Phil Wilayto
May 31, 1997

The Feeding Trough

The Bradley Foundation, "The Bell Curve" & the Real Story Behind W-2: Wisconsin's National Model for Welfare Reform

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Media Transparency will soon be publishing The Feeding Trough in its entirety, so stay tuned. One chapter, The Bell Curve: Roadmap to the "Ideal" Society is already available online. In the meantime, here's a synopsis.]

A study by the grassroots organizing group A Job is a Right Campaign has concluded that the Wisconsin welfare reform program known as "W-2" was developed under the guidance of the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation. Bradley is the country's leading ultra-conservative foundation, which, among other things, funded the nortoriously racist book "The Bell Curve", by authors Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein. Murray was actually brought in as a consultant by the task force that developed W-2 for the state of Wisconsin.

The following are some of the highlights of the report:

I - The Racist Agenda of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

The Bradley Foundation, with $600 million in assets, is the premier conservative grantmaking foundation in the country, one that has played a leading role in the development of both a philosophical approach and an activist agenda for the national conservative movement. Bradley is a leading force in a constellation of other conservative foundations, institutions, media networks and legal action projects and has used that leadership position to advance a racist, right-wing political 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 eliminates affirmative action in the state university systems of Texas as well as in neighboring Mississippi and Louisiana.

Through its funding of the National Association of Scholars, Bradley played a key role in last year's successful anti-affirmative action referendum campaign in California, known as the California Civil Rights Initiative. 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.
Bradley money supports the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative 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 the first Wisconsin voucher law, while working for the Landmark Legal Foundation, another Bradley recipient. Bolick also played a pivotal role in attacks on Lani Guinier, President Clinton's nominee to head the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division. Bolick's Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled "Clinton's Quota Queens" helped throw the Guinier nomination on the defensive. Bolick also teamed 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 representation might be a reasonable means of ensuring some diversity among state legislators and judges. Responding to the attacks, Clinton 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.
Bradley grants also support such major right-wing groups as the Heritage Foundation, author of policy papers on budget cuts, supply-side economics and the Star Wars military plan for the Reagan administration; the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, which provides funding for right-wing research and a network of conservative student newspapers; and 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"); former conservative officeholders like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jack Kemp and William Bennett; and arch-conservative jurists Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia.

II - "The Bell Curve" as an Ideological Blueprint for W-2

Charles Murray was the author of the book, "Losing Ground", in which he argued that poverty is the result of individual failings and that anti-poverty programs such as welfare were ill-conceived and should be eliminated. Commenting on the book in the Spring, 1994 issue of the Milwaukee education newspaper Rethinking Schools, Barbara Miner wrote "...Murray called for... an end to all government programs that provide economic support for single mothers such as AFDC, subsidized housing, or food stamps."

From at least 1986 to 1989, Bradley was giving Murray an annual grant of $90,000. By 1991, it was paying him $113,000 annually. In response to criticism of the book, Bradley president Michael Joyce said, "Charles Murray, in my opinion, is one of the foremost social thinkers in the country."

After writing "Losing Ground", Murray teamed up with Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein to write the book "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" According to an article in The New York Times, Hernstein "predicted that as a society became more meritocratic, individuals with low I.Q.s could congregate on the bottom of the economic scale, intermarry and produce offspring with low I.Q.'s." "The Bell Curve" incorporated elements of both Murray's "Losing Ground" and Hernstein's genetic theories. The book argued that poverty is the result, not of social conditions or policies, but of the inferior genetic traits of a sub-class of human beings. It was widely seen as a piece of profoundly racist and classist pseudo-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 poverty 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 and 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 were basically inferior people incapable of running their own lives.

III - Bradley Commissions W-2

According to an article in the March 2, 1997 edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 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 Quayle and former Nixon chief of staff Gen. Alexander Haig. The Institute's president, Leslie Lenkowsky, was deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency under Reagan. The manager of Hudson's research program, Gary L. Geipel, is a former analyst with the CIA. Also employed at the Institute are former Republican presidential hopeful Lamar Alexander; former editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine Norman Podhoretz; and Charles E. Finn, Jr., a founding partner and senior scholar with the Edison Project, the school-for-profit company once under consideration for a contract with the Milwaukee Public Schools system.

n 1995, Bradley gave Hudson a $175,000 grant "to support a study of welfare reform in Wisconsin." In the same year, Bradley also gave Hudson $150,000 "to support a program on the principles of American public policy" and another $70,000 "to support a study of American social and cultural life."

In 1994, Hudson had received $600,000 from Bradley. Hudson has three branch offices: one in New York; one in Brussels, Belgium; and one in Madison, Wisconsin. The Institute's "Welfare Policy Center", according to Hudson's website, "...is supported in part by the Lynde and Harry Bradley and Charles Stewart Mott Foundations" and is "...an outgrowth of Hudson's unique participation in helping the state of Wisconsin design and implement Wisconsin Works [W-2], the landmark welfare replacement plan passed into law early in 1996. A part of the policy team, Hudson worked closely with the state for over two years helping facilitate policy deliberations, researching specific issues, and acting as an independent contributor to the policy development process. Hudson maintains an office in Madison, Wisconsin through which the WPC continues to assist the state with the challenge of successfully implementing Wisconsin Works."

IV - Bradley Funds the Implementation of W-2

The Washington, D.C.-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (grants) was founded in 1981, the first year of the Reagan administration. Among the 17 members of its board of directors are Michael Baroody, of the anti-union National Association of Manufacturers; Jack Kemp, promoter of "supply side economics'; and Robert Beaver, of MacDonalds's Corp., the country's largest employer of Black youth - at minimum wage. In both 1994 and 1995, the NCNE received $225,000 from the Bradley Foundation "for general operations". It also received a two-year, $100,000 grant in 1996 from Milwaukee's Helen Bader Foundation, a newly arrived player in the W-2 "job creation" game, for "additional training in personal leadership skills, organizational development and factors which promote effective community development for grassroots community leaders in Milwaukee." Plus another $25,000 from Bader "to support the planning efforts to increase economic self-sufficiency in Milwaukee's African American community." Plus another $5,000 from Bader "in support of work processes of a task force to study the effectiveness of a local non-profit organization."

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. Woodson is author of such articles as "Blacks Who Use 'Racism' as Their Excuse" (The Wall Street Journal, 9/23/92); "Why I'm Proud to be a Black Conservative" (the Orlando Sentinel, 12/21/91) and many others along the same lines.

According to the NCNE, the group "was asked by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to form a [national] task force to make specific policy recommendations to the 104th Congress." Recommendations for that task force were used to justify Republican calls for an end to the principle national welfare program, AFDC.

That national task force convened here in Milwaukee at a conference underwritten by the Bradley and Bader foundations. Its "GAPP Report" reads like a right-wing Republican wish-list, including items such as the abolishment of the prevailing wage Davis-Bacon Act. In effect, it is a blueprint for the implementation of W-2, calling for direct government funding of community-based organizations regardless of qualifications; an end to "burdensome regulations" governing child care and social service delivery; and an elimination on restrictions for funding of religious organizations. In no area does it call for recognizing any rights on the part of the people who would be "serviced" 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".

On November 29, 1995, Wisconsin state representative Scott Jensen and state assembly speaker David Prosser wrote to Woodson, asking him to organize a state task force of "community leaders and organizations" to "develop strategies for helping community based groups solve social challenges like crime, education, economic development and alcohol and drug abuse" and to recommend ways that "barriers" to the work of these groups could be removed.

Jensen, Majority leader and co-chairman of the powerful Joint Finance Committee, is the right wing legislator who played a key role in attacks on the Social Development Commission, the state's largest anti-poverty agency and one that could have provided some cushion to W-2. He also has proposed selling off some of the 30 state-owned power plants and 18 sewage treatment plants, valued at nearly $193,000 million, "so we can afford more important things, like prisons." Seven years ago, Jensen was the author of Gov. Tommy Thompson's "Central City Initiative."

Woodson did form a "Wisconsin Grassroots Alternative for Public Policy Taskforce", which met a number of times in early 1996. At one such meeting, Rep. Jensen spoke for 25 minutes on the merits of W-2. The task force presented its recommendations to the state legislature on May 13.

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.

IV - And More...

"The Feeding Trough" also examines the central role that Bradley plays in coordinating the work of other right-wing foundations and national initiatives. It examines the agencies and companies that are now playing active roles in the implementation of W-2 in Milwaukee, such as the Greater Milwaukee Committee, the Marcus Corporation, and Aurora Health Care. Special attention is paid to Goodwill Industries of Southeastern Wisconsin, the non-profit agency responsible for two of the six W-2 regions and one-third of the "cases".

The report recognizes there were major flaws with the old welfare system. It argues, however, that solutions to the problems facing poor and working people cannot come from right-wing institutions committed to a racist, anti-working class agenda. Neither will they come from politicians, from whatever party, who accept the basic premises of those institutions. The only real answer is to organize for decent, union-wage jobs or guaranteed income for all.

The AJRC report draws on previous studies of the Bradley Foundation, including "Buying a Movement" by People For the American Way and "Downsizing the American Dream" by the House Democratic Policy Committee. However, the majority of the report is the result of original investigation, using as source material the Bradley and Bader annual reports; Internet websites for Bradley, the Hudson Institute and other conservative organizations; news articles from a wide range of local and national newspapers; as well as interviews with many individuals with knowledge of the background to and implementation of W-2.

Copies of the complete, 140-page report may be ordered from AJRC at the address below. Send name, address and a check or money order for $12.00 (which includes $2 for shipping and handling) made payable to: AJRC/W-2. For more information, contact:

-- Phil Wilayto, Coordinator, A Job is a Right Campaign.

A Job is a Right Campaign is an all-volunteer organization of labor and community activists. The group works on a wide range of issues affecting poor and working people, with a particular emphasis on fighting racism. Founded in January of 1994, AJRC played a leading role in organizing opposition to KKK recruitment rallies in Elkhorn, Wisc. and Rockford, Ill.; supported the union organizing campaign at Milwaukee's Steeltech Manufacturing plant; rallied community support against layoffs at Briggs & Stratton; and supported efforts to oppose a number of cases of police killings of Black youth. AJRC was active in the many rallies and demonstrations opposing W-2.

A Job is a Right Campaign

PO Box 06053, Milwaukee, WI 53206

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