PEW Trust and other sneaky groups

[nitestrikes]

Frankiesurf, thanks for the Jim Donofrio link. He mentioned the Pew Trust like 5 times, and it got my attention.Who the heck is this group that doesn't even fish, yet manages to intervene in all sorts of decisions affecting fishermen?
So I did some digging. Holy Toledo Batman, they are everywhere! They hire scientiests on fishing advisory committees. They have about 30 different names and organizations to hide their true agenda. All the little nerds that werre picked on in school, grew up to be angry pansies and joined the Pew Trust.
Does anyone have any personal experience dealing with these azzhats?

[voyager35]

This is a huge organizaton, folks. $5 billion in assets, spending budget of $250 million/year. They are a formidable competitor.

The Pew Charitable Trusts is an independent nonprofit and nongovernmental organization, founded in 1948 with over US$5 billion in assets. Its current mission is to serve the public interest by "improving public policy, informing the public, and stimulating civic life."[1]


[edit] History

The Trusts, a single entity, is the successor to, and sole beneficiary of, seven charitable funds established between 1948 and 1979 by the adult children of Sun Oil Company founder Joseph N. Pew and his wife, Mary Anderson Pew. The four co-founders were J. Howard Pew, Mary Ethel Pew, Joseph N. Pew, Jr., and Mabel Pew Myrin. The Trusts is based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with an office in Washington, D.C..


In 2004, the Pew Trusts changed from a foundation into a nonprofit. It can now raise funds freely and devote up to 5% of its budget to lobbying the public sector.
According to the 2007 Annual Report, five of the 12 persons currently serving on the Board for the Trusts are named Pew, including the Chair. Two of the five are physicians.

[edit] Current concerns

The Trusts' public policy areas include the environment, state policy, economic policy and health and human services.
The Trusts, with other groups, backed an effort to create marine protected areas in the Pacific Ocean, near the Marinas Islands.[5] The protect area was officially designated in January 2009, and includes the Mariana Trench, the deepest ocean canyon in the world. Another marine protected area that the Trusts and other groups sought to protect is Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument which was protected by President Bush in 2006.[6]
The Trusts also funds the Pew Research Center, the third-largest think tank in Washington DC, after the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress.

[edit] Financial facts

According to the 2007 Annual Report, as of 30 June 2006, the Trusts owned over US$5 billion in assets. For the 12 months ending on that date, total revenues were about US$264 million and total expenses were about $197 million, of which $12 million were for operating costs and fund raising expenses.




I had a thought, maybe not the most charitable one. How do you beat an organization like this? With guerrilla warfare. Colbert and other political pundits have suggested making a social statement by going onto Wikipedia and posting unflattering but true information about the subject. Why not make it a misssion to research the worst violations of this huge conglomerate? If they are so bad and underhanded, there have to be web examples out there of mis-behavior or manipulation.



This is from their home page:

It looks pretty impressive, but it would be even more impressive if somewhere there was an asterisk that said
* we manipulate and smooth date to fit our agenda wherever possible, and throw our money around to influence scientists and others to put forth our agenda, whether it is completely true or not.

http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_category.aspx?id=110

Environment

The global environment is at a crossroads. The rapid pace of technology and population growth is placing unrelenting pressure on the world’s natural resources. Many of our natural systems have been pushed to the breaking point.

The build-up of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuel is changing the planet’s natural systems, upon which all life depends. Overfishing and pollution have ravaged the oceans, leaving commercial fisheries at the point of collapse. On land, areas that have not been inalterably changed by human civilization are under increasing stress from activities ranging from logging and mining to agriculture and development.

Pew is a major force in educating the public and policy makers about the causes, consequences and solutions to environmental problems. We actively promote strong conservation policies in the United States and internationally. Pew applies a range of tools in pursuit of practical, meaningful solutions—including applied science, public education, sophisticated media and communications, and policy advocacy.

Pew’s environmental activities have grown steadily over the past two decades, as has our staff of attorneys, scientists, economists, media professionals and campaign advocates. The Pew Environment Group comprises more than 80 staff—with a presence throughout the United States as well as in Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean—making it one of the nation’s largest scientific and environmental advocacy organizations.

[voyager35]

Maybe we're on to something here. A google search on "Pew trust scandals"yielded over 4 million hits.

something smells at Pew, about candid remarks made after campaign finance reform
http://www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/FW0605.pdf

How the Pew Charitable Trust is Smothering the Grassroots Environmental Movement
http://www.counterpunch.org/pace10092004.html





http://www.heartland.org/publication...mon_Scare.html
Environment & Climate News

The Heartland Institute's national monthly outreach publication for common-sense environmentalism.

Experts Criticize Pew Trusts for False Salmon Scare

Scientists, European press slam study's hidden agenda

Environment & Climate News > April 2005
Environment
Environment > Fish

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Written By: James M. Taylor
Published In: Environment & Climate News > April 2005
Publication date: 04/01/2005
Publisher: The Heartland Institute
European scientists and media, who subjected the Pew Charitable Trusts to withering criticism a year ago after Pew released a study claiming farm-raised salmon presents greater health risks than wild salmon, launched a new round of criticism of Pew in the fall, after further scrutiny uncovered more problems with the study.

Euro Press Fights Back
"Pew's tactics have become bitterly controversial in North America," asserted the January 23, 2004 West Highland (Scotland) Free Press. "They have adopted a philosophy of paying for research and journalism out of their bottomless resources in order to influence public opinion towards the causes to which they are committed."
The "national media mugging of the salmon farming industry stemmed not from any impartial, unsullied source, but from an organization with an agenda," summarized the Free Press in a separate editorial. "Their record stands rather on the wildest extremes of the environmentalist movement. Pew's lavish amounts of money are used not for impartial scientific inquiry but to further the aims of that movement."
"The salmon scare which threatened last weekend to bring British salmon farming to its knees," noted the January 15, 2004 London Times, "is a sorry saga of flawed science, selective research and hidden commercial bias. That it was allowed into the pages of the apparently respectable journal Science is inexplicable. Its worldwide promotion by an organization with a vested interest in undermining farmed Atlantic salmon in favor of the wild Alaskan variety is a scandal."
"That well-planned and funded assault on the global seafood trade has European nations eyeing the credibility of the United States research community," added the International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources. "Imperious, incompetent, arrogant, and erroneous are reflective of the invectives being hurled at the so-called 'U.S. study.'"

Criticism Continues
The Free Press remains incensed about Pew's questionable motives and tactics, as noted in a September 10, 2004 editorial: "Far from being an independent, uncommitted organization, Pew worked as publicists and financers for militant 'green' groupings across the world. ... The level of incompetence involved in the research process was awesome--they did not know, it transpires, where the salmon they were testing came from. They did not even know whether it was wild or farmed.
"Dr. David Carpenter himself has admitted that Pew Charitable Trust were on a mission. 'There may be some legitimacy,' he said, 'in saying the reason they chose to fund this study was that they had another agenda well beyond the health effects.'
"We could not have put it better ourselves," the editorial concluded.
At the fifth Biennial Conference on Fish Processing, held September 16 in Grimsby, England, Scottish salmon expert Dr. John Webster delivered a presentation titled "Salmon Quality and Safety: Real and Perceived." Said Webster, "There are a series of flaws in the work funded by the Pew Charitable Trust. The research methodology is regarded as scientifically flawed by the World Health Organisation and food safety agencies worldwide. And the research completely ignored the considerable body of data on environmental contaminants in foods, including salmon, in the public domain already."

U.S. Media Hyped the Study
The salmon scare began when the January 9, 2004 issue of Science magazine published a Pew-funded paper by David Carpenter of the University of Albany Institute for Health and the Environment. The beneficiary of a $2.5 million Pew grant, Carpenter claimed to have compared the PCB levels of wild and farmed salmon from various regions of the world.
According to Carpenter, farmed salmon contained dangerously more cancer-causing PCBs than wild salmon, and humans could safely eat no more than one serving per month of farmed salmon. The study was particularly critical of salmon raised in Scotland and other northern European regions.
A January 9 article in the Los Angeles Times was typical of the U.S. media's coverage of the study. Noted the Times, "Salmon raised in ocean feedlots, the main source of supply for American consumers, contains such high levels of PCBs, dioxins, and other toxic chemicals that people should not eat it more than once a month, according to an extensive study reported today in the journal Science."
The Times then noted Carpenter's "chief concern ... that pregnant women can pass on these contaminants to their fetuses, impairing mental development and immune-system function."
"Our recommendations are that women and girls should reduce their consumption of farmed salmon and other contaminated fish until they are through reproductive age," the Times reported Carpenter as saying.
Similarly, the Washington Post quoted Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at the activist Environmental Working Group, as stating the study "leaves little room for the farmed fish industry to argue away the problems of polluted farmed seafood."

Fears Debunked
According to the Center for Consumer Freedom, "Canada's ... chief health authorities report: '[C]onsuming farmed salmon does not pose a health risk to consumers.' Likewise, the British Food Standards Agency (the UK's equivalent to our FDA) notes that the results of the Pew-funded study show the levels of PCBs and dioxins in salmon are 'within up-to-date safety levels set by the World Health Organization and the European Commission.' ... Pew failed to point out that the majority of the PCBs and dioxin are found in the fish's skin and fatty outer layer, which most people don't eat."
Dr. Charles Santerre, associate professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue University, observed that the "dangerous" PCB levels (0.06 parts per million) asserted in the study were merely 3 percent of the tolerance level prescribed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (2 ppm).
Santerre considered the Pew-funded study flawed because it did not take into account the nutritional benefits of eating salmon, which is rich in proteins, vitamins, and omega-3 fatty acids, particularly important for pregnant women. On January 9, the Los Angeles Times quoted Santerre as saying, "I would calculate 6,000 people getting cancer over their lifetime [by consuming farm-raised salmon], that's an approximation, versus potentially saving the lives of 100,000 individuals every year."
Santerre told ABC News that day, "I strongly believe that all the data we have today suggests that everyone should be eating more farmed salmon."

[bababooey]

They manipulated the data when they claimed the seas would have no fish by the year 2048. What else did they manipulate?


HIJACKING FISHERIES MANAGEMENT

How Pew Charitable Trusts has co-opted the management process using paid-for science and a well-oiled media machine.

In late 2006, “Fisheries Face Collapse by 2048!” was the headline read and heard around the world – at least in the world of Washington, DC. It just so happens that Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act at that precise moment.

The press stories sighted a study led by Dr. Boris Worm of Dalhousie University. While objective observers might question elements of the study, it was the media hype that the Pew Charitable Trusts (“Pew” or “the Trust”) wanted out there as part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to influence the Congressional debate on the Nation’s primary fisheries law.

Dr. Worm, a regular recipient of funding from Pew, working with SeaWeb, a Pew-funded public research group that specializes in media campaigns, worked on the message and the timing to get as much media coverage as possible. They were successful. Big media loves a crisis, and when you have the money and the manpower it’s easy to plant a good fish tale.