World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org

---

WSWS : Polemics

Oil and “conspiracy theories”: a reply to a liberal apologist for the US war in Afghanistan

Part two

By Patrick Martin
21 September 2002

Back to screen version | Send this link by email | Email the author

Below is the concluding part of a two-part article replying to a recent commentary attacking so-called “conspiracy theories” about the US response to the September 11 terror attacks, including an article posted last November on the World Socialist Web Site. The first part appeared Friday, September 20.

Ken Silverstein begins his article with what he presents as a summation of the conspiracy theories about September 11 and the war in Afghanistan now circulating on the Internet:

“The war in Afghanistan is a sham. The Bush administration had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks but took no action, using the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as an excuse to topple the Taliban regime and legitimize the takeover of Afghanistan. Well-placed government insiders, knowing of the impending attacks, made fortunes by betting on a huge fall in airline stocks. The war is not about terrorism but about America’s desire to control energy in Central Asia and promote corporate plans to plunder the region’s reserves. The chief US concern all along has been to help Unocal Corporation build a pipeline across Afghanistan, which would carry natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan.”

The first sentence is a puzzle, since no one denies that there is a real war going on and that real Afghan men, women and children are dying. Presumably he means that opponents of the war in Afghanistan regard the Bush administration’s rationale for waging war in Afghanistan as a sham. Whether you agree or disagree with that assessment, it is hard to see how this could be characterized as a “conspiracy theory.”

Imperialist governments lie, especially about war. The Johnson administration utilized an alleged North Vietnamese attack on American PT boats to gain passage of a congressional resolution authorizing intervention in Vietnam. It later emerged that the Tonkin Gulf incident was manufactured to provide a pretext for war—in other words, it was a sham.

Silverstein recites these charges as though they were self-evident absurdities, only discussing the oil issue at any length, as we have seen. He avoids any detailed examination of what must be the main element of any “conspiracy theory,” the claim that the Bush administration had extensive foreknowledge of the September 11 terrorist attacks, but allowed them to take place anyway.

The popularity of conspiracy theories about September 11, circulated through such web sites as www.rense.com, www.tenc.com, www.fromthewilderness.com and others, reflects the instinctive and healthy distrust among millions of working people of the US government and the American media. This distrust, however, falls well short of political consciousness, which requires the development of a scientific understanding of the social and class basis of the actions of the US government. This neither the muckraking sites nor repentant ex-radicals like Silverstein are capable of providing.

It is not necessary to believe that the American government planned every detail of the terrorist attacks or anticipated the scale of the destruction and loss of life to conclude that the most important unexplored aspect of September 11 is the behind-the-scenes role of the American intelligence agencies. As the WSWS article of November 20, 2001 observed: “[T]he least likely explanation of September 11 is the official one: that dozens of Islamic fundamentalists, many with known ties to Osama bin Laden, were able to carry out a wide-ranging conspiracy on three continents, targeting the most prominent symbols of American power, without any US intelligence agency having the slightest idea of what they were doing.”

This assessment has since been proven true, in the flood of revelations, beginning last May, about advance warnings provided to US intelligence agencies, not only from other countries, but from many of their own personnel who believed, however wrongly, that Washington was actually interested in preventing a major terrorist attack on the United States. Instead, as has since become clear, top FBI and CIA officials blocked any serious effort against Al Qaeda until after September 11.

Both bureaucratic inertia and incompetence, and the longstanding personal and business ties between the Bush and bin Laden families may have been involved. But the lack of a response to clear warnings of impending terrorist attacks using hijacked airplanes goes beyond what can be explained by such considerations. There were elements within the state that welcomed a major atrocity—perhaps without imagining its full extent—in order to provide the necessary pretext for a long-planned US military intervention in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Would the US government kill its own citizens?

Prior to Silverstein, the best example of what we might call conspiracy denial was an article by David Corn, the Washington correspondent of Nation magazine. Corn employed the same method as Silverstein: selecting the most bizarre and unconvincing examples of conspiracy theories to block any questioning of the official account of the September 11 attacks.

Corn expressed outrage over the widespread circulation of conspiracy theories about September 11 on the Internet. He declared openly that, in his opinion, the US government was not morally capable of organizing and carrying out the mass murder of thousands of its own citizens.

He wrote: “I won’t argue that the US government does not engage in brutal, murderous skullduggery from time to time. But the notion that the US government either detected the attacks but allowed them to occur, or, worse, conspired to kill thousands of Americans to launch a war-for-oil in Afghanistan is absurd.... Simply put, the spies and special agents are not good enough, evil enough, or gutsy enough to mount this operation” (Nation, March 4, 2002).

Corn concedes that the US government engages in murder “from time to time”—a remark that he does not appear to have thought through, since it describes the conduct of a serial killer. But it is not “evil enough” to kill 3,000 Americans, he claims. This is disingenuous, to put it mildly, given the bloody record of American imperialism in the twentieth century, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the wars in Korea and Vietnam, to atrocities in Guatemala, Indonesia and dozens of other countries.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the American ruling class and its police and spy agencies develop conscience qualms when their victims are American citizens rather than foreign nationals. Tens of thousands of Americans were sent to their deaths in Korea and Vietnam, mainly youth from the working class, sacrificed to the strategic interests of US imperialism. American corporations routinely kill thousands of workers each year through industrial accidents, chemical poisoning and other workplace and environmental hazards. American police shoot and kill several thousand people every year. And the American government leads the world in its willingness to execute its own citizens.

Are Donald Rumsfeld or Richard Cheney capable of sanctioning the mass killing of Americans on the scale of September 11? Without question and without the slightest hesitation, if they thought it served the interests of the American state. As for George W. Bush—assuming he was even permitted input into the decision—his belief in the sanctity of American lives is well documented from his tenure as Texas governor, where he approved 150 executions in six years.

In times of social crisis, the US government unhesitatingly kills its own citizens to defend the interests of the wealthy and powerful and uphold the authority of the state: from the Ludlow massacre of 1912, to the assassination of Black Panther members in the 1960s, to the military occupation of entire urban neighborhoods in the riots of that decade, to the bombing of the MOVE home which destroyed an entire Philadelphia block in 1985, to the Waco massacre of 1993.

Afghanistan: A war prepared in advance

While Silverstein characterizes the November 20, 2001 article in the WSWS as typical of the “conspiracy theory” approach to the Afghan war, he never addresses the substance of that article: that the US government systematically prepared the military intervention in Afghanistan over several years, and did not devise it hastily as a response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, which only provided the pretext.

The WSWS article was headlined “US planned war in Afghanistan long before September 11,” and it sought to document these plans through an examination of fragmentary reports which had appeared up until that time in the US and international press. There were citations from the Washington Post, the British-based Jane’s International Security and the Guardian, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the magazine IndiaReacts, and the then newly published French book, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie.

Such a detailed sifting of the evidence is hardly necessary today. Six months after the publication of the WSWS article—and two months before Silverstein’s piece appeared—the White House itself confirmed the principal thesis of our analysis. In the midst of the public uproar over the reports that Bush was briefed on the danger of Al Qaeda hijackings a month before September 11, administration officials revealed that a National Security Decision Directive calling for American military intervention in Afghanistan, including massive aid to the Northern Alliance, was approved by the National Security Council September 3, 2001 and was on Bush’s desk for his signature when the first hijacked jet struck the World Trade Center.

After that admission, there can no longer be any debate about the proposition that the US planned war in Afghanistan long before September 11. The only question is why a radical journalist like Silverstein should so strenuously insist that to believe this is “paranoid,” “delusional,” etc.

An entire cottage industry of such pseudo-left debunking has grown up over the past year. Its purpose is to cover up the material causes of the war in Afghanistan—and the larger drive for US global dominance—and to deny the legitimacy of any investigation into the role of conscious, behind-the-scenes preparation (i.e., “conspiracy”) in the aggressive actions of American imperialism.

It is significant that Silverstein does not mention that the article he denounces was written for the World Socialist Web Site. Instead, he portrays it as appearing on www.rense.com, a web site that combines exposures of the lies and distortions of official accounts of September 11 and the war on Afghanistan with reports of UFOs and other alleged paranormal phenomena.

The WSWS is not politically responsible for the views espoused by Jeff Rense, or any other site that re-posts material written by supporters of the Socialist Equality Party (US) and its international co-thinkers. Rense.com clearly attributed the article to the World Socialist Web Site, and gave its readers a link to editor@wsws.org if they wished to reply to the author or comment on the article.

Silverstein is not so forthcoming. He is a well-informed radical journalist who knows the WSWS is the organ of the International Committee of the Fourth International. But for his own purposes—i.e., to smear and discredit the analysis made by the WSWS—he conceals the source and attributes the article to a site where it appears alongside accounts of flying saucers and other fantasies.

The material roots of imperialist war

There is another, more important reason to avoid mentioning the source of the article. Doing so would compel Silverstein to address the issue of the Marxist analysis of imperialism, first elaborated by Lenin in his classic work Imperialism, and carried forward by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International that he founded.

The Marxist method focuses on the crucial class questions in evaluating any war: in whose social interests is the war being waged? Who stands to profit from it? In what historical context has the war emerged? Is one side in the war historically an imperialist or oppressor nation, and the other historically an oppressed or former colonial country?

Silverstein is one of many former radicals and supporters of the “left” who have long since abandoned any consistent or principled opposition to American imperialism. Denying the deeper causes of the war in Afghanistan allows them to evade the issue of a more fundamental assessment and response to imperialist war, one that challenges the capitalist system itself. Hence his adamant hostility to any attempt to probe beneath the surface of events.

Silverstein and his co-thinkers leave the capitalist system itself off the hook, concealing the fact that US wars are pursued, not in the interest of the American people as a whole, but in the interest of a narrow elite—the ruling class that monopolizes the means of production and the wealth of society.

This superficial approach gives the radical commentator the luxury of supporting American wars which they deem to be carried out for worthy motives: for the promotion of “human rights” (Yugoslavia); to “punish terrorism” (Afghanistan); or, soon, in “self-defense” (Iraq). But no serious historian would seek to analyze the wars of the twentieth century on such a basis. It would be like trying to portray the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand as the fundamental cause of World War I, when it was merely the trigger for the conflagration. Or worse, explaining World War II on the basis of the rantings of Hitler and Goebbels about the alleged crimes of Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.

By rejecting any analysis of the underlying material interests behind the US war drive, Silverstein, Corn & Co. are left with no other explanation than that offered by the Bush administration and the media: that the US government is invading country after country in reaction (or, at the worst, overreaction) to the terrorist attacks.

There is another pernicious political consequence: by portraying war as merely a policy choice of a particular government, and not a material necessity for a reactionary social system, radicals like Silverstein leave themselves free to support a supposedly anti-war faction of the ruling class, should such an element emerge in or outside the Democratic Party.

Are there conspiracies in history?

It is an elementary proposition of Marxism that history, while it is made by men and women, is not made by them under conditions of their own choosing, but under definite material conditions bequeathed by antecedent development. This materialist principle should not, however, be understood mechanically. Marxism has nothing in common with a fatalistic worship of objective forces that proceed unmediated by human consciousness and will.

The bourgeoisie is a conscious class, far more conscious, except in times of mass revolutionary upheaval, than the working class, because it is the ruling class, and is possessed of enormous resources for the development of a class political strategy. Trotsky examined this question in a brilliant speech after the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920:

“The bourgeoisie, even though it finds itself in a complete contradiction with the demands of historical progress, nevertheless still remains the most powerful class. More than that, it may be said that politically the bourgeoisie attains its greatest powers, its greatest concentration of forces and resources, of political and military means of deception, of coercion, and provocation, i.e., the flowering of its class strategy, at the moment when it is most immediately threatened by social ruin...

“Europe and the whole world are passing through a period which is, on the one side, an epoch of disintegration of the productive forces of bourgeois society, and, on the other side, an epoch of the highest flowering of the counterrevolutionary strategy of the bourgeoisie. We must understand this clearly and precisely. Counterrevolutionary strategy, i.e., the art of waging a combined struggle against the proletariat by every means from saccharine, professorial-clerical preachments to machine-gunning of strikers, has never attained such heights as it does today” (First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 2, New Park, pp. 5-6.).

Conspiracies cannot change fundamental world-historical processes: no conscious effort of the ruling class, for instance, could transform capitalism into a progressive system once it had reached the point of breakdown, as it did with the onset of World War I. But to say that history cannot be explained by conspiracy does not mean that there are no conspiracies in history.

On the contrary, conspiratorial methods have played an important role in the political struggle of the ruling class against the development of the world socialist revolution. The history of the twentieth century is rife with military coups, assassinations, anti-democratic provocations and CIA-backed counterrevolutions, many of them carefully organized ahead of time by conspirators whose names are well-known: Kissinger, Dulles, Helms, Casey, to cite only a few.

One example of a ruling class conspiracy is perhaps the closest historical analogy to September 11. On February 27, 1933 the Nazis organized the burning of the German parliament building. Hitler blamed the Reichstag Fire on the Communist Party. A former party member was arrested and executed, the party was outlawed and its leadership put on trial. Years later, after the fall of the Nazis, evidence emerged that the arson fire had been supervised by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s deputy. The whole affair was a stage-managed provocation that provided the pretext for banning other political parties and imposing Hitler’s totalitarian dictatorship.

Conspiratorial methods have played an ever-greater role in the affairs of the American ruling elite over the past half century: from the Kennedy assassination, whose murky origins in the intersection of the Mafia, the CIA, southern white supremacists and phony, government-sponsored “left” groups have never been explained; to Watergate, the Iran-Contra affair and the ultra-right campaign to destabilize the Clinton administration. Hillary Clinton’s famous remark about a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” was perfectly accurate as a characterization of the methods being employed against her husband.

Such methods are the hallmark of a period in which the bourgeoisie is no longer capable of making any genuine appeal to the masses, but must seek to manipulate events behind the scenes in an increasingly anti-democratic fashion. The result of this protracted decomposition of bourgeois democracy is the Bush administration. This government was installed in office by the anti-democratic intervention of the Supreme Court to suppress vote-counting in Florida. Its leading personnel were drawn from the most rapacious and criminal elements of the ruling elite, the same milieu that produced Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and the like. It gravitates naturally to methods of provocation and gangsterism towards its enemies, both at home and abroad.

Those like Silverstein who cover up or sugarcoat this bitter truth only reveal that, for all their radical rhetoric, they have hopeless illusions in the permanence of American democracy. They truly believe that “it can’t happen here,” even when the process of transformation is already well under way.

---

Copyright 1998-2008
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

CIA on Campus
General articles

CounterPunch, 2003-04-07: "The CIA is Back on Campus"

Los Angeles Times op-ed, January 2001: "Academics and Spies: The Silence that Roars"

An article from Lingua Franca on the state of the CIA-on-campus issue in year 2000

Another general overview of CIA on campus (1989)

Excerpts from the Church Committee on the CIA in academia (1976)

CIA skips Church -- Harvard and all the rest can go to hell (1979)

Michigan State University

The Ramparts article that started the controversy (1966)

National Student Association

Another Ramparts scoop: NSA is funded by the CIA (1967)

CIA destabilizes Ramparts, plus more on the NSA scandal (1991)

Tracking Student Activists

Gloria Steinem spies on students for the CIA (1961)

Operation CHAOS: Spying on the student movement (1975)

International Studies and Area Studies

Spooky funding started this entire field (Ramparts, 1969)

MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, Syracuse, U.Kentucky help Ford/CIA overthrow Sukarno (1970)

Scholars target Africa for the CIA (1976)

Social Science

From Project Camelot to the coup in Chile: An unbroken thread

Scholars perfect psychological warfare techniques (1945-1955)

CIA and the American Anthropological Association (1951)

MKULTRA and such: CIA's behavior caper (1977)

History

A short list of history scholars who worked for the OSS

Documents

CIA document on how to co-opt academia (1968)

"The Agency has a wide range of contacts with academics..." (1991)

Officer-in-Residence Program (2001)

Columbia University

Research by the student strikers (1968)

Harvard University

Harvard in service to the national security state (1991)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

How to start a war (1954)

Princeton University

Dulles papers reveal CIA consulting network (1980)

Rochester Institute of Technology

Is RIT a CIA subsidiary? (1991)

Rutgers University

By the way, class, that term paper you did was for the CIA (1984)

Tufts University

Students counter spies (1985)

University of California

UCLA asks CIA for affirmative action funds (1992)

University of Cincinnati

Brown-nosing the spooks (1990)

University of Massachusetts

Arrested protesters put CIA on trial - and win! (1987)

University of Southern California

A leaflet on the career of USC trustee John McCone (1977)

University of Texas at San Antonio

CIA cold warrior woos UTSA students (1994)

Yale University

Doug Henwood reviews Robin Winks' Cloak and Gown

Full-text search of this site plus the NameBase site:

Public Information Research, Inc.

The Gatekeepers The Progressive / Left establishment and the marginalization of conspiracy research NOTE: Bob Feldman's research is also hosted on another site, LeftGatekeepers.com. There are also several new articles by Feldman at http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles.htm. I don't endorse all of the material at leftgatekeepers, but there is often good information to be found there. Investigative report: journalist Bob Feldman follows the money trail to "Left" media organizations that have sought out funding from the big establishment foundations. Are the interests of the people being served by "dissidents" who are being subsidized by the agencies of the ruling class whom they should be exposing? What does this say about the motivations behind the Left establishment's ideological warfare against conspiracy researchers, and their adoption of an increasingly watered-down analytical view which fails to look closely at the inner power structures and conspiracies of the ruling elite? ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION? by bob feldman sections: Recent Additions The Left establishment's attack on 9/11 skeptics Background articles on conspiracy analysis and conspiracy phobia Misc. articles on media manipulation, foundations, etc. Articles & commentaries from questionsquestions.net A case study: Noam Chomsky and JFK Recommended articles on conspiracy phobia Written in reponse to the establishment Left's attacks against 9/11 conspiracy researchers following last Spring's White House prior knowledge scandal, this is a a stunning and detailed rebuttal of the government's "universal incompetence" cover story and the ideological pundits who support it, focusing on Zmag's Michael Albert, from the author of the acclaimed War on Freedom: 9/11 "Conspiracies" and the Defactualisation of Analysis: How Ideologues on the Left and Right Theorise Vacuously to Support Baseless Supposition (Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Institute for Policy Research and Development. 24 June 2002) Progressive Irrelevance? (Anis Shivani, Counterpunch. 29 Aug 2002) Conspiracy theories and real reporters (Carla Binion, Online Journal) Under close examination, the "structuralism vs. conspiracy theory" dialectic used by the Left media gatekeepers to give an air of intellectual legitimacy to their stubborn thought-policing quickly reveals itself to be laden with logical contradictions and blind spots. An Incorrect Political Memoir (Daniel Brandt, 1992) Written in the immediate aftermath of the furor over Oliver Stone's JFK, this fascinating essay examines the ideological crusades of "Leftists" such as Chip Berlet against conspiracy research, and connects this agenda with the ascendance of politically correct identity politics and multiculturalism which neutered the Left as a viable opponent of the ruling elite, which surely must delight the powers that be. The conclusions of this essay have been confirmed many times over during the past decade (especially by Bob Feldman's research which shows a pattern of CIA-linked establishment foundations favoring and encouraging the monopoly of identity politics on the Left). America's Extremist Center (Sam Smith, Progressive Review. 1995) This 1995 article makes a strong case that anticonspiratorial dogmatism has little to do with enlightened, progressive thinking, and instead bears its lineage from centrist liberal elitism and McCarthyism. Also, there is interesting historical background on the scapegoating of the grassroots right in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (in which Left anti-conspiracist John Foster "Chip" Berlet played a leading role). Although the issues and events being dealt with currently are different, this is still a timely and relevant analysis of media hype and the myths of extremist "paranoia." "That's an internet theory and it's hopelessly implausible. Hopelessly implausible. So hopelessly implausible I don't see any point in talking about it." —Noam Chomsky, at a FAIR event at New York's Town Hall, 22 January 2002, in response to a question from the audience about US government foreknowledge of 9/11. At that time, 9/11 investigators had already presented substantial documented evidence for: prior warnings, Air Force stand-down, anomalous insider trading connected to CIA, cover-up of the domestic anthrax attacks, inconsistencies in identities & timelines of "hijackers", US connections to al Qaeda in Balkans, a Pak ISI-al Qaeda funding connection, etc etc etc. "Apparently, 'conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth." — Gore Vidal, from "The Enemy Within", 27 Oct 2002 back to main...

gatekeepers

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).

to part 2




ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

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"

to part 3




ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

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"

to part 3




ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

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.

to part 4




ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

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.

to part 5...




ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

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 opinion 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; and

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.

to part 6...



ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

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.

to part 7...



ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

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."

to part 8...



ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

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?.


to part 9...



ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

Part 9:

FORD FOUNDATION, THE CIA & 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 FORD FOUNDATION, THE CIA & U.S. ESTABLISHMENT CONSPIRACY)

to part 10...



ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?

by bob feldman

Part 10:

POLITICAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATES' EDELMAN-BUNDY CONNECTION

In a 1998 book that was subsidized by the MacArthur Foundation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation, entitled THE COLOR OF TRUTH: MC GEORGE BUNDY AND WILLIAM BUNDY: BROTHERS IN ARMS, a contributing editor of Katrina vanden Heuvel's NATION magazine, Kai Bird, recalled that in June 1968, then-Ford Foundation President McGeorge "Bundy arranged fellowships totaling $131,000 for eight members of" the mysteriously-slain Robert F. "Kennedy's campaign staff." Bird also noted that recipients "included Frank Mankiewicz ($15,000 for a study of the Peace Corps in Latin America), Adam Walinsky ($22,200 for a study of community action programs) and Peter Edelman ($19,090 for a study of community development programs around the world)."

In recent years Peter Edelman has been sitting on the board of a foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, which subsidizes the alternative media work of Chip Berlet's Political Research Associates [PRA] group. In 2002, for instance, Peter Edelman's Public Welfare Foundation gave a $50,000 grant to Political Research Associates to provide "general support for research center that collects and disseminates information on extremist groups and provides information and training to local, state, and national organizations working to counter extremist activity." PRA's form 990 also indicates at least $90,000 in additional grant money was given to Political Research Associates by Peter Edelman's Public Welfare Foundation between 1993 and 1996; and in 1999, another grant of $50,000 was given to the Political Research Associates group by the Public Welfare Foundation.

Prior to working as a staffperson for RFK and then receiving his Ford Foundation fellowship from former National Security Affairs advisor Bundy, Public Welfare Foundation board member Edelman worked as a law clerk to a Supreme Court Justice named Arthur Goldberg. According to the 1982 book Rooted In Secrecy: The Clandestine Element in Australian Politics by Joan Coxsedge: "Arthur Goldberg, the General Counsel of the CIO engineered the expulsion of the Left from this organization...After the left-wing purge of the CIO, Goldberg worked to achieve union with the conservative American Federation of Labor [AFL] headed by rabid anti-communist and long-time CIA stooge, George Meany, and what was left of the CIO." Public Welfare Foundation board member Edelman is also both the political godfather/rabbi of U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham-Clinton and a former Clinton Administration official. According to the Center for Responsive Politics' web site, Public Welfare Foundation board member Peter Edelman also gave two campaign contributions, totalling $1,500, to Hillary Rodham-Clinton's campaign on September 26, 2000 and another $1,000 campaign contribution to SenatorRodham-Clinton's campaign on November 9, 2000. Marian Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund NGO also gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to Hillary Rodham-Clinton on November 9, 2000.

In the late 1990s, the Massachusetts-based Political Research Associates [PRA] was also given a $120,000 grant by the San Francisco Foundation. The board of trustees and/or the investment committee of the San Francisco Foundation has included the following members of the Bay Area Establishment in recent years: 1. Levi Strauss Foundation Board Member Peter Haas Jr.; 2. Advent Software Inc. Chair and U. of California-Berkeley Foundation board member Stephanie Marco; 3. Equidex Inc. Chair and former U.S. Ambassador to Luxembourg James Hormel; 4. Oakland Private Industry Council CEO Gay Plair Cobb; 5. Brookings Institute Trustee Emeritus and U. of California-Berkeley Foundation board member F. Warren Hellman; 6. Stanford University Trustee Leslie Hume; 7. Pacific Gas & Electric [PG&E] Chief Finance Officer Kent Hardy; 8. Seneca Capital Management Founder Gail Seneca; and 9. Foundation for Chinese Democracy Chair/President Rolland C. Lowe. In addition, the San Francisco Foundation presently controls over $695 million in assets and takes in about $15 million a year in investment income from its corporate stock portfolio.

Contributions exceeding $5,000 were also made to Political Research Associates by the following other individuals or foundations between 1993 and 1996: William & Robie Harris ($32,000); Jean Hardisty ($125,588), Thomas P. Jalkut ($85,000), Hannah Kranzberg ($5,000), Sister Fund ($20,000), CS Fund ($30,000); Funding Exchange ($12,000); Haymarket Peoples Fund ($17,000); Ms. Foundation for Women ($15,000); Nathan Cummings Foundation ($80,000); the Stresand Foundation ($7,500); Threshold Foundation ($27,825); Tides Foundation ($69,260); Unitarian Universalist Veatch ($50,000; Sylvia Goodman ($11,000); Michael Kieschnick ($29,279); Albert A. List Foundation ($75,000); US Trust ($5,032); The New Land Foundation ($5,000); and PRRAC ($10,000). In 1999, additional contributions exceeding $5,000 were made to Political Research Associates by the following individuals and foundations: Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program ($25,000); The Prentice Foundation ($5,000); Stephen & Diana Goldberg Foundation ($10,000); Tides Foundation ($57,550); Albert A. List Foundation ($25,000); Carol Bernstein ($5,000); Irving Harris Foundation ($25,000); Nathan Cummings Foundation ($55,000); Thomas Jalkut ($15,000); Nancy Meier ($15,025);; Warsh-Mott Legacy ($20,000); Chambers Family Fund ($25,000); and the Ms. Foundation For Women ($15,000).

At least $11,000 in politically partisan campaign contributions have also been made by a Jean Hardisty of Political Research Associates since 1992, according to the Center for Responsive Politics web site. On November 15, 1999, for instance Ms. Hardisty gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. And on September 12, 2000, Ms. Hardisty gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to KidPAC.

In the acknowledgment section of the 1995 Eyes Right! book which Chip Berlet edited, the Establishment Foundation-sponsored Political Research Asociates executive wrote: "An extra tip of the hat to Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive for his special assistance." Coincidentally, in recent months Berlet joined PROGRESSIVE magazine editor Rothschild in attempting to smear and marginalize 9/11 conspiracy journalists and researchers, while apparently failing to do much political research into possible links between the Ford Foundation, the Trilateral Commission, the Carlyle Group and/or the Bush White House.

questionsquestions.net