding higher minimum wages and more welfare entitlements. Banks have been pressured to change their lending practices or face ACORN charges of discrimination before regulators."

In the constellation that comprises the growing sector of right wing think tanks and policy institutes, the Capital Research Center (CRC) isn't the best funded, the most noteworthy, or the most influential. It doesn't have the largest staff, or the biggest building. Unlike its well-known sister institutions -- the Heritage Foundation (website), the American Enterprise Institute (website) and the Hoover Institution (website) – the Capital Research Center mostly slogs away in relative anonymity.

Don't be fooled by the CRC general lack of buzz-generating activities: For over 20 years, the CRC has been hell-bent on carrying out its mission – defunding and disempowering the progressive non-profit sector and casting a wary eye on the foundations that fund them.

Most of time, however, CRC staffers are busy doing the nuts and bolts of the Center – analyzing how tax-exempt, tax-deductible organizations combine advocacy and "direct action" to promote their vision of the public interest. And it examines how closely individuals in the corporate and foundation sectors are sticking to the "donor intent" of the founders of these corporations and foundations. CRC's staff gets most infuriated when they discover that foundations that were originally established by free-market entrepreneurs that accumulated enormous wealth based on distinctly anti-environmental activities, provide significant funding support for environmental groups.

During a late-May, 2000, hearing before the House Resources Committee on the role of the Pew Charitable Trusts played as part of a project called the Heritage Forests Campaign, CRC's executive vice-president Robert Huberty's testimony spoke to what he viewed as a disconnect between the founders original intent and how business was currently being handled: "The source of wealth for the Pew Trusts comes from energy exploration and development," but the original intent of the founders of the foundation was to "acquaint the American people [with] the evils of bureaucracy, the values of a free market and the paralyzing effects of government controls on the lives and activities of people." He rhetorically asked, "How do the Pew Trusts honor the intentions of their donor by supporting a campaign to permanently end logging in a large portion of the national forests?"

Founded in 1984 by Willa Johnson, a former Senior Vice President of the Heritage Foundation who worked as Deputy Director of the Office of Presidential Personnel in the first Reagan administration, the Capital Research Center (CRC) was established "to study non-profit organizations, with a special focus on reviving the American traditions of charity, philanthropy, and voluntarism."

In the CRC's 1991 annual report Johnson warned that "a unified, sophisticated and well-funded philanthropic elite is dedicated to imposing on us the doctrine of 'progressive' philanthropy, doctrines that would reorder our political, economic and cultural priorities." "This movement, driven by a bankrupt ideology, long since disproved by history, would impose its own standards of 'social justice' based on more involvement of government in philanthropy and more involvement of charities in politics. It has lost faith in the traditional American values of individual responsibility and free choice, to say nothing of the diversity in the marketplace of ideas," she wrote.

According to the web site, SourceWatch, a project of the Center for Media & Democracy, the publishers of the invaluable PRWatch newsletter, the membership of the National Advisory Board was listed on its website in 2001, but it no longer discloses the board's current membership: In 2001 it included a veritable Who's Who of the right:

Disinfopedia also reported that the CRC's 2002 IRS return filed in May 2003 listed the office bearers as:

CRC publishes four newsletters: Organization Trends, a monthly that reports on and analyzes the activities of advocacy organizations; Labor Watch, a monthly tracking "the increasing activism of labor unions that are trying to achieve through political coalition-building the goals they have failed to achieve at the bargaining table"; Foundation Watch, a monthly "examin[ing] the grantmaking of private foundations"; and Compassion & Culture, a monthly "highlighting the work of small, locally based charities that help the needy."

Ironically, reports Sourcewatch, while the organization "claims that exposing the funding" of progressive non-profits "is important because 'sunshine--the glare of public scrutiny--is 'the best of all disinfectants'...[it] doesn't seem to think its own hidden agenda should receive public scrutiny," as it allocates no space on its web site to information about where it receives its funding.

Media Transparency's grants database shows that between 1985 and 2002, the CRC received 153 grants valued at more than $7 million. Major donors include The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, The Carthage Foundation, and the Earhart Foundation.

CRC also sponsors three additional watchdog projects: GreenWatch, "an on-line database and information clearinghouse providing factual information on over 500 non-profit environmental groups"; EducationWatch, "an online database and news service providing timely information about nonprofit policy and advocacy groups involved in the public debate over the reform of K-12 primary education"; and CorporatePatterns, "monitor[ing] the philanthropic activities of America's leading corporations."