re: #25 jlakely

Nice to see the proprietor of the mighty LGF weigh in.

Thanks for the compliment; but as mighty as LGF undoubtedly is, it pales in comparison to the might of the industry front group you represent.

For one thing, we make do with quite a bit less money from industries that cause harm to the public.

Heartland Institute - SourceWatch:

Foundation funders

Media Transparency lists Heartland as having received grants from a range of foundations between 1986 and 2009. Of these foundations, by far the largest donor has been the foundation of Chicago industrialist Barre Seid[29], maker of Tripp Lite surge protectors.

Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation $1,037,977
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation $648,000
Exxon Mobil $531,500
Walton Family Foundation $400,000
Sarah Scaife Foundation $325,000
Charlotte and Walter Kohler Charitable Trust $190,500
Jaquelin Hume Foundation $166,000
Rodney Fund $135,000
JM Foundation $82,000
Castle Rock Foundation $70,000
Roe Foundation $41,500
John M. Olin Foundation $40,000
Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation $40,000
Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation $37,578
Armstrong Foundation $30,000
Hickory Foundation $13,000
Carthage Foundation $10,000

Exxon funding

Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets website lists Heartland as having received $676,500 (unadjusted for inflation) from ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2006.[30] (As mentioned above, Heartland insist that Exxon has not contributed to the group since 2006.)[31]

Exxon contributions include:

$30,000 in 1998;
$115,000 in 2000;
$90,000 in 2001;
$15,000 in 2002;
$85,000 for General Operating Support and $7,500 for their 19th Anniversary Benefit Dinner in 2003;
$85,000 for General Operating Support and $15,000 for Climate Change Efforts in 2004; and
$119,000 in 2005; and
$115,000 in 2006.

Secrecy on funding sources

While Heartland once disclosed its major supporters, it now refuses to publicly disclose who its corporate and foundation funders are. In response to an article criticizing the think tank for its secrecy, the group’s President, Joseph Bast, wrote in February 2005:

“For many years, we provided a complete list of Heartland’s corporate and foundation donors on this Web site and challenged other think tanks and advocacy groups to do the same. To our knowledge, not a single group followed our lead. However, critics who couldn’t or wouldn’t engage in fair debate over our ideas found the donor list a convenient place to find the names of unpopular companies or foundations, which they used in ad hominem attacks against us. Even reporters from time to time seemed to think reporting the identities of one or two donors—out of a list of hundreds—was a fair way of representing our funding or our motivation in taking the positions expressed in our publications. After much deliberation and with some regret, we now keep confidential the identities of all our donors.”[32]

It has also claimed that “by not disclosing our donors, we keep the focus on the issue.”