ALTERNATIVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: SPONSORED BY CIA's FORD FOUNDATION?
by bob feldman

Part 9:


FORD FOUNDATION, THE CIA AND 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 article)
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