Common Assets Defense Fund companion 501(c)(4) Common Assets Action Fund
P.O. Box 14967
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Phone: number reassigned to a private cell phone
Website: www.commonassets.org
[created February 8, 2000, available only on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
EIN: 48-1271532

Founded: Incorporated in California September 16, 2002 as Common Assets Defense Fund and name changed to On The Commons in 2004

Re-registered in Minnesota May 17, 2006 as Common Assets Defends Fund and as On The Commons Common Assets Action Fund registered in California October 12, 2004
Merged with the Tomales Bay Institute in June, 2006.

501(c)(3) exempt since: 2002
2007 Assets: $341,012
2007 Income:$497,930

Note: Common Assets Defense Fund and On the Commons are not listed in 2009's IRS Publication 78 Cumulative Index of Exempt Organizations.

Self-Description: Common Assets Defense Fund (CADF) was formed to preserve the public assets of the United States. Common assets include the air, the water, the airways used by TV and radio, and the Internet. Collectively such assets are worth more than our entire privately owned property put together. Worth more in dollars, and worth more in terms of health, happiness, and quality of life. Common Assets Defense Fund animates new policies, public understanding, and community-based strategies to protect and extend this common wealth.

Actual: A small grant-driven, foundation-ruled group of highly sensitive individuals opposing private property, private enterprise and all things private per se with an ideology that mocks, devalues and destroys the private individual and private ownership in favor of collective society and collective ownership. The concept assumes but does not say that government owns the commons. CADF's creators are profoundly intellectual. One of them (Barlow) is a Marxist "but not prescriptive. I am a fan of the clarity of Marxian analysis." CADF's board is profoundly analytical, widely experienced in movement dynamics, and well grounded in their beliefs. Their original executive director, Adam Werbach, was not, a young man suffering the platitude-ridden hubris of early celebrity as having been the youngest elected president of the Sierra Club. CADF ditched him in 2006 for Julie Ristau, co-creator with Eric Utne and publisher of Utne Reader (1983).

Background: CADF was an outgrowth of the small prototype Tomales Bay Institute, which was merged into CADF in 2006. CADF's original board of directors included: ....To Read More...