In The Pay of Foundations: How U.S. power elite foundations fund a `parallel left' media network--Part 12

Ford Foundation Founder gets German Eagle Grand Cross from Nazi officials, 1938.

In The Pay of Foundations—Part 12

How U.S. power elite and liberal establishment foundations fund a “parallel left” media network of left media journalists and gatekeepers.

 

In the same year that the U.S. power elite’s Ford Foundation gave the historically MacArthur Foundation-funded Deep Dish TV  a “charitable grant” of $75,000 [equal to over $104,000 in 2018] “for the television news series, DEMOCRACY NOW!, to continue incorporating the aftermath of the September 11^th attack into future broadcasts,” Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! co-hosts and producers transformed themselves into the “Democracy Now! Productions Inc.” media firm that was now defined as being separated from the Pacifica Foundation. As the Nation magazine senior editor who worked at Democracy Now! from September 2001 to July 2002, Lizzy Ratner, noted in her May 2005 “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’” article:

“…In June 2002 Goodman reached an agreement with Pacifica to turn Democracy Now! into a separate nonprofit organization that would continue to broadcast on the network but would also be free to build up its TV program. The deal generated some grumbling at the time from those who felt that Democracy Now! was abandoning Pacifica…”

Yet according to the same article, in 2005 Pacifica continued “to provide the show with $500,000 in operating support,” although the Democracy Now! Productions firm also collected money “from its TV broadcasters, Link TV and Free Speech TV, as well as through foundation grants, individual donations and sales from its online store.” In April 2004, for example, the U.S. power elite’s Ford Foundation gave Democracy Now! Productions Inc. a $150,000 [equal to around $200,000 in 2018] grant “to produce, broadcast and distribute a series of radio, television and internet reports,” according to the Ford Foundation’s 2004 Form 990 financial filing. And the following year, the Ford Foundation also gave a $50,000 [equal to around $64,000 in 2018] grant to Democracy Now! co-host Gonzalez to support the research for the News for All the People book that the then-NY Daily News mainstream corporate media columnist and former National Association of Hispanic Journalists [NAHJ] president co-authored with former NAHJ deputy director Joseph Torres.  Gonzalez’s News for All the People book co-author is currently the senior external affairs director of the parallel left Free Press media group—which, coincidentally, received 9 grants, totaling $9.5 million, from the Ford Foundation between 2006 and 2017, according to the Ford Foundation website’s grants data base.

At an Oct. 2, 2010 board of directors meeting of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers [NALIP], former NAHJ deputy director Torres was also unanimously nominated to sit on the NALIP board of directors; and in a “Spotlight” item that appeared in the Oct. 18, 2011 issue of the NALIP’s “Latinos In The Industry” newsletter, titled “NALIP Board Member Launches National Book Tour,” described how the Democracy Now! show-linked authors of the Ford Foundation-subsidized News for All the People book, not surprisingly, apparently promoted and marketed their book at events in some of the cities where  Democracy Now! was being aired or televised on a daily basis in 2011:

“NALIP Board Member Joseph Torres' new book News for All the People…,co-authored with Juan Gonzalez, is being launched with a national book tour, starting in NYC with multiple stops in California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado and Washington, DC.

“The first stop will be on Thursday, Oct. 20, in NYC. Joseph and Juan will be interviewed by Amy Goodman on the stage of the Great Hall of Cooper Union. 7-9 pm…This will be followed by events in San Francisco and Oakland on Friday, Oct. 21. Stops after that include Santa Cruz, Fresno, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Northridge, San Diego, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Houston, Denver, and Washington DC.”

Democracy Now! host Goodman had also used the daily parallel left media show on Oct. 13, 2011 to help promote and market the Ford Foundation-funded book of the show’s NY Daily News corporate media columnist co-host and the Ford Foundation-funded Free Press parallel left media group’s senior external affairs executive director; by staging an interview with Gonzalez and Torres on its Oct. 13, 2011 broadcast which ended with the following promotional sales pitch by Goodman:

“Well, this is part one of our conversation. Congratulations on this remarkable work, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media , by Juan Gonzalez and Joe Torres. They’re traveling across the country. They will be in New York next Thursday night. We’ll be having a major event with them at Cooper Union, then to Friday it will be in Oakland. You can go to our website for all the dates—Santa Cruz, Fresno, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Northridge, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Houston, Denver and Washington, D.C. Go to democracynow.org for all of those details that document the book tour of Juan Gonzalez and Joe Torres.”

 

And, also not surprisingly, when Torres noted that “we got some funding from the Ford Foundation, and it led to—to work on this book,” Goodman, whose own daily news show had been funded with $300,000 in Ford Foundation grant money between 1998 and 2004, failed to ask Torres and Gonzalez how much “funding from the Ford Foundation” they got “to work on” their “book;” or whether or not the Ford Foundation still obtains its grant money by investing in corporations that exploit workers and middle-class consumers of all racial backgrounds at home and abroad.

Yet the Ford Foundation was created in 1936 by an early 20^th-century exploiter of automobile industry workers and middle-class consumers named Henry Ford, who also apparently provided support for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany during the 1920s. As a muckraking journalist named George Seldes observed in his 1943 book Facts and Fascism:

“Henry Ford’s picture for years hung over Hitler’s desk in the Brown House in Munich. The Nazis in their early days boasted that they had the moral and financial support of the richest man in America…

“To many persons Ford has always been our No. 1 Fascist. (Newspapermen usually give that spot to William Randolph Hearst, and there is an unending argument as to which of the two has done more harm to the mind of America, but no one doubts that both have spread more fascist poison in this country than any other pair of prominent men…)

“It was general knowledge in the early 1920s, when it was not treason to aid Hitler, that Henry Ford was one of his spiritual and economic backers…The most credible evidence regarding Ford’s financing of early Nazism was given in the treason trial of Herr Hitler himself…On Feb. 7, 1924, Herr Auer, vice-president of the Bavarian Diet, testified in the Hitler trial as follows:

“`The Bavarian Diet has long had the information that the Hitler movement was partly financed by an American anti-Semitic chief, who is Henry Ford. Mr. Ford’s interest in the Bavarian anti-Semitic movement began a year ago…Herr Hitler openly boasts of Mr. Ford’s support…A photograph of Mr. Ford hangs in Herr Hitler’s quarters...’”

Funded Democracy Now! with $300,000 in "charitable grants" 1998 to 2004

The reason Billionaire Ford established the Ford Foundation was to enable his family members to both retain control over his Ford Motor Corporation and avoid paying a fair share of federal taxes after he died. As University of Virginia Commonwealth Professor of History Professor Oliver Zunz recalled in his 2012 book, Philanthropy In America: A History (that he wrote with “the support” he “received from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation”):

“The New Deal inheritance tax was directly responsible…for the creation and vast expansion of the biggest American philanthropic institution of the postwar era—the Ford Foundation…The act went into effect on Jan. 1, 1936. The same month, Henry and his wife Clara, and their son Edsel incorporated the Ford Foundation…The foundation gave the Fords the means simultaneously to avoid the huge inheritance tax and to pass on the company to the next generation without losing control of it…

“…In 1947, the foundation received about 90 percent of the non-voting stock in the company. By this means the Ford family avoided much of the tax burden and Henry II, Edsel’s son, kept full control over the automobile company his grandfather was leaving behind. If it had not been for the foundation, Henry and his two brothers would have paid an estimated federal estate tax of $321,000,000 [equal to around $3.6 billion in 2018] and lost control of the company…Hence the commonly heard charge that the leading American foundation of the 1950s began as a tax-dodge…”

Carl Bakal’s 1979 book, Charity USA: An Investigation into the Hidden World of the Multi-Billion Dollar Charity Industry, also observed:

“All the stock that was given to the foundation was nonvoting. The 10 percent retained by the family had total voting power, maintaining the family domination of the company. Moreover, the voting stock passed to the family tax free, saving another $42 million [equal to around $481 million in 2018], because the wills of Henry and Edsel provided that the taxes on the bequest be paid by the foundation.”

In the late 1940s and 1950s, during the Cold War era of U.S. history, the Ford Foundation began to collaborate with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] in support of the U.S. power elite’s anti-communist and economically imperialist foreign policy objectives. As Philanthropy In America: A History noted:

“…America’s largest foundations provided funds and collaborated in organizational strategies with the U.S. government…In devising Cold War strategies, the alliance between American diplomats, intelligence agents, and a small group of foundation officials was held together not only by common institutional goals but also by a tight professional and social network linking them. The early history of the Ford Foundation—then a newcomer to the big philanthropic scene…suggests the closeness of these ties….Ford officials conferred directly with officials from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency…”

In her 1999 book The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stoner Saunders also 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:

"The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with…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 Foreign 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…

"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..."

A Ford Foundation executive in the early 1950s named Richard Bissell--who later became the CIA Deputy Director For Plans responsible for the unsuccessful 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and a “president of the Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA], a think-tank that had been formed by a dozen universities (including MIT and Columbia University] to recruit scientific personnel for the evaluation of weapons systems” between 1962 and 1964, according to Bissell’s autobiography Reflections of A Cold Warrior—simultaneously worked, for example, as a CIA consultant. As Bissell recalled in his 1996 book:

“In January 1952 I joined the Ford Foundation…I worked out of a small office in Washington…The arrangement allowed me to work for the foundation while engaging in outside consulting assignments…Working in Washington…enabled me to maintain my close professional relationships…with people like Frank Wisner, Sherman Kent, Desmond Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes and Max Milliken, all of whom were in the CIA and close to Allen Dulles…

“In the fall of 1952, I became part of the CIA’s Princeton Group of consultants (so named because it met on the university’s campus)…In late 1952…Max Milliken resigned as an assistant director of the CIA…to become director of MIT’s Center for International Studies [CENIS]…I was able to get the trustees of the Ford Foundation to fund research at CENIS.”

During the same decade that the foundation, which in later decades helped fund Democracy Now!,  collaborated with the CIA in support of U.S. power elite foreign policy goals, it apparently did not use its special political influence and economic power in the 1950s to eliminate Jim Crow laws and legalized racial segregation in the southern region of the United States. As the Philanthropy In America: A History book observed, “the Ford Foundation did not come out in favor of racial integration until the 1960s.” (end of part 12)

In The Pay of Foundations: How U.S. power elite foundations fund a `parallel left' media network--Part 11

Funded `Democracy Now!' Show Between 1998 and 2004

In The Pay of Foundations—Part 11

How U.S. power elite and liberal establishment foundations fund a “parallel left” media network of left media journalists and gatekeepers.

 

In his 1971 book The Higher Circles: The Governing Class In America, University of California-Santa Cruz Professor G. William Domhoff observed that “all power elite foundations” are “involved in ideological combat” and “all power elite foundations” are “propaganda fronts which are involved in maintaining the legitimacy and respectability of the present Establishment, even if in some cases this involves no more than giving some bright-eyed novice a few thousand dollars with which to amuse himself;” and “if the” CIA-funded “Farfield Foundation” was “a conduit, so is the Ford Foundation (which is also a tax dodge).” And as Joan Roelofs wrote in her 2003 book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism:

“The cultural Cold War initiated concerted action by foundations and the CIA…Ford, the Kaplan Foundation, and others became `pass-throughs’ for the CIA project, Congress for Cultural Freedom [CCF]. In addition, starting in 1957, Ford provided funds for the CCF…Ford established a U.S.-type economic program at the Indonesian university and trained faculty at the U.S. universities to run the Indonesian program…When the coup [in September 1965] was instituted to overthrow [the anti-imperialist Indonesian political leader] Sukarno, well-trained leadership was available to run the country and negotiate reasonable deals with multinational corporations…”

Yet during the last two decades the long-time Democracy Now! show co-hosts have generally not provided their listeners or viewers with many news segments that examined in a critical way: (1) the role that Ford Foundation founder Henry Ford and his heirs or former Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy played in 20^th-century history; (2) the political role at home and abroad that Ford Foundation has played historically or in recent years; (3) what the special corporate connections and economic interests of Ford Foundation’s present and past board members and the Ford Foundation have been; or (4) how the multi-billion dollar Ford Foundation obtained and retains its assets and the grant money it distributes each year.

One reason might be because, between 1998 and 2004, $300,000 [equal to around $418,000 in 2018] in Ford Foundation "charitable grant" money was used to help fund Democracy Now!; and a $50,000 [equal to around $64,000 in 2018] Ford Foundation "charitable grant" was given to then-NY Daily News columnist, former National Association of Hispanic Journalists [NAHJ] president and long-time Democracy Now! co-host Gonzalez in 2005 to support the research for the News for All the People book. In addition, in 2003--during the period when Democracy Now!’s part-time co-host was also the NAHJ president—the Ford Foundation joined the Knight Foundation in establishing a “Challenge Fund for Journalism” program that provided $240,000 in grant money to NAHJ between 2003 and 2011; and in 2008 a separate grant of $100,000 [equal to over $117,000 in 2018] was given to the NAHJ group by the Ford Foundation.

The Ford Foundation’s historical funding of Democracy Now! began in 1998 when it gave the Pacifica Foundation a $75,000 [equal to over $114,000 in 2018] grant “toward marketing consultancy, promotional campaign and program development activities for radio program, DEMOCRACY NOW!”. But after listener-activists at Pacifica’s 5 radio stations pressured Goodman and Gonzalez in 1999 to break Pacifica Radio’s “gag rule,” and finally provide their listeners with news about Pacifica’s firings between 1995 and early 1999 in California of KPFA and KPFK volunteer or paid staff show producers who opposed the “NPRization” and corporatization of Pacifica’s programming and radio stations, Pacifica’s WBAI station managers stopped the Democracy Now! co-hosts from broadcasting from Pacifica’s Manhattan studios.

In 2002, however, the U.S. power elite’s Ford Foundation continued to help fund Democracy Now! by giving a grant of $75,000 [equal to over $104,000 in 2018] to Deep Dish TV “for the television news series, DEMOCRACY NOW!, to continue incorporating the aftermath of the September 11^th attack into future broadcasts.” According to its Form 990 financial filing for 2000 that Deep Dish TV submitted in June 2001, a few months before the September 11, 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, in 2000 Deep Dish TV had previously spent $42,427 of a $46,050 grant from some unidentified foundation, on “Democracy Now Live Coverage of the Democratic and Republican Political Conventions.”

Coincidentally, prior to receiving Ford Foundation money in 2002 to help air Democracy Now!, Deep Dish TV had previously been given 9 grants, totalling $335,000, between 1990 and 2000 by the same MacArthur Foundation that gave the Sound Portraits media firm of Goodman’s former WBAI colleague, David Isay, a $50,000 grant in 1997; and then, only three years later, gave an individual MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” of $500,0000 to the Democracy Now! producer-host’s former WBAI colleague, David Isay, in 2000. In addition, the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation--that the son of the MacArthur Foundation’s billionaire founder established—gave the Institute for Media Analysis a grant of between $60,000 and $85,000 in 2001 to “support the production of Democracy Now!’, according to the J.Roderick MacArthur Foundation’s Form 990 financial filing for 2001.

Funded Deep DishTV  That Ford Foundation Used To Fund Democracy Now!

The wealthier MacArthur Foundation, that the father of the J.Roderick MacArthur established, is named for John D. MacArthur, who owned 410 Park Ave., 61 Broadway, the Gulf & Western Building and the Lincoln Tower Apartments in Manhattan, the Exchange Park Office Complex in Dallas, the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas and property in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, on which he persuaded RCA to build a computer plant. Billionaire MacArthur’s “real estate activities were carried on largely through two private companies, Royal American Industries, Inc., and the Southern Realty & Utility Co.;” other holdings” included “an oil drilling company, and broadcasting and printing interests,” according to The National Cyclopedia of American Biography. In its 1988 pamphlet, John D. MacArthur: The Man and His Legacy, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation indicated how much of the “charitable grant” money, that was later used to fund parallel left media groups like Deep Dish TV in the 1990s was originally obtained during the 1960s Vietnam War era by John D. MacArthur:

“His new interest was real estate…At one point, he owned 100,000 acres of land in Florida and was the largest individual landowner in the state. He also owned a dozen insurance companies, several development companies and shopping centers, paper and pulp companies, 19 commercial office buildings in New York City, 6,000 apartments in Manhattan, several publishing enterprises, hotels, radio and television stations, and banks. By the 1970s, MacArthur was one of the nation’s two billionaires…”

And in his 1993 book The Assassination Of New York, Robert Fitch indicated how more money for “charitable grants” was obtained by the “non-profit” MacArthur Foundation in the 1980s from the real estate assets in Manhattan that “were part of the original bequest from John D. MacArthur,” according to the foundation’s 1995 Annual Report:

“One of the biggest industries in the city had been throwing people out of their apartments--`condo conversion’ it was called…The MacArthur Foundation…got involved. A team from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation converted thousands of apartments in the boom years. MacArthur managed to unload its total inventory in 1985 for about $500 million [equal to over $1.1 billion in 2018).”

In her May 2005 article, titled “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’,” the Nation magazine senior editor who worked at Democracy Now! from September 2001 to July 2002, Lizzy Ratner, described how Goodman’s media firm, after obtaining its $75,000 grant from the Ford Foundation “toward marketing consultancy, promotional campaign and program development activities for radio program” in 1998, began producing its soon-to-be Ford Foundation-subsidized daily cable-television show in September 2001:

“It was a few days before 9/11, and Goodman had just been forced from the studios of WBAI, the local Pacifica station...In the scramble to keep broadcasting on affiliate stations, she had landed at the firehouse, a small limestone castle of a building owned and operated by Downtown Community Television. The independent media collective also rented space to Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a cable access channel [whose current CEO Dan Coughlin is, coincidentally, both the former news and executive director of Pacifica Radio and a former WBAI colleague of Goodman], and in early September a MNN producer had the notion of switching on the TV cameras and videotaping Goodman's radio broadcast. The idea was to air the show on MNN once or twice a week….”

Former NBC News Anchor/Downtown Community Television Board Member Tom Brokaw in 2002

Also, coincidentally, sitting on the Downtown Community Television Center’s board of directors, when Democracy Now! began broadcasting in September 2001 from Downtown Community Television’s building at 87 Lafayette St. in Manhattan a televised version of its “parallel left” daily radio news show, according to the Downtown Community Television Center’s 2001 Form 990 financial filing, was Tom Brokaw--the then-anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News which the NBC corporate media network, that GE owned at that time, broadcast each evening. Brokaw, the husband of longtime Gannett corporate media conglomerate board member Meredith Brokaw, continued to sit on the Downtown Community Television Center’s board of directors until 2004, the same year he retired as the long-time NBC Nightly News anchor.

Like Deep Dish TV, the NBC Nightly News-linked Downtown Community Television Center was the recipient of MacArthur Foundation funding, in the years before Goodman and her parallel left radio show “landed at the firehouse, a small limestone castle of a building owned and operated by Downtown Community Television” and from which the Democracy Now!  show was broadcast between 2001 and late 2009.  For example, between 1986 and 2000 the MacArthur Foundation gave 8 "charitable grants," totalling $475,000, to the Downtown Community Television Center (including a $100,000 [equal to around $213,000 in 2018] grant in 1988 to “rehabilitate” the building that Democracy Now! would later be broadcasting from), as well as a loan of $375,000 whose loan repayment schedule had been suspended, according to the television center’s 2001 financial filing.

Coincidentally, Democracy Now! Productions, itself, would later receive in December 2007 “an interest free loan” of $6 million [equal to over $7.3 million in 2018] “from a private foundation, due on July 1, 2012…to finance the acquisition of their new office and production studio” at 207 W. 25^th Street in Manhattan, according to its 2007 Form 990 financial filing; and “as part of the loan agreement” with this “private foundation,” whose name the Democracy Now! Productions firm does not fully disclose, “the Organization received a conditional promise to give of $2 million dollars from this private foundation, which is contingent upon the organization’s meeting the loan repayment terms of $4 million dollars by July 1, 2012,” according to the same 2007 financial filing. (end of part 11)