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External LinksCursor.orgMediaTransparency.org sponsor More stories by Bill Berkowitz PERC receives Templeton Freedom Award for promoting 'enviropreneurs' Media Transparency writersAndrew J. Weaver FundometerEvaluate any page on the World Wide Web against our databases of people, recipients, and funders of the conservative movement. |
ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz Michael Joyce (1942-2006)Former Bradley Foundation czar's investments in privatization and faith-based initiatives helped build the modern conservative movementIf there was a Hall of Fame for right wing philanthropists and their facilitators -- and who knows, the Heritage Foundation just might establish such an institution some day -- one of its first inductees would undoubtedly be Michael Joyce. In 1986, Joyce was named in an Atlantic Monthly article as "one of the three people most responsible for the triumph Shortly after the first inauguration of President George W. Bush, Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal, wrote in that newspaper, "Michael Joyce is the closest thing to the original source for what Mr. Bush is trying to accomplish." When Joyce retired from the Bradley Foundation, Bradley Board Chairman Allen M. Taylor pointed out that he had made "extraordinary contributions to the Foundation and to the world of philanthropy." Joyce "built a start-up into a nationally respected institution and leaves a durable record of remarkable accomplishment. His work will be remembered with pride, not only in Milwaukee and Wisconsin but throughout the nation. We all owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude and wish him well in his future endeavors. He still has much to give." Joyce, who died last Friday at age 63 from liver illness, earned his well-deserved reputation as a major shaker of the right wing money-tree during his 16-year reign (1985-2001) as head of the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. He was a pioneering force behind the privatization of welfare -- funding initiatives that led to the Wisconsin Works program in Wisconsin -- and private school vouchers -- which is experiencing a rebirth through the Bush Administration's recently proposed budget. During his tenure at Bradley he helped it become one of the nation's most influential conservative philanthropic institutions. Steadfast in its pursuit of a conservative agenda, Joyce recognized the importance of creating and sustaining a broad infrastructure of right wing think tanks -- with its well-funded stable of researchers and academics -- a host of publications, chairs at academic institutions, and smaller local advocacy groups. On the local level, Bradley money was "earmarked for civic concerns -- a first rate museum, music and theatre, and above all for Mike, several million to keep the Brewers in town," Peter Collier wrote in his tribute to Joyce posted at David Horowitz's FrontPage website. "But he also believed that the Bradley Foundation had to play a national role. It seemed improbable: At $600 million or so, Bradley was small by comparison with Ford, Rockefeller, and other of the other liberal foundations that were postmodernizing America. But Mike felt that by leveraging its money with the neo conservative worldview, he could multiply the effect of the Foundation's smaller resources and make it a player. And this was what happened during his 15 years at Bradley. The Foundation, a mere David in comparison to the leftish philanthropic Goliaths, hit them squarely in the forehead with programs that countered their far more expensive own." More than giving other people's money awayAfter working as a high school teacher and football coach, Joyce took his first job in philanthropy at the Morris Goldseker Foundation in Baltimore. He later joined the Bradley Foundation after working with the New York-based Institute for Educational Affairs (IEA) and the John M. Olin Foundation (1979-1985). The IEA was described by Barbara Miner in the Spring 1994 issue of Rethinking Schools, as "a neoconservative organization started by right wing trailblazer Irving Kristol and William Simon, secretary of the treasury for Presidents Nixon and Ford." The John M. Olin Foundation, which recently funded itself out of business, was for years, one of the ideological mainstays of conservative foundations. According to the National Review's John J. Miller, "At the John M. Olin Foundation, he played a part in launching the Federalist Society, starting The New Criterion, and providing Allan Bloom with the financial support that eventually would allow him to write The Closing of the American Mind (which in its initial form was an essay in National Review)." Joyce also served on President Ronald Reagan's transition team in 1980, and on several Reagan-Bush advisory boards and task forces. Joyce joined Bradley at a propitious moment; the foundation received an infusion of $280 million from the sale of Allen-Bradley Co. to Rockwell International. Almost overnight, Bradley became a major player to be reckoned with. The Bradley Foundation was where Joyce solidified his national reputation as a philanthropic facilitator par excellence. From 1985 (the start of the Joyce period) until 2003 (two years after he left the organization), the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation spread its money about liberally -- both nationally and within the state of Wisconsin -- giving nearly $500 million. The top five recipients were Partners Advancing Values in Education, Inc. -- $17,536,419; American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research -- $15,892,797; The Heritage Foundation -- $13,283,702; Milwaukee School of Engineering -- $10,794,119; and Marquette University -- $10,102,102. The list of right wing think tanks and public policy institutes that received money from Bradley reads like a who's who of the modern conservative movement, and includes Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the San Francisco, California-based Institute for Contemporary Studies, David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Robert Woodson's National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, the Institute for Justice, and the Philanthropy Roundtable (a network of conservative foundations). Pushing the conservative movement forward meant relying on and supporting a distasteful stable of controversial figures. According to a June 2001 report published by TomPaine.com, in October 1996, Kathleen Biddick, Associate Professor in the History Department and the Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Notre Dame, spoke at the Gender Studies' Critical Issues Roundtable. In her talk, 'What Price Does It Cost To Silence Queers At U.N.D.?' she described some of the Bradley Foundation's grants to individuals: Grants to conservative writers included: Dinesh D'Souza for The End of Racism, a book that preposterously claimed there is no more racism in the US because it wouldn't make business sense; Charles Murray for The Bell Curve, an argument for the genetic intellectual inferiority of Blacks [According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Joyce said the foundation never specifically funded the book and did not endorse its conclusions"]; David Brock for The Real Anita Hill "which characterized Anita Hill as 'slightly nutty slightly slutty'" [Brock, who currently heads the liberal watchdog group, Media Matters for America, has since repudiated the book]; and Christina Hoff Sommers for Who Stole Feminism." Biddick said: "I think you get the drift here -- the Bradley Foundation and its cross-linked affiliates at the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Olin Foundation...seem to derive special pleasure in targeting Blacks, especially Black women." According to a Right Web profile, Joyce also had his hands firmly planted in foreign policy issues as well: "He helped establish two of William Kristol's outfits, PNAC and the Project for the Republican Future, which helped spearhead the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994." Shortly after leaving Bradley, Joyce was called upon by President Bush to help rescue the president's then-floundering faith-based initiative. Joyce, an experienced supporter of issues related to "charitable choice," was brought on board "to undertake a private initiative to help get this legislation through," Karl Rove told the Washington Post. Joyce quickly founded two new organizations and set out to raise millions of dollars. He set up the Washington, DC-based Americans for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprise (ACFE) to "advocate an expansion of charitable choice, tax credits, and other means of bringing faith-centered and community solutions to social ills." US Newswire reported that the second organization, the Phoenix-based Foundation for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprise (FCFE), was intended to "study and promote policies that encourage corporations, philanthropies, private foundations and individuals to provide resources to faith-centered and community groups... [and] encourage the full recognition and the vital role such groups must play in American life and culture." The right clearly admired Joyce not only as a disciplined facilitator of funds, but also as a visionary who was willing to speak his mind freely and play hardball politics. In "On Self-Government," an article published in the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review that was adopted from a speech he gave as part of the foundation's 25th anniversary lecture series in 1998, Joyce placed America's moral decline squarely at the feet of "progressive liberalism and its ambitious quest over the past century to build a great 'national community.'" He possessed a bulldog-like intensity: He once told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that "my style was the style of the toddler and the adolescent: fight, fight, fight, rest, get up, fight, fight, fight. No one ever accused me of being pleasant. I made a difference. It was acknowledged by friends and foe." Shortly after he retired from Bradley, Joyce told an audience at Georgetown University that "At Olin and later at Bradley, our overarching purpose was to use philanthropy to support a war of ideas to defend and help recover the political imagination of the [nation's] founders--the self-evident truth that rights and worth are a legacy of the creator -- not the result of some endless revaluing of values." Peter Collier pointed out that Joyce "hated the Left and what it had done to this country." According to Collier, when he and Horowitz made their mid-1980s conversion to conservatism and were "looking for funding to start a Second Thoughts Movement to bring together the handful of others who were also refugees from the '60s Left, we stopped in Milwaukee to see Mike, who had just recently begun at Bradley. He supported the Second Thoughts movement and kept supporting us without hesitation in endeavors like Encounter Books." It was Joyce's vision that pushed the Bradley Foundation, and the conservative movement, forward. In the end, Collier noted, rather than wanting to be known as a philanthropist, Joyce would have liked "to be remembered as an artist (perhaps a trapeze artist, because he worked, ultimately to his peril, without a net) of social change." Joyce the ideological workhorse, privatization maven, and "artist" without a net, certainly left his mark on the political landscape. But the "godfather of modern philanthropy," also left many of his fellow citizens barely hanging on to a tattered social safety net. sign in, or register to email stories or comment on them.
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MORE ORIGINAL RESEARCHBill Berkowitz PERC receives Templeton Freedom Award for promoting 'enviropreneurs'Right Wing foundation-funded anti-environmental think tank grabbing a wider audience for 'free market environmentalism' On the 15th anniversary of Terry Anderson and Donald Leal's book "Free Market Environmentalism" -- the seminal book on the subject -- Anderson, the Executive Director of the Bozeman, Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC - formerly known as the Political Economy Research Center) spoke in late-January at an event sponsored by Squaw Valley Institute at the Resort at Squaw Creek in California. While it may have been just another opportunity to speak on "free market environmentalism" and not the kickoff of a "victory tour," nevertheless it comes at a time when PERC's ideas are taking root.
Bill Berkowitz Neil Bush of Saudi ArabiaDuring recent visit, President’s brother describes the country as a 'kind of tribal democracy' In late February, only a few days after Saudi Arabia beheaded four Sri Lankan robbers and then left their headless bodies on public display in the capital of Riyadh, Neil Bush, for the fourth time in the past six years, showed up for the country's Jeddah Economic Forum. The Guardian reported that Human Rights Watch "said the four men had no lawyers during their trial and sentencing, and were denied other basic legal rights." In an interview with Arab News, the Saudi English language paper, Bush described the country as "a kind of tribal democracy."
Bill Berkowitz Newt Gingrich's back door to the White HouseAmerican Enterprise Institute "Scholar" and former House Speaker blames media for poll showing 64 percent of the American people wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances Whatever it is that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has come to represent in American politics, the guy is nothing less than fascinating. One day he's espousing populist rhetoric about the need to cut the costs of college tuition and the next day he's talking World War III. One day he's claiming that the "war on terror" may force the abridgement of fundamental first amendment rights and the next he's advancing a twenty-first century version of his Contract with America. At the same time he's publicly proclaiming how "stupid" it is that the race for the presidency has already started you know that he's trying to figure out how to out finesse Rudy, McCain and Romney for the nomination. And last week, when Fox News' Chris Wallace cited a poll showing that 64 percent of the public would never vote for him, he was quick to blame those results on how unfairly he was treated by the mainstream media back in the day.
Bill Berkowitz American Enterprise Institute takes lead in agitating against IranDespite wrongheaded predictions about the war on Iraq, neocons are on the frontlines advocating military conflict with Iran After doing such a bang up job with their advice and predictions about the outcome of the war on Iraq, would it surprise you to learn that America's neoconservatives are still in business? While at this time we are not yet seeing the same intense neocon invasion of our living rooms -- via cable television's news networks -- that we saw during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, nevertheless, a host of policy analysts at conservative think tanks -- most notably the American Enterprise Institute -- are being heeded on Iran by those who count - folks inside the Bush Administration.
Bill Berkowitz After six years, opposition gaining on George W. Bush's Faith Based InitiativeUnmentioned in the president's State of the Union speech, the program nevertheless continues to recruit religious participants and hand out taxpayer money to religious groups With several domestic policy proposals unceremoniously folded into President Bush's recent State of the Union address, two pretty significant items failed to make the cut. Despite the president's egregiously tardy response to the event itself, it was nevertheless surprising that he didn't even mention Hurricane Katrina: He didn't offer up a progress report, words of hope to the victims, or come up with a proposal for moving the sluggish rebuilding effort forward. There were no "armies of compassion" ready to be unleashed, although it should be said that many in the religious community responded to the disaster much quicker than the Bush Administration. In the State of the Union address, however, there was no "compassionate conservatism" for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
Bill Berkowitz Frank Luntz calls Republican leadership in Washington 'One giant whining windbag'On the outs with the GOP, legendary degrader of discourse is moving to California He doesn't make great art; nothing he does elevates the human spirit; he doesn't illuminate, he bamboozles. He has become expert in subterfuge, hidden meanings, word play and manipulation. Frank Luntz has been so good at what he does that those paying close attention gave it its own name: "Luntzspeak."
Bill Berkowitz Spooked by MoveOn.org, conservative movement seeks to emulate liberal powerhouseFueled with Silicon Valley money, TheVanguard.org will have Richard Poe, former editor of David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine as its editorial and creative director As Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the modern conservative movement and still a prominent actor in it, likes to say, he learned a great deal about movement building by closely observing what liberals were up to in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Bill Berkowitz Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action jihadFounder and Chair of the American Civil Rights Institute scouting five to nine states for new anti-affirmative action initiatives Fresh from his most recent victory -- in Michigan this past November -- Ward Connerly, the Black California-based maven of anti-affirmative action initiatives, appears to be preparing to take his jihad on the road. According to a mid-December report in the San Francisco Chronicle, Connerly said that he was "exploring moves into nine other states."
Bill Berkowitz Tom Tancredo's missionThe Republican congressman from Colorado will try to woo GOP voters with anti-immigration rhetoric and a boatload of Christian right politics These days, probably the most recognizable name in anti-immigration politics is Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo. Over the past year, Tancredo has gone from a little known congressman to a highly visible anti-immigration spokesperson. "Tancredo has thoroughly enmeshed himself in the anti-immigration movement and with the help of CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, he has been given a national megaphone," Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group, told Media Transparency.
Bill Berkowitz Institute on Religion and Democracy slams 'Leftist' National Council of ChurchesNew report from conservative foundation-funded IRD charges the NCC with being a political surrogate for MoveOn.org, People for the American Way and other liberal organizations If you prefer your religious battles sprinkled with demagoguery, sanctimoniousness, and simplistic attacks, the Institute on Religion and Democracy's (IRD) latest broadside against the National Council of Churches (NCC) certainly fits the bill.
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