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| Gave Pacifica $25,000 Grant in 1998 To Fund Democracy Now! Show |
How U.S. power elite and liberal
establishment foundations fund a “parallel left” media network of left media
journalists and gatekeepers.
Sitting on the Public Welfare Foundation’s board of directors
when the foundation, that super-rich
Texas corporate media baron Charles Marsh established, gave Pacifica its
$25,000 [equal to nearly $40,000 in 2018] grant in 1998 to help fund Democracy
Now! was a long-time Democratic Party political operative, a long-time
friend of Hillary and Bill Clinton and a former government official in the
Democratic administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton named Peter
Edelman. Between 1994 and 2012 Edelman sat on the Public Welfare Foundation’s
board of directors as a member of either its grant review, finance,
appropriations, nominating or policy and planning committees; and between 2007
and 2012 Edelman chaired the Public Welfare Foundation’s board.
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: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers In Arms,
a contributing editor of Katrina vanden Heuvel's Nation magazine, Kai
Bird, recalled that in June 1968, the former Johnson White House National
Security Affairs Advisor (who shared responsibility for the decision to begin
bombing North Vietnam in early 1965) and then-Ford Foundation President
McGeorge "Bundy arranged fellowships totaling $131,000 [equal to over
$950,000 in 2018] 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 [equal to over $138,000 in 2018] for a study
of community development programs around the world)." As longtime Public
Welfare Foundation board member Edelman recalled in a May 24-24, 2004 oral
history interview with the University of Virginia-affiliated Miller Center:
“When RFK died,
[McGeorge] Mac Bundy gave about eight senior members of Bobby’s staff,
including me, a year of Ford Foundation support….Number one, the Ford
Foundation is very generous to us, so we come back six months later and… it
says in the New York Times that we
were going on a honeymoon courtesy of the Ford Foundation…It said Marian
[Wright Edelman] and I were getting married and we were going on a honeymoon
courtesy of the Ford Foundation….”
Prior to working as a presidential campaign staffperson for
RFK and then receiving a Ford Foundation fellowship from former National
Security Affairs advisor Bundy, Public Welfare Foundation board member Edelman had
worked as a law clerk to a Supreme Court Justice named Arthur Goldberg in 1962,
as a special assistant in the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson Administration’s
Justice Department in 1963 and 1964, as a political operative in RFK’s
successful campaign in 1964 for New York’s seat in the U.S. Senate and as RFK’s
legislative assistant in the U.S. Senate between 1965 and 1968.
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;” and “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." Yet as longtime former Public Welfare Foundation
board member Edelman noted in his 2004 oral history interview:
“My relationship with
Justice Goldberg was wonderful…. Goldberg was this warm, effusive person.
Anybody who had anything to do with him was invited to his home….Passover Seder
was a cast of 30 or 40 people at Justice Goldberg’s house….Anyway, he became a
friend for life, and I ran the issues in his campaign for Governor in 1970 if
you want to get to that. So we had a wonderful relationship…”
In an interview that appeared in the April 2008 issue of Washington
Lawyer magazine, Edelman also recalled:
“At the suggestion of
Justice Goldberg, I went to work in the U.S. Justice Department. This was 1963,
the third year of the Kennedy administration, and I remember Justice Goldberg
telling me, `There won’t be many administrations like this in your lifetime.
You need to be part of this.’”
When the then-U.S. Attorney General Bobby “Kennedy decided
to run for the Senate” in 1964, Edelman “said to John Douglas [the Assistant
Attorney General for whom Edelman worked as a special assistant], `Do you think
I could get involved in the campaign?’,” according to the text of the longtime
Public Welfare Foundation board member’s May 24 and 25, 2004 interview with the
University of Virginia-affiliated Miller Center. And in RFK’s successful 1964
campaign, Edelman “was assigned to Bill vanden Heuvel, the chief issues person
on the research side” of RFK’s 1964 campaign, according to the text of the same
2004 interview.
Coincidentally, Bill vanden Heuvel was the father of Katrina
vanden Heuvel, the editor, publisher and part-owner for over two decades of The
Nation magazine, whose senior editor, Lizzy Ratner, worked at Democracy
Now! from September 2001 to July 2002. And Nation editor-publisher
Vanden Heuvel’s father is mentioned in Frances Stoner Saunders’ The
Cultural Cold War book in the following reference to the CIA-linked
Farfield Foundation:
"First president
of the Farfield [Foundation], 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 [magazine]...`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."
Besides working in as a staff person for Democratic
candidate RFK’s 1964 and 1968 election campaigns and Democratic candidate
Arthur Goldberg’s unsuccessful 1970 election campaign for New York’s governorship
, Edelman also worked as a political operative in the unsuccessful presidential
campaigns of Democratic candidates Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis
in 1988. As the longtime Public Welfare Foundation board member and former
board chair said in a 2004 oral history interview:
“…In any case, I was
very close to Fritz [Walter] Mondale. I had met him the day he was sworn into
the Senate, because I’m from Minnesota, as we said…When he was thinking about
running for President in ’74 and I was living in Boston, I would drive him
around New Hampshire. We were really very close….Yes, I was co-chair of a task
force on employment issues [in his 1984 presidential campaign]….I was the chief
coordinator of speechwriting in the Dukakis campaign [in 1988] after Labor
Day….”
Edelman also apparently “tapped” Hillary Rodham (despite her
previous work in election campaigns for 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry
Goldwater and in Republican Nelson Rockefeller’s unsuccessful campaign to obtain
the presidential nomination at the 1968 GOP national convention) as a possible
future leader in the Democratic Party in the late 1960s, before he was later
appointed to a position in her husband’s Democratic administration in the early
1990s. As Edelman noted in his 2004 oral history interview:
“…In 1969 the League
of Women Voters asked me to coordinate a conference….In fact I think it was my
idea and somebody asked me what to do. Younger leaders would come together with
older leaders….So there was a steering committee and we identified various
elected and non-elected people over 30 who we thought would be admirable for
younger people to meet, and we identified some younger people.
“Hillary graduates
from Wellesley and she makes that speech where she upbraids Senator [Edward]
Brooke…It gets into Time and Newsweek and so on….So I called her up
and I said, How do you do, I’m—and would you come to my conference? She says
Sure. So that’s where it started…. Marian [Edelman’s wife] then gets appointed
to be on the Carnegie Council on Children, which was a big thing that the
Carnegie Foundation invested in….And Hillary comes to work summers and part
time for the commission…She goes through law school, comes to work for Marian
as her first full-time job out of law school…Then we hear that she’s gone off
to Arkansas to marry this guy…In ’78, he’s elected Governor… We’re seeing
Hillary right along. By this time she’s on Marian’s board, and after we move
back to Washington in ’79 she comes and stays with us and we talk on the phone
quite a lot….
“All the way through
the ’80s we saw each other a lot, saw her more than him, but saw each other a
lot... We had some meetings in Little Rock. I stayed at the mansion. I would go
see him...We thought he was a person of great integrity…. I put her on the
board of something called the New World Foundation that I was on the board of
in about 1983 or ’84. We served on that board together for four or five years….
I really did want to be involved in the administration...”
A year after the Public Welfare Foundation gave its $25,000
grant to Pacifica to help fund the Democracy Now! show, the Clintons’
Democratic administration ordered the Pentagon to attack Yugoslavia/Serbia;
and, in his late 1999 article, titled “The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia,”
anti-war writer Michael Parenti described what happened:
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| Former Public Welfare Foundation Board Chair and Member Peter Edelman |
“In 1999, the U.S.
national security state…launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against
Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of
women, children, and men….Up until the bombings began in March 1999, the
conflict in Kosovo had taken 2000 lives altogether from both sides, according
to Kosovo Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources had put the figure at 800. In
either case, such casualties reveal a limited insurgency, not genocide. The
forced expulsion policy began after the NATO bombings, with thousands being
uprooted by Serb forces mostly in areas where the KLA was operating or was
suspected of operating…During the bombings, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000
Serbian residents of Kosovo took flight (mostly north but some to the south),
as did thousands of Roma and other non-Albanian ethnic groups….
“NATO's attacks on
Yugoslavia have been in violation of its own charter, which says it can take
military action only in response to aggression committed against one of its
members. Yugoslavia attacked no NATO member. U.S. leaders discarded
international law and diplomacy…While professing to having been discomforted by
the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and progressives were
convinced that “this time” the U.S. national security state was really fighting
the good fight… Even if Serbian atrocities had been committed, and I have no
doubt that some were, where is the sense of proportionality? Paramilitary
killings in Kosovo (which occurred mostly after the aerial war began) are no
justification for bombing fifteen cities in hundreds of around-the-clock raids
for over two months, spewing hundreds of thousands of tons of highly toxic and
carcinogenic chemicals into the water, air, and soil, killing thousands of
Serbs, Albanians, Roma, Turks, and others, and destroying bridges, residential
areas, and over two hundred hospitals, clinics, schools, and churches, along
with the productive capital of an entire nation..”
Yet in his 2004 oral history interview, former Public
Welfare Foundation board member and board chair Edelman said he still thought
that the Clintons “did the right thing in Kosovo.”
Coincidentally, after antiwar MIT Professor Noam Chomsky asserted
in an interview on Democracy Now!’s April 12, 1999 show that “other effects” of
the U.S./NATO bombing “were to wipe out a very promising and courageous
democratic movement in Belgrade, which was the best hope for getting rid of
this gangster Milosevic, with whom we’d been dealing,” longtime Democracy
Now! co-host Goodman did not question either the moral and political basis or the accuracy for Chomsky’s assertion. But as
Michael Parenti wrote in his late 1999 “The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia”
article:
“During my trip to
Belgrade in August 1999, I observed nongovernmental media and opposition party
newspapers going strong. There are more opposition parties in the Yugoslav
parliament than in any other European parliament. Yet the government is
repeatedly labeled a dictatorship. Milosevic was elected as president of
Yugoslavia in a contest that foreign observers said had relatively few
violations. As of the end of 1999, he presided over a coalition government that
included four parties. Opposition groups openly criticized and demonstrated
against his government. Yet he was called a dictator…”
And in the same late 1999 article Parenti also observed:
“The propaganda
campaign against Belgrade has been so relentless that prominent personages on
the Left — who oppose the NATO policy against Yugoslavia — have felt compelled
to genuflect before this demonization orthodoxy. Thus do they reveal themselves
as having been influenced by the very media propaganda machine they criticize
on so many other issues. To reject the demonized image of Milosevic and of the
Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim they are faultless or free of
crimes. It is merely to challenge the one-sided propaganda that laid the
grounds for NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia….”
Besides sitting on the Public Welfare Foundation board of directors when that foundation gave Pacifica its $25,000 grant in 1998 to help
support Democracy Now!, Edelman also, at the same time, sat on the
board of directors in the late 1990s of the liberal Zionist New Israel Fund
(that in more recent years has expressed opposition to the U.S. antiwar and
Palestine solidarity movement’s BDS campaign). As Edelman recalled in a 2004
oral history interview:
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| Opposed U.S. Antiwar and Palestine solidarity movement's BDS Campaign |
“In the late 1980s I
got involved with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians…I was actually
recruited to be the co-chair of the board...I’ve been very active on Israel
ever since. I’m now the board president of something called the New Israel
Fund, which is quite a substantial organization, a $20 million organization…”
The former longtime Public Welfare Foundation board member
and chair is no longer the board president of the New Israel Fund, but in more
recent years Edelman has continued to sit on the board of the New Israel Fund,
whose annual revenues in 2016 exceeded $26.9 million, according to the
“non-profit” organization’s 2016 Form 990 financial filing.
Of the over $26.9 million in revenues it obtained in 2016,
over $9.9 million was used by the tax-exempt New Israel Fund to pay “salaries,
other compensation and employee benefits,” including a total annual
compensation for its Executive Director/CEO, a former Jewish Community
Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties executive
director named Daniel Sokatch, of $422,758.
And, not surprisingly, the New Israel Fund [NIF] website posted a March
10, 2015 press release on its website which stated that “The NIF does oppose
the global (or general) BDS movement” and “NIF will not fund global BDS
activities against Israel nor support organizations that have global BDS
programs.”
Coincidentally, former New Israel Fund board president and
Public Welfare Foundation board member Edelman apparently sat on a plane near
the long-time Democracy Now! co-host Gonzalez’s then-employer, then-NY
Daily News Owner Mort Zuckerman, when both men flew on the Clinton
White House’s Air Force One in November 1995 to attend the funeral of former
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who was assassinated by a right-wing
extremist Zionist a few days before the funeral). As Edelman recalled in his
2004 oral history interview:
“The phone rings and
it’s Hillary. She says, A seat has opened up on Air Force One because Jim Baker
I think, has a bad back. She said, I’d like you to go…I said, Yes, of course,
I’d be delighted. She said, Somebody will call you, you appear at such-and-such
a place at Andrews Air Force Base. So that’s how I came to go….Was in a back
compartment with former Secretaries of State and with the congressional
leadership and a couple of other people like Mort Zuckerman….On the way over
they had had everybody in that big conference room in the center of the plane
to have a briefing about the political situation, what might some of them want
to say if they’re asked by the press, and so on and so forth….I walk up there
and sitting in that room are Clinton and Bruce Lindsey and Mort Zuckerman...”
And, not surprisingly, in his 2004 oral history interview,
former longtime Public Welfare Foundation director and Clinton Administration
official Edelman noted that “I’m the Board President of the New Israel Fund”
and Bill Clinton “came just last week,
May 10, 2004, to New York City and was our speaker at our 25th anniversary;”
and “I was ecstatic that he did that, and he was pleased to do it.”
In 2018, New Israel Fund board member Edelman no longer also
sits on the board of directors of the Public Welfare Foundation that gave
Pacifica its $25,000 grant in 1998 to help fund Democracy Now!. But in
2018 the Public Welfare Foundation board is now chaired by Skadden, Arps,
Slate, Meagher and Flom corporate law and lobbying firm partner Cliff Sloan,
who is a former Associate Counsel to Democratic President Bill Clinton, a
former Assistant to the Solicitor General in GOP President George W. Bush’s
administration, a former Washington Post Online subsidiary’s General Counsel
and a former Slate magazine website publisher. Other members of the Public
Welfare Foundation board in 2018 include the following other U.S. Establishment
folks:
1.
Former Goldman Sachs Foundation President Stephanie
Bell-Rose, who is also a Knight Foundation trustee, a Stephen Rose Foundation
trustee, a Council on Foundations board member and a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations;
2.
Nation Insurance corporate board member Lydia
Marshall, who is also a former Citibank/Citigroup vice-president;
3.
Former Democratic Obama Administration
Under-Secretary of State Maria Otero, who is also a Kresge Foundation board
member and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations;
4.
A former Deputy Assistant to Democratic President
Bill Clinton and Deputy Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton named Shirley Sagawa;
and
5.
Former Hogan and Hartson/Hogan Lovells corporate
law and lobbying firm partner Eric Washington, who is also now a D.C. Court of
Appeals judge.
In addition, the current president of the Public Welfare
Foundation, Candace Jones, is a former program officer at the Chicago-based
MacArthur Foundation.
For sitting on the Public Welfare Foundation board of
directors for just 1 hour per week between Oct. 1, 2015 and Sept. 30, 2016,
each member of the foundation’s board was paid $6,000, according to the Public
Welfare Foundation’s 2015 Form 990 financial filing. In addition, during that
same period the “non-profit” Public Welfare Foundation paid its president a
total annual compensation of $400,569, according to the same financial filing.
Between Oct. 1, 2014 and Sept. 30, 2016, the Public Welfare
Foundation gave at least two grants, totalling $160,000, to help fund the
“parallel left” Institute for Public Affairs/In These Times magazine/website
media organization, according to the foundation’s Form 990 financial filings
for 2014 and 2015. Yet much of the grant money used to help fund In
These Times magazine (whose editor and publisher, Joel Bliefuss, was paid an annual compensation of $83,194 in 2016, according to the Institute for Public Affairs' Form 990 financial filing for 2016) was obtained by the Public Welfare Foundation’s
investments in the corporate stocks and bonds of corporations that profit from
the exploitation and manipulation of workers and middle-class consumers in the
USA and around the globe.
On Sept. 30, 2016, for example, the “non-profit” Public
Welfare Foundation’s assets exceeded $488 million, including over $126 million
invested in corporate stock, over $137 million invested in corporate bonds and
over $204 million invested in private equity or hedge funds; and $264,322 was
paid by the Public Welfare Foundation to Common Fund for its “investment
management”/stock speculation services, according to the foundation’s 2015 Form
990 financial filing.
Over $99 million, for example, was invested by the Public
Welfare Foundation on Sept. 30, 2016 in the private equity or hedge funds of
the Boston-Based Adage Capital Partners LP stock speculation firm, whose
portfolio of over $44.2 billion worth of corporate stocks on Dec. 31, 2017
included (according to the www.nasdaq.com
website:
1. Over $1.2 billion worth of Apple corporate stock;
2. Over $1 billion worth of Microsoft corporate stock;
3. Over $938 million worth of Amazon corporate stock;
4. Over $749 worth of Deere & Co. corporate stock;
5. Over $668 million worth of Facebook Inc. corporate stock;
6. Over $582 million worth of Berkshire Hathaway corporate
stock;
7. Over $579 million worth of Bank of America corporate
stock;
8. Over $569 million worth of JP Morgan Chase corporate
stock;
9. Over $500 million worth of Johnson and Johnson corporate
stock;
10. Over $491 million worth of Aetna corporate stock;
11. Over $300 million worth of Boeing corporate stock;
12. Over $293 million worth of Chevron corporate stock;
13. Over $296 million worth of Comcast corporate media
stock;
14. Over $264 million worth of United Technologies corporate
stock;
15. Over $239 million worth of Philip Morris Int’l corporate
stock;
16. Over $228 million worth of Citigroup corporate stock;
17. Over $210 million worth of McDonald’s corporate stock;
18. Over $193 million worth of Walt Disney/ABC corporate
media conglomerate stock;
19. Over $186 million worth of Time Warner corporate media
conglomerate stock;
20. Over $183 million worth of Walmart corporate stock;
21. Over $178 million worth of Altria corporate stock;
22. Over $155 million worth of Caterpillar corporate stock;
and
23. Over $151 million worth of Exxon Mobil corporate stock.
(end of part 10)
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