ustxtxb_obs_1997_02_28_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

Public Schools: Circle C bike track and soccer fiel Circle C bike track: Dick Nichols park: Federal bailout of Circle C Ranch: Total Subsidies: Source: Hill Country Foundation ion from Austin and Eanes School Districts $0.6 million from City of Austin $0.5 million from State of Texas $1.10 million from City of Austin $92.0 million from RTC $474,280,000 Paul. \(For some reason, this remarkable proposal brought to mind the image of a rowboat with a bull-horn sent out to stop the insist that PERC also opposes subsidies, but that the problem Bunch had just described was obviously “too much government,” and “less government meant less opportunity for subsidies.” But there are subsidies, and there are subsidies. Remember, environmentalism pays”free market environ mentalism,” that is. PERC’s leading lights are tenured faculty members at the Montana State University at Bozeman, and PERC itprofit corporation, allowing its supporters to to fund PERC’ s ongoing campaign to hand over most public assets and public business to private industry. Not surprisingly, PERC has found a ready market for its ideas among those who stand most to benefit from their dissemination and enactment. PERC’s most gener ous recent benefactors include such friends of the environment as the Adolph Coors Company, Amoco, Burlington Northern/Meridian Oil, Coca Cola, Conoco, Exxon, Pfizer, and Proctor and Gamble. The really big bucks have come from a group of giant right-wing foundations, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Liberty Fund, the FMC Foundation, and a whole group of foundations created by Koch Industries \(oil, gas, and land manageFoundation, which paid for the Barton Creek conference. “The Koch A For Rent: Rm w/ vu, Big Bend Nat’l Pk people consider the middle of the country…to be their general zone of influence,” Anderson told me. “So they asked us to do a conference in Minnesota, and now this one in Texas.” David Koch told the National Journal that the family foundationswhich also underwrite the libertarian Cato Institute and “sound science” propagandists Citizens for a Sound Economypromote projects designed to “minimize the role of government and to maximize the role of private economy and to maximize personal freedoms.” With apologies to Victor Hugo, the Koch-funded message of the PERC conference might be summarized as follows: The rich and poor alike henceforth will be free to buy their own privatized piece of the environment. Caveat emptor. Harrison Saunders THE TEXAS OBSERVER 13 FEBRUARY 28, 1997