WARNING: This site deals only with the corporate corruption of science, and makes no inference about the motives or activities of individuals involved.
    There are many reasons why individuals become embroiled in corporate corruption activities - from political zealotry to over-enthusiastic activism; from gullibility to greed.
    Please read the OVERVIEW carefully, and make up your own mind.

OPINION ONLY

Alan Gottlieb , is another of the long list of nuclear scientists who became radical zealots for the far right in reaction to the anti-nuclear liberal activists who destroyed the prospects of their profession in the 1970s.

He is now both a professional fund raiser for right-wing causes and candidates, and a professional think-tank operator. He founded the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE) based in Bellevue, WA, which itself was instrumental in organisting the Wise Use Movement. He works closely with with the highly vocal anti-environmental extremist, Ron Arnold.

Gottlieb and Arnold paint environmentalists as self-serving communists or Nazis who seek to broaden the power of big government, impose restraints on individual liberty, and destroy civilization.

Gottlieb and his wife also own Merril Associates, a couple of small publishing ventures (Free Enterprise Press) and the American Press Syndicate; the American Broadcasting Network; The Service Bureau, Inc. (a non-profit telephone fund-raising business) and Merril Mail Marketing , a direct mail company which puts him in a prime position for direct mail fundraising. The CDFE mails more than 20 million items a year, much of this for the Wise Use Movement

He is also owner of KBNP , a business radio station in Portland, Oregon and Chairman of the Board of the Talk America Radio Network and its affiliated stations nationwide.

Gottlieb, has spent ten months in prison for tax-evasion. He wears this as a badge of office, describing himself as a 'premiere anti-communist, free-enterprise, laissez-faire capitalist'.

He is also credited with founding the anti-gun control Second Amendment Foundation (which made $2,533,427 in 1991) and the Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. (which garnered $2,318,804 in 1992)

The CDFE's previous main focus had been opposing gun control, but according to the New York Times, Gottlieb shifted the Center's focus when he realized the fundraising potential of opposing environmentalism,

"For conservative fundraisers like Mr. Gottlieb, the enemies were Senator Edward M. Kennedy and the threat of gun control. But now Mr. Gottlieb has found a better target. "For us" said Mr. Gottlieb... "the environmental movement has become the perfect bogeyman."

1947: Born in Los Angeles. Brought up in New York.

1966: Enrolled in the University of Tennessee

1968: Joined the US Army National Guard (at time of Vietnam War - a way to escape the call up). Joined William F Buckley's Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative political organization that supported the Vietnam War

1971: Graduated after five years with a degree in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee. The US Department of Energy was scaling down new nuclear energy projects, and he couldn't get a job.

"I got involved [in conservative causes] because I watched government picking on me and my future," he says bitterly. "Nuclear energy was the wave of the future to insure an energy-free and independent America. Here I am with a dream, my father works two jobs, my parents go into debt for it. I bust my tail in college and lo and behold, the rug is pulled out from underneath me. Ultimately by government, by government getting involved in my life.

1972: Took a political job in Seattle which put him in charge of running the eleven-state region for Young Americans for Freedom and also directing the national office of an ad-hoc YAF group called the Students Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. He writes:

I saw there was a vacuum and a void, in the gun movement, there was the NRA and at the time, it was 1971, early '72, at the time the NRA didn't have a registered lobbyist in Washington, DC. The NRA considered that lobbying was that you write an article in your magazine and that ...would get... [the readers] all excited and [they would] write Congress. And congress never got such mail in their life and it was considered to be successful."

1973: He split the [renamed] Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) away from the YAF. At about same time he became a member of the YAF's national advisory board and the national treasurer of the American Conservative Union , positions he still holds.

1974 Jan 30: He became the sole incorporator of his new CCRKBA organisation.The articles said it was:

To operate exclusively for the purpose of defending the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, to provide aid and information to people throughout the United States who may desire it to assist them in achieving and maintaining the realization of the goals of the organization.

    At the same time as he was making the Citizen's Committee a thing of his own, Gottlieb formed two other companies in his fledgling empire. The Citizen's Committee was a 501(c)(4) non-profit, a tax-exempt classification that allows lobbying, but donors can't take a tax deduction for a contribution.

    When individual contributions are deductible, they are usually a little larger. Gottlieb's Second Amendment Foundation solved this problem with its 501(c)(3) status, which allowed contributors a tax deduction.

    Like the Citizens Committee, the SAF has Alan Gottlieb as its sole incorporator. Forming a second organization gave Gottlieb a way to solicit donors twice. He estimates that this overlap in the two organizations is about 40%. Like the Citizens Committee, the Second Amendment Foundation has no members, only a board of trustees.

1976: Gottlieb now founded the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise (CDFE) . He was also the sole proprietor. It was intended to fight what he saw as the Carter administration's regulatory excesses, "protecting free enterprise and private property rights".

    The election of the anti-regulatory President, Ronald Reagan, however, made this organisation redundant. The Center was provided with office space by the Unitarian Church who were anxious to be seen as supporting Reaganism.

    Later it purchased its own headquarters. Sourcewatch says:

Alan Gottlieb seemed to possess a genius for dancing along the edge of legal business practices. He purchased the CDFE headquarters with money from two of his own non-profit foundations [ie. the NRA/gun promoting ones], then transferred the building title to his own name. He then charged his own foundations over $8,000 per month in rent.

    Mr. Gottlieb also spent seven months in prison for tax evasion ]

1982 June: He purchased the Liberty Park property (in Bellevue WA) in conjunction with the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. " 'It was a typical move of the go-go years under Reagan. Many leveraged buy-outs were financed by takeover artists gaining control of a corporation, selling the assets to themselves and then leasing it back at a hefty profit.'"

The statutory warranty deed, dated June 1, 1982, lists the purchasers as the "Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, a Washington Non-Profit Corporation; the Second Amendment Foundation, a Washington Non-Profit Corporation; Alan M. Gottlieb and Julianne V. Gottlieb, husband and wife." According to records at the King County Department of Assessments, the sale price was $760,000. Liberty Park was assessed in 1983 at $630,000.

1982 Nov 7: The SAF and the Citizens Committee filed a Quit Claim deed that gave Alan and Julie Gottlieb the buildings on the property. On the same day, Alan and Julie Gottlieb filed a Quit Claim Deed that gave the land to the SAF and the Citizens Committee.

    Now the Gottliebs owned the buildings. and leased office space to each of the non-profits at around $4,000 a month.

    According to documents filed with the IRS, the lease agreement "includes requirements for payments of property taxes, insurance, maintenance and other related expenses by the Foundation during the term of the lease." This property deal would later become the subject of a legal order at the end of a bitter lawsuit between Gottlieb and some disgruntled employees.

1983 Feb: Gottlieb got an all expense paid trip to Jamaica to attend a conference put on by the Confederation of Associations for the Unification of the Societies of the Americas. (CAUSA). Founded in Mexico City by Col. Bo Hi Pak (Rev. Sun Myung Moon's chief lieutenant) and Kim Sang In , the former Korean Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Mexico City,

    CAUSA was the Moonies' multinational anti-communist and political organization which served as the vehicle for Rev Moon's funding of the New Right, as well as for supporting the Reagan administration's military build-up and its cause celebre, the Nicaraguan contras.

1983 Mar: /E Gottlieb and the Citizen's Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms was involved in a long battle to block gun-control legislation that would make armor-piercing pistol ammunition illegal. This eventually split the police groups away from the gun lobby/

1984: his own company (actually only a business name) Merril Associates was briefly registered with the Secretary of State as a commercial fundraiser, but filed only one report in 1985/

1984: [Early] Ron Arnold approached him for help in funding what became the Wise Use Movement. He wanted to build a political movement to halt the 'impending destruction of industrial civilization' by out-of-control environmentalists.

1984 Aug: Ron Arnold says Gottlieb appointed him Executive Director of the Center for the Defence of Free Enterprise

1984 Mar: /E A federal grand jury indicted Gottleib on two counts of filing false income tax returns and neglecting to pay $40,000 in taxes for 1977 and 1978. He eventually admitted to underpaying by $17,000 and was fined $5,000 and sentenced to 366 days in a minimum security jail in Spokane.

    While he was absent, seven employees in Belleviue had been going through the books and concluded that for some time he had been mismanaging the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF). Greg McDonald, the nominal head of the SAF, and other SAF employees "ask the court to appoint a court receiver to manage the foundation."

1984 Sep: The police were called to Liberty Park when a scuffle broke out between McDonald's SAF faction and Gottlieb family members. McDonald's group had filed a summons and complaint that day requesting that Gottlieb show why a receiver should not be appointed. Later they filed federal charges against Gottlieb for "racketeering and conspiracy to defraud" contributors. [He was still in jail]

1985 March: Released from Jail. Gottlieb now filed a countersuit charging McDonald and the other ex-employees with defamation. The trials and appeals lasted 18 months, but in the end Gottlieb emerged victorious. The court dismissed the charges by McDonald and the others with prejudice and they had to pay $30,000 in damages

1985: /Late Gottleib joined the Council for National Policy — one of the most powerful and secretive right-wing groups in the country. This was the group embroiled in fundraising for the Iran-Contra scandal along with Lt Col Oliver North.

    CNP members must be approved by a unanimous vote of the current executive committee. Some of the people that approved Gottlieb's membership included the three past presidents of the CNP: Thomas F. Ellis, a former director of the Pioneer Fund, which supports efforts to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites (Ellis later distanced himself from his racist past); Nelson Bunker Hunt, silver speculator and member of the John Birch Society's national council; and Dr. Tim LaHaye, the founding president.

    Gottlieb is not an ordinary member of CNP with dues of $2000 per year, but a member of the elite board of governors with annual dues of $5000. In the nine years since Gottlieb joined, the total dues for a board of governors membership would come to $45,000.

1985 May: Gottlieb complied with a request from Bernard Goetz's attorneys to cease and desist using Goetz's name in fund raising efforts by the Second Amendment Foundation. The SAF had been soliciting donations by telephone for the "Citizens' Self-Defense Fund."

    Goetz rose to national prominence in December 1984 for shooting four black youths in a New York subway. Supposedly, the money would be earmarked for the defense of people like Goetz. Mike Kenyon of the SAF at first told the Seattle Times that "only $10,000 or $12,000" had been raised, however he later admitted the amount was actually $42,000.

1986 April: Gottlieb was exonerated of all but one of the allgegations raised over the Second Amendment Foundation war. The SAF trustees solved the problem by selling their ownership rights in the property to Gottlieb.

1986: After a bitter lawsuit over Gottlieb's management of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms the articles were amended to read:

The corporation is to operate exclusively to defend human and civil rights secured by law, specifically the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution

... and all references to membership were removed. This was now a privately-owned corporation.

1987 Jan 1: Rev Sun Myung Moon told the congregation at his Unification Church that the Moonies must expand their political influence, especially through the conservative movement and the Reagan Republican ranks.

1987 early: Gottlieb, Arnold and CDFE member Chuck Cushman launced a lawsuit to stop a report of the President's Commission on Americans Outdoors. (the first step towards the Wise Use Movement.

1987 Jun 30: The Second Amendment Foundation and Citizens Committee now sold their rights in any land to Gottlieb. Joseph Tartaro was now President of the SAF, and Joe Friend the Executive Director of the Citizens Committee. They then signed lease agreements that ran until 1996 (he earns about $100,000 a year from these)

1987: late/ Gottlieb and Arnold meeting with Dr Robert Grant of Christian Voice who wanted to form a new political group called the American Freedom Coalition with financial help from the Rev Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church (This was effectively CAUSA + Christian Voice)

1988 March: the American Freedom Coalition filed its first annual report. It had three directors (Arnold as President, and Gottleib as director) but no officers had been elected. It rented office space from Gottleib. It's main role appears to have been to support the Bush presidential campaign of 1988. Gottlieb says of the AFC

"There was no way you could pollinate these people on any other issues.... The AFC never had an identity and I think they were just doomed to die. It never had an identity, in fact I don't understand what the purpose ever was."

    "Reverend Bob Grant is a Baptist minister, who surely doesn't share either the religious view of Moon or, probably, his political agenda, either, to a large extent. I know for a fact, sometimes I talk to Bob Grant [] at various conferences. Reverend Moon never, he or his people, never ever told him what to do or picked the staff for them or anything. They were totally, just— It was sort of like, they would say 'We need money and we need this to do this and this and this' ... fine, he'd just write a check."

Arnold insists that the AFC was even more remote from the CDFE and their other operations:

"it has never been clear to me exactly what role the Moonies had with AFC, because we only dealt essentially with the state group."

1988 Aug: Gottlieb and Arnold were the founders of the Wise-Use coalition, which was a loose coalition of Western ranching, mining, oil, companies and their associates, who celebrated the traditional freedoms of the old wild west. They promoted the way the cowboys of legend traditionally did business and solved their private disputes without government interference.
   

    Among the organisations attending or supporting the 1988 conference that set the Agenda were executive-lobbyists from DuPont, Exxon , the National Rifle Association, Consumer Alert and the Moonie-linked American Freedom Coalition.

[Amplification from Sweetliberty.org] The companies were mainly from the west's "big four" natural-resource industries — timber, mining, energy and ranching. They included The American Mining Congress, the National Cattlemen's Association, the DuPont Co., Exxon Co., USA, Louisiana Pacific Corporation, Northwest Independent Forest Manufacturers, Willamette Forestry Council, and Timber Association of California.

    The lobbyists, promoters, flacks and "leaders" were industry supporters like Gottlieb and Arnold with CDFE; Cushman's National Inholders Association; Clark Collins' Blue Ribbon Coalition; James Watt's Mountain States Legal Foundation; Grant Gerber's Wilderness Impact Research Foundation; Ted Cowan's Public Land Users Society; Montana PLUS; Consumer Alert; Columbia Gorge United; James D. Peterson, a forest industry public relations consultant; and the Northwest Legal Foundation headed by current [in 1995] Washington Supreme Court candidate Jeannette Burrage.

    The little guys were represented in the "Index to the Wise Use Movement" by property owners associations and recreational clubs such as Bremerton Cruisers, Eastern Washington Dirt Riders, Roadrunners Motorcycle Club, Skagit Motorcycle Club, Tacoma Motorcycle Club, the Idaho Gem and Mineral Society, the Magic Valley Trail Machine Association, the Arizona Bowhunters' Association, and the Yakima Valley Dust Dodgers. Most of the organizations listed did not attend, but rather "supported the Wise Use Movement" through their participation in umbrella organizations like the Blue Ribbon Coalition or the Public Land Users Society.

Wise Use combines a legal strategy with political organizing. The legal front was already covered by right-wing legal foundations like California's Pacific Legal Foundation , Watt's Mountain States Legal Foundation and Jeannette Burrage's Northwest Legal Foundation .

National Parks magazine (Nov/Dec 1992) reported that "The meeting resulted in formation of a working coalition united by two correlating goals: to curb any constraints on the use of private land and to abolish all limits to the abuse of public land. The time was propitious. There were three major pieces of environmental legislation about to come before Congress: renewal of the Endangered Species Act, which restricted logging; renewal of the Safe Drinking Water Act, which restricted property rights and access to some wilderness areas; and repeal of the 1872 Mining Act, which allowed mining and energy companies to mine and drill on public lands at annual fees of $2.50 an acre."

Gottlieb and Ron Arnold set up the conference and had the CDFE publish the Wise Use Agenda the following year.

1988 Dec: The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise started the Wise Use publicity drive by cheerleading a lawsuit brought by eleven Washington apple growers against "60 Minutes", the National Resource Defence Council and others for "damages suffered during last year's scare over the growth-regulating chemical Alar." In a December 1988 story from the Associated Press, the NRDC's attorney said the suit "is part of a right-wing political agenda attempting to chill free speech and intimidate the environmental community."

1990: Gottlieb ran a national ad campaign that demanded that "Sarah Brady Stop Lying." Mrs. Brady is the wife of former White House press secretary John Brady, who was permanently disabled in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. She spearheaded gun control as a national issue.

1991: Nov/E was a busy time for Gottlieb and Arnold. The Wise Use story was finally breaking and they needed to ride it for all it was worth.

The New York Times quoted Gottlieb as saying "The environmental movement has become the perfect bogeyman," under the headline "Fund-Raisers Tap Anti-Environmentalism." In this article, Gottlieb claimed to have raised about $3 million from an audience of 5 million.

    Arnold's efforts for Wise Use in Canada, where it is called the SHARE movement, got featured in a three-part report aired on CHEK-TV in Victoria B.C.. A month later, on January 13, the Boston Globe quoted Arnold as saying "We are sick to death of environmentalism and so we shall destroy it. We will not allow our right to own property to be stripped from us by a bunch of eco-fascists."

1991 Dec: The Research Branch of the Canadian Library of Parliament released a report titled "Share Groups in British Columbia." The Share Movement in Canada is their version of the Wise Use Movement. This exposd the connection and named Ron Arnold and his associates as being behind the organisation

1992: Now that Wise Use was running smoothly and the money was beginning to flow in to Gottlieb at Liberty Park, he turned the public end of the operation over to Arnold. Gottlieb has very rarely taken a public role in Wise Use since it started to make money in 1992. Arnold gets the press and Gottlieb stays in the background. Gottlieb says, "sometimes you're a lot more effective when you get less attention."

1993: In their book Trashing the Economy, Gottlieb and CDFE Vice President Ron Arnold, write with startling frankness that:

"The message of the direct mail letter must appeal to three base emotions; Fear, Hate and Revenge... (The) fund raising mailer must present you with a crisis — a problem won't do...That crisis must frighten you...If you are not frightened, you won't send money.
    Then the direct mail letter must present you with a bogeyman against whom to focus your anger... Once you've been frightened and made to hate the bogeyman, the successful direct mail appeal must offer you a way to get revenge against the bogeyman — the payoff for your contribution. The more soul-satisfying the revenge, the better the letter pulls. All this must be dressed up in an appeal that appears to have a high moral tone, but which — without you realizing it — works on your lower emotions."

1994: an audit uncovered the fact that Merril Associates had not registered as a fund-raiser for nine years. Gottlieb requested that the registration be canceled since he was now exempt.

1997 June 3: An invitation to a "Salue to Jesse Helms" by the American Conservative Union, has Gottlieb's name on the letterhead as a member.

1994 June: Gottlieb sent a mass mailing which appeared to be from Rep. Philip M. Crane, a Republican from Illinois. The envelope bore a replica of the Congressional seal and in large, bold letters identified the sender as: The Honorable Philip M. Crane, Rep. Crane, Member of Congress and bore his signature:

"Dear Friends,
    I recently asked Alan Gottlieb, Chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, for the names of a few selected Americans with whom I could communicate directly on a matter of great importance to our gun rights. ...Yours was one of the names Alan gave me. Will you join with me and U. S. Senators Bob Dole, Orrin Hatch, Trent Lott, Don Nickles and other distinguished Americans as a member of the National Advisory Council of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms?

    Crane had not endorsed the letter.

1999 June: [In Court newsletter] Says the ABC News and/or the San Francisco Examiner commented:

Will the momentum of gun lawsuits continue to build? Or will public outrage against gun violence fade with the summer sun?

    Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation in Washington State likens the suits to "trying to sue General Motors for a bank robbery simply because the getaway car was a Chevy."

2005 Sep: Washington Times/Supreme Court in Illinois frees gun makers of liability by Audrey Hudson.

The manufacturers targeted in such lawsuits "also make firearms for police officers and the military," Mr. Cox said. "Having these companies shut down and jobs sent overseas and then relying on foreign countries to produce military firearms is reckless at best.. but unfortunately, that will be the result of these politically motivated lawsuits."

    Similar cases are pending in Ohio, New York, and Indiana, and 28 such lawsuits have been defeated in other states including Louisiana, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, Georgia and Pennsylvania, said Alan Gottlieb. founder of the Second Amendment Foundation.

    Pro-gun groups are lobbying Congress to pass legislation protecting firearm manufacturers from such lawsuits. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act would end liability by manufacturers and sellers of firearms for criminal misuse of lawfully sold weapons.

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