The Bradley Watch is an insert to the bi-monthly newsletter of A Job is a Right Campaign. A follow-up to our report The Feeding Trough, it’s purpose is to disseminate new information on the Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, like-minded foundations, think tanks & institutes and the social/political initiatives they are promoting. We welcome comments, tips, leads from our readers. The Bradley Watch is written and edited by Phil Wilayto, coordinator of A Job is a Right Campaign and author of the report The Feeding Trough.
In just a few weeks, Milwaukee’s new Midwest Express Convention Center will host its first function: a conference of the National Governor’s Association. The top elected administrators for all 50 states will gather here to listen to former NGA president Gov. Tommy Thompson extol the virtues of what he calls The Wisconsin Miracle. It’s no accident the NGA is meeting in Wisconsin. In the development of public policy, different geographical areas serve different purposes. California, with its statewide voter referendums, has acted as a bellwether for broad policy changes. New York City, with 17 million people in its metro area, has been the battleground for the broad enactment of major programs. Wisconsin, a medium-sized state with a hyper-segregated African American community, has become a kind of incubator for key right-wing national policy initiatives. Well-funded, well-publicized pilot projects in areas such as welfare reform and school voucher programs are developed here and then exported around the county.
A key factor in this overall development has been the role played by Milwaukee’s own Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. What began as a local, family-based foundation has grown to become the country’s largest, best endowed and most influential conservative grantmaker. Bradley money helped fund the overturn of state affirmative action programs in California, Texas and now Washington state. Bradley-funded authors such as Charles Murray (Losing Ground and The Bell Curve) have helped prepare public opinion for the overturn of welfare programs such as AFDC. Bradley money supports right-wing think tanks such as the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis (attacks on social security and public schools), the Manhattan Institute (privatization of NYC city services and an end to open admissions in the city and state college systems) and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (welfare reform, school vouchers and prison-labor-for-profit.)
In June of 1997, A Job is a Right Campaign published The Feeding Trough: The Bradley Foundation, ‘The Bell Curve’ and the Real Story Behind W-2, Wisconsin’s National Model for Welfare Reform. This 140-page report documents the role of Bradley and the other right-wing foundations in not only funding these various policy initiatives, but in formulating them and manipulating public opinion to support them.
To date, over 1,000 copies of the report have been distributed. It was favorably reviewed by New York’s Welfare Law Center, the leading information clearinghouse for legal workers and activists fighting workfare programs around the country. Members of AJRC have been interviewed or quoted by national news media such as the McNeil-Lehrer Report, the Village Voice and Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now program. We were invited to participate in a panel on welfare reform at last year’s conference of the National Caucus of Black State Legislators. There have been numerous speaking engagements at colleges and universities in Wisconsin and Illinois.
All this is good, but none of it will stop the onslaught of right-wing initiatives being pushed by Bradley, Gov. Tommy Thompson and their legislative cohorts. What’s needed is ORGANIZATION. We have tried to follow our own advice in a modest way here in Milwaukee, but so much more is needed.
Using our newsletter, this Bradley Watch insert and this web site, we will try to provide more of the information that can help activists around the country expose and oppose the role of the foundations and their proteges in expanding the Bradley Program.
Ultimately, however, our fight isn’t with Bradley -- it’s with that small 1% of the population that owns and controls the economy and is trying to systematically eliminate any obstacle to the complete maximization of their profits. But exposing the mechanisms they are currently using -- the whole spectrum of reactionary foundations, think tanks, periodicals, law offices, authors and assorted intellectual mercenaries -- can be a useful weapon in this struggle.
We hope you agree. If you do, please help us get the report out further. Forward new information to us. Invite us out to speak. Stay in touch and stay committed to beating back this reactionary assault. Together, we can win!
[A longer version of this article first appeared in the national newsweekly Workers World.]
In a decision with great importance for parents of schoolchildren across the country, particularly in the communities of color, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled June 10 that taxpayer money allocated to the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) system could be used to send students to religious schools. While four other states have similar court battles pending, this is the first to reach the level of a state supreme court. Opponents vowed to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Under the Milwaukee program, parents are given "vouchers" in the amount theoretically allocated for each student in the city’s public school system. Parents can then use these vouchers toward the cost of tuition at private schools. Because the vouchers are given to the parents as opposed to the schools themselves, the state court ruled that expanding the program to include religious schools did not violate either Wisconsin law or the First Amendment in regard to the separation of church and state.
In Milwaukee, most private schools are religious, so including religious schools was crucial to expanding the voucher program. However, describing the issue as simply one of defending the separation of church and state misses the point. The real essence of the "choice" movement is the creation of a publicly funded, two-tier system of education -- one private, predominately middle and upper income white, the other public, poor and overwhelmingly students of color. While the present program is still limited to low-income families, it’s clear that lifting the income caps will be a major focus of the school choice movement.
"Choice" advocates argue that taking money from public schools in the form of vouchers won’t result in further pressures on already financially strapped inner city schools, since there will be proportionately fewer students left in the public schools to educate. However, losing 10% of the students in MPS won’t result in a 10% reduction in the cost of heating, electricity, rent, mortgage or bond payments. But it will mean staff layoffs, larger class sizes and less individual attention to students -- thereby accelerating the demand for an expansion of the voucher and charter programs. (Voucher, or "choice" programs involve schools entirely separate from the public schools, while "charter" schools continue to operate within the framework of the public school system. Both are free to disregard union contracts.)
It’s true there are tremendous problems facing the public schools. For one thing, they’re funded by property taxes, so schools in well-off neighborhoods are much better funded and equipped than those in poorer neighborhoods. In Milwaukee, while 75% of the students are from communities of color as compared to only 20% of the teachers, the teachers’ union has historically resisted efforts at "super-seniority" which would allow lower-seniority Black and Latino teachers to be placed in their own communities. The union leadership has also opposed community control of curriculum and has fought for an end to residency rules that require teachers to live in the communities they serve.
So there are legitimate community concerns about the public schools, but these concerns have been manipulated by other, more powerful forces with a vested interest in weakening not only the teachers’ unions but the public school system itself.
In fact, the choice and charter movements are cut from the same cloth as so-called welfare reform and the attacks on affirmative action. Welfare reform creates a class of super-exploited workers with little room for advancement. Weakening affirmative action reduces competition for the fewer, better paid jobs. And choice and charter programs attack one of the greatest social "welfare" programs in the U.S.: the public school system. All three efforts greatly reduce economic opportunities for people of color while pouring vastly increased profits into the pockets of the already super-rich.
Wisconsin has been in the forefront of the choice movement since 1990 when Milwaukee became the first city to begin a voucher program. Wisconsin is also home to W-2, the draconian welfare "reform" program now being promoted as a national model. Both programs were fostered, funded and nurtured by the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
Bradley paid for the lawyers who defended the first voucher program in court. Bradley provided millions of dollars to independently expand the voucher program when it was tied up in court battles. And Bradley money funded the "grassroots community groups" quoted so often in the media as supporting the program.
The Wisconsin court decision is sure to spur attempts to rapidly expand voucher programs around the country. While all attempts to block that expansion should be supported, any movement to defend the public school system is doomed to failure unless it is based first of all on the workers and poor who are most directly affected, and in particular, unless it makes the struggle against racism the first item on its agenda. Only a united, militant, working class movement that promotes the principle of self-determination and community control for the oppressed communities can have any hope of turning back this well-funded, concerted right-wing assault.
Here’s a recent item from Publishers Weekly that will be of interest to our friends in California:
The Bradley Foundation, a Milwaukee-based conservative institution, is providing the seed money to launch Encounter Books, a new publishing house that will publish nonfiction titles in the field of history, culture and public affairs. Bradley is investing $3.5 million in start-up capital, although a spokesperson for the foundation said Encounter will be an autonomous and independent publisher. The company will be based in San Francisco, and Peter Collier, the author of several biographies, has been named editor-in-chief. The new house expects to publish its first 10 titles in the year 2000 and anticipates publishing approximately 20 titles per year by 2002.
FYI: Peter Collier and David Horowitz were editors of the progressive magazine Ramparts in the 60’s. They have since both found profitable careers in denouncing their youthful ideals. The two have co-authored such titles as The Heterodoxy Handbook: How to Survive the PC Campus and Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties.
The Badger Herald, an independent student newspaper at UW/Madison, reported in its March 20th edition that "The next New Hope Project trial will be placed in Oakland, Calif., when sufficient funds can be raised to start the project." We examined New Hope in The Feeding Trough. This was a Milwaukee welfare-to-work project, the stated goal of which was "...to demonstrate that poor Americans can work their way out of poverty if given incentives to work for adequate wages and benefits." It was really a prototype for W-2. According to Charles Wright, head of the Private Industry Council that oversees W-2 in Milwaukee County, "The New Hope Project serves as a valuable model for implementing the W-2 program in Milwaukee." Wright is also the second vice-chair of the board of directors of Goodwill Industries of SE Wisconsin, the largest of the five W-2 administrating agencies in the county and a "non-profit" that has profited tremendously from W-2 labor. (Goodwill’s relationship to welfare reform was the inspiration for the title of our report.) Our evaluation of the project was that its real goal was to provide a kind of humanitarian fig leaf to welfare reform while working out the kinks of the program itself. One of the unfortunate things about New Hope was that it included on its board of directors not only the president of the local Goodwill, but also the head of the Milwaukee County Labor Council. (That was the fig leaf part of the arrangement.) With the full implementation of W-2, there are now 10,000 workers in the Milwaukee providing absolutely free labor to area employers. With less than 70,000 union members in the county, it’s easy to see the effect of W-2 on labor’s bargaining position. Union leaders in Oakland would be wise to refuse to collaborate with the New Hope Project in their area. (By the way, the Badger Herald article also described how New Hope was praised as a model for welfare reform by a leader of Britain’s Labour Party, which in January began promoting its own version of workfare, called the New Deal [!]
Wonder how Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, got invited to UW/Milwaukee last fall to headline a "debate" on affirmative action? Well, since June of 1997, the president of the Board of Regents for the entire University of Wisconsin system has been investment banker Sheldon Lubar -- a member of Bradley’s Board of Directors. Murray got paid $7,000 for that visit. Other "anti’s" on the panel were UC Board of Regents member Ward Connerly, a leader in the Prop 209 anti-affirmative action campaign in California, and Lydia Chavez, a Heritage Foundation "fellow." AJRC took part in a student/community protest of that panel.
Researchers in New York City inform us that the Bradley-funded Institute for Justice plans to open an office soon in that city. The Institute is a legal advocacy office based in Washington, D.C. that has as its strategic goal the complete deregulation of the U.S. economy. Its overall target is what it calls the "regulatory welfare state," by which it means any legal restriction on businesses to maximize their profits, or any legislative or court-mandated program or institution that requires the use of public money to benefit poor, working or middle class people. Among its goals are the elimination of all affirmative action programs, the Davis-Bacon Act and the concept of free and universal public schooling.
The Institute was founded in 1991 by William H. "Chip" Mellor and Clint Bolick. Mellor, the group’s president and general counsel, was Deputy General Counsel for Legislation and Regulations in the Dept. of Energy under President Reagan. He then served as president of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, the San Francisco-based think tank that is Gov. Pete Wilson’s favored source of information regarding privatization and water rights.
The Institute’s other co-founder, vice president and director of litigation is Clint Bolick. Bolick, who is white, presents himself as a friend of the African American community, but his record speaks otherwise. He is the author of a number of books attacking affirmative action and is also the author of legislation that would end all affirmative action on the federal level. He played a pivotal role in the right-wing attack on Lani Guinier, Clinton’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Bolick’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece (with the blatantly racist title "Clinton’s Quota Queen") helped to throw Guinier on the defensive. (Bolick, by the way, was an assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission when Clarence Thomas was chairman. They got close enough that Bolick asked Thomas to be godfather to his youngest son.)
The Institute has played a key role in the promotion of school voucher programs in Wisconsin, where Bolick and his co-counsel Kenneth Starr (yes, that Kenneth Starr) defended the state’s first voucher legislation against legal challenges. In 1992, the Institute filed lawsuits in Chicago and Los Angeles to promote school vouchers. This year the group is involved in voucher litigation in Vermont and again in Wisconsin. Other initiatives of the Institute include legal challenges to the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires the payment of prevailing (union) wages for federally subsidized building projects.
Bolick has been involved in a number of efforts to end regulation of small businesses with the goal of setting legal precedents that could then be applied to giant corporations. His intention in New York is reportedly to seek to represent livery drivers in a suit to end restrictions on their ability to pick up street fares. Such a suit would aim to pit the predominantly African American livery drivers against predominantly immigrant taxi drivers. The timing is important because it comes in the middle of a fierce struggle by taxi drivers to defend their meager standard of living against attacks by the Giuliani administration.
New York activists would be well-advised to begin gearing up a campaign to expose the Institute and its racist past before it has a chance to develop relationships among local livery drivers who may not be aware of its record.
Looks like Jason Turner got himself into a little trouble in the Big Apple. Turner, who headed up the Bradley-funded task force that developed the W-2 program, told a New York interviewer that, in his opinion, "Work makes you free." That was the slogan the Nazis hung above the entrance to the Auschwitz slave labor camp. Turner, who now heads up NYC’s giant workfare program, was forced to apologize for the remark.