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Wenonah on foundations Subject: Re: interesting facts The influence of foundations on public policy is an interesting subject. I raise a significant amount of foundation money for the Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program at Public Citizen and have had a great deal of experience with foundations attempting to set our agenda and change our point of view. For instance, several of us who work on energy issues in different organizations attempted to fund a large scale campaign against electric utility deregulation and were defunded by The Energy Foundation and Pew Charitable Trusts. Let me be clear, we spoke out against electric utility deregulation and were punished for it. In fact, one of the program officers involved contacted other foundations and told them not to fund my program because we were "too strident." That was 6 years ago when I was criticizing Enron and predicting the failure of utility deregulation. The San Francisco Bay Guardian wrote extensively on the subject of The Energy Foundation and the battle that activists had with the foundation has also been addressed in articles in The Nation. The Energy Foundation is a creation of other large foundations, including Pew and Rockefeller. If you really want to know about foundation influence, I suggest that you read Mark Dowie's 1995 book, "American Foundations: An Investigative History." Dowie questions the wisdom of placing so much power at the disposal of nondemocratic institutions and explores foundation roles in a number of issue areas, including the environment, science, public education, etc. But, to address your "interesting fact" on Ford and Pacifica, it is even more interesting if you know more about the Ford Foundation. Ford was created from the vast Ford automobile fortune in 1936. As, Frances Stonor Saunders describes in "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters," the Ford Foundation was an extension of government policy in the area of cultural propaganda. The following is a quote from that book on page 139. The quote refers to Frank Wisner who was a former Wall Street lawyer who ran the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination. He is famous for hiring Nazis and fascists to do CIA dirty work: "The [Ford] foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with Marshall Plan and CIA officials on specific projects. This reciprocity was further extended when Marshall planner Richard Bissell, under whose signature counterpart funds were signed over to Frank Wisner , came to the Ford Foundation in 1952, accurately predicting there was 'nothing to prevent an individual from exerting as much influence through his work in a private foundation as he could through work in the government'. During his tenure at Ford, Bissell met often with Allen Dulles and other CIA officials...in a 'mutual search' for new ideas. He left suddenly to join the CIA as a special assistant to Allen Dulles in January 1954, but not before he had helped steer the foundation to the vanguard of Cold War thinking." The book describes in detail how Ford participated in creating propaganda that would undermine radical politics in Europe and in the U.S. The CIA was the architect of the strategy and Ford, one of the players. I could go on, but anyone interested in the subject should read the book. So, it is no surprise that Ford gave money to Pacifica at a time when they were pushing for Cold War poltics. It makes perfect sense. So, Joe, was Rojas a heretic? No, but naive and ill informed, yes. It makes me very nervous when anyone wants to replace citizen activism (including individuals giving money to public radio stations) with foundation money. As someone who spends lots of time raising money, having a source (a membership) allows freedom to do the right thing. Isn't the ability to be an independent voice, what we want for Pacifica and WPFW?

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