THE "BILLIONAIRE BRIGADE" OF POPULATION CONTROLLERS

Mary Meehan

Ted Turner, founder of the Cable News Network, believes that there are
"too many people" in the world and that they harm the environment. In
a 1997 interview with the Village Voice, Turner said that humanity can
be dumb "and go to extinction like the dodo. Or we can be real smart
and intelligent, and progress to a brave new world." Turner, who has
five children, made a startling proposal: "What we need to have for
100 years is a one-child policy....If everybody voluntarily had one
child for 100 years, we'd basically be back to two billion
people..."(1) Writers Paul and Anne Ehrlich, of "population bomb"
fame, had told him years earlier that roughly two billion would be an
ideal population for the world.(2)

Now Turner is putting up serious money to advance population control
through the United Nations. Soon after the Village Voice interview, he
announced a gift of one billion dollars to the U.N. The money is
supposed to promote peace and children's health and to help poor
people, but also to restrain population growth. Grants are to be given
over a period of 10 years, through a new foundation that Turner
controls. When his United Nations Foundation announced its first
grants, they included ones for population control in the Philippines,
Honduras and Lebanon. Also included was a $300,000 grant to the United
Nations Population Fund to influence media coverage of population
stories.(3)

Old wealth in the United States has long supported eugenics and
population control, especially through major private foundations such
as Ford and Rockefeller. But while the old-wealth families generally
give their money quietly, Turner likes to make a big splash.

Tact is not his strong point. In 1989, for example, when right-to-
lifers criticized a Turner television film that supported abortion, he
promised a televised debate after the film. "We'll give the other
bozos a chance to talk back," he said, according to the Associated
Press. "They look like idiots anyway."(4)

In 1996 he criticized fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and William
H. Gates III (Bill Gates of Microsoft) for not giving enough money to
charity. "Why isn't it better to be the biggest giver rather than the
biggest hog?" Turner asked a New York Times columnist. He claimed that
he had talked to Buffett and Gates and that "they would be inclined to
give more if there was a list of who did the giving rather than the
having." Buffett and Gates, though, denied having said that.(5)

Actually, both men make substantial donations to various causes, and
Buffett's foundation may eventually become one of the largest funders
of population control. After Buffett, 70, and his wife die, their
shares in the Berkshire Hathaway holding company--worth many billions
of dollars--are scheduled to go to the Buffett Foundation. That
foundation is already deeply involved in population control. It has
given substantial sums to Planned Parenthood groups, Pathfinder
International, the Population Council, and a host of similar groups.
It has helped finance research on the abortion pill, RU-486, and has
given large sums to International Projects Assistance Services, a
group that sends abortion equipment to poor countries. The foundation
has also helped finance Catholics for a Free Choice, which campaigns
against Catholic teaching on abortion, and the Religious Coalition for
Reproductive Choice, which tries to put a religious seal of approval
on the choice of abortion.(6)

Warren Buffett doesn't like to talk about population issues in public.
In 1997 he told Barron's financial weekly that he might write about
them eventually: "But until then, I don't want to comment on the
question or become a spokesman. I'd end up getting 50 letters a day.
It would change my life too much."

Relying on comments by Buffett acquaintances, Barron's said that the
billionaire investor "holds fairly conventional, neo-Malthusian views
about overpopulation." But Barron's stressed that many industrialized
nations' fertility rates have dropped below replacement level and that
even the birth rate of poor nations has declined to an average of "3.3
births per woman."(7)

Max Schulz of the Competitive Enterprise Institute criticized Buffett
and other members of what he called the "Billionaire Brigade" for
buying into "the phony crisis of overpopulation." Schulz contended
that problems in high-density population areas "stem from failed
socialist policies, not from too many people."(8)

Thomas Goetz, the Village Voice writer who interviewed Ted Turner in
1997, made an intriguing comment about the economics of population
control. He said that "our billionaires can't fully tap a global
market when the potential customers are too busy scrounging for food
to save for a laptop. For television, software, and investment alike,
a developed economy--with its corresponding low birthrate--produces
the best consumers."(9)

Warren Buffett's good friend, Microsoft entrepreneur Bill Gates,
shares his interest in population. The Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, now the wealthiest U.S. foundation, gives large sums to
population control. Bill Gates and his father accompanied Buffett and
his wife on a 1995 trip to China. The senior Gates told Barron's that
"we all made a point of visiting a family-planning center at a small
village on the Yangtze River." Barron's didn't indicate whether the
group was concerned about coercive population control in China.(10)

But the Gates foundation at least applies one limit. In late 1999 its
spokesman said: "We, as a policy, don't fund any abortion services of
any kind....We have specific guidelines that our funding isn't to be
used to provide abortion services."(11)

Warren Buffett has given advice to the four children of the late David
Packard, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, on how to spend the money of
their huge family foundation. The David & Lucile Packard Foundation
has put huge sums into population control for many years. Among its
grants have been ones for abortion training in Africa, birth control
pills in Vietnam, and "emergency contraceptives" promotion in
Washington State.(12) ("Emergency contraceptives" are largely
abortifacient.)

Another immensely wealthy individual, financier George Soros, also
funds population control. Soros, like Turner, has five children but
worries that other people are having too many. His foundations include
the Open Society Institute (OSI), which has a unit that supports
abortion. Like many other foundations, OSI is intensely political in
its grant-making. In 1998 it noted a large grant to one group "to
protect the laws governing reproductive health care, especially
abortions"; a grant to another group "to support public opinion
research and field organizing in Colorado and Washington states to
combat anti-choice activities"; and a $1 million grant to the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America for a "campaign to gain widespread
public awareness and acceptance of emergency contraception." More
recent grants also show a keen appreciation of propaganda campaigns,
especially ones "targeting young people."(13)

In 1998 the International Women's Health Coalition, which has received
generous grants from OSI, published a strategy booklet on how to
spread abortion in poor nations. Focusing on legal change, it
suggested:

Using documents from recent international conferences to promote
abortion. While conceding that such documents "do not explicitly
assert a woman's right to abortion," the booklet suggested that they
can be "broadly interpreted and skillfully argued" in order "to expand
access to safe abortion."

Training "health professionals in basic abortion techniques" so
abortion will be available where it is permitted

Exploiting loopholes so that abortions can be done "even in settings
where laws are restrictive"

Changing administrative practice so that, for example, paramedics can
do early abortions

Using research on illegal and "unsafe" abortion to campaign for
legalization(14)

The booklet is one of a long line of Western plans to suppress birth
rates in poor nations by propaganda and pressure for legal change.
Cultural imperialism is an accurate description of this and other
projects of the Billionaire Brigade. Some people use an even harsher
term: genocide.

Notes

1. Quoted in Thomas Goetz, "Billionaire Boys' Cause," Village Voice, 7
Oct. 1997, 42.

2. Washington Times, 17 Feb. 1999, A-3.

3. "Ted Turner Announces $1 Billion Donation," Philanthropy News
Digest, 24 Sept. 1997, 1-2,http://fdncenter.org, 25 Sept. 1997;
Stephen G. Greene, "Ted Turner Maps Out His Sphere of Influence,"
Chronicle of Philanthropy, 4 June 1998, 9 ff.; Tom Riley, "Keeping
Ted's Promise," Philanthropy, May-June 1999, 17-22. For current
information, seewww.unfoundation.org.

4. New York Times, 15 July 1989, 8.

5. Quoted in Maureen Dowd, "Ted's Excellent Idea," ibid., 22 Aug.
1996, A-25. See, also, Robert Lenzner, "The Mouth of the South Puts
His Foot In It," Forbes 400, 14 Oct. 1996, 40-41.

6. Jennifer Moore and Grant Williams, "Corporate Giving, the Buffett
Way," Chronicle of Philanthropy, 13 Nov. 1997, 1 ff.; 1996 and 1997
Buffett Foundation tax returns; Jonathan R. Laing, "Baby Bust Ahead,"
Barron's, 8 Dec. 1997, 37 ff.

7. Ibid., 37 & 40.

8. Max Schulz, "From the Editor: Population Control Billionaires," CEI
UpDate, July 1999, 2.

9. Goetz (n. 1), 43.

10. Laing (n. 6), 38.

11. Trevor Neilson, telephone interview by author, tape recording, 5
Nov. 1999.

12. George Anders, "Giving Away $9 Billion Isn't Easy; Just Ask the
Packard Children," Wall Street Journal, 6 March 1998, A-1 & A-9.

13. Open Society Institute, U.S. Program Notes, Oct. 1998, 15;
"Program on Reproductive Health and Choice: Grants, 1997-2001,"www.soros.org,
13 July 2001.

14. Adrienne Germain and Theresa Kim, Expanding Access to Abortion:
Strategies for Action (New York, 1998), 6-13. OSI support for the
International Women's Health Coalition is noted in Geoffrey Knox, "A
Revolution Brewing in Women's Health," Open Society News, Spring 1999,
4-5.