In The Pay of
Foundations—Part 3
How U.S. power elite and liberal
establishment foundations fund a “parallel left” media network of left media
journalists and gatekeepers.
In its 1991 edition, Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac estimated
that “the duPonts are the wealthiest and most powerful dynasty in the United
States.” As Gerard Colby also observed in the 1984 edition of his DuPont
Dynasty: Behind The Nylon Curtain book:
“No family in America
has been richer longer than duPonts…The family has developed many ruses for
avoiding any public control over its wealth. Besides their 11 personal trusts,
the duPonts have established 37 tax-free foundations…Most of the duPonts, plus
the first line of their in-laws and a few of the second line, make up the 250
`big’ duPonts…These are the duPonts who comprise the richest family in the
world…These are the duPonts who own more estates, more thoroughbred horses,
more yachts, more servants than the Queen of England and the royal family…It
has been precisely by `hard bargaining,’ by exploitation of labor at home and
abroad, by fat government contracts, that the duPonts amassed their $10 billion
[equivalent to over $23.7 billion in 2018 dollars] fortune.”
Yet since 1996, Democracy Now! has not seemed eager
to produce many radio or tv news show segments that critically examine how the
super-rich duPont dynasty members specifically obtained their wealth,
historically, and have, specifically, retained their individual wealth since 1996.
One reason might be because a Columbia University School of
Journalism-administered program funded by the Alfred I. duPont Awards
Foundation gave the Pacifica Foundation’s WBAI station a “silver baton” Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in Broadcast Journalism, for the MacArthur foundation grant-subsidized 1991 “radio documentary on East
Timor” that Democracy Now! Productions president Goodman produced; which
she personally accepted, at a Jan. 27, 1994 ceremony in Columbia’s Low Library, from
corporate media journalist Mike Wallace of CBS News, who was the event’s MC.
DuPont Awards Foundation “silver baton” awards were also
distributed to the news departments and professional journalists of mainstream
corporate media organizations like ABC, NBC, CNN and PBS-affiliated television
stations at this same ceremony, which was broadcast nationally by
PBS-affiliated stations. According to the Jan. 28, 1994 issue of Columbia
Daily Spectator , “hundreds of radio and television news professionals”
from the U.S. mainstream
corporate media world “gathered in the rotunda of Low Library” for this annual self-promotional event to celebrate the reporting of mainly Establishment media journalists.
Created in the early 1940s by Jessie Ball duPont in memory
of her deceased husband, Alfred I. DuPont, the Alfred I. duPont – Columbia
University Awards in Broadcast Journalism, which Columbia University’s School
of Journalism has administered since 1968, is funded by the Alfred I. DuPont
Awards Foundation that, in turn, receives grants from the Jessie Ball duPont
Fund. For example, between July 1, 2013 and June 30, 2016, the Alfred I. duPont
Awards Foundation gave Columbia University’s School of Journalism 3 grants,
totalling $1,220,000, to fund the duPont awards program; and the Jessie Ball duPont
Fund, whose assets exceeded $291 million in 2013, in turn, gave 3 grants,
totalling $807,000, to the Alfred I. duPont Awards Foundation. And one year
before Goodman was presented with her “silver baton” duPont-Columbia award,
Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, itself, was directly given a $1.25
million gift in January 1993 by the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, to continue the
Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Awards and other duPont awards program-related
activities at Columbia.
As the Jessie Ball duPont Fund website notes, Jessie Ball duPont
“re-established an earlier friendship with Alfred I. duPont, a member of one of
America’s most distinguished families and a man of great wealth” in 1920; and
“they were married in 1921 and by 1927 had built their estate, Epping Forest,
in Jacksonville, Florida.” In her 2004 book Dream State, University
of Alabama Professor of English Diane Roberts indicated why Alfred I. duPont
apparently moved from Delaware, the state in which economic and political life
has been dominated by duPont dynasty members for over a century, to Florida,
after Florida amended its state constitution in 1924:
“…In 1924 the state
amended its constitution to outlaw income tax. Even better, the constitution
also prohibited inheritance taxes. If you had it, Florida would let you keep
it. So Alfred du Pont, of the more money than Croesus duPonts, cast an eye on
Florida and saw potential….Delaware was run by a cabal of his megabucks with
whom Alfred did not get along…Alfred packed up his young wife Jessie Ball duPont,
her business savvy little brother, Edward Ball and a few bank accounts, and
moved south…”
In his 1989 book Some Kind Of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man
and Land in Florida, Mark Derr described what happened after Alfred I. duPont--for
whom the “silver baton” award that Democracy Now! producer Goodman
accepted in Columbia University’s Low Library in 1994 is named—moved to Florida
with his wife and brother-in-law Ed Ball, who later became one of the first
trustees of the Jessie Ball duPont Fund that funds the Alfred I. duPont Awards
Foundation:
“From the start of the
Depression, Alfred I. duPont, traveling with his brother-in-law Ed Ball, bought
played-out north Florida farmland, cut-over pine forests, and failing banks. He
wanted to establish across the land-and water-rich, transportation-poor
Panhandle and north peninsula, from Pensacola to Jacksonville, a quasi-feudal
state…After duPont’s death…Ball became sole trustee of the duPont estate and
the most powerful man in Florida, a racist, union-busting anti-communist
vilified by his opponents, fawned over by the people he supported until his
death…During his 30-year reign in the state, Ball became so powerful that it
was, in the words of his biographer, `difficult to go 50 miles in any part of
Florida without coming in contact with a portion of the empire [he] built.’
“DuPont started the
St. Joe Paper Company in Port St. Joe, and his estate eventually came to own
one million acres of pineland in the Florida Panhandle and south Georgia, along
with 23 box plants in the United States and Europe, 31 banks in Florida, the
Florida East Coast Railway, and its assorted properties. Ball bought the
railroad’s bonds at 16 cents on the dollar when it was in receivership in the
1930s and gained control of it…Ball broke the railroad unions in Florida during
the 1960s by provoking a strike noteworthy for its duration, violence, and lack
of substantive negotiations.
“For three decades the
duPont estate, as a `testamentary trust’ was exempt from provisions of the
federal Bank Holding Act prohibiting banks from owning other major businesses,
a bit of largesse that allowed Ball to purchase the railroad…’
According to Diane Roberts’ Dream State, former
Jessie Ball duPont Fund trustee Ed Ball “admired J. Edgar Hoover and may have
been an FBI informant;” and among the failed banks that Ball acquired for
Alfred I. duPont in the late 1920s, were banks in Miami, St. Petersburg,
Daytona and Orlando. The same book also noted that, as late as 2004, the 1
million acres of Florida Panhandle and south Georgie pineland, equal to the
land area of Delaware, that Ball had purchased for duPont was still nearly all
owned by a company controlled by the Alfred I. duPont estate; and “Ball and
others of his ilk had terrorized the Florida legislature when, in 1935,
lawmakers had flirted with repealing the state’s prohibition on an income tax.”
In 2013, the Jessie Ball duPont Fund was still earning over
$3.8 million in dividends and interest from the over $101.5 million in
corporate stock, over $56.1 million in corporate bonds and over $123.5 million
in mutual funds shares that it owned, according to its Form 990 financial
filing for 2013. The same 2013 financial filing indicated, for example, that it
owned over $140,000 worth of Comcast stock, over $220,000 worth of Google
stock, over $91,000 worth of Facebook stock, over $90,000 worth of Occidental
Petroleum stock, over $134,000 worth of Halliburton stock, over $165,000 worth
of Amazon stock, over $321,000 worth of Apple stock and over $180,000 worth of
Starbuck’s stock in 2013. The Alfred I. duPont Awards Foundation, which also
funded the duPont-Columbia awards program that gave its “silver baton” award to
Goodman in 1994, still owned over $700,000 in corporate bonds and over $2.1
million in corporate stock in 2016, including over $5,000 worth of Chevron
stock, over $5,000 worth of ExxonMobil stock, over $6,000 worth of Comcast
stock, and over $6,000 worth of Northrop Grumman stock, according to its 2015
Form 990 financial filing for the period between July 1, 2015 and June 30,
2016.
And nine years after the CIA-backed 1965 military coup (that
established a right-wing military dictatorship under Suharto and quickly led to
the massacre of between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesian leftists by right-wing
death squads) and one year before the Indonesian military invaded the former
Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975 (and then killed over 25 percent of
East Timor’s inhabitants by the time Goodman accepted her 1994 duPont
journalism award), the Delaware-based duPont dynasty’s E.I. DuPont company also established a subsidiary
in Indonesia, PT.DuPont/PT DuPont Indonesia, which then invested more than $100
million in Indonesia during the next four decades. (end of part 3)
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