Alternative Media Censorship: Sponsored By CIA's Ford Foundation (and Billionaire Pritzker Family/Hyatt Hotels Dynasty)?--Part 5

“Although Susan and Nicholas Pritzker purchased their $2.5-million ranch several years ago, it was not until they disclosed plans to build a 10-structure family compound totaling 54,000 square feet that residents learned of the renowned hotelier's desire to go rural -- very rural.


“An hour's drive north of San Francisco, Nicasio's population of 589 could fit into just one of the Pritzker family's 212 Hyatt hotels.


“Yet this is the community in which Nicholas Pritzker, chairman and president of Hyatt Development Corp. and president of Hyatt Equities, and his wife, Susan, a part-time philanthropist and full-time mother, want to settle.


“A privately held company, Hyatt manages and owns hotels, resorts, apartment complexes, casinos, senior citizen housing and health care businesses. The large Pritzker family is among the wealthiest in the nation.


“Not all of Nicasio embraces the Pritzker plan. That the Pritzkers want to build a complex of oversized houses, critics say, despoils the very beauty that drew them to Nicasio…


“Initial plans for the Pritzkers' 845-acre ranch call for a 12,000-square-foot main ranch house, a caretaker's residence and an agricultural building. The pool house, garages, farming facilities and other houses, for their four children and two grandchildren, would be built over the course of many years…

--from a March 16, 2003 article in the Los Angeles Times

“Susan [Pritzker] has…has been a on the board of Pitzer College since 1990 and the chair since 2001. ..Susan is also chair of the board of directors of the Chicago Foundation for Women…Susan is married to Nick Pritzker, whose family are owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain.”

--from the Mother Jones/motherjones.com/ Foundation for National Progress website’s board of directors’ biographies page

“This week, Hyatt hotel workers and their allies are holding demonstrations in London and cities across the United States, marking the launch of a global boycott of Hyatt hotels. The far-reaching boycott is a response to the hotel company’s extensive abuse of its workers and low wages…Hyatt has singled itself out as the worst employer in the hotel industry. Hyatt has abused its housekeepers and other hotel workers, replacing longtime employees with minimum wage temporary workers and imposing dangerous workloads on those who remain…”
--from the Hyatt Hurts website on July 24, 2012

(Note: The following historical article about the hidden financial history of the U.S. alternative media and its historical left gatekeepers was written in 2002. So in 2012, some of the left gatekeepers mentioned in this 2002 historical article may have moved on to other positions within the U.S. alternative media/left subculture or mainstream U.S. media or academic world during the last 10 years.)

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[Schumann Center for Media and Democracy] 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 an early 21st century 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 Progress 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 Harris--a former general manager of the Washington Post Company's Newsweek magazine's Pacific operations--was paid an annual salary of $144,379;

3. Mother Jones magazine Director of Sales & Marketing Eric Weiss was paid an annual salary of $105,004;

4. Mother Jones magazine Creative Director Jane Palecek was paid an annual salary of $88,197;

5. Foundation for National Progress Secretary/Treasurer and CEO Joan Catherine Braun was paid an annual salary of $85,453;

6. Mother Jones magazine Editor Eric Bates was paid an annual salary of $74,716;

7. Mother Jones magazine Advertising Manager Eileen Ellis was paid an annual salary of $67,233; and

8. Mother Jones Art Director Caroline Joy was paid an annual salary of $61,187.

Mother Jones/Foundation for National Progress also spent $247,000 on fund-raising in 2000; and its board of directors included [now-deceased] 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. [In recent years, Susan Prtizker, the wife of a member of the billionaire Pritzker family of Chicago that both controls Hyatt Hotels and played a leading role in raising campaign funds for the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign of Barack Obama, has also been a member of the Mother Jones/Foundation for National Progress board of directors.]

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 represented 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 the Pritzker Family and Hyatt Hotels]--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.

(end of part 5 of 2002-written historical article)