PERC 2 prop env res ctr

oops , see also spelled out

NO MERRI

HELPED KILL BEARS EARS SIMMONS UTAH

See also The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) is a think tank based in Bozeman, Montana that specialises in free market environmentalism. PERC was previously known as the Political Economy Research Center.

BURGUM

KOCH IHS CARTHAGE DONORS TRUST AEI CLEMSON

EXXON COORS

BRADLEY DUNN OLIN SCAIFE

SEE AIER ECON STROUP JULIAN SIMON

STEVEN HAYWARD

===

Former PERC executive director Terry Anderson was one of the State of Montana’s expert witnesses at the Held v. Montana trial and presented himself as the founder of “free market environmentalism.”

He presented data about greenhouse gas emissions that the judge in the case wrote “was not well-supported, contained errors, and was not given weight by the Court.”

In response to questions about some of those papers and stances from the past, Dwyer said many were more than 20 years old and written by people no longer affiliated with the organization.

SEE JUDGE JUNKET GMU

Session 5: Fence In, Fence Out Sara Sutherland, Lecturer, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University Graduate Fellowship Director and Senior Research Fellow, PERC 9:30 – 10:45 am Session 6: Our Land, Our River Bryan Leonard, Associate Professor, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University Senior Research Fellow, PERC

---

The Far-Right Campaign to Destroy Our National Monuments

The attack on Bears Ears was just the first successful salvo of a robust offensive backed by dark money and powerful allies in Washington.

Jimmy Tobias NAT MAG

Bears Ears dark money

A billboard outside Blanding, Utah, stating opposition to the Bears Ears Monument designation. ODD SPARSE RW AND BLUE HASHTAG FLAG

(Reuters / Andrew Cullen)

On December 4, Donald Trump swaggered onto a stage in Utah’s sprawling granite capitol building and declared before an adoring crowd of local politicians and conservative activists that he would radically shrink two national monuments in the state’s wild and arid southeastern region.

“I don’t think it is controversial, actually,” he told his audience, without irony. “I think it is so sensible.”

The audience laughed and clapped and cheered. Then the president sat down and signed an order that dismembered both the 1.3 million-acre Bears Ears National Monument and the 1.8 million-acre Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument. Designated for protection by President Obama and President Clinton respectively, the two monuments were meant to preserve red-rock landscapes rich in intricate topography, ancient artifacts, and Native American sacred sites. They were meant to protect forever federal land owned by all Americans. But with a stroke of his pen Trump eradicated those protections, shrinking the monuments by a collective 2 million acres and raising the prospect that the terrain they occupied may someday be open to uranium mining, coal extraction, or oil and gas drilling.

As the ink on his presidential order dried, Trump mingled onstage with prominent county commissioners, Utah’s congressional delegation, and the governor. The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” blared over loud speakers in the background.

The Salt Lake Tribune, in a blistering editorial later that week, called the gleeful event “downright sickening.” It was, according to the Tribune, a “disgraceful display of hubris” that showed Utah “at its very worst.”

But the conservative operatives and politicians onstage were apparently too pleased to care about optics—and not without reason. Trump’s attack on the two national monuments, after all, wasn’t just a lucky break, a gift that fell from the sky. Rather, it was the result of a savvy, multiyear campaign by a network of far-right organizations with powerful friends in Washington and financial backing from dark-money funds tied to the billionaire Koch brothers and their political kin.

Led by organizations like Utah’s Sutherland Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Heritage Foundation, and an array of allies, this network has labored assiduously over the last few years to undermine the legitimacy of federal lands across the American West. It has done this, in part, by working to erode public support for key conservation laws and institutions, including the Antiquities Act of 1906. And it has had great success.

Trump’s trip to Utah, his decision to destroy the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante monuments, is a consequence of that deeper, long-game campaign to chip away at America’s conservation system.

The Antiquities Act is one of this country’s oldest conservation statutes. It empowers the executive branch to unilaterally protect “objects of historic or scientific interest” on public land by declaring them national monuments. Theodore Roosevelt signed it into law in 1906, and since then every president save Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush have used it to designate national monuments on federal lands across the country. The act was instrumental in establishing the progressive conservation paradigm that later gave birth to public-interest laws like the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. And in this era of intractable partisan polarization, the act has been one of the few reliable tools presidents can use to preserve portions of this nation’s vast public estate.

This is precisely what President Obama did when he established the Bears Ears National Monument on December 28, 2016, after months of deliberation and a campaign by a coalition of Native American nations. The monument preserved public access and prohibited most commercial activity on more than 1.3 million acres of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land in southeastern Utah.

“The protection of the Bears Ears cultural landscape is powerful medicine for healing—of the land, of plants and animals, and for all people,” wrote a coalition of tribal governments, including the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Zuni Nations, at the time of the designation. “The Bears Ears National Monument will also ensure continued access to tribal ceremonies, firewood and herb collection, hunting, grazing and outdoor recreation.”

But even as the tribes were celebrating their historic achievement, conservative groups in Utah and Washington were gearing up to roll back the designation, tapping into a long tradition of trying to rip monument protections from the public domain. From the beginning, the Antiquities Act—and the monuments it protects—has had powerful enemies: When Teddy Roosevelt used the law in 1908 to protect more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon, mining, cattle, and other commercial interests were enraged; the prospector turned US Senator Ralph Cameron fought the federal government for control over portions of the canyon for years, ultimately losing the battle when the Supreme Court ruled against him in 1920.

Trump's decision to destroy the Bears Ears and Grand Escalante monuments is a consequence of a deep, long-game campaign to chip away at America's conservation system.

In the century since, the struggle between commercial interests and conservationists has never really ceased. Our country’s 640 million acres of federal land are a titanic repository of natural wealth and scenic splendor—a grand, albeit imperfect, social-democratic experiment. Laws like the Antiquities Act constrain the ability of powerful interests to do as they please on these lands. By banning or limiting activities like mining, drilling, and grazing in order to promote conservation values, they enshrine the notion that the public interest takes precedence over private and even local concerns.

As a result, both the public lands and the conservation laws that protect them are constantly under attack. From the Sagebrush Rebellion in the 1970s and ’80s to the militant occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge early last year to the many local lawmakers and activists today who seek to transfer federal lands to state and local control, the dedicated foes of the federal domain have always been with us. The attack on the Antiquities Act is just the latest iteration of this anti–public land legacy. This iteration, though, has had astonishing success—and powerful supporters.

The state of Utah, with its world-renowned canyons, is the ground zero of the anti–public land movement today. Since at least 2012, right-wing politicians and activists there have been leaders of the so-called land-transfer movement, an effort across the West to force the federal government to relinquish ownership over the public lands to state and local governments. And the state has also been the site of vigorous and ongoing anti-monument activity. So it’s not altogether surprising that it was in Utah that a well-connected far-right think tank called the Sutherland Institute largely led the charge against both the Bears Ears National Monument and the Antiquities Act itself.

From its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Sutherland launched a flagship website called rescindbearsears.org, filling it with a constant squall of anti-monument content. It produced an array of video clips that cultivated and amplified the voices of local residents opposed to the monument, including the local county commission and members of the Aneth Chapter of the Navajo Nation. It maintained a constant social-media presence, organized a petition drive, and sent staffers to Capitol Hill to rally against the proposed monument. Its operatives flooded news outlets with op-eds, publishing regularly in The Hill, The Salt Lake Tribune, and Deseret News, among other places.

“What would you think if you found out that one individual could take away your home, ruin your livelihood and destroy your culture—all in the name of securing his legacy and furthering his political agenda?” wrote Matthew Anderson, director of the Sutherland Institute’s Coalition for Self-Government in the West, of the Antiquities Act in a November 2016 Daily Caller op-ed. “Such a proposition seems impossible in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But an antiquated law makes this a reality for countless Americans every day.”

The Institute also worked in the Utah State Legislature. According to e-mails obtained by the Western Values Project, Sutherland’s Matthew Anderson actually wrote the draft language of a controversial resolution the Utah Legislature passed in February 2017 that called on President Trump to rescind the Bears Ears National Monument designation.

The Sutherland Institute’s campaign was a multifaceted and far-reaching attempt to shape the public narrative about Bears Ears, and the group had the influence to pull it off. The Institute’s president, Boyd Matheson is the former chief of staff to Utah’s junior US senator, Mike Lee, and an oft-mentioned prospect for high office himself. (In October, he met with Steve Bannon and Citizens United President David Bossie to discuss a potential challenge to Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, but ultimately decided to pass on the chance.)

According to tax filings, the Institute has also received at least $1.3 million between 2010 and 2015 from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, two dark-money funds that have taken millions of dollars from the billionaire fossil-fuel tycoons Charles and David Koch and their network of corporate magnates and conservative donors. Mother Jones has described the two entities as the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement”—multimillion-dollar donor-advised funds that strive to conceal the identity of their benefactors.

The Sutherland Institute is also a member of the State Policy Network, or SPN, an association of state-based think tanks and advocacy groups that the Center for Media and Democracy describes as “the tip of the spear” of a “nationally funded policy agenda in the states that undergirds extremists in the Republican Party.” SPN and its member groups have together received large cash contributions over the years from corporate interests and conservative billionaires, including the Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, the Bradley Foundation, and the Scaife Foundations.

Sutherland did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but, in a written statement last May, a spokesperson told me that the group “has not received any out-of-state funds for research or communications related to the Bears Ears issue.” According to tax filings, however, many of the donations the group typically receives from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund are earmarked for “general operations.”

By spring, it was clear that Sutherland’s message, and that of its allies, had been well received in Washington, DC. Their efforts were shepherded along by Utah’s congressional delegation, including Senator Orrin Hatch, who once described Obama’s Bears Ears designation as a “massive land grab,” and Representative Mike Lee, who has taken a pro-environment stance on just 9 percent of his congressional votes, according to the League of Conservation Voters. Representative Rob Bishop, the powerful chair of the House Natural Resources Committee and a longtime opponent of environmental laws and regulations, also played a crucial role in stoking animosity toward the Antiquities Act and Bears Ears in particular.

On April 26, Trump held a press conference at the Interior Department headquarters in Washington, DC, where he announced that his administration planned to “review” and possibly resize or rescind dozens of national monuments across the West, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. During the conference, Trump singled out Utah’s senior senator, Orrin Hatch, for praise.

“Believe me, he’s tough,” said Trump of Hatch, who is perhaps Utah’s most powerful political figure, a man that has taken more than $870,000 in career campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industries. “He would call me and call me and say, ‘You got to do this.’” And Trump did it.

Upon news of the White House’s national-monument review, staffers at the Sutherland Institute rejoiced. From a chic office building, the Institute’s Matthew Anderson celebrated the announcement in a video broadcast over the group’s website and social-media accounts.

“As the dust settles from President Trump’s executive order calling for review of national monuments, Western rural communities wake up to a brighter and more hopeful future,” he said. In May, when Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke traveled to the Bears Ears National Monument as part of his review, photos of the event showed Anderson by his side.

As the Sutherland Institute continued its anti-monument campaign over the summer and fall of 2017, it had a notable assortment of allies at the local, regional, and national level.

In Utah, a group called Strata Policy stands out. A research institution that takes a “liberty-minded” approach to the issues of “the environment, energy, and public lands,” the group has published a number of anti-monument op-eds and submitted a lengthy public comment to the Interior Department opposing Bears Ears. In November, it unveiled a slick, professionally produced 14-minute documentary that features local opponents of the monument and frames the Bears Ears designation as a tyrannical imposition.

As with Sutherland, Strata has close ties to what is often described as the Koch network. The group has received more than $500,000 in recent years from Donors Trust. It also received a $310,000 grant from the Charles Koch Foundation in 2015 for general operating support, and a $1.1 million grant in 2014. Strata’s co-founder and president, Randy Simmons, is a professor at Utah State University (USU), where he served as the Charles G. Koch Professor of Political Economy from 2008 to 2012, according to LinkedIn. Simmons also runs USU’s Koch-funded Institute of Political Economy. (After a number of requests for comment, Strata informed The Nation that its president was away on holiday.)

The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), in Bozeman, Montana, which describes itself as “the home of free market environmentalism,” has also been a stalwart voice against the Antiquities Act. Its many fellows have churned out a regular stream of anti-monument op-eds this year. In late September, a PERC adjunct fellow and Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer named Jonathan Wood published an opinion piece in The Washington Post arguing that Trump has a legal right to shrink Bears Ears and other monuments like it. And in May the House Committee on Natural Resources, which is chaired by the powerful Utah Republican Representative Rob Bishop, posted on its website an op-ed published in Montana newspapers in which PERC staffer Shawn Regan calls for the “modernization” (i.e., dismantling) of the Antiquities Act.

PERC, meanwhile, received more than $130,000 from Donors Trust between 2010 and 2015 alone. It also gets support from the Charles Koch Foundation, which gave it a $150,000 grant for general operating support in 2015. PERC’s executive director, Reed Watson, worked as an associate at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation between 2008 and 2009. One of the members of its board of directors, Kimberly Dennis, is also chairman of the board of Donors Trust and vice chairman of the board of Donors Capital Fund. And PERC counts among its many fellows Randy Simmons, the director of Strata Policy in Utah.

This close-knit network of anti-monument activists, however, is not confined to the western side of the 100th meridian. Powerful people with close Koch ties have also been agitating passionately against the Antiquities Act in Washington, DC.

The Nation

This Is How the Trump Administration Gives Big Oil the Keys to Public Lands

Adam Federman

The American Legislative Exchange Council, a network of state elected officials and private sector operatives that receives consistent funding from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, has long had its gun sight set on the Antiquities Act. In 2000, the group approved a model bill that legislators could use to denounce potential national monuments within their state’s borders. ALEC reapproved that bill in 2013. The model bill has a similar objective, if different language, as a resolution passed by the Utah legislature in 2016 that urged President Obama not to designate the Bears Ears National Monument and called on Congress to prevent future presidents from independently designating national monuments in the state. Meanwhile, the floor sponsor of the legislature’s February 2017 anti–Bear’s Ears resolution—the one that the Sutherland Institute helped draft—was a state senator named Wayne Niederhauser. Niederhauser is the second vice chair on ALEC’s board of directors. ALEC, meanwhile, received $500,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation in the years 2014 and 2015 alone.

The Heritage Foundation—that 100-pound gorilla of far-right policy-making—is also out to destroy the Antiquities Act. With its bank accounts flush with funding from a wide variety of corporate entities and wealthy individuals, it has enormous sway in Washington, DC. At least three of its former employees currently work at the highest levels of the Interior Department. According to her LinkedIn page, Elinor Renner, a special assistant to the Interior secretary, worked in a variety of roles at the Heritage Foundation from December 2012 until July 2017, when she took a job in the federal government. Lori Mashburn, who began serving as Interior’s White House liaison in May, has worked on and off for Heritage since 2011.

The foundation’s influence is indisputable. And it has used that influence to rail against Bears Ears as well as other national monuments. In 2015, for instance, it published a report called “The Antiquated Act,” in which it called on Congress to repeal the executive branch’s ability to independently designate national monuments. And in October of this year, it partnered with the Sutherland Institute to hold a summit in Washington called “National Monuments and The Communities They Impact.” The event featured speeches by Representative Rob Bishop of Utah, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Hannah Downey of PERC, and the Sutherland Institute’s Boyd Matheson and Matthew Anderson, who also formerly worked in Congressman Bishop’s office. The gathering’s central message was simple: Obama and others have abused the Antiquities Act’s intent and so it must be abolished in its current form.

When The Nation reached out to Heritage to inquire about its involvement in the campaign to shrink Bears Ears, as well as its connection to groups like the Sutherland Institute and ALEC, a Heritage spokesperson responded with a statement saying that the organization’s “experts have long-argued that antiquities designations strip economic opportunities away from local communities, with often little-to-no input from them. For far too long these designations have exceeded their statutory limitations and President Trump is right to shrink this abuse of power.”

Other Koch-backed groups that have militated against national monuments in recent months include Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Many of these organizations, from the Sutherland Institute and ALEC to Heritage and Cato, are also major proponents of transferring federal land to state and local government, thereby depriving millions of Americans of their stake in the public domain.

In June, almost every single one of the groups named above came together to send a letter to President Trump. They called on the White House to “reduce or rescind egregious national monuments where local support exists to do so.” The letter’s signatories included the Sutherland Institute, Strata Policy, ALEC, Heritage Action for America, Americans for Prosperity, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, numerous members of the State Policy Network, and the American Energy Alliance.

On August 24, 2017, after many months of lobbying and agitation, these groups finally got their way: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke completed his national monument review and recommended that the president shrink or otherwise alter a slew of national monuments across the country. Just three months later, during that gloating rally in December, Trump made his first move on those recommendations, shrinking Bears Ears by 85 percent and shrinking Grand Escalante by nearly 50 percent. It was the largest cutback of land conservation protections in American history. And the president will likely modify or shrink a half dozen other sites in the months ahead, including the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southern Oregon.

1. Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund — $20.6 million

Known as the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement,” DonorsTrust and its sister fund, Donors Capital Fund, have been the nonprofit funding vehicles of choice for the wealthy right wing for many years. They are both donor-advised fund sponsors, meaning that they manage the charitable donations of their clients. These clients “advise” the funds on which nonprofit charities should receive their money, but the funds decide on the recipients.

Between 2014 and 2020, the two funds gave the most money—$13.3 million—to the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free-market think tank and charity that “has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change,” according to DeSmog.

The institute has historically received significant funding from fossil fuel giants such as ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and Murray Energy, and in the 1990s it worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question the science linking second-hand smoke to health problems.

The funds bankrolled the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based free market advocacy group that also has a history of funding from tobacco and oil companies, with nearly $6 million. The institute’s former executive director, Gregory Conko, is senior director of programs at DonorsTrust.

In addition, DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund funded these climate misinformation groups from 2014–20:

Energy and Environment Legal Institute ($421,000)
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change ($400,000)
Institute for Energy Research ($371,000)
Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow ($122,000)
Property and Environmental Research Center ($30,000)

Kimberly Dennis, cofounder and board chair of DonorsTrust, is on the board of the Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC), which was formerly known as the Political Economy Research Center. She’s also president of the right-wing Searle Freedom Trust.

Thomas Beach, a member of the DonorsTrust board of directors, also serves on the PERC board.

---

PERC is one of the pioneers of "the approach known as free market environmentalism, which is based on the following tenets:

Private property rights encourage stewardship of resources;
Government subsidies often degrade the environment;
Market incentives spur individuals to conserve resources and protect environmental quality; and
Polluters should be liable for the harm they cause others." [1]

"We believe environmental quality can be achieved by managing our resources based on property rights, private initiative and voluntary activity. Free market environmentalism offers a genuine alternative to excessive government control and regulation," PERC argues on its website. ^[1]

...

At some point since April 2003, PERC recently underwent a name change from Political Econonomy Research Center. According to Mediatransparency, PERC under its old name, received $603,600 from Bradley Foundation and $640,775 from Olin Foundation.

Other funding has come from Sarah Scaife, JM Foundation, Lambe Foundation, McKenna Foundation, Earhart Foundation, Koch Foundation, Carthage Foundation and Castle Rock Foundation -- the guts of a force of roughly a dozen or so foundations that, since the 1960s, have coordinated their efforts toward forging national policy favorable to deregulation of industry and to privatization. According to Mediatransparency's records, PERC received $4,175,875 from all funding sources combined from 1985 to 2002.

Since 1998 PERC has received $80,000 (unadjusted for inflation) from ExxonMobil. [2]

Steven F. Hayward, F.K Weyerhaeuser Fellow in Law and Economics, American Enterprise Institute, and Senior Fellow, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, San Francisco.

8/15

Their latest target is one of our most successful parks programs, the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). LWCF has helped protect everything from the Grand Canyon to local ballparks, but after 50 years of ensuring access to outdoor recreation areas for all Americans, LWCF is set to expire. We need Congress to reauthorize it or we risk losing these treasured opportunities for future generations.

And it won’t be easy. While fringe Republicans in Congress try to siphon away money for parks to pay for their own pet projects, new attacks by Koch brothers-backed groups are putting LWCF’s renewal at even greater risk.

If you've ever visited a national park or played at a local baseball diamond in your neighborhood, tell Congress today: Reauthorize and fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund before it’s too late »

The good news is that renewing LWCF has bipartisan support. LWCF protects and maintains America’s parks without a penny from taxpayers, and since its establishment 50 years ago, LWCF has helped fund tens of thousands of projects in every state across the country.

However, new Koch-backed groups are trying to prevent its renewal entirely. The Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), one of these groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, has launched efforts to undermine LWCF. If PERC and the Koch brothers have their way, new parks could lose their funding and be vulnerable to development — and no one wants unrestricted access to public lands more than the fossil fuel industry.

---

PERC

https://www.perc.org/2011/11/01/percs-lone-mountain-fellows-are-an-impressive-group/

PERC’s Lone Mountain Fellows are an impressive group

Laura Huggins

November 1, 2011

This special issue is dedicated to PERC’s Lone Mountain Fellows who are as impressive as Lone Mountain (featured on the cover), which towers over PERC at 11,166 feet. Lone Mountain Fellowships offer a unique opportunity for scholars, policymakers, and environmentalists to advance our understanding of the role of markets and property rights in promoting environmental quality. PERC has hosted 52 Lone Mountain Fellows, representing institutions such as Yale and Columbia University and from countries spanning from Australia to Bolivia. This issue of PERC Reports highlights the work of some of these scholars.

BRIAN STEED arrived at PERC straight from defending his thesis with Noble Laureate Elinor Ostrom. Here Steed explores green against green. Although many environmentalists favor green energy, they loathe its localized impacts. Rather than accept the tradeoffs inherent in green energy production, some have fought the siting of wind and solar farms based on concerns about their impact on the local environment. Green energy is not the problem, they argue—it should just be done elsewhere. But as Steed points out, the “elsewheres” are limited.

Considered one of the top environmental economists in the United States, MATTHEW KAHN recently escaped the southern California summer to enjoy the cooler climate in Montana and to further explore human adaptation to climate change. His recent book Climatopolis has received critical acclaim.

University of Toronto economist, MATTHEW TURNER, asks a provocative question: Does building more roads to alleviate traffic create more traffic? Turner’s research, which he furthered at PERC, suggests a fundamental law of road construction—build it and they will come.

JEFF BENNETT emerged from the land down under to visit the Big Sky State. With more than 30 years of experience researching, consulting, and teaching in the fields of environmental economics, Bennett has turned toward investigating what he calls “little green lies.”

KURT SCHNIER recalls his experience being stuck on an island off Alaska. This circumstance allowed him plenty of time to get to know the local fishermen who encouraged him to think beyond the efficiency gains resulting from rights-based management programs for fisheries.

PERC assembles an assortment of scholars knowing that cross fertilization will advance the frontiers of free market environmentalism. Todd Zywicki, professor of Law at George Mason University summed up the Lone Mountain Fellowship well: “An important element of the program is its interdisciplinary focus—by bringing together law professors, economists, and experts in natural resources, PERC promotes exactly the sort of cross-disciplinary exchange that will be necessary to create innovative public policy proposals in the area of property rights, natural resources, and energy policy.”

Finally, if you are fed up with the presidential campaign, especially when it comes to new ideas for the environment, don’t miss PERC’s executive director TERRY ANDERSON’S discussion of the need for a Green Tea Party. For more on this campaign visit live-perc-wp.pantheonsite.io/greentea and percolatorblog.org.

---

As of April 1, 2007, SEC documents show that there were eight investors who held more than 5% of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, of which seven held 9% or greater. These seven are William Dunn(19%), Arthur Dantchik (10%), Thomas L. Phillips (10%), Robert A. Levy (10%), the Claws Foundation (9%), The Randolph Foundation (9%), and Donors Capitol Fund (9%). These seven investors control a combined total of 76% of the total assets of the fund.

The largest shareholder, William Dunn of Stuart, Florida, is the director of Dunn Capitol Management and the founder of Dunn’s Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking. William A. Dunn of Stuart, Florida is also a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In addition, he is a Director and a member of the Board of Trustees for the Reason Foundation and a Director of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). If you’ll recall from yesterday’s post, Mr. Milloy’s associate Kenneth P. Green (currently of the American Enterprise Institute) used to work for the Reason Foundation and Mr. Milloy himself works with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Dunn’s Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinkinggave away over $3 million in grants in 2004 alone, with much of that money going to organizations associated in some way with Mr. Milloy or people he knows: $445,000 to the CEI, $370,000 to the Institute for Justice (see Arthur Dantchik below), $370,000 to PERC, $308,000 to the Reason Foundation, $185,000 to the Cato Institute, and $25,000 to the AEI. Some of the other backers for both the CEI, PERC, and Reason Foundation have been the Charles G. Koch and the David H. Koch Charitable Foundations. The Charles G. Koch foundation funds the CEI and PERC to the tune of almost $60,000 and $15,000 respectively. The David H. Koch foundation granted $315,000 to the CEI between 1995 and 2001 and over $1.5 million to the Reason Foundation between 1986 and 2001. rogues and scholars