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ExxonMobil Protesters Seek to Inflict 'Death of a Thousand Cuts'
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
May 30, 2002

Dallas (CNSNews.com) - The anti-corporate protesters who converged on ExxonMobil Corporation's annual shareholder meeting in Dallas Wednesday are "part of a new phenomenon in anti-capitalist activism," according to the author of a book that tracks the funding of environmental groups.

By targeting one company from many angles, the well-organized anti-corporate protestors seek to inflict "the death of a thousand cuts" on companies such as ExxonMobil, according to Ron Arnold, author of Undue Influence .

According to Arnold, who also serves as vice president for the nonprofit Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, the activists' goal is to force corporate management to capitulate to protestors' demands "at the expense of vital products, jobs and economic well being."

Arnold told CNSNews.com that the anti-corporate protesters are funded by the Energy Foundation, which he described as a consortium of seven other foundations that serve as "front groups."

Those seven foundations include the Pew Charitable Trusts, Turner Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Arnold said it is a very complicated "shell game" to follow the flow of money that funds the anti-corporate demonstrations.

Arnold calls the campaign against ExxonMobil, "the first large campaign of the new left-wing convergence." His website describes the strategy as a "new phenomenon in anti-capitalist activism" that merges "environmentalist, social justice, labor, shareholder and consumerist movements in concerted and persistent attacks on single corporations."

The students recruited for the protests "have no clue" that they are being orchestrated by these foundations, according to Arnold. He called the students "naive" and "idealistic."

Arnold is calling on the IRS and Congress to investigate the activists' financing, which he calls "invisible to public scrutiny."

Niger Innis, national spokesman for the Congress on Racial Equality, witnessed the ExxonMobil protests in Dallas this week and said that most of the protesters were from out of town. Innis's group was among the free-market groups who staged counter-protests.

"This was obviously an organized, orchestrated event from outside the state of Texas," Innis said.

Innis said one of the protesters at the ExxonMobil annual shareholder meeting told him they had to catch a flight to Washington, D.C., for another event.

"So apparently they are all from out of the state, invading this great state of Texas," Innis said.
 

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