Columbia University Provost Katznelson's Russell Sage Foundation Connection: Part 4

 

How U.S. Robber Baron Jay Gould and business partner, Russell Sage, became rich from owning U.S. railroads in 19th-century.

The Russell Sage Foundation, whose board of trustees Columbia Provost and 2019-2020 Russell Sage Foundation “Olivia Sage Scholar” Ira Katznelson (who failed to immediately agree to meet the demands of the Graduate Workers of Columbia [GWC-UAW 2110] in the union's 2021 strike at that Upper West Side university) chaired between 1999 and 2002, has a “Conflict of Interest Policy” posted on its website.

And according to this “Conflict of Interest Policy”, among “the requirements” governing “the activities” of its Trustees, the Trustees “may not be Visiting Scholars, Principal Investigators of a funded project, Authors/Editors of a Foundation book, or compensated participant in a funded project;” and “the Foundation may not approve or engage in any…arrangement that would constitute an act of `self-dealing.’” In addition, in an Apr. 2, 2021 email to this writer, Russell Sage Foundation President Sheldon Danziger stated the following:

“The Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees has a robust Conflict of Interest Policy and a Conflict of Interest Committee to ensure that the Foundation serves its mission to strengthen the methods, data and theoretical core of social sciences in order to better understand societal problems and develop informed responses. The Foundation and Committee take seriously any conflicts of interest and address them consistent with New York law and the laws and regulations governing exempt operating foundations.”

 

Yet, according to the CV that Russell Sage Foundation Trustee and Yale University Professor Jennifer Richeson posted on the internet, the Russell Sage Foundation gave her a grant of $163,531 to study “Sociostructural and psychological factors supporting the misperception of racial economic equality” in 2020-2021; although Professor Richeson has been sitting on the Columbia University-linked Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees since 2019.

In response to an email query asking why a grant of $163,551 was apparently awarded by the Russell Sage Foundation to Russell Foundation Trustee Richeson in 2020-2021 for a funded project, if, according to the foundation’s “Conflict of Interest Policy”, Trustees “may not be Visiting Scholars, Principal Investigators of a funded project, Author/Editors of a Foundation book, or compensated participant in a funded project” and “the Foundation may not approve or engage in any…arrangement that would constitute an act of `self-dealing’”, Russell Sage Foundation President Danziger, in his Apr. 2, 2021 email, replied:

“You have only quoted part of the Russell Sage Foundation’s Conflict of Interest Policy. The Policy provides that trustees `may not be…Principal Investigators of a funded project…unless such activity was initiated prior to his or her appointment’ as a trustee. The grant to Jennifer Richeson was initiated before she was invited to join or elected to the Board and was awarded without any input from her whatsoever.

“Furthermore, Ms. Richeson is not the Principal Investigator (PI) on the grant but a co-PI and receives no salary support under the grant. The proposal received very high reviews during the roughly six-month review process involved in approving such grants (which involves input from a panel of expert, independent evaluators), and the Board approved the proposal without the input or participation of Ms. Richeson. As a result, there was no conflict of interest, no financial benefit to Ms. Richeson, and no-self-dealing.”

Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Richeson was also a Russell Sage Foundation “Visiting Scholar” in 2004, a member of a Russell Sage Foundation Working Group between 2010 and 2014 and a member of a Russell Sage Foundation Advisory Committee between 2016 and 2019; before joining the foundation’s board of trustees in 2019.

And, in addition to Trustee Richeson being given the $163,531 grant by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2020 (in which the Russell Sage trustee is described as a “Co-Principal Investigator” with M. Kraus PI, according to this trustee’s posted CV), Trustee Richeson was previously given a grant by the “philanthropic” Russell Sage Foundation of $197,524 between 2002 and 2005 to study “intergroup contact: interpersonal and situational influence of dyadic interactions;” a grant of $174,953 between 2013 and 2014 to study “public views about inequality, opportunity and redistribution: evidence from media coverage and experimental inquiry;” and a grant of $114,316 between 2015 and 2018 to study “inequality, diversity and working-class attitudes.”

Besides receiving all this “charitable” grant money from the tax-exempt “philanthropic” Russell Sage Foundation since 2002, Russell Sage Foundation Trustee Richeson was also given a $500,000 individual “genius grant” by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation in 2007. And, coincidentally, a former Columbia provost and former Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees chair and longtime trustee, Claude M. Steele, and a current Russell Sage Foundation trustee, Martha Minow, have been sitting on the MacArthur Foundation board of directors, since 2008 and 2012, respectively.

(end of part 4. To be continued). (This article was first posted on the Upper West Side Patch website)

Democratic Party Leader Obama's 1990's Joyce Foundation Connection

"Non-profit" foundations that fail to pay a fair share of local, state and federal taxes, like the Chicago-based Joyce and MacArthur foundations, are supposed to be just politically non-partisan "charitable" organizations. Yet during the 1990's, both Joyce Foundation and MacArthur Foundation executives apparently helped launch Democratic Party leader and future Democratic President (and possible 2020 Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee/candidate?) Barack Obama's politically partisan office-seeking career; by arranging to have Obama sit on the Joyce Foundation's board of directors in 1994. As David Garrow noted in his 2017 Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama book:

"...Barack...talked [in 1994]...with Sokoni Karanja about a prospective leadership training and development project...Eighteen months earlier Sokoni had been awarded a $320,000 MacArthur Foundation `genius grant' and the Woods Fund already had committed a further $72,000 toward his effort...

"...Barack's range of acquaintances was growing too, and one of the most significant new onews was Deborah Leff...producer at ABC News before being recruited as president of the Joyce Foundation in 1992. Thanks to a family timber fortune, Joyce for a quarter century had been a significant grant maker...

"...Leff recommended Barack...as a...new board member...Barack's election to Joyce's board was announced just after Thanksgiving 1994."

The same book also recalled:

"Equally significant was Debbie Leff's recommendation of Barack to a pair of fellow presidents of prominent Chicago foundations, Adele Smith Simmons at MacArthur and Patricia A. Graham at Spencer. One year earlier publishing billionaire Walter Annenberg had pledged $500 million...Wieboldt Foundation executive director Anne Hallett had left that post to create a new national network...Professor Bill Ayers...immediately queried Hallett and new Joyce Foundation education program officer Warren Chapman about Annenberg's potential...They submitted a final proposal...requesting $49.2 million...Hallett and Ayers reached out to Patricia Graham at Spencer...

"A Chicago entity would be needed to administer the Annenberg grant...and Graham in turn asked her fellow foundation presidents Adele Simmons and Debbie Leff to join her. The three women met for breakfast in mid-December [1994], and then held several more meetings with Hallett and Ayers in early January [1995]...A local board for the new organization would have to be chosen, and Debbie strongly recommended Barack...Pat Graham agreed to ask Barack, and invited him to meet her for a mid-February [1995] dinner at a well-known Italina restaurant...

"At dinner that night with Barack, Pat Graham...popped the question, explaining how she, Debbie, and Adele all wanted him to chair the new Chicago Annenberg Challenge board...At another breakfast meeting, Pat, Debbie, and Anne introduced Barack and Bill Ayers to each other...Ayers was well known in Chicago...His father Thomas G. Ayers...had...been...the longtime head of Commonwealth Edison...

"...By mid-March [1995] a board...was in place, and at its first meeting, Pat Graham's motion to elect Barack as their chair was unanimously adopted...The Chicago Annenberg Challenge reached the midpoint of its five years in mid-1997, jsut as the board mad its largest allocation of dollars to date. Notable was a grant of $750,000 to Bill Ayers's {project]..."

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)   

In The Pay of Foundations: How U.S. power elite foundations fund a `parallel left' media network--Part 2

In The Pay of Foundations—Part 2

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

Within New Left Movement anti-war activist circles in New York City prior to the 1980s, it was considered morally and politically contradictory and hypocritical for individuals on the U.S. left, who claimed to be working to build a grassroots-based U.S. left anti-war movement in political opposition to the U.S. power elite, to rely on grant money from foundations--like the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation—of this same U.S. power elite to fund their “Movement” work projects. In addition, individuals on the U.S. left who were into middle-class professional “Movement careerism,” left celebrity/”Movement media super-star” status-seeking, individual monopolization of radio-tv media and left-wing microphone access, censorship or exclusion of dissident grassroots anti-war New Left viewpoints or individual “Movement empire-building” entrepreneurial work projects and “Movement profiteering, were generally seen as acting in an undemocratic and politically contradictory way.  As the radical feminist journal Women In Revolution reported in its Summer 1970 issue, the Class Workshop was formed “as a reaction to the oppression working class women experienced in the Movement” and proposed a radical feminist media strategy “in the interests of most women, not in the interests of the privileged few who want to make it on our backs.” Among the media strategy proposals made by the Class Workshop in 1970, for example were the following:

“Anyone who appears in the media is to be drawn by lot from her group. No one is to participate in the media alone…No member of a group can appear as an independent feminist…No individual or group can earn a living by writing or speaking about women’s liberation…Anyone who wants to write should write for the Movement.”

Yet for over 20 years, Democracy Now! accepted foundation money from U.S. power elite foundations and was mainly hosted and produced by just two professional upper middle-class journalists: Amy Goodman and a columnist of the New York Daily News mainstream newspaper  (and former Philadelphia Daily News mainstream newspaper columnist), Juan Gonzalez.

A daughter of Multimillionaire New York City real estate developer Bruce Ratner (whose personal worth was estimated to be $400 million in 2017), Lizzy Ratner, worked at Democracy Now! from September 2001 to July 2002: and, after subsequently being hired to be a senior editor at The Nation magazine, noted in a May 2005 article in The Nation, titled “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’,” that “Goodman grew up in the cozy middle-class suburb of Bay Shore” on Long Island, “her father was an ophthalmologist” and “her mother was a social worker and teacher of women’s literature and history.”

Like her brother, journalist David Goodman, Democracy Now! Productions president Goodman is a Harvard graduate, who received a Harvard-Radcliffe B.A. in anthropology in 1984.  Not long afterwards, according to the “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’” article, “Goodman landed an apprenticeship” at WBAI-FM and “started out making documentaries, then moved to covering local news stories, and two years later she was running the WBAI newsroom.”

According to WBAI’s Australian-born and raised program director between 1989 and 1994, a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist named Andrew Phillips, after immigrating to New York City in late 1975, he “introduced Amy to WBAI in 1985” when he “was teaching radio documentary production at Hunter College.”

While “running the WBAI newsroom” in 1987, “Goodman encouraged” David Isay “to produce his first radio piece,” according to the “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’” article. The same May 2005 Nation article also quoted Isay as saying that "for the first couple of years, Amy was the person I learned everything from.”

Subsequently, Isay produced a radio piece for corporate and foundation-sponsored National Public Radio [NPR] in 1989, was given a “Livingston Award for Young Journalists” money grant by the Molly Parnis Livingston Foundation (whose grant money was obtained from the profits of a fashion designer’s New York City garment industry firm) in 1990, and set up his own “non-profit” media firm Sound Portraits Production in 1994—the same year he was also given Guggenheim Fellowship money (from the foundation whose tax-exempt wealth originally came from money the Guggenheim family obtained, historically, in the late 1800s and early 1900s by owning Kennecott Copper, Anaconda and Asarco mines and smelters, utilizing cheap labor and making windfall profits from the lifting, refining and marketing of metals during World War I).  A July 1, 2003 Transom article that Sydney Lewis edited, titled “David Isay and Sound Portraits,” quotes Goodman’s former colleague as recalling in 2003:

“I’ve been doing radio since a year out of college – fell into it through a series of strange, wonderful, serendipitous events that happened over a 24-hour period, and never turned back. I was fortunate to get a [U.S. government-funded] CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] grant early on, so had the time to make stories that I could use to snag more CPB grants. I…eventually formed a non-profit so I could get foundation money (only CPB gives to individuals, everyone else gives to non-profits). The Company started to grow and it’s the best thing that ever happened….”

After forming his “non-profit” Sound Portraits media firm “so” he “could get foundation money” in 1994, Isay’s then-Brooklyn-based radio segment production firm was given a $50,000 [equivalent to over $76,000 in 2018] grant by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation to fund his “StoryCorps” oral history project--one year after the Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation gave Pacifica its $25,000 grant to launch Goodman’s Democracy Now! radio show. Three years later, Goodman’s former colleague at WBAI was given a $500,000 [equivalent to over $717,000 in 2018] individual MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2000--payable in $100,000 chunks a year in each of the following five years.

 As David Plotz noted in a July 7, 2000 Slate website article, the then-$4 billion MacArthur Foundation “ is the estate of John D. MacArthur, a skinflint who became the second-richest American” and “his son Rod grabbed control of the trust after John's 1978 death and pushed the genius project.” Plotz also described the secretive and undemocratic way recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s big money individual “genius grants” are chosen:

“…Several hundred talent scouts, whose identities are secret, suggest nominees to the selection committee. The committee, whose members are also secret, covertly gathers dossiers on the nominees and selects two-dozen-odd winners….”

In 2003, the same year the Sound Portraits Productions was renamed “StoryCorps,” the MacArthur Foundation gave the StoryCorps media firm of the 2000 MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Isay a $75,000 [equivalent to over $100,000 in 2017] grant “in support of StoryCorps.” The following year, “to help create a cash flow reserve fund,” another grant of $50,000 was given to Isay’s “StoryCorps” by the MacArthur Foundation; and in 2006, yet another $200,000 [equivalent to over $245,00 in 2017] in MacArthur Foundation grant money was shifted to Goodman’s former WBAI colleague “in support of general operations” of his StoryCorps media business. In addition, five more MacArthur Foundation grants, totalling $2.6 million, were collected between 2009 and 2016 by StoryCorps; prior to Isay’s media firm being given a $1 million grant by the Rockefeller Foundation in October 2017. In the Rockefeller Foundation’s October 26, 2017 press release announcing this $1 million grant to StoryCorps, Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah claimed that ”Our partnership with Story Corps’ is `one small step’ toward rebuilding trust among the American people through transparency, respect and candor” and “We can think of no more appropriate a partner to fund in this effort than Story Corps.”

As the 2005 “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’” article recalled, “in 1990 Goodman headed over with fellow journalist Allan Nairn” to East Timor for the first time and, during her second trip to the Indonesian military-occupied island country in November 1991, “she and Nairn were nearly killed in a massacre of at least 271 Timorese” by Indonesian soldiers that became known as the Santa Cruz Massacre. Also in 1991, the MacArthur Foundation, that began subsidizing Isay’s Sound Portraits Productions in 1997, also gave the Pacifica Foundation, whose WBAI News Department Goodman headed, a $5,000 [equivalent to over $9,000 in 2018 dollars] grant “to support a radio documentary on East Timor.” (end of part 2)

Did `Non-Profit' MacArthur Foundation Profit From NYC Gentrification-Co-op-Condominium Conversion In 1980s?

The Chicago-based 'non-profit" MacArthur "Genius Grant" Foundation apparently made a lot of money, historically, during the 1980's from the gentrification process in Manhattan and the conversion of apartment building rental units into co-op or condominium units in Manhattan, Queens and Great Neck. As The Assassination Of New York by Robert Fitch recalled in 1993:

"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..."

Among the apartment buildings converted into co-ops or condominiums by the "non-profit" and "philanthropic" MacArthur Foundation's real estate deal were "the eight buildings of Lincoln Towers, on the West Side between 66th and 70th streets; nine other buildings in Manhattan, mainly in the East 66s and 70s, and two properties outside Manhattan--Silver Towers apartments in Kew Gardens, Queens, and Great Neck Terrace in Great Neck, Long Island." (New York Times 6/13/93).

MacArthur "Genius Grant" Foundation's Historical Harry Helmsley Real Estate Connection Revisited

"A consortium closed on the purchase of the development from the John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation, which had been the partner in the complex with the late Harry B. Helmsley. The price was $215 million..."

--The New York Times on December 28, 1997

Every year the Chicago-based "non-profit" and tax-exempt MacArthur Foundation board of directors commits itself to transferring $625,000 over a 5-year period to each individual "MacArthur Fellow" who is undemocratically nominated by secret nominators and recommended by secret selection committee members to receive an individual "genius grant."

Yet although the MacArthur Foundation--whose current assets exceed $6.4 billion--claims to be a "non-profit" organization, much of its "genius grant" money apparently was derived from the real estate industry profits it obtained as a result of owning the Fresh Meadows Development's rental apartment complex in Queens, in partnership with the now-deceased billionaire Harry Helmsley, until 1995.

Over 10,000 New York City tenants lived in the 3,287 rental units of the 140-building Fresh Meadows apartment complex that Billionaire John D. MacArthur and Helmsley bought in October 1972; and between 1972 and 1995 MacArthur or the MacArthur Foundation--that assumed control of an estimated $1 billion of John D. MacArthur's assets following his death in January 1978--  owned 40 percent of the Fresh Meadows Development, before the MacArthur Foundation increased its ownership to 100 percent between 1995 and 1997, by purchasing Helmsley's 60 percent stake. Then, by selling its 100 percent ownership stake to the Witkoff Group, the Insignia Financial Group and the Federal Realty Investment Trust in December 1997, the "non-profit" MacArthur Foundation was apparently able to obtain an additional $215 million to add to its total assets in the late 1990's.

After John D. MacArthur and Helmsley bought the real estate in October 1972, maintenance services declined, elevators became defective, air-conditioning fees and snow removal complaints increased and a tenants association was formed which organized rent strikes and filed lawsuits against the MacArthur-Helmsley partnership. In his 1989 book, The Ultra Rich: How Much Is Too Much?, Vance Packard noted that "New York realtor and billionaire Harry Helmsley called real estate attractive because `You don't have to do anything. You just have to sit. The values go up.'"

When the MacArthur "Genius Grant" Foundation jointly-owned the Fresh Meadows apartment complex with Harry Helmsley, its Fresh Meadows real estate managers apparently historically discriminated against African-American applicants. As Palace Coup: The Inside Story of Harry and Leona Helmsley by Michael Moss recalled in 1989:

"...One Fresh Meadows case in particular stood out. It was brought by the NAACP, and the issue was racial discrimination...The suit, filed in 1983, had some biting affidavits...Valerie Stroud, a police officer, testified...`It was my understanding that...Fresh Meadows did not rent to Black people.'

"Helmsley and the NAACP avoided a costly trial by agreeing to a settlement that both prohibited Helmsley from refusing to rent on the basis of race and required him to take a number of steps to encourage minorities to apply. A year later the NAACP was back in court, accusing Helmsley of violating the agreement by trying to convert the apartments into co-ops. Helmsley again settled the matter...The Open Housing Center, a non-profit citizens group monitoring Fresh Meadows, estimated that the number of Black families rose from less than one percent..."