ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman
The multi-billion dollar Ford Foundation's historic relationship to the
Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] is rarely mentioned on Pacifica's
DEMOCRACY NOW / Deep Dish TV show, on FAIR's COUNTERSPIN show, on the
WORKING ASSETS RADIO show, on The Nation Institute's RADIO NATION show,
on David Barsamian's ALTERNATIVE RADIO show or in the pages of
PROGRESSIVE, MOTHER JONES and Z magazine. One reason may be because the
Ford Foundation and other Establishment foundations subsidize the
Establishment Left's alternative media gatekeepers / censors.
PACIFICA / DEMOCRACY NOW / DEEP DISH TV
Take Pacifica / DEMOCRACY NOW, an alternative radio network with annual
revenues of $10 million in 2000, whose National Program Director was
paid $63,000 in that year. In the early 1950s--when the CIA was using
the Ford Foundation to help fund a non-communist "parallel left" as a
liberal Establishment alternative to an independent, anti-Establishment
revolutionary left--the Pacifica Foundation was given a $150,000 grant
in 1951 by the Ford Foundation's Fund for Education. According to James
Ledbetter's book MADE POSSIBLE BY..., "the Fund's first chief was
Alexander Fraser, the president of the Shell Oil Company."
Besides subsidizing the Pacifica Foundation in the early 1950s, the Ford
Foundation also spent a lot of money subsidizing many other
noncommercial radio or television stations in the United States.
According to Ledbetter's MADE POSSIBLE BY..., between 1951 and 1976, the
Ford Foundation "spent nearly $300 million on noncommercial radio and
television."
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pacifica relied primarily on
listener-sponsor contributions to fund the operations of its radio
stations. And in the early 1970s, Pacifica also began to accept funds
from the U.S. Establishment's Corporation for Public Broadcasting [CPB],
according to Rogue State author William Blum--who worked as a KPFA
staffperson in the early 1970s. But in the early 1990s, some Pacifica
administrators decided to again seek grants from the Ford Foundation and
other Establishment foundations. As former Pacifica Development Director
Dick Bunce wrote in the appendix to the "A Strategy for National
Programming" document which was prepared for the Pacifica National Board
in September 1992, entitled "Appendix Foundation Grantseeking National
Programming Assumptions for Foundation Fundraising":
The national foundation grantseeking arena has changed enough in recent
years to make activity in this arena potentially worthwhile--for
organizations prepared to be players and partners in the same field as
NPR, APR, maybe some others...The foundation funding of interest is in
gifts of $100,000 or more a year, for several years...Three of America's
six largest foundations (Ford, MacArthur, Pew) have begun to fund public
broadcasting, public radio in particular, and evidently intend to
continue doing so. Pacifica requested meetings with each of these
foundations earlier this year and was treated seriously enough in
subsequent meetings to give us some hope of securing funding possibly
from all three. A `Report Sheet' on this work is included in Appendix 3.
"Beyond these three foundations there are no others among the country's
100 largest which have made substantial grants to public broadcasting.
So the second tier of foundation prospects look substantially different
from the first tier requiring more work on our part to open doors,
establish `standing' and find a workable `fit.'
"There are nonetheless a number of interesting prospects--in some cases
only because of particular people who are currently involved, or because
of formal criteria which we could try to fit. The second tier list
includes several from the top 100--Rockefeller, Irvine, Surdna, George
Gund--Nathan Cummings--and a number of smaller foundations, but still
capable of 6 figure grants: Aaron Diamond, Revson, Rockefeller Family &
Associates, New World, Winston Foundation for World Peace.
"Once we drop to the $35,000 to $75,000 grant range, the list enlarges,
but these take as long to cultivate as the bigger ones, so it makes
sense to start from the top.
"Foundation fundraising at this level has extraordinary payoffs--but it
takes senior staff time, not `grantwriting' but in communicating. It is
therefore expensive, and not successfully done as an afterthought to
everything else in the day. It also requires `venture capital visits' to
the foundations to open doors and conversations that lead to
partnerships.
"In initiating three top level contacts in April, May and June, and
attempting to capitalize on the opportunities apparent to us, we have
already been stretched beyond our capacity to really interface
effectively with these funders--although admittedly much of the problem
to date has been due to the fact that we don't yet have a clear business
plan for national programming.
"Foundation grantmaking will most likely proceed as short-term funding.
Funders will want to `fund projects, not operations.' We should presume
that we can succeed in raising serious money to launch or establish new
programs, etc. but not to sustain them beyond start-up. The standard of
self-sufficiency will be required for many proposals we submit, and our
own planning will be most successful if we relate to this funding source
accordingly.
"Short-Run Strategies for Developing a Foundation Grantseeking Program
"Seek Development Committee leadership in planning for Foundation
grantseeking.
"Pursue 3 `anchor' grants to acquire funding beginning in FY'93 from the
Big 3 foundations we've already begun to work with.
"Long-Range Strategies for Developing a Foundation Grantseeking Program
"Initiate an informal `feasibility inquiry' of foundation support for
Pacifica's objectives by requesting visits with the dozen top prospects
to shape proposals and establish relationships...
"Foundation Grants Summary: Late this spring we began our first efforts
in national foundation grantseeking on behalf of national programming.
We have a good chance of securing six figure grants in the coming fiscal
year from any or all of the 3 foundations we're working with, but our
approach is still dependent upon our own organizational progress toward
a business plan that we are committed to following through on.
"The second tier of foundation prospects is more challenging, and will
require increased staff resoucres, a modest feasability inquiry and
active planning with the Board Development Committee.
By 1995, billionaire speculator George Soros' Open Society Institute had
given the Pacifica Foundation a $40,000 grant. And in 1996, the Carnegie
Corporation of New York gave Pacifica a $25,000 grant to launch its
DEMOCRACY NOW show. In 1997 came a $13,000 grant from the J.M. Kaplan
Fund to Pacifica to provide support for DEMOCRACY NOW. And in 1998 came
a $25,000 grant to Pacifica from the Public Welfare Foundation "to
report on hate crimes and related issues as part of its `DEMOCRACY NOW!"
public-affairs radio program and an additional $10,000 grant to support
DEMOCRACY NOW from the J.M. Kaplan Fund. That same year the Ford
Foundation gave a $75,000 grant to Pacifica "toward marketing
consultancy, promotional campaign and program development activities for
radio program, DEMOCRACY NOW." In 1998 and 1999, two grants, totalling
$22,500, were also given to Pacifica by the Boehm Foundation, to support
its DEMOCRACY NOW show.
In early 2002, an additional Ford Foundation grant of $75,000 was given
to Deep Dish TV "for the television news series, DEMOCRACY NOW, to
continue incorporating the aftermath of the September 11th attack into
future broadcasts." Besides being presently subsidized by the Ford
Foundation to air Pacifica's DEMOCRACY NOW show, Deep Dish TV, with an
annual income of $158,000 in 2000, was also subsidized by the MacArthur
Foundation in the 1990s. Between 1993 and 1998, $190,000 in grants were
given to Deep Dish TV by the MacArthur Foundation. And one of the
members of Deep Dish TV's board of directors in recent years has
apparently been a WBAI staffperson named Mario Murillo.
Another Ford Foundation grant of $200,000 was given in April 2002 to the
Astraea Foundation, whose former board finance committee chairperson,
Leslie Cagan, is presently the chairperson of Pacifica's national board.
Three other grants have been given to the Astraea Foundation by the Ford
Foundation since 2000: two grants, totalling $75,000, in 2000; and a
$200,000 grant in 2001 "for general support and subgrants to
community-based organizations addressing social, political and economic
justice, especially those focused on lesbians and other sexual
minorities." The former finance committee chairperson of the Ford
Foundation-sponsored Astraea Foundation recently signed a $2 million
"golden handshake / sweetheart contract" with the Ford
Foundation-sponsored, soon-to-be-privatized DEMOCRACY NOW producer (who
has apparently been receiving a $90,000/year salary from Pacifica in
recent years for her alternative journalism work).
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman
Part 2:
FAIR / COUNTERSPIN / INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY
The FAIR/COUNTERSPIN/Institute for Public Accuracy alternative media
gatekeepers/censors--which includes COUNTERSPIN co-hosts/producers Steve
Rendall and Janine Jackson, Institute for Public Accuracy/MAKING CONTACT
executive director Norman Solomon, MSNBC/DONAHUE SHOW PRODUCER Jeff
Cohen and WORKING ASSETS RADIO show producer Laura Flanders--have also
been subsidized by the Ford Foundation and other Establishment
foundations in recent years.
At a June 1988 street fair in Manhattan's Union Square which marked the
35th anniversary of the Rosenbergs' execution, MSNBC DONAHUE SHOW
producer Jeff Cohen sat behind a table selling copies of his
recently-created Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting [FAIR] group's
journal, EXTRA!. Within a few years, Cohen's FAIR alternative media
group was airing a weekly media watch show called COUNTERSPIN on
Pacifica's WBAI station in New York City. What listeners of COUNTERSPIN
were not told in the 1990s, however, was that around 30 percent of
FAIR's funding was coming from foundation grants, including grants from
Establishment foundations like the Rockefeller Family Fund, the
MacArthur Foundation, Bill Moyers' Schumann Foundation and the Ford
Foundation.
In 1991, FAIR was given a $20,000 grant from the Rockefeller Family fund
"for general support." And then in 1992, annual grants to FAIR started
to pour in from the MacArthur Foundation offices in Chicago. In an early
1997 interview, the program officer who was then responsible for the
MacArthur Foundation's media program, Patricia Boero, told
AQUARIAN/DOWNTOWN magazine: "MacArthur is funding Fairness & Accuracy in
Reporting. And in '96, they received $75,000 towards the cost of
operations. We've been funding it since 1992, at approximately the same
level. It was slightly higher a few years ago, when the media budget was
a little bigger." Boero also told AQUARIAN/DOWNTOWN in 1997 that one
reason the MacArthur Foundation began funding FAIR was that FAIR was
already being funded by other foundations such as "the Rockefeller
Family Fund."
Later in 1997, more MacArthur Foundation money was thrown in FAIR's
direction by a MacArthur "genius grant" program--which was then headed
by a member of both the Public Broadcasting Service [PBS] board and
NATION magazine's Nation Institute Board, named Catharine Stimpson. A
dancer who was the partner of one of the co-hosts/producers of FAIR's
COUNTERSPIN radio show was given a $290,000 individual grant by the
MacArthur Foundation program which Nation Institute and PBS board member
Stimpson directed. Since 1997, FAIR has continued to receive grants from
the MacArthur Foundation. In 1998 it was given an additional grant of
$150,000 by the MacArthur Foundation. And in 2000, another MacArthur
Foundation of $125,000 was given to FAIR.
Another Establishment foundation, Public Affairs TV Inc. Executive
Director Bill Moyers' Schumann Foundation also began subsidizing FAIR's
alternative media work in the early 1990s. In 1995, for instance,
Moyers' Schumann Foundation gave FAIR a $150,000 grant "to support
promotion of book THE WAY THINGS AREN'T," which was co-authored by
COUNTERSPIN co-host/producer Steve Rendall. And in 1996, an additional
grant of $15,000 from the Schumann Foundation (whose president, Public
Affairs TV Inc. Executive Director Bill Moyers, was President Lyndon
Johnson's press secretary in the 1960s) was given to FAIR. Since 1996
FAIR has continued to receive grants from Moyers' Schumann Foundation,
including a post-2000 grant of between $50,000 and $100,000. In
addition, one of the co-hosts/producers of FAIR's COUNTERSPIN show,
Janine Jackson, sits on the board of a group, Citizens for Independent
Broadcasting [CIPB]. In 2002, Moyers' Schumann Foundation gave the
Center for Social Studies Education a $200,000 grant "for continued
support for activities of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting
[CIPB]."
The executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy [IPA]/MAKING
CONTACT alternative media group, Norman Solomon, was listed on FAIR's
1997 form 990 as being the "president" of FAIR and has been a FAIR
associate in recent years. Like FAIR, former FAIR President Solomon's
Institute for Public Accuracy, with an annual income of $267,000, has
been subsidized by Bill Moyers' Schumann Foundation. In 1997, Moyers'
Schumann Foundation gave a $100,000 grant to Solomon's IPA/International
Media project "for effort to hold think tanks to high standards of
accuracy."
In addition to being subsdiized by the Rockefeller Family Fund, the
MacArthur Foundation and the Schumann Foundation in the 1990s, FAIR also
began receiving grants from the Ford Foundation in the mid-1990s. As the
WORKING ASSETS RADIO web site noted in 2001: "As the founder of the
Women's Desk at the media watchdog FAIR [WORKING ASSETS RADIO
producer-host Laura] Flanders received a $200,000 grant from the Ford
Foundation for a collaborative project to combat racism and sexism in
the news. The resulting book, REAL MAJORITY, MEDIA MINORITY: THE COST OF
SIDELINING WOMEN IN REPORTING, was published to rave reviews by Common
Courage Press in 1997." Besides the Ford Foundation's $200,000 grant to
FAIR in 1996 or 1997 to help subsidize the alternative media work of its
Women's Desk, an additional grant of $150,000 from the Ford Foundation
was given to FAIR in 1997 or 1998. And in 2001, yet another $150,000
grant was given to FAIR by the Ford Foundation for "general support to
monitor and analyze the performance of the news media in the United
States."
In recent months, the Ford Foundation and Schumann Foundation-subsidized
"media watchdogs" from FAIR and the Institute for Public
Accuracy--Norman Solomon and Steve Rendall--have seemed more interested
in preventing 9/11 conspiracy researchers and journalists from receiving
any airtime on Pacifica's radio stations than in revealing the
historical links of their funders to the CIA or the Johnson White House
to their alternative media listeners and readers. And WORKING ASSETS
RADIO--which is aired on San Francisco's KALW and produced by a former
co-host/producer of FAIR's COUNTERSPIN and a forme Pacifica Network News
staffperson--has apparently not been eager to welcome 9/11 conspiracy
researchers and journalists onto the show.
WORKING ASSETS RADIO
WORKING ASSETS RADIO is a promotional/marketing tool of the $140
million/year, for-profi Working Assets, Inc. telecommunications company.
And besides funding its own alternative WORKING ASSETS RADIO show that
is aired on KALW in the Bay Area and over the Internet, Working Assets
Inc. also helps fund other alternative media groups such as
FAIR/COUNTERSPIN and Norman Solomon's Institute for Public Accuracy
(IPA). In 1996, for instance FAIR/COUNTERSPIN was given a $59,723 grant
by Working Assets Inc. Among the alternative media groups funded by
Working Assets Inc. in 2000, besides FAIR/COUNTERSPIN and Norman
Solomon's IPA were Free Speech TV and the Independent Press Association.
That same year, Working Assets Inc. also helped fund a gorup with which
DEMOCRACY NOW producer/host Amy Goodman has worked closely, the East
Timor Action Network, as well as the National Public Radio News and
Information Fund, the Astraea Foundation, People for the American Way
Foundation, the Center for Campus Organizing, United for a Fair Economy,
Children's Defense Fund, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights
Action League (NARAL), MADRE, and the American Friends Service
Committee.
Based in San Francisco, Working Assets Inc. is a privately-held,
secretive telecommunications company that discloses very little
financial information about its for-profit business to either its
400,000 customers or to U.S. consumers in general. One of its founders
was Tides Foundation President Drummond Pike. A trustee of Mills College
in recent years, Laura Scher, is a top executive at Working Assets Inc.
Another top Working Assets Inc. executive, Michael Kieschnick, has also
been involved until recently with the board of the National Network of
Grantmakers, which also includes representatives of the Funding Exchange
and the board of Mother Jones magazine/Foundation for National Progress.
Kieschnick still sits on the White House Project Advisory Board between
folks like PBS CEO Pat Michell and former U.S. Vice President Walter
Mondale. The White House Project Advisory Board was set-up to promote
the presidential candidacies of mainstream women politicians such as
U.S. Senator Rodham-Clinton. Another Working Assets Inc. official in
recent years, Lawrence Livak, has also been the Tides Foundation
Treasurer in recent years.
Because Working Assets Inc.'s stock is not sold on the stock market, it
is not legally obligated to post much financial information about its
business operations onto the Internet. In addition, executives at
Working Assets Inc. have been reluctant to reveal to Movement
writer-activists what kind of salaries it is presently paying its top
executives. Working Assets Inc. has also collaborated with J.C. Penney
in recent years on a "Shop for Social Change" business project.
Besides having the book she wrote in the 1990s subsidized by the Ford
Foundation, the WORKING ASSETS RADIO host/producer, Laura Flanders, also
had her journalism work subsidized for awhile in 1998 by another
foundation. After the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation gave a $50,000
grant to the Center for Democracy Studies of The Nation Institute, "to
monitor anti-abortion activities of several right-wing groups," Flanders
was employed briefly by that Nation magazine think-tank to write an
article on the subject, which subsequently appeared in The Nation
magazine. In 2000, the Rockefeller Foundation also gave the WORKING
ASSETS RADIO producer/host and two colleagues a $20,000 grant "to
support the creation and production of `Action Heroes,' a
multidisciplinary work." Members of the Rockefeller Foundation have
included World Bank manager, a Ford Motor Company director, a MacArthur
Foundation director, and an ITT Sheraton Corp. vice-president in recent
years.
Besides being the niece of COUNTERPUNCH editor Alexander Cockburn,
WORKING ASSETS RADIO producer/host Flanders is also the older sister of
Stephanie Flanders, who worked in the Clinton Administration as a
speechwriter/special assistant to Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
Around the same time that former U.S. Treasury Secretary Summers was
named the new president of Harvard University, Stephanie Flanders began
working as a NEW YORK TIMES reporter. An October 1999 OBSERVER article
by Simon Kuper, entitled "The New Elite Who Run Our Equal Society"
indicated that the WORKING ASSETS RADIO host's younger sister is part of
a British elite group nicknamed "The Young Chiefs." According to Kuper:
"Members of this new elite were presented with thrilling opportunities
early in life... Another characteristic of the new elite is networks.
The Young Chiefs, who tend to live near each other in the centre of
London, got the big breaks from old friends or people they meet at their
friends' brunches or leaving parties. On the political side, the Young
Chiefs are so close that many of them are related. Ed Balls (Oxford,
Harvard and the Financial Times, economic adviser to Gordon
Brown)...studied in Boston...Ball's wife, Yvette Cooper (Oxford and
Harvard, now a Labour MP), is a Young Chief too, as is her sometime
tutorial partner at Oxford, Stephanie Flanders (Oxford, Harvard and the
Financial Times, senior adviser to the U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry
Summers)...Nick Denton (Oxford and the Financial Times, founder of
Moreover.com) was a friend of Flanders at the Financial Times and
through her met the elder Balls"
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ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman
Part 3:
THE NATION INSTITUTE / RADIO NATION / THE NATION MAGAZINE
The Nation Institute's RADIO NATION show is a promotional/advertising
tool for a liberal-left establishment magazine, THE NATION, that
generally tends to be a Democratic Party-oriented publication. Neither
the magazine nor its radio tie-in show that is aired on Pacifica radio
stations and many college radio stations may be eager to encourage much
discussion about the historic relationship between foundations and the
CIA or about the evidence of a 9/11 conspiracy which grassroots
journalists and researchers have discovered. Yet in a 1996 interview
with former BOSTON PHOENIX media critic Dan Kennedy, NATION editor
Katrina vanden Heuvel claimed that "We have a monopoly on weekly
progressive journalism in this country." But are RADIO NATION listeners
and readers of THE NATION magazine actually being provided with
authentically progressive anti-war, anti-corporate and
anti-establishment journalism each week by THE NATION editor?
THE NATION magazine, a for-profit limited-partnership, was started in
1865 by a British abolitionist named E.L. Godkin and in the early
20th-century it was owned by Oswald Garrison Villard, a descendent of
U.S. abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. It was subsequently owned by a
Wall Street financier--the father of a NATION writer named Bobby
Tuckman--who sold it to then-NATION editor Freda Kirchwey in the 1930s
for $35,000 (which he loaned to her). NATION editor-owner Kirchwey was a
former member of the early 20th-century Intercollegiate Socialist
Society (ISS) campus group that Jack London and Upton Sinclair had
headed.
By the early 1940s, however, THE NATION was an increasingly large
money-loser and was in danger of folding because of its financial
difficulties. So in early 1943, Kirchwey decided on a reorganization
plan to keep THE NATION publishing. She divested herself of her
individual ownership and created a new, nonprofit organization, Nation
Associates, which would own THE NATION on a nonprofit basis--although
Kirchwey would still determine the magazine's editorial direction by
serving as its publisher. In 1955, Kirchwey retired and a health
insurance industry executive named George C. Kirstein became the
magazine's publisher and the principal financial backer of the nonprofit
Nation Associates, which continued to own the magazine.
In the 1970s, however, THE NATION was on the verge of bankruptcy again,
until a group of investors led by Hamilton Fish III purchased ownership
of THE NATION. Although Hamilton Fish's group of investors sold THE
NATION in 1985 to a former Wall Street investment banker (whose real
estate and utilities properties were worth about $200 million in 1991)
named Arthur Carter, as recently as 2000 Hamilton Fish was being paid
$83,000 a year salary by the magazine's tax-exempt Nation Institute
affiliate for being the Nation Institute's president.
After purchasing THE NATION in 1985, Arthur Carter began publishing his
NEW YORK OBSERVER weekly newspaper in 1987, under the initial
supervision of former New York Times Company Vice-Chairman James
Goodale, a Wall Street corporate lawyer at Debevoise & Plimplton who was
a member of the Democratic Party National Convention's rules committee
in 1988. Although NEW YORK OBSERVER owner Carter sold THE NATION
magazine in 1995 to a group of investors that included Columbia
University Magazine Journalism Center Director Victor Navasky, former
Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairperson Alan Sagner, Hollywood
actor Paul Newman, novelist E.I. Doctorow and the current editor,
Katrina vanden Heuvel, Arthur Carter has continued to sit on the board
of trustees of the Nation Institute in recent years.
NATION magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel is the daughter of
International Rescue Committee [IRC] board member William vanden Heuvel.
NATION editor Vanden Heuvel's father is mentioned in the book THE
CULTURAL COLD WAR by Frances Stoner Saunders in the following reference
to the CIA-linked Farfield Foundation: "First presdient of the Farfield
[Founcation], and the CIA's most significant front-man, was Julius
`Junkie' Fleischmann, the millionaire heir to a high yeast and gin
fortune...He had helped finance THE NEW YORKER...`The Farfield
Foundation was a CIA foundation and there were many such foundations,'
Tom Braden went on to explain...Other Farfield directors included
William vanden Heuvel a New York lawyer who was close to both John and
Bobby Kennedy."
A short review by Michael Rogin of THE CULTURAL COLD WAR book, entitled
"When The CIA Was The NEA," appeared in THE NATION's June 12, 2000
issue. It also made a reference to "small CIA-created nonprofits,
especially the Farfield foundation," yet failed to disclose to THE
NATION readers that the father of the magazine's editor used to sit on
the Farfield Foundation board.
In the 1950s, the Farfield Foundation helped subsidize the activity of
the liberal anti-communist American Committee for Cultural Freedom. As
the book THE HIGHER CIRCLES by G. William Domhoff noted in 1970: "It
seems that in the mid-fifties the head of the American Committee for
Cultural Freedom was having trouble getting money for his project. So he
wrote to Edward Lilly, a member of a governmental agency for
coordinating intelligence and psychological warfare operations, to plead
his case. At the same time he wrote to [non-communist leftist Norman]
Thomas, asking him to get in touch with [then-CIA Director] Allen Dulles
via telephone. Shortly thereafter the American Commitee for Cultural
Freedom received $14,000 from the Farfield Foundation and the Asia
Foundation...Thomas then wrote to the committee head: `I am, of course,
delighted that the Farfield Foundation came through...'" The 1982 book
ROOTED IN SECRECY: THE CLANDESTINE ELEMENT IN AUSTRALIAN POLITICS by
Joan Coxsedge also observed that: "The CIA is not so crude as to simply
hand over money directly. It normally uses wealthy philanthropists such
as the J.M. Kaplan Fund and foundations such as the Asia Foundation, the
Farfield Foundation and the Hoblitzelle Foundation."
Born in 1930, NATION editor Vanden Heuvel's father apparently served
between 1953 and 1954 as the executive assistant to CIA founder William
"Wild Bill" Donovan, when Donovan was the U.S. Ambassador to Thailand.
In their 1998 book WHITE OUT: THE CIA, DRUGS AND THE PRESS, Alexander
Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair make the following references to the
political role that U.S. Ambassador to Thailand Donovan played around
the time that IRC board member Vanden Heuvel apparently was Ambassador
Donovan's executive assistant:
"General Phao ahd been made director of Thailand's national police after
the CIA-backed coup of 1948 led by Major General Phin Choohannan. Phao's
40,000-member police force, the Police Knights, immediately engaged in a
campaign of assassinations of Phin and Phao's political enemies. These
troops also assumed control of Thailand's lucrative opium trade...Phao's
control of the opium trade was directly abetted by the CIA, which had
funnelled him $35 million in aid...
"In the 1950s the CIA backed General Phao in a struggle with another
Thai general for monopoly of control of Thailand's opium and heroin
trade...Backed by squads of CIA advisers, Phao set about the task of
turning Thailand into a police state. The country's leading dissidents
and academics were jailed...Phao also cornered the country's gold
market, played a leading role on the top twenty corporate boards in the
country, charged leading executives and businessmen protection fees and
ran prostitution houses and gambling dens. Phao became great friends
with Bill Donovan, at that time U.S. ambassador to Thailand.
In the early 1960s, NATION editor Vanden Heuvel's father served as U.S.
Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy's special assistant. According to
WHITEOUT: THE CIA, DRUGS AND THE PRESS, around the time that William
Vanden Heuvel was his special assistant, RFK "was obsessed with the
elimination of Castro," and "told Allen Dulles that he didn't care if
the Agency employed the Mob for the hit as long as they kept him fully
briefed."
During the 1960s and 1970s, NATION editor Vanden Heuvel's father also
became increasingly active in the International Rescue Committee [IRC]
In addition to being a current board member of the IRC, William vanden
Heuvel has, in the past, held the posts of IRC President, IRC
Vice-Chairman and Chairman of the Planning Committee of the IRC.
In an essay that appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of NEW POLITICS
magazine, entitled "Albert Shanker: No Flowers," Paul Buhle made the
following reference to the International Rescue Committee's historical
role: "Eric Chester's important recent volume, COVERT NETWORKS:
PROGRESSIVES, THE INTERNATIONAL RESCUE COMMITTEE AND THE CIA, offers a
well-researched perspective on one of the most interesting Cold War (and
post-Cold War) operations linked on one side to favorite causes of
prominent liberals and on the other to assorted intelligence agency
projects...The International Rescue Committee [IRC] became a central
mechanism--through its spin-off American Friends of Vietnam [AFVN]--for
selling the impending Vietnam War to the U.S. public...The young Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, working as its public relations officer, had described
the IRC as the `ideal instrument of Psychological Warfare.'
"The IRC was subsequently involved directly or indirectly in a shef of
other operations...As during the U.S. saturation bombing in Southeast
Asia, the IRC followed U.S. trained and funded military forces
decimating large districts of El Salvador..."
The book cited by Buhle, COVERT NETWORK: PROGRESSIVES, THE INTERNATIONAL
RESCUE COMMITTEE, AND THE CIA by Eric THomas Chester, was published in
1995 by M.E. Sharpe Inc. An unsigned review of the book that appeared on
the Internet described Chester's book in the following way: "The Cold
War period in American history was characterized by a seamless
cooperation among international charities, quasi-governmental
organizations, major foundation, funding conduits, and the CIA...This
book singles out the International Rescue Commitee, and to a lesser
extent the Ford Foundation."
During the 1980s, the Interhemisperic Resource Center in Albuquerque
also examined the political role that the IRC has played historically.
Besides noting that the IRC board members in the 1980s included folks
like Richard Holbrooke, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Lauder, Albert Shanker
and William vanden Heuvel, the Interhemisperic Resource Center also
observed:
"The IRC has consistently followed policies which have indeed coincided
with U.S. foreign policy interests. It has operated in such geopolitical
hotspots as Southeast Asia, Central America, Afghanistan, and Eastern
Europe, conducting programs which have bolstered Washington's
anti-communist activities...
"Many of IRC's members have ties to the intelligence community, and at
least one author calls the IRC 'a long-time ally of the Central
Intelligence Agency.'
"...In 1987, it received approximately 72 percent of its fundings from
U.S. government contracts and grants...
"In 1987, IRC received a $1 million grant from the National Endowment
for Democracy [NED], which was appropriated by the U.S. Congress
throught he Agency for International development [AID], to 'assist the
independent Polish trade union Solidarity...' ...Recently, IRC's major
focus has been on the Afghan refugees...IRC has published 10 books for
the National Endowment for Democracy-funded American Friends of
Afghanistan [AFA]...
"[Former IRC Chairperson] Leo Cherne [since-deceased] has a long history
of intelligence connections. He served as a member of the President's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1973-1976, the chairman from
1976-1979, and most recently, served as the vice-chair on former
President Ronald Reagan's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board...In 1954
Cherne sent a cable to a U.S. government official about the situation in
Vietnam, 'If free elections were held today all agree privately
communists would win...Future depends on organizing all resources to
resettle refugees, sustain now bankrupt government...' During the Reagan
Administration, Cherne was involved in private fundraising efforts
coordinated by the National Security Council aimed at disseminating
propaganda supporting U.S. foreign policy.
"William Casey [former IRC president] was one of the members of an IRC
commission that visited INdochinese refugee camps in 1978 and advocated
'a virtual open-door policy' for letting the refugees into the U.S.
Under Reagan, Casey was head of the CIA until his death in 1987...
"John Richardson [former IRC president} was the Assistant Secretary of
State for Cultural Affairs from 1969-1977. He served as the head of the
U.S. Information AGency's [USIA] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from
1961-1968. During those years, it was closely linked to the CIA...
"The IRC was heavily involved in supporting the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem
in Vietnam. In fact, the executive committee for the pro-Diem lobby, the
American Friends of Vietnam, was virtually identical to that of the IRC.
The strongest supporer of Diem in the group was former IRC official
Joseph Buttinger..."
In the late 1960s, THE NATION editor's father was the president of the
IRC at the same time former CIA Director William Casey was the chairman
of the IRC's executive committee. And according to the minutes of the
IRC board of directors meeting of June 15, 1967, "Leo Cherne appointed
the following Middle East Subcommittee: William Casey, Leo Cherne, David
Sher, William vanden Heuvel and Edwin Wesley" and "The Board meeting
adjourned at 7:10 and was followed by the first meeting of the Middle
East Subcommittee."
Besides sitting on the IRC board next to NATION editor Katrina vanden
Heuvel's father in both the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, former CIA
Director Casey was also one of the original investors and a director of
the Capital Cities media conglomerate that gobbled-up ABC in the
1980s--before, itself, being gobbled-up by the Disney Company media
conglomerate in the 1990s. Former IRC President Casey also sat on the
board of directors of the LILCO utility company, which operated the
Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island, despite the opposition of
U.S. anti-nuclear power activists in the 1970s. Prior to managing
Reagan's successful 1980 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination,
IRC board member Casey had also worked in the corporate law firm of
Rogers & Wells, where he represented the special interests of clients
like Saudia American Lines, International Crude Oil Refining Company and
the Government of Indonesia. As Reagan's CIA director until his death in
1987, former IRC board member Casey continued to retain control of over
$3 million worth of stock in companies like DuPont and Exxon while he
simultaneously made decisions at the CIA which affected the
profitability of his personal stockholdings.
Casey was not the only IRC director who became involved in politically
partisan Establishment party presidential campaigns in the 1970s and
early 1980s. During the 1976 presidential campaign, NATION editor Vanden
Heuvel's father also chaired the New York State presidential primary
campaign committee of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. In a January
12, 1976 letter to Robert Shnayerson, the then-editor-in-chief of
HARPER'S magazine, NATION editor Vanden Heuvel's father wrote:
"It is my understanding that you were considering an article regarding
the presidential candidacy of former governor Jimmy Carter in your March
issue of Harper's magazine. In that context, I send you a copy of a
telegram from Congressman Andrew Young addressed to a recent column
published by the Village Voice. I hope you will find it interesting and
relevant.
"If there are any questions, please call me at either 425-XXXX or
757-XXXX.
"Yours sincerely, William vanden Heuvel."
The telegram referred to in IRC board member William vanden Heuvel's
letter (sent by former Carter Administration Ambassador to the UN Andrew
Young to a Bardle B. at Carter Headquarters on 1/9/76) made the
following reference to a column written by Alexander Cockburn: "The
January 12 column by Alexander Cockburn, `The Riddle of Jimmy Carter,
Can A Dark Horse Change His Spots,' is a wonderful example of the
creation of `The Big Lie' by a compilation of half truth and distorted
facts.
"Jimmy Carter is not and never has been guilty of the kind of implied
racism of these charges. He is one of the finest products of a most
misunderstood region of our nation."
But according to A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES by Howard Zinn:
"The Democratic candidate for President in 1976, Jimmy Carter, was a
member of the Trilateral Commission...Indeed, the number of Trilateral
Commission members appointed to important posts in the Carter
administration was startling. Brzezinski became his National Security
Adviser...Walter Mondale, the new Vice-President, was a member of the
Trilateral Commission. So were Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew
Young, Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal, and Secretary of
Defense Harold Brown...The price of food and the necessities of life
continued to rise faster than wages were rising. Unemployment remained
officially at 6 or 8 percent--unofficially, the rates were higher. For
certain key groups in the population--young people, and especially young
black people--the unemployment rate was 20 percent or 30 percent.
"By 1978 it was clear that blacks in the United States, the group most
in support of Carter for President, and without whose support he could
not have been elected, were bitterly disappointed with his policies. He
opposed federal aid to poor people who needed abortions, and when it was
pointed out to him that this was unfair, because rich women could get
abortions with ease, he replied: `Well, as you know, there are many
things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and
poor people cannot.'"
On October 6, 1976 the then-executive vice president of THE NEW YORK
TIMES, Sydney Gruson, also wrote the following letter to William vanden
Heuvel (on New York Times Company stationary), which was apparently
mailed to Carter/Mondale Headquarters at 730 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan:
"Dear Bill: Enclosed is the resume of my brother that I spoke to you
about. He is an extremely talented fellow. Anything you can do will be
deeply appreciated. How about bringing your fellow in for lunch before
the election? As ever, Sydney."
The NATION editor's father then wrote the following letter on October
12, 1976 to one of the people who apparently would be responsible for
offering people jobs in a new Carter Administration--Jack Watson of the
King & Spalding corporate law firm. (Disclosure note: a King & Spalding
lawyer in Manhattan is currently representing his landlord father in a
frivolous, harassment-type lawsuit against a rent-stabilized tenant who
is a sister of the writer of this article): "Dear Jack, Sydney Gruson is
the Executive Vice President of the New York Times. He made a special
point the other evening of taking me aside and asking me to forward a
resume for his brother, Edward Gruson. It would be helpful if you could
have someone review the resume--and perhaps a note from you to Sydney
Gruson as well as to his brother would be most useful. Sincerely,
William vanden Heuvel."
That same day, the 1976 Carter/Mondale New York Campaign official Vanden
Heuvel also wrote the following letter to New York Times Executive Vice
President Sydney Gruson:
"Dear Sidney, I have forwarded Edward's resume with a special note to
Jack Watson. If Governor Carter does win the election, I assume Jack
will have a major transitional role, including personnel. In my next
conversation with him, I will pursue the matter.
"My guess is that Governor Carter's schedule is not going to permit
lunch before the election. The debates make scheduling almost impossible
because they require essentially three days for each event.
"Hoping to see you very soon.
"As ever, William vanden Heuvel"
After Trilateral Commission member Carter was elected president, he
eventually named William vanden Heuvel to be his deputy permanent
representative to the United Nations. The IRC board member vanden
Heuvel's daughter, Katrina, meanwhile attended Princeton University,
majoried in politics and apparently graduated from Princeton in 1981.
According to an article by Van Wallach which appeared in a March 20,
1996 issue of a Princeton alumni publication, Katrina vanden Heuvel
began working "as a NATION intern for nine months after taking the
`Politics and the Press' course taught by Blair Clark, the magazine's
editor from 1976 to 1978" and "returned to THE NATION in 1984 as
assistant editor for foreign affairs." In 1988 she married a professor
named Stephen F. Cohen, who was also a contributing editor of THE NATION
in 1996. In recent years, a "Stephen F. Cohen--NYU" has also been on a
POST-SOVIET AFFAIRS magazine editorial board that also includes a "James
Noren--Central Intelligence Agency." In 1989, IRC board member vanden
Heuvel's daughter was then named "THE NATION editor-at-large,
responsible for its coverage of the USSR" and "in 1990 she co-founded
LYI I MYI...a quarterly journal linking American and Russian women,"
according to the Princeton alumni publication.
After the former NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE editor-turned NATION magazine
editor, Victor Navasky, organized the for-profit business partnership
(which included Katrina vanden Heuvel as one of the business partners)
to buy THE NATION magazine from NEW YORK OBSERVER owner Arthur Carter,
Navasky appointed Katrina vanden Heuvel as the editor, while he assumed
the title of publisher and editorial director.
By 1996, NATION editor Vanden Heuvel had "moved the magazine's content
into new venues through a syndicated radio program and a World-Wide web
page," according to the Princeton alumni publication article. Like
Pacifica's DEMOCRACY NOW show and FAIR's COUNTERSPIN show, the
syndicated NATION magazine radio show, RADIO NATION, is also subsidized
by Establishment foundation money. The money is granted to the
non-profit division of THE NATION magazine, The Nation Institute, on
whose board of trustees sits NATION editor Vanden Heuvel and the former
member of the PBS board of directors who used to head the MacArthur
Foundation's "genius grant" program, Catharine Stimpson. The Dean of an
NYU Graduate School in recent years, Stimpson has also been the
treasurer of The Nation Institute in recent years. Of the $1.4 million
in annual revenues which The Nation Institute takes in, around $88,000
is spent on producing the magazine's syndicated RADIO NATION show, which
is aired on around 100 U.S. radio stations, including Pacifica Radio's
stations. NATION magazine editors and writers who have attempted to
smear and marginalize 9/11 conspiracy journalists and researchers in
recent months, like David Corn, have also apparently been using RADIO
NATION as a self-promotional, radio tie-in media outlet for advancing
their careers as professional journalists in the Establishment's
mainstream media world.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman
Part 4:
ALTERNATIVE RADIO / Z MAGAZINE / SOUTH END PRESS
Although David Barsamian's ALTERNATIVE RADIO show is aired on a number
of NPR stations which are subsidized by both corporate underwriters and
grants from various Establishment foundations, the Institute for Social
& Cultural Change Communications Inc. (of which ALTERNATIVE RADIO is a
part) doesn't appear to have yet been given grants directly from the
Ford Foundation or other Establishment foundations. However, one of
ALTERNATIVE RADIO's most frequently featured guests, MIT Professor Noam
Chomsky, was given a $350,000 "Kyoto Prize" by the Japanese
Establishment's Inamori Foundation in 1988.
The Institute for Social & Cultural Change Communications Inc. does
business as Z magazine. Ironically, although it may have taken its name
from a Costa-Gavras film adaptation of the novel Z (which dramatizes the
uncovering of an assassination conspiracy), Z magazine has attempted to
marginalize 9/11 conspiracy researchers and journalists in recent months
on its web site and in its printed pages..
According to its 990 form for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2000,
Z magazine takes in over $641,000 a year in gross evenues and only has
annual expenses of $531,000. A big chunk of Z magazine's annual revenues
goes to three members of just one family: the Albert-Sargent family. At
least $120,000 per year of Z magazine's total revenues ends up in the
pockets of either Michael Albert, his partner Lydia Sargent or Lydia's
son Eric Sargent. All three family members are each paid an annual
salary of $30,000 by Z magazine. An additional $10,000 in "rent" is paid
to each family member by Z magazine for the "office space" that the
Albert-Sargent family "rents" from itself, to publish its Z magazine and
maintain its web site.
Although the left entrepreneur family that publishes Z magazine took in
$120,000 in the fiscal year ending 12/31/2000, all the writers it
published were only paid $38,700 during the year, for the articles they
wrote.
Of the $38,700 which the Albert-Sargent family paid its writers in 2000,
$4,400 was given to ALTERNATIVE RADIO producer David Barsamian, whose
book THE DECLINE AND FALLOF PUBLIC BROADCASTING, was published, with an
introduction by DEMOCRACY NOW INC's Amy Goodman, in 2000 by South End
Press. Although a chart in Barsamian's book on public broadcasting
indicates that the Ford Foundation was among the PBS national
programming underwriters who contributed more than $1 million in 2000,
the book's index apparently contains no reference to the Ford
Foundation's crucial role in setting up the public broadcasting system.
Barsamian's book index also contains no reference to the Schumann
Foundation, although it makes 3 references to book passages that
describe Schumann Foundation President Bill Moyers' Public Affairs TV
programs in a favorable way.
South End Press is the business enterprise of the Institute for Social
&Cultural Change publishing firm which the Albert-Sargent family started
in 1984, apparently with the help of $232,956 in low-interest "loans"
from various individuals and organizations, that will no longer have to
be paid back. According to the South End Press's form 990 for the fiscal
year ending 6/30/200, the book publishing arm of Z magazine (which
markets books like PROPAGANDA AND THE PUBLIC MIND: CONVERSATIONS WITH
NOAM CHOMSKY that ALTERNATIVE RADIO producer Barsamian co-authored),
took in over $1 million from its book sales.
So if Z magazine/web site and South End Press were considered as one
left business entitity, we would be talking about a business that takes
in about $1.7 million a year from the cultural leftism market. In times
of U.S. imperialist war, anti-war books by anti-conspiracy theorist
Chomsky, such as 9/11, tend to sell well and even make mainstream media
best-seller lists. So, even without being directly dependent upon grants
from Establishment Foundations which wish to discourage public opinion
from considering the evidence dug up by U.S. conspiracy journalists and
researchers, ALTERNATIVE RADIO/Z MAGAZINE/SOUTH END PRESS may have a
vested economic interest in attempting to marginalize anti-war
journalists involved in 9/11 conspiracy research and journalism.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman
Part 5:
MOTHER JONES / Foundation for National Progress
Like FAIR/COUNTERSPIN/IPA, MOTHER JONES/Foundation for National Progress
received a lot of money from Public Affairs TV Inc. Executive Director
Bill Moyers' Schumann Foundation in the 1990s. In 1995, for instance,
MOTHER JONES/Foundation for National Progress was given a $500,000 grant
by Moyers' Schumann Foundation "to support MOTHER JONES magazine." A
second grant of $150,000 was given to MOTHER JONES/Foundation for
National Progress in 1996 "to support the hiring of a new senior editor
at MOTHER JONES magazine." And an additional grant of $100,000 was given
to MOTHER JONES/Foundation for National Progress in 1997 "to promote
money in politics investigation by MOTHER JONES magazine." As Rick
Edmunds noted in a recent essay on the internet (entitled "Getting
Behind the Media: What are the subtle tradeoffs of foundation support
for journalism?"): "Though it is often buried in the fine print of the
masthead...many journals of oopinion are themselves nonprofit, the
better to attract foundation funding. That is true of MOTHER JONES."
MOTHER JONES magazine claims to be a non-profit "Foundation for National
Progress." Yet MOTHER JONES magazine took in nearly $6 million in annual
revenues in 2000, including $822,358 from the sale of advertising space
and $176,140 from renting out its subscriber list. From this gross
income of $6 million in 2000, MOTHER JONES/Foundation for National
Progess then paid out the following salaries to its top alternative
media executives:
1. MOTHER JONES magazine Editor-in-Chief Roger Cohn was paid an annual
salary of $144,670;
2. MOTHER JONES magazine Publisher and Foundation for National Progress
Board President Jay Haris--a former general manager of the Washington
Post Company's NEWSWEEK magazine's Pacifica operations--was paid an
annual salary of $144,379;
3. MOTHER JONES magazine Director of Sales & Marketing Eric Weiss was
paid an annual salary of $105,004;
4. MOTHER JONES magazine Creative Director Jane Palecek was paid an
annual salary of $88,197;
5. Foundation for National Progress Secretary/Treasurer and CEO Joan
Catherine Braun was paid an annual salary of $85,453;
6. MOTHER JONES magazine Editor Eric Bates was paid an annual salary of
$74,716;
7. MOTHER JONES magazine Advertising Manager Eileen Ellis was paid an
annual salary of $67,233; and
8. MOTHER JONES Art Director Caroline Joy was paid an annual salary of
$61,187.
MOTHER JONES/Foundation for National Progress also spent $247,000 on
fund-raising in 2000; and its board of directors included Anita Roddick
of the Body Shop, Kadima Foundation CHair Chara Schreyer, HKH Foundation
director Harriet Barlow and MOTHER JONES magazine founder Adam
Hochschild. Hochschild also has set up the Adam Hochschild Charitable
Trust/Sequoia Fund, whose stated tax-exempt purpose is to "promote the
charitable literary and educational purposes of Foundation for National
Progress." According to its 2000 report, the Adam Hochschild Charitable
Trust/Sequoia Fund apparently did this by contributing $2.4 million
worth of stock to MOTHER JONES/Foundation for National Progress. As a
result, $1,176,617 worth of Wal Mart Stores stock (19,082 shares) was
apparently owned by MOTHER JONES/Foundation for National Progress in
2001.
Besides receiving money from Bill Moyers' Schumann Foundation and the
Hochschild Charitable Trust/Sequoia Fund of one its own board members,
another interesting connection to the world of Establishment foundations
exists at MOTHER JONES magazine. In 1997, the wife of MOTHER
JONES/Foundation for National Progress board member Adam
Hochschild--University of California-Berkeley Professor of Sociology
Arlie Russell Hochschild--was given a $3 million grant by the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation "to establish a Center for Working Families" at
UC-Berkeley, which she now directs. Among the Establishment folks who
presently sit on the board of trustees of the Sloan Foundation which
funds UC-Berkeley Professor Arlie Russell Hochschild's center is former
Secretary of the Air Force Sheila Widnall--who presently represents MIT
on the board of trustess of the Pentagon's weapons research think-tank:
the Institute for Defense Analyses (www.ida.org). Other members of the
Sloan Foundation board include former chairmen of the General Motors, JP
Morgan and Morgan Stanley corporate boards and two other MIT professors.
In 1991, the wife of MOTHER JONES/Foundation for National Progress board
member Hochschild also was apparently given a grant by the Ford
Foundation.
So it's probably not likely that many muckraking articles about either
the Ford Foundation's historic relationship to the CIA, Bill Moyers'
Schumann Foundation and Public Affairs TV Inc., the Sloan Foundation,
the Institute for Defense Analyses, MIT or UC-Berkeley--or on what
evidence has been dug up by 9/11 conspiracy journalists and
researchers--will be published much by the MOTHER JONES magazine
alternative media gatekeepers/censors.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman
Part 6:
PROGRESSIVE
The editor of PROGRESSIVE magazine, Matthew Rothschild, also attempted
to smear and marginalize 9/11 conspiracy journalists and researchers a
few months ago. Coincidentally, the Madison, Wisconsin-based PROGRESSIVE
enterprise has also been receiving a lot of money from the foundations
of a politically unprogressive U.S. Establishment since the 1990s.
In 1992, for instance, a $50,000 grant was given to PROGRESSIVE by the
MacArthur Foundation (on whose board ABC News radio commentator Paul
Harvey and Enron Global Power & Pipelines director Thomas Theobald have
sat for many years) "to solicit and disseminate opinion pieces relevant
to U.S. foreign policy and international security." That same year,
"several MacArthur staff members" were "called to consult with staff
members of Bill Clinton's presidential campaign," according to THE
CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY. And, during the late 1990s, one of the top
Clinton Administration economic policymakers, Laura Tyson, became a
member of the MacArthur Foundation board of directors.
An additional $150,000 grant was also given to PROGRESSIVE by the
MacArthur Foundation in 1994. And in 2002, the MacArthur Foundation gave
$120,000 more in grant money to the PROGRESSIVE enterprise, whose
magazine anti-conspiracy theorist Matthew Rothschild edits.
Like FAIR/COUNTERSPIN and PACIFICA/DEMOCRACY NOW, the PROGRESSIVE
enterprise has also been receiving a lot of money from the Ford
Foundation since the 1990s. In 1998, for instance, PROGRESSIVE was given
a $200,000 grant by the Ford Foundation (on whose board of trustees sat
Clinton crony Vernon Jordan). And in 2000, two more grants, totalling
$250,000, were given to PROGRESSIVE by the Ford Foundation.
Besides receiving grants from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford
Foundation, PROGRESSIVE has also obtained funds from The Rockefeller
Foundation in recent years. In 1998, for instance, a $50,000 grant was
given to PROGRESSIVE by The Rockefeller Foundation.
In 2000, PROGRESSIVE Inc. took in an annual income of $1.7 million,
including $69,727 from its sale of advertising space. And its editor,
Matthew Rothschild, has apparently been paid an annual salary of $44,468
in recent years--for putting out a Democratic Party-oriented magazine
that rarely mentions the Ford Foundation's historic relation to the CIA
and rarely publishes articles written by 9/11 conspiracy journalists or
researchers.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman
Part 7:
FORD FOUNDATION, THE CIA & U.S. ESTABLISHMENT CONSPIRACY--part 1
In her book THE CULTURAL COLD WAR, Frances Stoner Saunders recalled how the
Ford Foundation collaborated with the CIA in the past--on behalf of the
Ultra-Rich families of the U.S. Establishment's power elite--to perpetuate a
globalized corporate economic system which denies political, economic and
cultural freedom and equality to the majority of humanity:
"Incorporated in 1936, the Ford Foundation was the tax-exempt cream of the
vast Ford fortune...The foundation had a record of close involvement in
covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA
officials on specific projects...On 21 January 1953, Allen Dulles, insecure
about his future in the CIA under the newly elected Eisenhower, had met his
friend David Rockefeller for lunch. Rockefeller hinted heavily that if
Dulles decided to leave the Agency, he could reasonably expect to be invited
to become president of the Ford Foundation. Dulles need not have feared for
his future...Allen Dulles was to become Director of Central Intelligence.
"The new president of the Ford Foundation was announced shortly after. He
was John McCloy...By the time he came to the Ford Foundation, he had been
Assistant Secretary of War, president of the World Bank...In 1953 he also
became chairman of the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank, and chairman of
the Council on Froeign Relations. After John F. Kennedy's assassination, he
was a Warren Commission appointee...McCloy took a pragmatic view of the
CIA's inevitable interest in the Ford Foundation when he assumed its
presidency. Addressing the concerns of some of the foundation's executives,
who felt that its reputation for integrity and independence was being
undermined by involvement with the CIA, McCloy argued that if they failed to
cooperate, the CIA would simply penetrate the foundation quietly by
recruiting or inserting staff at lower levels. McCloy's answer to this
problem was to create an administrative unit within the Ford Foundation
specifically to deal with the CIA. Headed by McCloy and two foundation
officers, this three-man committee had to be consulted every time the Agency
wanted to use the foundation, either as a pass-through, or as cover. `They
would check in with this particular committee, and if it was felt that this
was a reasonable thing and would not be against the foundation's long-term
interests, then the project would be passed along to the internal staff and
other foundation officers (without them) knowing the origins of the
proposal,' explained McCloy's biographer, Kai Bird.
"With this arrangement in place, the Ford Foundation became officially
engaged as one of those organizations the CIA was able to mobilize for
political warfare...The foundation's archives reveal a raft of joint
projects. The East European Fund, a CIA front in which George Kennan played
a prominent role, got most of its money from the Ford Foundation...The
foundation gave $500,000 to Bill Casey's International Rescue Committee [of
which NATION editor Vanden Heuvel's father was also an official], and
substantial grants to another CIA front, the World Assembly of Youth. It
was also one of the single largest donors to the Council on Foreign
Relations, an independent think-tank which exerted enormous influence on
American foreign policy, and which operated (and continues to operate)
according to strict confidentiality rules which include a twenty-five-year
embargo on the release of its records...
"McGeorge Bundy, became president of the Ford Foundation in 1966 (coming
straight from his job as Special Assistant to the President in Charge of
National Security, which meant, among other things, monitoring the
CIA)...The Congress for Cultural Freedom...was one of Ford Foundation's
largest grantees, receiving $7 million by the early 1960s..."
THE CULTURAL COLD WAR book also recalled how the money from the J.M. Kaplan
family (some of which has been thrown towards Pacifica/DEMOCRACY NOW in
recent years) was used in the past by the CIA: "In 1956...J.M. Kaplan,
president of the Welch Grape Juice Company, and president and treasurer of
the Kaplan Foundation (assets: $14 million), wrote to Allen Dulles offering
his services...Dulles subsequently arranged for a CIA `representative' to
make an appointment with Kaplan. The Kaplan Foundation could soon be
counted as an asset, a reliable `pass-through' for secret funds earmarked
for CIA projects, amongst them the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and an
institute headed by veteran socialist and chairman of the American Committee
for Cultural Freedom, Norman Thomas.
"The use of philanthropic foundations was the most convenient way to pass
large sums of money to Agency projects without alerting the recipients to
their source. By the mid-1950s, the CIA's intrusion into the foundation
field was massive. Although figures are not available for this period, the
general counsel of a 1952 Congress committee appointed to investigate US
foundations concluded that `An unparalleled amount of power is concentrated
increasingly in the hands of an interlocking and self-perpetuating group.
Unlike the power of corporate management, it is unchecked by stockholders;
unlike the power of government, it is unchecked by the people; unlike the
power of the churches, it is unchecked by any firmly established canons of
value.' In 1976, a Select Committee appointed to investigate US
intelligence activities reported on the CIA's penetration of the foundation
field by the mid-1960s: during 1963-6, of the 700 grants over $10,000 given
by 164 foundations, at least 108 involved partial or complete CIA funding.
More importantly, CIA funding was involved in nearly half the grants made by
these 164 foundations in the field of international activities during the
same period.
"`Bona fide' foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie were
considered `the best and most plausible kind of funding cover.' A CIA study
of 1966 argued that this technique was `particularly effective for
democratically run membership organizations, which need to assure their own
unwitting members and collaborators, as well as their hostile critics, that
they have genuine, respectable, private sources of income.' Certainly, it
allowed the CIA to fund`a seemingly limitless range of covert action
programs affecting youth groups, labor unions, universities, publishing
houses, and other private institutions from the early 1950s."
Among the liberal-left Establishment anti-war folks sponsored by the Ford
Foundation during the 1960s was a former head of the CIA-subsidized National
Student Association [NSA] named Allard Lownestein (who was assassinated
under mysterious circumstances in 1980 by Dennis Sweeney). According to the
1985 book THE PIED PIPER: ALLARD K. LOWENSTEIN AND THE LIBERAL DREAM by
Richard Cummings: "Students followed Lowenstein in his quest for a just and
peaceful world. But they did not know that his deep sense of patriotism and
intense anti-Communism led him to work for the CIA in Africa and Spain and
to inform on suspected Communists in the civil rights movement...In
1962...according to sources with background in intelligence work, he was
formally recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. Although the
author's attempts to obtain Lowenstein's CIA file under the Freedom of
Information-Privacy Act from the CIA and from his lawyer Gary Bellow proved
unavailing, other evidence overwhelmingly supports these
sources...Lowenstein's work in the CIA involved southern Africa, and because
Franco supported Portugal and South Africa, it also involved Spain, where
Lowenstein worked with the anti-Communist left opposed to
Franco...Lowenstein came to believe that his greatest enemies were to his
left...
"According to sources, Lowenstein was separated from the CIA sometime in
1967 (the sources say Lowenstein `was in the agency from 1962 to
1967')...During 1975, Lowenstein became deeply involved in the politics of
Portugal because of his relationship with Portugese Socialist Mario Soares,
who was foreign minister at a period when the Portugese revolution was
pushing increasingly leftward. Involving Lowenstein was his friend Frank
Carlucci, who served as U.S. ambassador to Portugal from 1975 to 1978 and
then as Jimmy Carter's deputy director of the CIA...
"To further supplement his income, Lowenstein was to work for the Ford
Foundation, a consultancy having been arranged for him by a
friend...Lowenstein's job with the Ford Foundation, which, according to his
diary, included a $2,500 fee, all expenses, and freedom to decide when and
where he would work (an NSA grant had been approved as well), enabled him to
fly to various campuses, study the causes of the unrest, and prepare a
report. He particularly focused on Berkeley where President Martin Meyerson
attempted to use Lowenstein as a peacemaker...A new generation of student
leaders was now openly challenging authority in more extreme ways than
Lowenstein had...Their rebellion was growing beyond the confines of the
liberal National Student Association, which Lowenstein had continued to
monitor. It was taking dangerous and unpredictable forms...On April 1,
1965, Paul Ylvisaker, the director of the Ford Foundation project on campus
unrest, wrote to Lowenstein: `This will confirm the arrangements made with
Mr. John Ehle for you to serve as a consultant to the Foundation for a
maximum of five days between April 1 and 9 to explore the possibility of
involving youth and student groups in community action programs. We
understand you will make brief visits in institutions in North Carolina,
Massachusetts, California and New York.
"`The Foundation will provide a daily fee of $50 and reimbursement for
first-class round-trip air transportation to your destinations. Enclosed
you will find expense report forms and certificates of time worked, which we
would appreciate your filling out, signing and returning to us. Please send
your transportation stubs and hotel bills, and receipts for expenses of $25
or more.'"
Former Ford Foundation Consultant Lowenstein's friend, Carlucci, later
became the Secretary of Defense under Reagan and has been a top executive at
the Bush II White House and Ford Foundation Board of Trustees-linked Carlyle
Assets firm in recent years. In her 1982 book ROOTED IN SECRECY: THE
CLANDESTINE ELEMENT IN AUSTRALIAN POLITICS by Joan Coxsedge noted that "the
Ford Foundation" also "took over the funding of the Congress for Cultural
Freedom after its CIA cover was blown in 1966."
Eric Chester's book COVERT NETWORKS: PROGRESSIVES, THE INTERNATIONAL RESCUE
COMMITTEE AND THE CIA also contains some information about how the Ford
Foundation has historically worked with the CIA:
"The Ford Foundation...maintained a close and continuing relationship with
the intelligence community throughout the most confrontational years of the
Cold War.
"In particular, the Foundation established in 1951 a subsidiary affiliate,
the East European Fund, which disbursed its considerable resources to
projects oriented toward political exiles from the Soviet Union. Over the
next few years, the Foundation and its affiliated fund worked closely with
other organizations within the covert network, including the International
Rescue Committee...
"The New York office was headed by Bernard Gladieux...After shifting to the
Ford Foundation in 1950, Gladieux remained a committed proponent of
psychological warfare programs targeted at the Soviet bloc countries. He
continued to maintain contacts with high officials in the Agency; while an
officer of the Foundation, he also `served in a consultant and liaison
capacity with the Central Intelligence Agency involving certain highly
sensitive matters.' Soon after being appointed director of Central
Intelligence in February 1953, Allen Dulles reassured Gladieux that he had
been kept `fully-advised of recent developments' and that he wanted `to work
closely with' Gladieux in the future.
"Within the New York office, John Howard had primary responsibility for
screening overseas grant proposals. This meant that Howard was a key
liasion between the Foundation and the CIA...
"[On March 5, 1958] Don Price...an associate director of the Foundation,
wrote Matthew Baird of the CIA to set up a discussion on `potential ideas
for future action.' Joining Price would be John Howard, still a central
figure in the oversight of overseas programs. Baird responded by inviting
Price and Howard to a meeting at CIA headquarters with `40 or 50 Agency
representatives' from the Clandestine Services Division. The agenda would
feature a presentation by Price and Howard in which they would `discuss
informally those programs of the Foundation' that they felt would `be of
general interest to the Agency.' Afterward, the Ford Foundation officials
would meet with smaller groups of CIA staff to discuss specific projects.
"The CIA and the Ford Foundation maintained close relations throughout the
1950s and into the 1960s...
"Although the full extent of the Ford Foundation's cooperation with the CIA
over the last three decades cannot be determined as long as the relevant
files remain closed or unavailable, it is clear that the Foundation worked
closely with the intelligence community on several sensitive operations
during the 1950s..."
According to Chester's 1995 COVERT NETWORKS book, a Ford Foundation grant of
$150,000 was apparently used during the 1950s to subsidize the activity of a
right-wing anti-communist paramilitary group, the "Fighting Group" in East
Germany: "The Ford Foundation was interested in funding the activities of
the Fighting Group from the start...Having approached top Agency officials,
Howard and Gladieux, of the New York office, concluded that `CIA officials
were unanimous in their view that Foundation support of the Fighting Group
would be most helpful...Fighting Group commandos blew up a railroad bridge
near Berlin just before an express train coming from Warsaw was due to pass
over it...A bridge over a canal was damaged with explosives..."
The same book also noted how the IRC board member that NATION editor Vanden
Heuvel's father apparently worked for, William Donovan, apparently also
intervened in 1950s German domestic politics: "The [International Rescue]
Committee established a special Redefection Commission in February 1956,
with William Donovan, IRC board member...as chair...Donovan and the rest of
the commission immediately embarked on an inspection tour of West German and
France...Donovan was utilizing the trip as a cover for a covert mission to
provide funds for cooperative politicians...While visiting West Berlin,
Donovan arranged to have couriers give [former West German Chancellor Willy]
Brandt one hundred thousand Deutschmarks in cash at a clandestine rendevous.
The cash drop, worth twenty-five thousand dollars at the time, was employed
by Brandt to strengthen his position within the Social Democratic Party."
end of part 1
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ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman
Part 8:
FORD FOUNDATION, THE CIA & U.S. ESTABLISHMENT CONSPIRACY--part 2
For 13 years, a former national security affairs advisor in the Kennedy and
Johnson White House during the Vietnam War Era, McGeorge Bundy, was the Ford
Foundation's president. As James Ledbetter recalled in his book MADE
POSSIBLE BY... "The Ford effort took a new twist in 1966, when the
Foundation began plotting a system that would unite satellite communication
with educational broadcasting. McGeorge Bundy, the former national security
advisor who had personally ordered American bombing raids on North Vietnam
in early 1965, left the government and moved to the Ford Foundation to
oversee this plan...Bundy obtained his position without being knowledgeable
about, or even comfortable with, the medium of television..."
In a September 26, 1996 press release that was issued by the Ford Foundation
following its former long-time president's death, the Trustees of the Ford
Foundation stated:
"The Trustees of the Ford Foundation are deeply saddened by the death of
McGeorge Bundy on September 16 [1996]. Mr. Bundy served as President of the
Foundation from 1966 to 1979. He forged new lines of work in such
critically important areas as civil rights, overseas development, and
security and arms control. His intellect, candor, and high standards left
an indelible mark on the Foundation's culture. The work of the Foundation
today builds on Mac's legacy and we are in his debt."
Yet evidence exists that former Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy was
apparently one of the White House officials responsible for planning crimes
against humanity during the Vietnam War Era, in violation of the Nuremberg
Accords.
On May 11, 1961, for instance, former Ford Foundation President McGeorge
Bundy signed "National Security Action Memorandum 52" which approved a
program for covert action against North Vietnam that included forming
"network of resistance, covert bases and teams for sabotage and light
harassment" in North Vietnam. And on September 10, 1964, former Ford
Foundation President McGeorge Bundy signed "National Security Action
Memorandum No. 314," which approved the resumption of naval patrols and
covert maritime operations off the coast of North Vietnam.
According to THE PENTAGON PAPERS, each maritime operation against North
Vietnam after October 1964 had to be approved in advance by former Ford
Foundation President McGeorge Bundy. And among the maritime operations
approved in advance by the now-deceased former Ford Foundation president
were "ship-to-shore bombardment of North Vietnam radar site" and "underwater
demolition team assaults on bridges along coastal roads, bridges and rails"
in North Vietnam.
In a February 7, 1965 memorandum to Democratic Party Leader Lyndon Johnson,
former Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy next recommended that the
U.S. adopt "a policy of `sustained reprisal'" against North Vietnam; and on
March 2, 1965 the Johnson White House's "Rolling Thunder" bombing campaign
against North Vietnam was begun.
On April 6, 1965, former Ford Foundation President Bundy signed "National
Security Action Memorandum No. 328," in which he stated:
"We should continue roughly the present slowly ascending tempo of ROLLING
THUNDER Operation...We should continue to vary the type of target, stepping
up attack on lines of communication in the near future, and possibly moving
in a few weeks to attacks on the rail lines north and northeast of Hanoi.
"Leaflet operations should be expanded to obtain maximum practicable
psychological effect on the North Vietnamese population.
"Blockade or aerial mining of North Vietnamese ports needs further study and
should be considered for future operations...Air operations in Laos...should
be stepped up to the maximum remunerative rate..."
By the time McGeorge Bundy retired as Ford Foundation president in 1979,
millions of people in Indochina and over 57,000 U.S. military personnel had
lost their lives, as a result of the militaristic actions authorized by the
"National Security Action Memorandum" which the former Ford Foundation
president personally signed.
A few years before his death in 1996, the former Ford Foundation president
had been named as a "Scholar-in-Residence" by the same Carnegie Corporation
of New York foundation which was to give a $25,000 grant to Pacifica in 1996
to launch the DEMOCRACY NOW! show. As the Carnegie Corporation of New
York's "Scholar-in-Residence," former Ford Foundation President Bundy
co-authored a 1993 book with Stanford University Professor Sidney Drell and
former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William J. Crowe (who also sat
on the board of directors of a Big Oil company called Texaco in the early
1990s), entitled REDUCING NUCLEAR DANGER.
In the acknowledgement section of their book, Bundy and his co-authors noted
that "the book is the product of a decision in 1990 by the Carnegie
Corporation of New York to invite the three of us to work as co-chairmen of
a Carnegie Commission on Reducing the Nuclear Danger;" and "we must express
our warmest personal thanks to Dr. David A. Hamburg, the president of the
Carnegie Corporation" and "the staff of the Carnegie Corporation has helped
with unfailing kindness and understanding."
Former Ford Foundation President Bundy and his co-authors then expressed
their support for the immoral 1991 high-technology U.S. military attack on
the people of Iraq, on behalf of Big Oil's special interests, by writing:
"Saddam Hussein has provided a sharp reminder of a different nuclear
danger--that nuclear weapons may come into the hands of unpredictable and
adventurous rulers. We learned in Iraq that when international awareness,
will, and capability are all three sufficient, it is possible to take
effective action against such danger...The case of Saddam is unique both in
the breadth of the international judgment that a bomb under his control
would be unacceptably dangerous and in the strength of the American presence
and engagement created by his aggression against Kuwait. Multinational
action against the Iraqi bomb has been effective, at least in the short
run...
"It is now evident that if Saddam's effort had not been interrupted by the
war he provoked, he would probably have had nuclear weapons sometime in the
1990s--quite possibly in the first half of the decade. Knowing Saddam as it
now does, the world has been shocked by this narrow escape. It is not
surprising that an effective conscensus has developed, growing in strength
as the process of inquiry and dismantling has continued in Iraq, that the
international community should see to it that leaders such as Saddam do not
get the bomb."
Yet three years after the former Ford Foundation president who was one of
the U.S. Establishment leaders responsible for crimes against humanity in
Vietnam joined his co-authors in rationalizing a pro-war policy in relation
to Iraq, the Ford Foundation board of trustees asserted in 1996 that "the
work of the Foundation today builds on Mac's legacy and we are in his debt."
Perhaps a brief look at some of the corporate connections of those who sit
on the Ford Foundation board of trustees--and at how the Ford Foundation
operates--might indicate how "the Foundation today builds on Mac's legacy"
by, for instance, sponsoring alternative media groups which generally
attempt to marginalize anti-war/anti-corporate 9/11 conspiracy journalists
and researchers?.
-----------------------------------------------------
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman
Part 9:
FORD FOUNDATION, THE CIA AND U.S ESTABLISHMENT CONSPIRACY--part 3
The Ford Foundation's Vice-President for Media in recent years, Alison
Bernstein, was an associate dean at Princeton University between 1990
and 1992. But for most of the last twenty years she has been on the Ford
Foundation payroll. [A poster to the WBAI Listener's Bulletin Board a
few months ago remembered Ford Foundation Vice-President for Media
Bernstein as being a family relation of the now-deceased former
conductor of the New York Philharmonic orchestra, Leonard Bernstein; and
as someone who, as a college student, claimed to be anti-Establishment
in her politics. But the accuracy of the WBAI listener's memory of
Alison Bernstein could not be confirmed.]
As the Ford Foundation's Vice-President for Media, Bernstein implements
the media policy priorities that are determined by committees of the
Ford Foundation board of trustees and authorized by the Ford Foundation
president. In recent years the Ford Foundation board of trustees has
included two former CEOs and former board chairmen of the Xerox
Corporation, the CEO and board chairman of ALCOA, an executive
vice-president and general counsel of Coca Cola Company, the chairman
and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., the chairman of Reuters Holdings, PLC,
the senior partner of the Akin, Gump,Straus Hauser & Feld lobbying firm,
and the president of Vassar College. Other corporations with directors
who sat on the Ford Foundation board of trustees in the late 1990s or
after 2000 included Time Warner, Chase Manhattan Bank, Ryder Systems,
CBS, AT & T, Adolph Coors Company, Dayton-Hudson, the Bank of England,
J.P. Morgan, Marine Midland Bank, Southern California Edison, KRCX
Radio, the Central Gas & Electric Corp. DuPont, Citicorp and the New
York Stock Exchange. A vice-president and general counsel of Texaco Inc.
named Deval Laurdine Patrick has also sat on the Ford Foundation board
of trustees in recent years.
The Ford Foundation's Board of Trustees' Education, Media, Arts and
Culture Committee in the late 1990s, for instance, included the
president of Vassar College, the chairman of Reuters Holdings PLC, the
former chairman and CEO of Xerox and Clinton crony Vernon Jordan--also a
director of Revlon, American Express, J.C. Penney, Sara Lee, Xerox,
Bankers Trust, Dow Jones, Union Carbide and Ryder Systems. Clinton crony
Jordan also was the chair of the Ford Foundation Board of Trustee's
Audit and Management Committee in the late 1990s.
Currently, the wife of the Bush II White House's presidential historian
(Michael Beschloss] sits on the Ford Foundation board of trustees. Ford
Foundation Trustee Afsaneh Mashayetkhi Beschloss, a former World Bank
managing officer, also is the CEO/president of the Carlyle Asset
Management Group. President Bush II's father George Bush, former
Secretary of Defense and former Deputy CIA Director Frank Carlucci,
former Secretary of State James Baker and Billionaire Speculator George
Soros are also involved in the Carlyle Group that Ford Foundation
Trustee Mashayetkhi Beschloss manages. The Ford Foundation board-linked
Carlyle Group received $1.3 billion in Pentagon war contracts in 1999,
was the 11th-largest recipient of Pentagon war contracts in 2000 and
invests heavily in war stock.
A former member of the board of directors of Chase Manhattan Bank, Susan
Berresford has been the Ford Foundation president since 1996. Ford
Foundation President Berresford is presently a member of the North
American Committee of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission--sitting
next to other U.S. Establishment figures, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski
and Madeline Albright.
Ford Foundation President Berresford is also a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, to which the Ford Foundation gave a grant of $100,000
"for the development of a Council Task Force on Terrorism" in 2002.
Featured on the Council on Foreign Relations web site at www.cfr.org on
9/26/02 was an advertisement for "a New Council book," which stated
"Invasion Is The Only Realistic Option to Head off the Threat from Iraq,
Argues Kenneth Pollack in THE THREATENING STORM." In recent years, the
vice-chairman of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign
Relations, Carla Hill, has sat on the board of directors of Chevron (as
has National Security Affairs Adviser and former Carnegie Corporation of
NY Trustee Condoleezza Rice). Other members of the Council on Foreign
Relations include former CIA Director John Deutch, former CIA
Consultant/MacArthur Foundation Consultant and current Northwestern
University President Henry Bienen, Richard Holbrooke, Billionaire
Speculator George Soros and former MacArthur Foundation Director Laura
D'Andreas Tyson. A few years ago, the Ford Foundation also gave a
$701,130 grant to the Council on Foreign Relations for "core support for
the activities of the Program on Alternative Future for Southern Asia,
its Energy and United States Policy."
In a 2000 interview with PHILANTHROPY MAGAZINE, Trilateral Commission member
Susan Berresford gave the official version of how the Ford Foundation
operates:
"We have a senior management team that meets every Monday morning in my
office...I approve all grants over $100,000. Grants up to $100,000 can be
made by staff at various levels. We budget on a two-year basis, and we work
with our board...Every grantmaker writes what we call a program office memo.
That is ultimately approved by his or her immediate supervisor and then by
someone at a vice-presidential program level. Then, all grants that they
make under $100,000 pursuant to that memo, they and their immediate
supervisors approve. And anything over that needs my approval. We meet
every other week for an entire morning; and all the grants over $100,000
that have been recommended in the prior two-week period are on a list and we
talk about them.
"I get a write-up on every single grant. There may be 50 on the list, or
ten on the list. I read them all, think about them all, and we discuss some
of them...The meeting is really a group discussion. I lead it, and I have
to put my signature on the grant in the end, but all the officers of the
foundation are there, and any program officer or any staff member who wants
to attend can attend and participate.
"...We make grants of $1,000 and we make $50 millioin grants. We make
endowment grants and project grants and general support grants...
"It's a policy-making board instead of a grantmaking board...
"In our foundation we draw our board members from all over the world...It
makes more sense for the board to set foundation policy.
"They set the budget level and broad allocations...We set our budget at 5.8
percent of a three-year rolling average of our portfolio value. Then,
depending on our judgment about the stock market and other things, we may
move around a little bit from that...
"We convene groups of our grantees with grouups of our staff who make grants
to them...
"...Linda Strumpf is the vice president for investment at the foundation.
We have an investment committee of the board. They are in touch regularly
and Linda and I talk frequently. We all think hard about asset allocation
and the broad investment choices we make...In recent years, we have put a
significant amount of money into venture capital and a lot of that in
technology, and have done very, very well with those investments.
"...We do not, other than in a very few cases, screen investments."
Besides managing the Ford Foundation's multi-billion dollar unscreened
investment portfolio and the rest of the Ford Foundation's $10.7 billion in
assets, Ford Foundation Vice-President for Investments Linda Strumpf also
has been a member of the investment committee of the Ms. Foundation for
Women--which has received millions of dollars in grants from the Ford
Foundation in recent years. In addition, Ford Foundation Vice-President for
Investments Strumpf is a member of the investment committee of Penn State
University--which recieved over $58 million in war research contracts from
the Pentagon in 1999. That same year, the "non-profit," tax-exempt Ford
Foundation paid Linda Strumpt, its vice-president for investments, an annual
salary of $852,911.
In the December 1988 issue of MULTINATIONAL MONITOR, Jim Donahue reported,
in an article entitled "The Foundations of Apartheid and The Nuclear
Industry," that in 1988, during the apartheid era, the Ford Foundation had
$1.32 billion invested in companies doing business in South Africa,
accounting for 43 percent of tis total investment value at that time. The
MULTINATIONAL MONITOR also noted that in 1988, "eighteen million dolars" of
the MacArthur Foundation's investments were in apartheid South Africa-tied
companies and "the Rockefeller Foundation held $233 million in corporations
doing business in or with South Africa" during the apartheid era.
MULTINATIONAL MONITOR also observed in 1988 that "Nuclear Weapons-Linked
Investment Corporations that receive government contracts to build
components for nuclear weapons are popular among leading foundations" and
"the Ford Foundation...holdings account for 16 percent of Ford's total
investment value, or $496 million, with the largest holding being in
nuclear-contract-linked IBM and General Electric."
Although the Ford Foundation posts a list of its recent grants on its web
site, it's not that easy to locate on the Internet a list of all the current
corporate stocks that are currently contained in the Ford Foundation's
unscreened stock portfolio. Establishment foundations have a long tradition
of not being eager to make it easy for the U.S. public to know which
corporate stocks they own. As Ferdinand Lundberg observed in his AMERICA's
60 FAMILIES book long ago: "E.C. Lindeman, the outstanding authority on the
internal functioning of foundations, states in his monumental WEALTH AND
CULTURE, published in 1936, that his `first surprise was to discover that
those who managed foundations and trusts did not wish to have these
instruments investigated. Had it occurred to me then,' he continued, `that
it would require eight years of persistent inquiry at a wholly
disproportionate cost to disclose even the basic quantitative facts desired,
I am sure that the study would have been promptly abandoned."
What can be easily discovered on the Internet is that over $4 billion of the
Ford Foundation's $10.7 billion in assets in 2001 was invested in U.S.
corporate stock and over $1.3 billion in foreign corporate stock. From its
billions of dollars in corporate stockholdings in 2001, the "non-profit"
Ford Foundation received $343 million in dividends and interest income and
earned an additional capital gains income of $992 million. Yet on its 2001
annual income, the "non-profit" Ford Foundation only paid a 1% excise tax.
But despite the great power that control over such excess wealth gives to
Establishment foundations like the Ford Foundation to influence world
history and manage social change on behalf of Ultra-Rich power elite
interests, the foundation-subsidized alternative media groups rarely report
critically on the world of Big Foundations--or on the U.S. Estalbishment
conspiracies that may may be hatched in either the foundation, corporate or
national security state apparatus boardrooms. Yet without an understanding
of the political economic and cultural role that Big Foundations and
Ultra-Rich power elite conspiracy plays in global politics, one can't really
understand how the System operates or how world history is determined. And
one's political and intellectual consciousness and analysis is going to
remain incomplete and partial, in a significant way.
In his article, entitled "Getting Behind the Media: What are the subtle
tradeoffs of foundation support for journalists?", Rick Edmunds
characterized the ethical issues that develops when journalists--even
alternative media journalists--begin to rely on subsidies from the Big
Foundation to fund their alternative media work:
"In research published...by the Poynter Institute on the rising number,
scope, and dollar amounts of foundation grants for journalism, I found that
media recipients are becoming ever more comfortable--and perhaps less
reflective--about taking the money...When they show up with much-needed
funding for an investigative series or pay the freight for a reporter
working on an underreported beat, foundations don't receive the same
due-diligence scrutiny for hidden subtext that journalists apply to a
corporaet press release or a politician's statement. The effect that
foundation money may have on the news business is subtle but real, and
increasingly troubling on the ethical front...In public television and radio
and at certain serious magazines, foundation funding has become a way of
life, and grants can run to seven figures...The percentage of public
broadcasting revenue coming from foundations has doubled in the past two
decades. And in the world of nonprofit media, a few million a year goes a
long way...
"...The lack of overt editorial should not blind us to the more subtle, one
might say cultural, ties that bind these news organizations to their
funders. There are, for example, any number of opportunities for grant
makers to shape the editorial product as it is developed...If the
foundations' and recipients' goals have been properly `aligned' not much
more may be needed to see that the intent is carried out...
"Lost in the benevolent fog that surrounds most foundations is the notion
that they may have more of an agenda, not less, than a sponsoring
corporation...Cultural affinity can sometimes make it difficult for editors
and journalists to draw the distinction between accepting a grant and
accepting a funder's point of view...
"National Public Radio is the heavyweight champion in harvesting these
grants...Its income is pushing $100 million, about 40 percent of that from
corporations and foundations. NPR consistently declines to say what share
of the grants that it receives are restricted to specific content
areas...Also, for several years, NPR's reporting unit on money and politics
has been supported by a grant from the...Schumann Foundation..."
Speaking of the Schumann Foundation, a KPFA listener and 9/11 conspiracy
journalist recently discovered that its President, Public Affairs TV Inc.
Executive Director Bill Moyers, also now sits on the board of directors of
Billionaire Speculator George Soros' Open Society Institute. But since the
former publisher of the Schumann Foundation-subsidized COLUMBIA JOURNALISM
REVIEW, Joan Konner, is both a board member of Open Society Institute board
member Moyers' Schumann Foundation and the president of Open Society
Institute board member Moyers' Public Affairs TV Inc., don't expect the
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW to question too much the ethical appropriateness
of this Schumann Foundation/Open Society Institute board interlocking
directorate. And certainly don't expect too much questioning of such
institutional relationships by the Schumann Foundation-subsidized FAIR group
or by the Open Society Institute-subsidized Pacifica/DEMOCRACY NOW or
NATION/RADIO NATION.
And if, by some chance, the Ford Foundation's publicity shield ever gets
penetrated in a "parallel left" alternative media world which it has
been heavily subisidizing in recent years, it still can move quickly to
neutralize any negative publicity‹by calling upon a "counter-cultural"
public relations firm that used to represent the Pacifica Foundation,
called Fenton Communictions. In addition to having the Ford Foundation
as one of its clients during the 1990s, the Ford Foundation web site now
indicates that Fenton Communications was apparently given a $300,000
grant "for communications activities designed to promote informed
dialogue in response to the September 11 activity, with an emphasis on
protecting civil liberties and preventing discrimination"--by a Ford
Foundation on whose board sits the wife of the Bush White House
presidential historian.
( end of article)
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