by William F. Jasper

The hefty new book, Trashing the Economy, by Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb, is a heavy artillery broadside at the exposed flanks of the environmental movement. Subtitled, How Runaway Environmentalism Is Wrecking America, the 658-page tome is a veritable encyclopedia on all of the major (and many of the minor) environmental groups, their leaders, goals, depredations, and funding sources.

In compiling and publishing this detailed study, the authors, who are leading activists and theorists in the "wise use" movement, have, in many respects, rendered a singular service to America. And yet, on the other hand, they have rendered a disservice as well. They seem oddly bent on convincing the growing numbers of Americans who are beginning to realize the design and orchestration behind the insanely destructive environmental campaigns that they are chasing bogeymen and kooky conspiracy theories.

According to Arnold and Gottlieb, "about the only thing the Communist Party USA and the John Birch Society have in common is a seething, irrational hatred of Trilateralism. Don't get caught up in that. Conspiracy theories are almost always wrong." Moreover, say the duo, "To characterize the environmental movement as just a cabal of rich capitalist Trilateralist One Worlders who control all environmental groups from a hidden central point is perhaps a favorite war cry of commie pinkos and redneck crackers who are not noted for their research skills ... but it is no more true than that they are all a bunch of unwashed weird-lifestyle radicals."

Decades of Documentation

Of course, it is always easy to dispose of a position by distorting it to the point of caricature. While not presuming to speak for whatever "commie pinkos and redneck crackers" the authors may have had in mind, the present writer can confidently assert that the reductio ad absurdum Arnold and Gottlieb offer as "conspiracy theory" bears no resemblance to anything that has appeared in these pages. The staff of this magazine and its predecessors, American Opinion and The Review of the News, have long recognized that the "environmental movement" is a very large and diverse entity involving hundreds of organizations and millions of individuals, including many well-intentioned, ordinary folks. And, among the green devotees, as in any militant crusade, there are divergent viewpoints, quarrels, and cleavages among even true believers.

That notwithstanding, we have carefully documented over the course of more than 20 years overwhelming evidence that many of the top leaders and key players in this movement are advancing a hidden agenda: They are struggling not to save the earth from ecological destruction as they claim, but to concentrate political and economic power -- in their hands and the hands of powerful elites who are bankrolling their fraudulent campaigns.

The Trilateral Commission (TC) to which Arnold and Gottlieb refer is but one of the elite power circles of Establishment Insiders involved in this gigantic confidence game. Its sister organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), is another. The titular head of both groups is David Rockefeller, the epitome of Establishment power. The membership of these two groups wield unparalleled power and influence in the federal government, the banking world, multinational corporations, the major media, and the tax-exempt foundations.

Admiral Chester Ward, a former judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy and a member of the CFR for 16 years, denounced the Council as a coterie of "one-world-global-government ideologists" dedicated to the "purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government." From his own experience in the group, Admiral Ward found that "this lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of the membership."

Classic Scissors Strategy

In the environmental movement these one-world Insiders have the perfect instrument for realizing their revolutionary global government schemes. They do not have to "control all environmental groups from a hidden central point"; they need only control a few key organizations and shape many others through strategic funding, strategic placement of selected leadership, and control of access to the dominant media. By so doing, they are able to apply what has been called the "scissors strategy": pressure from above, pressure from below.

The scissors strategy works this way: 1) The Establishment's eco-militants generate panic (pressure from below) by warning about an impending "crisis" -- acid rain, ozone depletion, global warming, or threats from asbestos, alar, PCBs, etc. -- which is either a complete fraud or a gross exaggeration; 2) the CFR media and CFR politicians (pressure from above) advocate "solutions" to the "crisis" that invariably involves the expansion of government (more taxes and regulation) and the diminution of personal rights and economic opportunity.

The ecology movement is not the only arena where this scissors strategy has been applied. Indeed, the same Insiders have employed the pressure-from-above-and-below gambit with the civil rights movement, the student radical movement, the "peace" and disarmament movement, the poverty movement, the pro-abortion movement, and many others. Of course, an essential ingredient of this stratagem is always money -- lots of money. That is no major problem: The Establishment's foundations shower these anti-Establishment movements with fortunes. And Establishment politicos help anti-Establishment revolutionaries tap into taxpayer funds. During the 1940s and '50s this incestuous relationship between communist organizations and the Establishment foundations became so blatant and alarming that congressional investigations were launched. During one of those investigations, in 1953, Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither admitted to Norman Dodd, staff director of the congressional Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations, that he and his foundation cohorts were following directives to "make every effort to so alter life in the United States as to make possible a comfortable merger with the Soviet Union."

Foundation Funding

The Ford Foundation continues to follow the same revolutionary directives, and its grants to eco-fanatics advance the same treasonous objectives. Population planning and environmental controls of every sort were favorite causes of the Ford Foundation decades before "ecology" became a household word, but it was Ford President McGeorge Bundy (CFR) who opened the foundation's funding floodgates to finance radical environmentalism in a big way in the 1960s and '70s.

In 1969, for example, to feed the "Population Bomb" hysteria, the Ford Foundation distributed $3.5 million to the Population Council, the Population Reference Bureau, the Urban Institute, and other ecology/population groups hyping the overpopulation myth. It has poured millions of dollars into the anti-capitalist, anti-private property campaigns of the Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Conservation Foundation, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and others.

The Rockefeller Foundations have shown a special affinity for the green alarmists, and there is scarcely an enviro-activist or eco-cause they have failed to fund. In the January/February 1974 issue of The Center magazine, for instance, then-Governor Tom McCall of Oregon approvingly reported: "The Rockefeller Task Force on Land Use ... has said that, beginning now, development rights on private property must be regarded as being vested in the community and its well being rather than the fact of ownership." In 1975 they came out with The Managing of Interdependence: The Planning Function, a conference report that called for global central planning and "cartelization" of such functions as "peacekeeping, the regulation of money, environmental monitoring and protection, the development of an adequate food reserve system, and management of the oceans."

In 1977, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund published its Environmental Agenda Task Force Report, The Unfinished Agenda, a proposed blueprint for transforming America into a centrally planned, command-and-control society. Besides calling for an appointed "Economic Planning Board" to rein over the U.S. economy, the report recommended heavy taxes on gasoline and other carbon-based fuels, restrictions on the ownership and use of automobiles, increased population controls, an end to nuclear power development, and tightened controls over agriculture and food and water distribution. All of which was hardly surprising since the task force was comprised of top leaders from a dozen of the big environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, the Wilderness Society, the Nature Conservancy, and the Environmental Defense Fund.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, now the largest of the foundations with over $3 billion in assets, has eclipsed Ford and Rockefeller in green giving. In 1990 it lavished more than $23.3 million on environmental causes. President of the foundation is Adele Smith Simmons (CFR), who also serves on the board of directors (along with fellow CFR member Kurt Gottfried) of the radical, far-left Union of Concerned Scientists. One of the biggest influences on MacArthur's eco-largess has been Dr. Murray GellMann (CFR) who for years chaired the foundation's environmental grant-making committee.

"Research" and Leadership

Strategic leadership and "research" are provided to the environmental movement by Establishment fronts such as the World Resources Institute (WRI), Resources for the Future (RFF), and the Worldwatch Institute (WWI). The president of WRI, and one of the green lobby's most influential figures, is Dr. James Gustave Speth (CFR), who also sits on the board of directors of the Environmental Law Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Vice president at WRI is Jessica Tuchman Mathews (CFR). CFR members on WRI's board of directors include Matthew Nimetz (chairman), Robert O. Anderson, Robert O. Blake, Alice F. Emerson, Curtis A. Hessler, Thomas E. Lovejoy, C. Payne Lucas, Robert S. McNamara, Speth, and Russell E. Train.

At Resources for the Future, the board of directors includes CFR luminaries James R. Ellis, John H. Gibbons, Thomas E. Lovejoy, and Mason Willrich. Isabel V. Sawhill (wife of John Sawhill, CFR) also sits on the board. Former RFF board members include Robert O. Anderson and Laurence Rockefeller. Between 1953 and 1968 the Ford Foundation gave over $8 million to RFF, which means, notes William H. McIlhany in his book, The Tax-Exempt Foundations, "that this major source of ecological propaganda was almost an exclusive Ford project from the beginning."

The Worldwatch Institute features Lester R. Brown (CFR) as president and former Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman (CFR) as chairman. Its annual serving of ecological fright-peddling known as the State of the World report is quoted as gospel by both Establishment and anti-Establishment alarmists. WWI acknowledges that "core funding" for the publication (as well as for its other activities) comes "from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Winthrop Rockefeller Trust."