Bradley Foundation
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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] (http://www.jsonline.com/news/gen/apr03/131523.asp)
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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] (http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=11219)
Past and present grantees
List of grants and cumulative amounts given from 1985-2002 [3] (http://www.mediatransparency.org/search_results/recipientsoffunder.php?providerID=1).
National organizations
Over $10 million
Over $5 million
Over $2 million
Over $1 million
- Brookings Institution
- Intercollegiate Studies Institute
- Institute for American Values
- Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace
- Institute for Educational Advancement
- Institute for Justice
Over $500,000
Over $100,000
- Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability
- Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
- Heartland Institute
- Third Way Foundation (see Third way)
- Progressive Foundation (see Democratic Leadership Council)
$100,000
Less than $100,000
Unknown
- Center for Education Reform
- Child Abuse Prevention Fund
- Corporation for National and Community Service
- Thomas B. Fordham Institute
- Middle East Media Research Institute
- Cato Institute
- Citizens for a Sound Economy
- Institute on Religion and Democracy
- Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf
- Committee for the Free World
- Alexis de Tocqueville Institution
- Institute for Humane Studies
- New Citizenship Project
- Project for the New American Century
Local charities
Over $5 million
Over $1 million
Over $500,000
Over $100,000
Unknown amount
- Association of Midwest Museums
- Epilepsy Association of Southwest Wisconsin
- Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra
- Milwaukee Public Museum
Public officials
Jurists
Writers
External links
- The Bradley Foundation (http://www.bradleyfdn.org) -- Official website
- The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (http://www.mediatransparency.org/funders/bradley_foundation.htm) -- An analysis and critique by Phil Wilayto
- The Feeding Trough: The Bradley Foundation, "The Bell Curve" and the Real Story Behind W-2, Wisconsin's National Model for Welfare Reform. (http://my.execpc.com/~ajrc/ft.html) -- Investigative report by Phil Wilayto
- Response from Michael Joyce, foundation president, to The Feeding Trough (http://www.educationforthepeople.org/Background%2097statement.htm)