The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a large and influential right-wing foundation with about half a billion US dollars in assets. According to the Bradley Foundation 1998 Annual Report, it was giving away more than $30 million per year. The Foundation has financed efforts to support welfare reform, to promote school vouchers, to deregulate business, and to privatize government services.
The Bradley Foundation's former president, Michael S. Joyce , was instrumental in creating the Philanthropy Roundtable, a network of foundations that support right-wing advocacy organizations.
In the early 1990s the foundation helped support The American Spectator magazine, which at the time was researching damaging material on President Bill Clinton. Before that, it had paid to have David Brock's attack on Anita Hill published.
The Bradley Foundation has provided important support for think tanks and groups that advocated an attack on Iraq as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, such as the Project for a New American Century and the John M. Olin Center for Strategic Studies . In early 2003, Joyce bragged to a local paper that President George W. Bush and members of his administration were influenced by the policy discussions of those groups. Joyce commented that the attack only hastened Bush's inevitable move towards neoconservatism. [1]
Criticism
Phil Wilayto , a writer for the communist Workers World Party, and Media Transparency , a left wing website that tracks the funding of right wing politics, writes:
- The overall objective of the Bradley Foundation, however, is to return the U.S. -- and the world -- to the days before governments began to regulate Big Business, before corporations were forced to make concessions to an organized labor force. In other words, laissez-faire capitalism: capitalism with the gloves off.
Wilayto also published a 140-page "investigative report" on the Bradley Foundation, The Feeding Trough, on behalf of the "A Job is a Right Campaign" in Milwaukee. The report attacks the Bradley Foundation for allegedly commissioning the studies that supported the Welfare Reform legislation in Wisconsin. Wiyalto has stated that Wisconsin welfare reform is a draconian program that has increased the misery of the poor by supplying business with forced labor at wages inadequate to maintain a reasonable standard of living for the purpose of bringing massive profits to private business and non-profit agencies. He has accused the Bradley Foundation of using the black community of Milwaukee as a laboratory to increase profits.
People for the American Way alleges that the Bradley Foundations underreports its giving to right-wing organizations. [2]
Past and present grantees
List of grants and cumulative amounts given from 1985-2002 [3].
National organizations
Over $10 million
Over $5 million
Over $2 million
Over $1 million
Over $500,000
- Black Alliance for Educational Options
- American Spectator Educational Foundation
Over $100,000
$100,000
Less than $100,000
- Children First America
- Council for the Spanish Speaking
- Potomac Foundation
Unknown
Local charities
Over $5 million
- Wisconsin Policy Research Institute
- Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
Over $1 million
- Madison Center for Educational Affairs
Over $500,000
- Milwaukee Public Library Foundation
Over $100,000
- Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee
- Wisconsin Historical Foundation
Unknown amount
- Association of Midwest Museums
- Epilepsy Association of Southwest Wisconsin
- Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra
- Milwaukee Public Museum
Public officials
Jurists
Writers
External links
Last updated: 05-16-2005 15:08:30
