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ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP:
SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
Part 9:
FORD FOUNDATION, THE CIA & U.S. ESTABLISHMENT
CONSPIRACY — part 3
The Ford Foundation's Vice-President for Media in recent years,
Alison Bernstein, was an associate dean at Princeton University
between 1990 and 1992. But for most of the last twenty years she
has been on the Ford Foundation payroll. [A poster to the WBAI
Listener's Bulletin Board a few months ago remembered Ford Foundation
Vice-President for Media Bernstein as being a family relation
of the now-deceased former conductor of the New York Philharmonic
orchestra, Leonard Bernstein; and as someone who, as a college
student, claimed to be anti-Establishment in her politics. But
the accuracy of the WBAI listener's memory of Alison Bernstein
could not be confirmed.]
As the Ford Foundation's Vice-President for Media, Bernstein
implements the media policy priorities that are determined by
committees of the Ford Foundation board of trustees and authorized
by the Ford Foundation president. In recent years the Ford Foundation
board of trustees has included two former CEOs and former board
chairmen of the Xerox Corporation, the CEO and board chairman
of ALCOA, an executive vice-president and general counsel of Coca
Cola Company, the chairman and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., the
chairman of Reuters Holdings, PLC, the senior partner of the Akin,
Gump,Straus Hauser & Feld lobbying firm, and the president of
Vassar College. Other corporations with directors who sat on the
Ford Foundation board of trustees in the late 1990s or after 2000
included Time Warner, Chase Manhattan Bank, Ryder Systems, CBS,
AT & T, Adolph Coors Company, Dayton-Hudson, the Bank of England,
J.P. Morgan, Marine Midland Bank, Southern California Edison,
KRCX Radio, the Central Gas & Electric Corp. DuPont, Citicorp
and the New York Stock Exchange. A vice-president and general
counsel of Texaco Inc. named Deval Laurdine Patrick has also sat
on the Ford Foundation board of trustees in recent years.
The Ford Foundation's Board of Trustees' Education, Media, Arts
and Culture Committee in the late 1990s, for instance, included
the president of Vassar College, the chairman of Reuters Holdings
PLC, the former chairman and CEO of Xerox and Clinton crony Vernon
Jordan--also a director of Revlon, American Express, J.C. Penney,
Sara Lee, Xerox, Bankers Trust, Dow Jones, Union Carbide and Ryder
Systems. Clinton crony Jordan also was the chair of the Ford Foundation
Board of Trustee's Audit and Management Committee in the late
1990s.
Currently, the wife of the Bush II White House's presidential
historian (Michael Beschloss] sits on the Ford Foundation board
of trustees. Ford Foundation Trustee Afsaneh Mashayetkhi Beschloss,
a former World Bank managing officer, also is the CEO/president
of the Carlyle Asset Management Group. President Bush II's father
George Bush, former Secretary of Defense and former Deputy CIA
Director Frank Carlucci, former Secretary of State James Baker
and Billionaire Speculator George Soros are also involved in the
Carlyle Group that Ford Foundation Trustee Mashayetkhi Beschloss
manages. The Ford Foundation board-linked Carlyle Group received
$1.3 billion in Pentagon war contracts in 1999, was the 11th-largest
recipient of Pentagon war contracts in 2000 and invests heavily
in war stock.
A former member of the board of directors of Chase Manhattan
Bank, Susan Berresford has been the Ford Foundation president
since 1996. Ford Foundation President Berresford is presently
a member of the North American Committee of David Rockefeller's
Trilateral Commission--sitting next to other U.S. Establishment
figures, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeline Albright.
Ford Foundation President Berresford is also a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations, to which the Ford Foundation gave
a grant of $100,000 "for the development of a Council Task Force
on Terrorism" in 2002. Featured on the Council on Foreign Relations
web site at www.cfr.org on 9/26/02 was an advertisement for "a
New Council book," which stated "Invasion Is The Only Realistic
Option to Head off the Threat from Iraq, Argues Kenneth Pollack
in THE THREATENING STORM." In recent years, the vice-chairman
of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations,
Carla Hill, has sat on the board of directors of Chevron (as has
National Security Affairs Adviser and former Carnegie Corporation
of NY Trustee Condoleezza Rice). Other members of the Council
on Foreign Relations include former CIA Director John Deutch,
former CIA Consultant/MacArthur Foundation Consultant and current
Northwestern University President Henry Bienen, Richard Holbrooke,
Billionaire Speculator George Soros and former MacArthur Foundation
Director Laura D'Andreas Tyson. A few years ago, the Ford Foundation
also gave a $701,130 grant to the Council on Foreign Relations
for "core support for the activities of the Program on Alternative
Future for Southern Asia, its Energy and United States Policy."
In a 2000 interview with PHILANTHROPY MAGAZINE, Trilateral Commission
member Susan Berresford gave the official version of how the Ford
Foundation operates:
We have a senior management team that meets every Monday morning
in my office...I approve all grants over $100,000. Grants up
to $100,000 can be made by staff at various levels. We budget
on a two-year basis, and we work with our board...Every grantmaker
writes what we call a program office memo. That is ultimately
approved by his or her immediate supervisor and then by someone
at a vice-presidential program level. Then, all grants that
they make under $100,000 pursuant to that memo, they and their
immediate supervisors approve. And anything over that needs
my approval. We meet every other week for an entire morning;
and all the grants over $100,000 that have been recommended
in the prior two-week period are on a list and we talk about
them.
I get a write-up on every single grant. There may be 50 on
the list, or ten on the list. I read them all, think about them
all, and we discuss some of them...The meeting is really a group
discussion. I lead it, and I have to put my signature on the
grant in the end, but all the officers of the foundation are
there, and any program officer or any staff member who wants
to attend can attend and participate.
...We make grants of $1,000 and we make $50 millioin grants.
We make endowment grants and project grants and general support
grants...
It's a policy-making board instead of a grantmaking board...
In our foundation we draw our board members from all over the
world...It makes more sense for the board to set foundation
policy.
They set the budget level and broad allocations...We set our
budget at 5.8 percent of a three-year rolling average of our
portfolio value. Then, depending on our judgment about the stock
market and other things, we may move around a little bit from
that...
We convene groups of our grantees with grouups of our staff
who make grants to them...
...Linda Strumpf is the vice president for investment at the
foundation. We have an investment committee of the board. They
are in touch regularly and Linda and I talk frequently. We all
think hard about asset allocation and the broad investment choices
we make...In recent years, we have put a significant amount
of money into venture capital and a lot of that in technology,
and have done very, very well with those investments.
...We do not, other than in a very few cases, screen investments.
Besides managing the Ford Foundation's multi-billion dollar
unscreened investment portfolio and the rest of the Ford Foundation's
$10.7 billion in assets, Ford Foundation Vice-President for Investments
Linda Strumpf also has been a member of the investment committee
of the Ms. Foundation for Women—which has received millions
of dollars in grants from the Ford Foundation in recent years.
In addition, Ford Foundation Vice-President for Investments Strumpf
is a member of the investment committee of Penn State University—which
recieved over $58 million in war research contracts from the Pentagon
in 1999. That same year, the "non-profit," tax-exempt Ford Foundation
paid Linda Strumpt, its vice-president for investments, an annual
salary of $852,911.
In the December 1988 issue of MULTINATIONAL MONITOR, Jim Donahue
reported, in an article entitled "The Foundations of Apartheid
and The Nuclear Industry," that in 1988, during the apartheid
era, the Ford Foundation had $1.32 billion invested in companies
doing business in South Africa, accounting for 43 percent of tis
total investment value at that time. The MULTINATIONAL MONITOR
also noted that in 1988, "eighteen million dolars" of the MacArthur
Foundation's investments were in apartheid South Africa-tied companies
and "the Rockefeller Foundation held $233 million in corporations
doing business in or with South Africa" during the apartheid era.
MULTINATIONAL MONITOR also observed in 1988 that "Nuclear Weapons-Linked
Investment Corporations that receive government contracts to build
components for nuclear weapons are popular among leading foundations"
and "the Ford Foundation...holdings account for 16 percent of
Ford's total investment value, or $496 million, with the largest
holding being in nuclear-contract-linked IBM and General Electric."
Although the Ford Foundation posts a list of its recent grants
on its web site, it's not that easy to locate on the Internet
a list of all the current corporate stocks that are currently
contained in the Ford Foundation's unscreened stock portfolio.
Establishment foundations have a long tradition of not being eager
to make it easy for the U.S. public to know which corporate stocks
they own. As Ferdinand Lundberg observed in his AMERICA's 60 FAMILIES
book long ago: "E.C. Lindeman, the outstanding authority on the
internal functioning of foundations, states in his monumental
WEALTH AND CULTURE, published in 1936, that his `first surprise
was to discover that those who managed foundations and trusts
did not wish to have these instruments investigated. Had it occurred
to me then,' he continued, `that it would require eight years
of persistent inquiry at a wholly disproportionate cost to disclose
even the basic quantitative facts desired, I am sure that the
study would have been promptly abandoned."
What can be easily discovered on the Internet is that over $4
billion of the Ford Foundation's $10.7 billion in assets in 2001
was invested in U.S. corporate stock and over $1.3 billion in
foreign corporate stock. From its billions of dollars in corporate
stockholdings in 2001, the "non-profit" Ford Foundation received
$343 million in dividends and interest income and earned an additional
capital gains income of $992 million. Yet on its 2001 annual income,
the "non-profit" Ford Foundation only paid a 1% excise tax.
But despite the great power that control over such excess wealth
gives to Establishment foundations like the Ford Foundation to
influence world history and manage social change on behalf of
Ultra-Rich power elite interests, the foundation-subsidized alternative
media groups rarely report critically on the world of Big Foundations--or
on the U.S. Estalbishment conspiracies that may may be hatched
in either the foundation, corporate or national security state
apparatus boardrooms. Yet without an understanding of the political
economic and cultural role that Big Foundations and Ultra-Rich
power elite conspiracy plays in global politics, one can't really
understand how the System operates or how world history is determined.
And one's political and intellectual consciousness and analysis
is going to remain incomplete and partial, in a significant way.
In his article, entitled "Getting Behind the Media: What are
the subtle tradeoffs of foundation support for journalists?",
Rick Edmunds characterized the ethical issues that develops when
journalists--even alternative media journalists--begin to rely
on subsidies from the Big Foundation to fund their alternative
media work:
In research published...by the Poynter Institute on the rising
number, scope, and dollar amounts of foundation grants for journalism,
I found that media recipients are becoming ever more comfortable--and
perhaps less reflective--about taking the money...When they
show up with much-needed funding for an investigative series
or pay the freight for a reporter working on an underreported
beat, foundations don't receive the same due-diligence scrutiny
for hidden subtext that journalists apply to a corporaet press
release or a politician's statement. The effect that foundation
money may have on the news business is subtle but real, and
increasingly troubling on the ethical front...In public television
and radio and at certain serious magazines, foundation funding
has become a way of life, and grants can run to seven figures...The
percentage of public broadcasting revenue coming from foundations
has doubled in the past two decades. And in the world of nonprofit
media, a few million a year goes a long way...
...The lack of overt editorial should not blind us to the more
subtle, one might say cultural, ties that bind these news organizations
to their funders. There are, for example, any number of opportunities
for grant makers to shape the editorial product as it is developed...If
the foundations' and recipients' goals have been properly `aligned'
not much more may be needed to see that the intent is carried
out...
Lost in the benevolent fog that surrounds most foundations
is the notion that they may have more of an agenda, not less,
than a sponsoring corporation...Cultural affinity can sometimes
make it difficult for editors and journalists to draw the distinction
between accepting a grant and accepting a funder's point of
view...
National Public Radio is the heavyweight champion in harvesting
these grants...Its income is pushing $100 million, about 40
percent of that from corporations and foundations. NPR consistently
declines to say what share of the grants that it receives are
restricted to specific content areas...Also, for several years,
NPR's reporting unit on money and politics has been supported
by a grant from the...Schumann Foundation...
Speaking of the Schumann Foundation, a KPFA listener and 9/11
conspiracy journalist recently discovered that its President,
Public Affairs TV Inc. Executive Director Bill Moyers, also now
sits on the board of directors of Billionaire Speculator George
Soros' Open Society Institute. But since the former publisher
of the Schumann Foundation-subsidized COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW,
Joan Konner, is both a board member of Open Society Institute
board member Moyers' Schumann Foundation and the president of
Open Society Institute board member Moyers' Public Affairs TV
Inc., don't expect the COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW to question
too much the ethical appropriateness of this Schumann Foundation/Open
Society Institute board interlocking directorate. And certainly
don't expect too much questioning of such institutional relationships
by the Schumann Foundation-subsidized FAIR group or by the Open
Society Institute-subsidized Pacifica/DEMOCRACY NOW or NATION/RADIO
NATION.
And if, by some chance, the Ford Foundation's publicity shield
ever gets penetrated in a "parallel left" alternative media world
which it has been heavily subisidizing in recent years, it still
can move quickly to neutralize any negative publicity—by
calling upon a "counter-cultural" public relations firm that used
to represent the Pacifica Foundation, called Fenton Communictions.
In addition to having the Ford Foundation as one of its clients
during the 1990s, the Ford Foundation web site now indicates that
Fenton Communications was apparently given a $300,000 grant "for
communications activities designed to promote informed dialogue
in response to the September 11 activity, with an emphasis on
protecting civil liberties and preventing discrimination"--by
a Ford Foundation on whose board sits the wife of the Bush White
House presidential historian.
(end of FORD FOUNDATION, THE CIA & U.S. ESTABLISHMENT CONSPIRACY)
to part 10...
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