Playing the Name Game

I received an email from my dad that was interesting and that brought me back to a class about links between foundations, funding, and activist groups I took last year. Since he reads this blog regularly :), I figured writing about it here is just as good as responding to him by email!

Emails that accompanied the video link all testified to its veracity and objectivity. So I checked it out, and immediately noticed in the intro the name of an author and an institution. So before watching the rest of the video, I looked up the organization. It's called NumbersUSA and suggests that visitors "Use this website to fight the U.S. population threat to environment, farmland, community quality of life, schools, wage fairness, and freedom." The text is on a background of snow-covered mountains (and they're based in Virginia... hmm. However, many people with the organization are from Colorado. Guess that explains the mountains.)

NumbersUSA has been around, at least according to tax records, since 2002. Now there are two organizations, NumbersUSA Action and NumbersUSA Education and Research Foundation. It's probably for a tax purpose that they have two organizations. In any case, it looks as if they paid their director Roy Beck $105,050 last year. Nobody else who works there seems to have been paid, though. That doesn't really matter, I guess, but I did find it interesting. Now, where does that money come from?

The only contributing group I could find, through mediatransparency.org (full disclosure: generally seen as a left-leaning website) was the Sarah Scaife Foundation, a group funded by the Mellon industrial oil and banking fortune (primarily through stock holdings in Gulf oil). You can see the Media Transparency profile of the Sarah Scaife Foundation as well. Now, people are allowed to do what they will with their money, including influence legislation. And the more money you have, the more you can influence legislation. I don't always like it, but that's the way our oligarchic-capitalistic society works. And I am free to refute your research findings - it's the beauty of the First Amendment. I do think it is important to know where information comes from, though, before making an ultimate decision on it.

I do find it interesting that in their list of links, the site has a link and an essay called "No to Immigrant Bashing," and when you watch the video, the speaker emphasizes this point.

The video itself focuses on numbers - numbers of immigrants, numbers of "native" born Americans, and the growth in these populations over the next several years based on census data. Mr. Beck, author and director of the center, also does this demonstration with jawbreakers, each one representing one million people from the third world. Basically, he argues visually that even though a million people from the developing world could come to America to have a better life each year, billions more would still be in their own countries suffering.

I have no doubt that Mr. Beck used real census data to come up with his presentation. However, data and numbers have no meaning outside of the context in which they are presented. As I watched the video, I kept thinking, "What's happening to the world population during this same time period?" (roughly the next 100 years). If the world population is exploding, I have no doubt the U.S. will experience the same amount of pressure. At some point, we're all going to have to learn how to share our resources regardless.