Ted Turner has been in the news lately. The legendary media
titan resigned his seat on the board of AOL-Time-Warner, where the
value of a share of its stock decreased 70 percent in the last two
years. Consequently, Turner’s personal net worth shrunk from
roughly $7 billion to $2 billion in that time. It’s gotten so bad
that his financial advisers finally got him to switch his legal
residence from Georgia to Florida to take advantage of the Sunshine
State’s absence of a state income tax. And Turner recently dumped
450,000 shares of AOL-Time-Warner stock, a portion of which went to
the United Nations as part of his well-known pledge of $1 billion
to be paid over ten years.
Needless to say, Turner’s money woes don’t bode well for his
myriad philanthropic activities (for instance, he may be forced to
extend that U.N. payment schedule by a few years). Gloom is
descending on everybody from U.N. bureaucratic hacks to scruffy
tree huggers. Ted’s liberal do-gooder spendthrift days seem to be
on hold until the U.S. economy improves. “As soon as the stock
market rebounds, we really want to get back in the game,” Devon
Finley, a program officer at the Turner Foundation, told the
Portland Oregonian.
A
recent story in that paper by staff writers Michelle Cole and
Jonathan Brinckman tells us that the Green gravy train has
derailed. Nonprofit environmental organizations rely on
philanthropic organizations for 60 to 80 percent of their total
revenues, and “the nation’s top ten environmental grant-makers, led
by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, saw assets drop in two
years from $51 billion to $39 billion. Awards to environmental
groups fell $73 million.” Grants from the top ten had climbed 78
percent from 1997 to 2001, reflecting fat times in the stock
market, but are down an average of 30 percent since then. The
downturn has forced the Turner Foundation to award no new grants in
2003, though it will honor “previous commitments.”
The American West’s most notorious land baron is very supportive
of local Green groups in the Northern Rockies, home to three of his
sprawling ranches. Montana organizations including the Greater
Yellowstone Coalition, the Predator Project, the Northern Plains
Resource Council, and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies have long
enjoyed Turner’s patronage. The last group, based in Missoula, has
laid off two of three paid staffers (becoming an Alliance of One?)
as its annual budget shrunk from $400,000 to $150,000 in just the
last year. It also closed a field office in the ritzy ski town of
Ketchum, Idaho (those high rents for office space just to be
amongst the disinterested glitterati must have been awful).
“One of the people we laid off focused on ecosystem defense,”
Mike Garrity , the Alliance of One’s Executive Director told the
Oregonian. “He commented on and appealed timber sales. So
we [I?] probably won’t be able to comment on as many timber
sales.”
The Robert W. Woodruff Foundation (83 percent of its assets are
in Coca Cola stock) has steadily decreased its annual
enviro-philanthropy from $42 million in 1997 to $11.5 million — a
full 70 percent — in 2001. The weak economy coupled with the
extremely competitive soft drink market forces upon the
Atlanta-based foundation “times for austerity,” its head, Charles
McTier, told Cole and Brinckman. (Attention unemployed timber
workers: drink Pepsi!)
Looking in their own backyard, the reporters found that such
trickle-down misery means that the LaGrande, Oregon Hell’s Canyon
Preservation Council’s annual budget is down from $305,000 to
$229,000 in a year. There have been salary cuts and other
belt-tightening measures. “We’re going to get creative. We’re not
going away,” said Ric Bailey, the group’s executive director. Even
the Sierra Club — with its massive $70 million annual budget — is
shaky. “We’re trying to hold the line,” said Richard Dietrich,
associate director for foundation and corporate relations.
Look for an amplification of the Green Left’s standard shrill
Bush-Cheney bashing, and other “the-sky-is-falling” rhetoric; SUVs
being the current politically incorrect target. Anything to help
fill those shrinking donation coffers. As Mr. Bailey said: “We’re
going to get creative.”
In the meantime, let’s all pity poor Ted Turner. He’s slowly
going broke, and he’s lost Jane. But I have faith in old Ted. He’s
an American success story, and he’ll be back.
Hey, maybe he’ll hook up with Arianna Huffington.
