Richard Mellon Scaife

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Richard Mellon Scaife (born July 3, 1932 in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , † July 4, 2014 there ) was an American billionaire . He was known and important as a supporter of conservative and libertarian politicians and institutions, above all through a number of his own foundations .

origin

His parents were Sarah Mellon Scaife and Alan Scaife. The mother came from one of the richest families in the USA (Mellon). When Fortune magazine first drew up a list of the richest Americans in 1957, it was ranked among the eight richest people along with three other members of the family. His great-uncle Andrew W. Mellon was a banker and Treasury Secretary of the United States from 1921 to 1932. He successfully campaigned for tax cuts that particularly benefited the richest.

Life

Scaife's assets came mainly from the Aluminum Corporation of America ( Alcoa ), the oil company Gulf Oil , from coal, steel and copper companies, from the Mellon National Bank of Pittsburgh and other banks and trusts.

His father worked in the Office of Strategic Services , a forerunner of the CIA , during World War II . He was very concerned about an alleged communist threat to wealth in the United States, which made a big impression on his son. When he died in 1958, Richard took over management of his mother's property. In order to avoid inheritance tax, large parts of it were converted into several charity funds, which could be transferred tax-free to Richard and his sister Cordelia provided that the profits were used for charitable purposes for 10 and 20 years respectively. As a result, he had his own fortune of 175 million dollars from 1963, which he could only use for charitable purposes. When the mother died in 1965, the siblings took control of the much larger Sarah Scaife Foundation, which the parents had founded in 1941. Like her mother, Cordelia wanted to promote the arts, education and science, but over the years Richard prevailed with his predominantly political goals.

In 1964 Richard Scaife was involved in founding the Carthage Foundation, which was named after ancient Carthage because parallels were seen between the current situation in the USA and the decline of Carthage. In the presidential election , Republican candidate Barry Goldwater suffered a heavy defeat by Lyndon B. Johnson , and Johnson began pursuing civil rights laws and anti-poverty programs that Scaife and his partners firmly opposed.

In the 1972 presidential election , Scaife supported the re-election of Richard Nixon with nearly one million dollars, which he distributed to 330 participating institutions in order to comply with the restrictions on campaign contributions. In the Watergate affair , however, he spoke out passionately in favor of Nixon's impeachment, and afterwards he no longer campaigned on a larger scale for individual politicians, but funded over a hundred foundations and other institutions in order to influence the content of politics.

In 1975 he became the main sponsor of the Heritage Foundation established two years earlier . This acted as a think tank , but differed from conventional think tanks such as the Brookings Institution or the Rockefeller Foundation in that it did not conduct open-ended research, but instead represented decidedly arch-conservative views and actively promoted these to politicians ( lobbying ). While the older institutions paid close attention to neutrality in order not to endanger their charitable status, within a few years, financed by rich donors such as Scaife, they succeeded in building "alternative" institutions such as Heritage and successfully staging them as a counterweight to the established, predominantly liberal-oriented ones by presenting them as partisan and their own, until then marginal, agenda as at least equal.

Scaife also helped in financing the Arkansas project is to connect the ultimately to the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton led. In addition, he was responsible for founding the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow , one of the most important front groups on the organized climate denial scene .

Scaife was married twice, first to Frances L. Gilmore and second to Margaret “Ritchie” Battle. Both marriages ended in divorce. From his first marriage he had two children. He died on July 4, 2014 at the age of 82 years at his home in Pittsburgh from the effects of cancer .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016, ISBN 978-0-3855-3559-5 , pp. 62-65.
  2. Homepage of Gudrun Eussner ( Memento of the original from January 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.eussner.net
  3. Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. pp. 63-72.
  4. Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. p. 61.
  5. Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. pp. 76f.
  6. Jane Mayer: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Doubleday, New York 2016. pp. 77-83.
  7. ^ Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Organized Climate Change Denial , in: John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, David Schlosberg (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society . Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 144-160, esp. 149f.
  8. Robert D. McFadden: Richard Mellon Scaife, Influential US Conservative, Dies at 82. Obituary in The New York Times, July 4, 2014 (accessed July 5, 2014).