Foundation Capitalism Part 2: Following the Money Loop
Foundation Capitalism Part 2: Following the Money Loop
How billions from foundations support fear-based research, and return billions more
In the 1960s and 70s, foundations funded scientists like Norman Borlaug to halt famines, supported researchers to find cures for cancers and gave medical teams the means to provide basic medicines in regions with pressing healthcare needs. Today, it seems more foundation donations are directed toward funding activist scientists to skew their methodologies to produce data that raises fears about food safety, drawing thin correlations between synthetic chemicals and certain cancers while diminishing trust in scientific research and regulatory expertise. Rather than solving problems, today countless numbers of obscure foundations are pouring billions into creating problems, raising fears and entrenching political divisions.
How did this happen?
The Firebreak’s Foundation Capitalism series is examining how an ecosystem of political opportunism is forming around a group of foundations managed by a network of activists with the ability to provide unimaginable amounts of capital to influence discourse, policy, culture and research. These political activists are today’s robber barons, able to manipulate a system not yet up to speed on how their tools are spinning public perception while undermining trust and engagement in the political process. This first section will examine the special interest funding loop where foundations fund researchers via dark, donor-advised funds to generate poor data that is misused to create public fear, uncertainty and doubt … and the return on investment the special interests then obtain.
How to Buy a Scientist
A recent Firebreak article looked at how, with too many scientists stuck in the academe, it was easy for activist NGOs or tort law firms to employ a significant number of bitter, under-employed and disgruntled PhDs who had fallen through the cracks of the research establishment. NGOs were able to set up research divisions (under the warm label of “independent science”) with ample foundation money to employ these angry spent forces to design studies that would raise doubts and question the safety of consumer products, agricultural practices, chemical applications, tobacco alternatives, plastics, food additives and, well, anything non-natural produced by industry.
These activist scientists know they can prove anything with a well-calibrated chromatograph coupled with misguided political intentions. They don’t have to prove that a part-per-billion trace of some targeted chemical is causing any harm, they just have to prove that it is there and it is not supposed to be (and then correlate that to whatever NGO campaign or tort lawsuit chemical proves to be the most lucrative). They then publish their deceptive results in broken, pay-to-play predatory journals (knowing full well that nobody pays attention to the quality of these publications).
These junk science claims are then converted into activist campaigns, amplified in a captured media, producing nothing more than public fear and outrage, giving the interest groups a solid return on investment. All the NGOs needed, in order to run their little dog and pony show, was a solid network of likeminded political activists on the boards of foundations with millions to spend on “changing the world”.
If it were only that simple…
This movement of funds from the foundation to the NGO to activist scientist has been presented in a linear fashion. But there are other interest groups in the shadows using this network to advance their own agenda (and generating more capital that feeds back into the loop). Two such highly motivated (and wealthy) groups are:
Companies and industries with alternative products can benefit from public doubt and fear of the main product or technology. I have referred to this as the tyranny of the alternatives. The organic food industry, for example, has been able to thrive from biased research they funded with the purpose of raising fear on the safety of conventional agricultural produce.
Tort law firms have abused the judicial system to the point where they can finance scientists to use their networks to produce data creating uncertainty about the safety of, say, a chemical or pesticide, and then threaten a company with hundreds of thousands of lawsuits to extort out-of-court settlements in the tens of billions. They then throw some of their winnings back into the system to generate more studies raising the next uncertainty around another large corporation that may have reputational vulnerabilities. The best example here is the glyphosate gameplan where, after paying scientists to go to IARC to produce a hazard-based correlation, the billions extorted from Bayer are now being reinvested to create links between herbicide exposures and Parkinson’s, autism, neonatal complications … a bottomless litigation honeypot.
The only threat to this lucrative money loop is if people find out that the science and scientists are being funded by these interest groups. Enter the foundation, trusted by the public as a force for good, and easy to exploit and manipulate.
To accommodate these interest groups, and generate further capital, foundations created the means for the opportunists to anonymously donate to NGOs and their activist researchers through the foundations. In setting up donor-advised funds, special interest capital can be anonymized, cleansed and then passed on to the specified groups (undeclared but still tax deductible … minus the handsome management fees the foundations charge the donors to protect their anonymity). No one actually knows how much money is moving via the dark corners of these “charitable institutions” since there is no transparency and no media or regulatory scrutiny.
It is rare to find anyone who donates millions of dollars anonymously without expectation of some return. The money loop is interesting here.
Using donor-advised funds, organic food companies can secretly finance a study to suggest some fear about pesticides and cancers or birth defects, consumers get frightened and spend more to buy organic food.
Tort law firms create a non-transparent funding tool to donate via a foundation to funds into an NGO using a group of scientists to challenge the safety of a chemical found in miniscule amounts in people’s urine samples.
An NGO connected to these schemes can amplify the outrage so that no jury could possibly acquit a reviled producer of this chemical and no consumer would dare buy their product.
Potential profits from fear and outrage can be called “capitalism in a modern form”: foundation capitalism.
Many of the foundations unwittingly buy into what has, quite frankly, become the scam of the century. Foundation idealism of “changing the world” and helping those who have fallen through the cracks in capitalist economies can easily transition into fighting industry to establish a post-capitalist, degrowth world. So they jump into bed with these anti-industry activists unaware of how their support is generating unimaginable wealth for the interest groups who pretend they are fighting systemic injustice. Are these foundations fools, hypocrites or just captured by these manipulative, left-wing opportunists?
Friends with Benefits
To complicate the money loop scheme even more, these foundations are also funding news organizations like the Guardian or the Associated Press to amplify the fear-based research findings they had ultimately paid for. This ensures that the interest groups get an even better return on their investment (industries with alternatives benefitting from public fear of the competing product; tort law firms profiting from higher punitive damages from biased, angry jurors). If the media dared to scrutinize their campaigns, they would destroy all that has been invested in the interest groups’ schemes (but for some reason the media don’t … and so long as the money keeps coming in, they won’t).
In the US, there does not seem to be any way to reform or ban these dark donor-advised funding tools. This is likely because many political donations from sensitive sources (and countries) use this same scheme. The political involvement (and donations) of these foundations at the government level are justified as part of the effort to reform the regulatory process (ie, change the world). With any luck, maybe the consumer products under attack will be banned or the companies in question pushed into bankruptcy.
There are many examples of this unethical use of funds to undermine trust in industry, consumer products, the food chain, the regulatory process and scientific research, all to feed the greed or ideological obsession of the interested actors pretending to make the world a better place. What is surprising is how little of this information is discussed in public where foundations, NGOs and the media still enjoy a high level of trust (and corporations do not). I suppose their support of those media groups has not hurt the foundations at all.
Here are some case studies that will be covered in more detail in the next part of this series:
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has published a series of low quality research papers in low-level predatory journals suggesting a remote correlation of health risks and a list of their targeted chemicals. All papers form the basis of policy campaigns, all funded by foundations with donor-advised funding tools and all meant to raise fear and uncertainty about industry and some synthetic substance found in consumer products. Many EWG papers become the source for lawsuits against the producers (in a recent case, filed just two working days after the EWG publication).
A recent Firebreak exposé revealed how the Heartland Health Research Alliance was founded for the purpose of channeling funds into a group of activist scientists seeking a correlation between herbicides and prenatal/neonatal issues. Despite clever obfuscation where the dark money was triple cleansed (via anonymous donor-advised funds, then via Heartland funding the academic institutions who then, in turn, financed the scientists’ research as their own), it was revealed that most funds originated from tort law firms suing herbicide manufacturers and organic food industry lobbyists via anonymous donor-advised funds).
The anti-glyphosate film, Into the Weeds, was funded by the Utah Film Center. I contacted this donor-advised fund to ask who had donated to them to finance the film but they refused to reveal the names claiming they needed to respect the privacy of the donors. The film’s intent was to glorify the tort lawyers who sued Monsanto and to destroy the reputation of anyone who had opposed them (in other words, kind, caring activists quietly using cut-throat capitalist techniques). Millions are being spent post-production so key journalists and activist scientists from the film can travel the world to attend screenings, press junkets, film festivals and anti-glyphosate campaign events (so long as they keep praising their tort sugar daddies).
With billions freely available for passionate political activists to buy under-employed scientists to reinforce their campaigns (with the added involvement of predatory tort law firms, opportunistic alternative industries, a financially-strapped mass media, arrogant academics and weak political leaders), foundations have been able to orchestrate a web of influence, power and opportunity. They may not want to call the profits they’re turning “capitalism”, but it is.
This may already seem complicated, but the exposé is only getting started. For those who thought giving away a billion dollars was easy and for the good of humanity, please accept my apologies. The next section will only get darker.