lead fFrom: Leon Todd Subject: Bradley, Bell Curve, W-2: Behind the scenes in the right-wing machine Summary of the September's Socialist Potluck Phil Wilayto discussed his investigative report: THE FEEDING TROUGH": A look at the Bradley Foundation. Also: The Bell Curve, and the real story behind Tommy Thompson's W-2. With a half-billion dollars in assets, the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation is the premier reactionary grantmaking foundation in the country. It has played a major role in the development of both a philosophical approach and an activist agenda for the national pro-corporate conservative movement. Bradley is a leading force in a constellation of other foundations, institutions, media networks and legal action projects created to advance a racist, right-wing agenda. For example: Bradley is a major funding source for the Center for Individual Rights, the public law firm that successfully argued Hopwood vs. the State of Texas, a challenge to affirmative action policies at the University of Texas Law School. That 1996 decision effectively eliminated affirmative action in the state university systems of Texas as well as in neighboring Mississippi and Louisania. Through its funding of the National Association of Scholars, Bradley played a key role in last year'successful anti-affirmative action campaign. The co-author of CCRI is Thomas Wood, executive director of the state affiliate of the NAS, which receives over $100,000 a year from Bradley. As a result of these two Bradley initiatives, there has been a sharp decline in the numbers of Black and Latino students entering law school this fall in the university systems of California and Texas, the country's two most populous states. Not only will these mean a severe drop in the number of future Black and Latino lawyers in those states, but also a reduction in the number of Black and Latino elected officials as well, many of whom traditionally come from a legal background. Bradley money supports the Pacific Legal Foundation, a right-wing legal advocacy group that provided pro bono representation to California Gov. Pete Wilson in his challenge to five state statutes dealing with affirmative action in state employment and contracting goals. A bill that would end affirmative action on the federal level was drafted by Clint Bolick, vice-president and director of litigation for the Institute for Justice, another recipient of Bradley money. Earlier in his career, Bolick led the legal defense for the first Wisconsin voucher law, while working for the Landmark Legal Foundation, another Bradley recipient. Bolick also played a pivital role in behavioral modification. The goal was not the "empowerment" of poor people through acquiring jobs and independence, but rather their total regulation, on the theory that these are basically inferior people incapable of running thier own lives. Attacks on Lani Guinier, President Clinton's nominee to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Bolick's Wall Street Journal opinion piece entiitled "Clinton's Quota Queens" helped to throw the Guinier nomination on the defensive. Bolick alsotad withdrew his nomination and today proportional representation has suffered severe judicial defeats. In 1992, Bradley gave $11,850 to author David Brock for the publication of his work The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story. The book, which attacked Hill's credibility, was based on an article Brock wrote for The American Spectator magazine, another Bradley grantee. These attacks helped ensure the confirmation of jurist Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he played a key role in continuing attacks on affirmative action. Bradley grants also support such major right-wing groups as the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, literary home for such racist authors as Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) and Dinesh D'Souza (The End of Racism). The Bell Curve as an Ideological Justification for W-2 Charles Murray was the author of the book "Losing Ground," which argued that poverty is the result of individual failings and that anti-poverty programs such as welmed up with another Bradley-funded organization, The Free Congress Foundation, to orchestrate further attacks on Guinier. The nominee's crime was to suggest that proportional reprrme diversity among state legislators and judges. Responding to the attacks, 13,000 annually. After writing "Losing Ground," Murray teamed up with Harvard psychologist and eugenisist Richard Hernstein to write the book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in Amercian Life. The book argued that poverty is the result, ot of social conditions or policies, but rather of the supposidly inferior genetic traits of a sub-class of human beings. It was widely seen as a piece of profoundly racist and classist psuedo-science. Immediately after the book's publication, Bradley raised Murray's annual grant to $163,000. Murray and Hernstein's prescription for an end to povery and the "threat" of a growing "underclass" was the elimination of all social welfare programs and their replacement by a work-centered program of coercion annnat minimum wage. The NCNE's president is Robert L. Woodson, Sr., who from 1977 to 1995 was a Resident Fellow at the Bradley-funded American Enterprise Institute, the same time period in which AEI Fellow Charles Muwas co-writing The Bell Curve. Bradley Commissions W-2 According to an article in the March 2, 1997 edition of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, a "major architect" of W-2 was the Hudson Institute. The Hudson Institute is a right-wing think tank based in Indianapolis. Members of its Board of Trustees include former vice president Dan Quale and former Nixon chief of staff Gen. Alexander Haig. In 1995, Bradley gave Hudson a $175,000 grant "to support a study of welfare reform in Wisconsin." In 1994, Hudson had received $600,000 from Bradley. Hudson describes its Bradley-funded Welfare Policy Center in Madison as "an outgrowth of Hudson's unique participation in helping the State of Wisconsin design and implement Wisconsin Works (W-2)." Further, Hudson "continues to assist the state with the challenge of successfully implementing Wisconsin Works." Bradley Funds Implementation of W-2 Another major Bradley recipient is the Washington, D.C.-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, founded in 1981, the first year of the Reagan Administration. Its board of directors includes Michael Baroody of the anti-union National Association of Manufacturers: Jack Kemp, promoter of "supply side economics"; and Robert Beaver of McDonald's Corp., the country's largest employer of Black youth--esentation might be a reasonable means to ensure some diversity among state legislators and judges. The book played a key role in preparing the Reagan-era attacks on social services. From at least 1986 to 1989, Bradley was giving Murray an annual grant of $90,000. By 1991, it was paying him $ national welfare program, AFDC. The task force convened in Milwaukee at a conference underwritten by the Bradley and Helen Bader foundations. Its "GAPP Report" is essentially a blueprint for the implementation of W-2, calling for direct government funding of community-based organizations (regardless of qualifications) and an end to "burdensome regulations" governing child care and social service delivery. In no area does it call for recognizing the rights on the part of the people who would be "servicedddd" by the network of "providers." The poor are assumed to be poor because of personal failings. They must be placed in a tightly regimented structure in order to "succeed" The NCNE also organized "leadership training" workshops in Milwaukee, funded by the Bader Foundation. These NCNE "leaders" are expected to play local roles in the implementation of W-2. Milwaukee as Bradley's Social Laboratory The racist philosophy espoused in The Bell Curve, the anti-poor attacks represented by W-2 and the reduction of social services recommended in the GAPP Report are all coming together in Milwaukee. In this, the most segregated of U.S. cities, Bradley has found a local laboratory to experiment with its twisted theories of social engineering. ------------------------------------ The Bradley Foundation, "The Bell Curve" and the Real Story Behind W-2, Wisconsin's National Model for Welfare Reform. An Investigative Report by Phil Wilayto Coordinator, A Job is a Right Campaign, Milwaukee, Wisconsin The welfare "reform" program developed in the U.S.A. by the state of Wisconsin has been held up as a model not only for other states but for other countries as well. The essence of this program, known as "Wisconsin Works" or "W-2", is the complete elimination of any contractual obligation by the government to provide for the most needy of society, specifically single mothers with children. Instead, that obligation -- dating back to the massive labor struggles of the Great Depression -- has been replaced by a draconian program of forced labor at wages inadequate to maintain a reasonable standard of living. Hailed by government apologists as a daring response to the challenges of poverty, it has meant increased misery for the poor while bringing massive profits for private businesses and so-called "non-profit" agencies. The Feeding Trough explores the roots of W-2 in the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the country's leading right-wing funder of conservative causes. Bradley money has fueled the national attacks on affirmative action, attempts to destroy the public educational system and the propaganda campaign designed to undermine a wide range of social welfare programs, in particular Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The report pays special attention to Bradley's racial agenda, which has included funding some of the most notoriously racist pseudo-scientific books of the last decade, such as "The Bell Curve" by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein. Some of the individuals, organizations and books that receive attention in the report include: The Bradley Foundation The Bader Foundation Losing Ground The Bell Curve W-2 The Hudson Institute William Bennett & Empower America Robert L. Woodson, Sr. & the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise Newt Gingrich & the Contract on America The Clinton Administration Economic Zones Gov. Tommy Thompson The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development The Private Industry Council Goodwill Industries of SE Wisc. Manpower, Inc. OIC-GM UMOS YW-Works Maximus, Inc. The New Hope Project and many, many, more. Activists in other areas would do well to familiarize themselves now with the background to the development of W-2 and the racist and anti-working class premises it is built on. Here are what some elected officials, labor leaders and community activists have to say about "The Feeding Trough": "After reading the information that you provide, the readers can better conceptualize this type of wickedness in high places... And after conceptualizing those Powers better and what's going on around us better, then we are better equipped with that knowledge to go to war against those Principalities and Powers." -- MINISTER WILLIAM MUHAMMAD, Muhammad's Mosque No. 3, Milwaukee "Five Stars!" -- STAN YASAITIS, President, AFSCME Local 82, Milwaukee "Wilayto argues in this report that W-2 is less about getting welfare recipients into real, family-supporting jobs than it is about providing corporations with subsidies and inexpensive workers who are easy to control." -- JOYCE EVANS, Columnist, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "... it succeeds in examining core issues in the welfare debate, and it offers a troubling thesis regarding the role and intentions of Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation in shaping W-2." -- John Nichols, Columnist, Madison Capitol Times "I highly recommend that all providers and employers read The Feeding Trough before they decide whether to become overseers on the New Plantation." -- GWENDOLYNNE MOORE, Wisconsin State Senator This new government/corporate partnership for reinstituting chattel slavery is most insidious. But before we can overcome it, we must first be able to recognize it. Thank God for Phil Wilayto's most necessary and important study." -- JOHNNIE MORRIS-TATUM, Wisconsin State Representative "The Feeding Trough exposes the relationship between the Public Policies of the Thompson Administration and millions of Bradley Foundation Dollars." -- JAMES WHITE, Milwaukee County Supervisor "A good, thorough investigative job." -- JOHN NEELANDER, Managing Editor, Racine Labor "... an encyclopedia of national information and a textbook of national character... It is the story of America." -- JAMES CAMERON, Founder-President-CEO, America's Black Holocaust Museum "It's nothing but unreconstructed Marxist-Leninism." -- MICHAEL JOYCE, President, The Bradley Foundation The Feeding Trough -- 140 pp. -- $10.00 To order, send name, address and check or money order for $12.00 (includes shipping) to: A Job is a Right Campaign, PO Box 06053, Milwaukee, WI 53206. (Make check or money order payable to: AJRC/W-2.) For overseas orders, please add an additional $5 for shipping. For more information, contact AJRC at the above address or at: Phone/Fax: (414) 374-1034; email: ajrc@execpc.com An Introduction to what The Feeding Trough is about. A Detailed Summary of the contents. A Related Story on Kenneth Starr. Periodic updates on the Bradley Foundation: [1] [2] [3]. Back to AJRC Home Page. http://www.execpc.com/~ajrc/ft.html http://www.execpc.com/~ajrc/ft.html