Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank located in Washington, DC, is widely regarded as one of the world's most influential public policy research institutes. Founded in 1973, initial funding came from Joseph Coors, a political conservative and owner of the Coors brewing company in Golden, Colorado. Conservative activist Paul Weyrich was its first head and Edwin Feulner has been its President since 1974. Until 2001, when it was acquired by the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation published Policy Review, one of the world's leading conservative public policy journals.

History and major initiatives

The Heritage Foundation is known for the wide-ranging nature of its work. However, it is perhaps best known for the following two efforts: First, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the Heritage Foundation was a key champion of the Reagan Doctrine, under which the US government channeled overt and covert (and often times illegal) support to embattled anti-Communist governments and/or resistance movements in such places as Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua and generally supported global anti-communism. Unlike traditional think tank advocacy, Heritage foreign policy analysts didn't restrict their support for the Reagan Doctrine to work from behind a Washington desk. During the 1980s and early 1990s, many were also deeply intertwined players in wars against legitimate regimes, visiting regularly with rebel forces in Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua to provide the rebel insurgents with valued political and military guidance. Heritage's support for anti-Communist forces drew public praise from these resistance movements, and some conservative historians believe ultimately it was a contributing factor in Moscow's decision to withdraw from those theaters. In the view of some Reagan Doctrine opponents and others, however, Heritage's involvement in those conflicts vastly inflamed Third World hostilities, fueling even more unnecessary death and destruction. The foundation also supported President Ronald Reagans belief that the former Soviet Union was an "evil empire" and that its defeat, not its mere containment, should be Americas foreign policy objective. Consistent with this thinking, Heritage also played a key role in building support for Reagan's plans to build an orbital ballistic missile shield, the ("Strategic Defense Initiative"), for the United States, commonly called "Star Wars". Second, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal, the Heritage Foundation publishes the annual Index of Economic Freedom, which measures how free a country's citizens are in terms of property rights, control over their money, freedom from regulation, and so on. The factors used to calculate the Index score are corruption in government, barriers to international trade, income tax and corporate tax rates, government expenditures, rule of law and the ability to enforce contracts, regulatory burdens, banking restrictions, labor regulations, and black market activities. Deficiencies in any of these areas will result in a lower score on the Index. Many Heritage Foundation personnel have held, or gone on to hold, influential roles in American business and government, including Richard V. Allen, L. Paul Bremer, Elaine Chao, Michael Johns and Edwin Meese. Other notables include: David Brock (right-wing journalist turned left-wing activist), Todd Gaziano (legal scholar), Stephen Glass (journalist on which the movie "Shattered Glass" is based), Eli Lehrer (law enforcement guru), Robert Moffitt (health care analyst), Nina Rees (education analyst and Bush administration staffer) and Larry Wortzel (foreign policy expert). Although Heritage is just over 30 years old, it has assumed a preeminent place among Washington think tanks. While the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute continue to be forces on the right, Heritage is recongnized as the face of conservatism. The only other organization with any comparable level of influence is Heritage's liberal counterpart, the Brookings Institution.

Financial support

Though it boasts enormous clout on Capitol Hill, the Heritage Foundation insists it doesn't "lobby." So, Heritage retains its tax-exempt status which helped it collect $29.7 million last year. Core funding comes from just a few places: In 1995, a total of 31 checks accounted for $8.5 million; another 123 donors supplied $2.6 million more. Through direct mail fundraising, however, Heritage gets millions more from ordinary people. Among Washington's major think tanks, it is the only one with a large, popular base of support. In 1973, beer baron Joseph Coors contributed a quarter-million dollars to get the project rolling. Since then, money has come from the founders of Amway Corp. and a slew of right-leaning foundations, as well as wealthy families with names like Scaife, and Mellon. Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife has been a generous donor. With a long history of receiving large donations from overseas, Heritage continues to rake in a minimum of several hundred thousand dollars from Taiwan and South Korea each year. In autumn of 1988 the South Korean National Assembly uncovered a document revealing that Korean intelligence gave $2.2 million to the Heritage Foundation on-the-sly during the early 1980s. Heritage officials "categorically deny" the accusation. Heritage's latest annual report does acknowledge a $400,000 grant from the Korean conglomerate Samsung. Another donor, the Korea Foundation, which conduits money from the South Korean government, has given Heritage almost $1 million in the past three years.

External links

• Heritage Foundation - Official site
• Index of Economic Freedom - Official site
• Privatization of Social Security - Heritage's 1982 strategy to privatize Social Security
• Happy Birthday, Heritage Foundation: At 25, the right-wing agitprop machine has a lot to celebrate.
• The Coors Connection, by Russ Bellant, (Political Research Associates, 1990).

category:Foundations Category:Political and economic thinktanks

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