"Alternative" media paymasters: Carlyle, Alcoa, Xerox, Coca Cola...?

The Ford Foundation, historically closely linked to the CIA and the
military-industrial-academic complex, has in recent years provided
substantial funding grants to a number of "alternative" media
organizations, such as FAIR, Progressive magazine, and Pacifica. Also
participating in this type of funding are other elite foundations such
as MacArthur, Soros, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Schumann.

General policy for grant-making at the Ford Foundation is handled by the
Board of Trustees. Approval for all grants over $100,000 must be
personally signed by Ford Foundation President Susan Berresford, who is
also a member of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission and the Ford
Foundation-subsidized Council on Foreign Relations Inc.. So, for
example, a $150,000 grant to FAIR by the Ford Foundation in 2001 for
"general support to monitor and analyze the performance of the news
media in the United States" was approved directly by Trilateral
Commission member Berresford, in accordance with the grantmaking policy
guidelines established by the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees. Given
the tremendous power that the Ford Foundation has historically wielded
in influencing cultural, academic, and political affairs, one must ask,
who makes up this board of directors whose policies the Ford Foundation
president implements--and what interests do they represent?

In May 2002, the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees welcomed a new
member, Afsaneh M. Beschloss, former World Bank investment officer and
CEO / President of Carlyle Asset Management Group, which is a division
of the Carlyle Group, the defence-related international investment firm
which enjoys all-star revolving door influence in the Bush White House
and is enjoying a post-9/11 profit bonanza. Beschloss first joined
Carlyle Asset Management Group in 2001 as a managing director. She also
happens to be married to George W. Bush's official presidential
historian, Michael Beschloss.

It would appear that the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees is within the
Bush administration's sphere of cronyism. Is this who should be
entrusted to decide how grant money gets doled out to "alternative"
media organizations? Is the CEO of Carlyle Asset Management Group and
wife of a current presidential historian likely to smile upon funding
alternative media organizations which are eager to go beyond offering
the usual cut-and-paste complaints about Carlyle Group influence in the
White House, and ask more probing questions about this company's role
the "War on Terrorism", such as its alleged investment in anthrax
vaccine maker Bioport or its past business ties with the
not-quite-completely-estranged-from-their-errant-son bin Laden family?

In 1999 the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees was joined by Deval L.
Patrick, currently Executive Vice President and General Counsel for
Coca Cola. As General Counsel, Patrick currently has a difficult task to
contend with at Coca Cola: defending the company against an historic
lawsuit brought by the International Labor Rights Fund and the United
Steelworkers of America on behalf of the largest Coca Cola union in
Columbia. The charges are that the company is guilty of willful
negligence and complicity during a long-running campaign of kidnapping,
violence, and murder committed against unionists at Colomian bottling
factories by paramilitary death squads (conditions which have kept labor
costs conveniently low). A number of humanitarian and labor rights
groups have lent their support to the lawsuit. Incidentally, this
wouldn't be Mr. Patrick's first run-in with paramilitary death squads:
in 1995, as Clinton's Assistant Attorney General for civil rights, he
declined to pursue any serious action following an internal Justice
Department report which recommended criminal prosecution of the Federal
agents who massacred the Randy Weaver family at Ruby Ridge in 1992.
Prior to joining Coca Cola, Patrick was the Vice President and General
Counsel for Texaco.

Also on the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees are Paul A. Allaire,
Chairman of the Board of the Ford Foundation and Former Chairman / CEO
of Xerox Corporation, and David T. Kearns, another former Chairman / CEO
of Xerox. Xerox happens to be one of the corporations implicated in the
ongoing accounting scandals. Can we fully depend on media organizations
funded by the Ford Foundation to turn up the heat and beyond the
limited, damage-controllable cover story of "greedy, reckless CEOs" and
"excess deregulation" to examine the deeper aspects of the corporate
scandals which seem to indicate a calculated mass transfer of wealth to
the ultra-rich? Even more significant are much larger related ripoffs in
the US government, such as the HUD scandal and the disappearance of
roughly THREE TRILLION dollars from the US Treasury (according to
official US audits which failed to produce audited financial statements
as required by law. Financial expert Catherine Austin Fitts (who helped
with the official clean-up of the Savings & Loan and BCCI scandals and
helped implement the requirement that Federal agencies had to produce
audited financial statements as an Assistant Secretary for HUD in the
first Bush administration) argues that such extraordinary failures to
produce audited financial statements along with trillions of
undocumentable adjustments to get the books to "balance" could not have
occured without a conspiracy involving high officials of the Treasury
Department and the Federal Reserve. Is the Ford Foundation likely to
support media efforts to tell the truth about concerted upper class
looting of public resources?


Another powerful elite corporate interest represented on the Board of
Trustees is aluminum manufacturing giant Alcoa. Alain J. P. Belda,
Chairman and CEO of Alcoa, joined the Ford Foundation in 2000 (he is
also a director of Citigroup and DuPont). Alcoa is also linked to the
Bush administration through Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was
Belda's predecessor and who has also served as the chairman of war
industry think tank Rand Corporation. Alcoa happens to posess some
uniquely repellent skeletons in its corporate closet. Originally founded
by the powerful right-wing Mellon family (whose Mellon Bank is currently
the Carlyle Group's sole outside partner), the company was centrally
involved in the conspiracy amongst a group of US industrialists and Wall
Street interests in the 1930s to support and trade with the Nazis
through a cartel agreement with I.G. Farben, the notorious industrial
giant which built the Nazi war machine and ran their concentration
camps. This would continue even into the early part of World War II, and
Alcoa's sabotage of the US Air Force's aluminum production program with
this cartel agreement led Secretary of Interior Harold Ickles to warn in
June 1941, "If America loses the war it can thank the Aluminum
Corporation of America." Some of the other elite names involved in this
crime were Rockefeller, Ford, Harriman, DuPont, and Bush; all were
strong supporters of the racial eugenics movement which inspired some of
Hitler's own policies.

There doesn't seem to be much indication that the "alternative" media
recepients of Ford Foundation funding have any interest in exposing this
still heavily suppressed treasonous episode in US history, nor does
there seem to be much interest in exposing how these same elite families
continue to fund racial eugenics-related organizations, one example
being the Manhattan Institute (funded by the Mellon-Scaife fortune and
the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank) which originated President
Bush's "compassionate conservatism" policies. It hardly seems likely
that the Ford Foundation Board of Trustees would want to fund
alternative researchers and journalists who are inclined to connect
these kinds of dots and bring critical scrutiny to the alarming fact
that the US elite interests who have had the closest historical
relationship with fascism, eugenics, and genocide (in addition, being
closely connected with the biotech & biowarfare industries) are in a
position of great influence over the planning of US bioterrorism defence
policy, including new proposals for mass forced vaccinations.

Is it any more likely that the Ford Foundation, given its long and
well-documented history as a back channel for CIA covert funding
streams, would favor the kind of alternative media which might be
expected to ask troublesome questions about the CIA's recent activities?
For example, many questions need asking about the CIA's close
connections with its subordinate in Pakistan, the ISI, which was a main
supporter of the Taliban before 9/11. The former head of the ISI was
discovered to have organized a wire transfer of $100,000 to the
enigmatic alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta in Summer of 2001, and
yet also wound up visiting Washington D.C. for high-level meetings with
US officials the week of 9/11. Any competent investigative journalist
would find information like this to be compellingly in need of further
inquiry, but the "alternative" media who receive Ford Foundation grants
don't seem to find it very interesting at all.

Is it likely that the Ford Foundation would fund the kind of alternative
media which would be inclined to look deeply into the long-running
control over US foreign policy exerted by the private and secretive
Council on Foreign Relations, given the fact that the CFR counts among
its funding sources the Ford Foundation and Xerox? Or would the Ford
Foundation more likely favor those who could be relied upon to toe the
party line that the CFR (and other elite policymaking NGOs like the
Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group) functions only as a stuffy
intellectual debate society, and that anyone who argues otherwise is a
"paranoid nut"?

Is it likely that establishment foundations, which are invested heavily
in Big Oil, would choose to fund the kind of alternative journalists and
researchers who are asking challenging questions about the formative
role of oil politics in 9/11 and the so-called "War on Terrorism"? Or
those who have been pursuing urgent investigations into the stunning
array of evidence pointing to Bush administration complicity in the 9/11
attacks?

Of course not. Instead, the big establishment foundations are likely to
seek out "alternative" media that is more bark than bite, which they can
rely on to ignore and dimiss sensitive topics like those mentioned above
-- and many more -- as "irrelevant distractions" or "conspiracy theory."
Recipients of funding will always protest that they are not swayed by
any conflicts of interest and don't allow the sources of funding to
affect their decisions, but whether or not these claims are actually
true is already somewhat of a red herring. The more important question
is, what sort of "alternative" journalism garners the goodwill of the
Ford Foundation corporate rogues' gallery in the first place? Or the
Rockefeller Foundation? Or Carnegie, Soros, and Schumann?

Judging by the journalism being offered (and not offered) by Nation
magazine, FAIR, Pacifica, Progressive magazine, IPA, Mother Jones,
Alternet, and other recipients of their funding, the big establishment
foundations are successfully sponsoring the kind of "opposition" that
the US ruling elite can tolerate and live with.

Brian Salter, questionsquestions.net, 29 September 2002

see also:

Alternative Media Censorship: sponsored by CIA's Ford Foundation? by Bob
Feldman http://www.questionsquestions.net/gatekeepers.html

The Ford Foundation, the CIA, and US Establishemnt Conspiracy (part 3)
by Bob Feldman http://www.questionsquestions.net/feldman/feldman09.html