Bradley Foundation & the Attack on Welfare id WAA28324; Sun, 12 Oct 1997 22:25:39 -0400 Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit ------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the October 16, 1997 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- THE BRADLEY FOUNDATION & THE ATTACK ON WELFARE Behind the Scenes in the Right-Wing Machine By Phil Wilayto Milwaukee Before the managers of any big corporation shut down a factory, they take extraordinary steps to prepare for the action. They hold high-level strategy meetings with the heads of the production, human-resources and public-relations departments. They examine the company's relationship with the union. They discuss it with members of the city council and county board, one by one. They consider any activist organizations in the area. The bosses do all this with the aim of neutralizing any possible opposition to the shutdown. Deals are cut. Private promises are made. A public- relations campaign is carefully prepared and implemented. And finally, orders are given to beef up security. The police department is notified as to the day the shutdown will be carried out. If each company's management routinely goes through such extensive preparations before closing a single plant--what greater steps would the corporate class as a whole take before it moved to close down a 60-year-old social program on which millions of people depend for their survival and from which many millions more benefit? Long before so-called welfare reform swept the country, the U.S. capitalist class was making preparations for this historic reversal of the government's commitment to survival benefits for the poor. Books like "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve" were funded, written and distributed to "prove" that welfare programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children were "counter-productive" and only further institutionalized poverty. Supposedly objective studies painted a picture of widespread corruption and abuse in the welfare system. Demeaning and racially tinged code words were popularized. Legislative programs were drafted--not by legislators, but by professional right-wing ideologues. And finally, "grassroots representatives" were recruited to help explain to low-income communities why the new "reforms" were in their best interests. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee was a key player in this preparation for welfare reform. The foundation is best known for funding the book "The Bell Curve"--a piece of racist trash that attempted to "prove" the racial inferiority of Black people. STAR IN RIGHT-WING FIRMAMENT The Bradley Foundation is based on the family fortune of Milwaukee's Allen-Bradley manufacturing company. Harry Bradley was an early financial supporter of the arch- reactionary John Birch Society, based in nearby Appleton, Wis. In 1984, the Rockwell International Corp. bought out Allen-Bradley. Much of the profits from the sale went to the foundation. With a half-billion dollars in assets, Bradley is now the pre-eminent conservative grant maker in the country. It is a leading example of the family-fortune-based foundations set up by Corporate America since the early 1970s. These foundations exist to mold public opinion, and to push the government--which represents the capitalist class anyway--toward ever more strongly pro-corporate policies. Bradley's current president, Michael Joyce, formerly headed the New York-based Olin Foundation. He was a member of the Ronald Reagan presidential transition team. Joyce had been recruited to lead Olin by Wall Street investment banker William Simon, who later served as Reagan's treasury secretary. When Joyce left Olin for Bradley, Simon replaced him as Olin's president. Along with Olin, Bradley funds the major right-wing think tanks. One is the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation developed the 20-volume "Mandate for Leadership" for the Reagan administration--the blueprint for Reagan's program of supply-side economics, massive budget cuts and the Star Wars missile "defense" plan. Bradley also funds the Manhattan Institute. The Manhattan Institute supplies New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani with his position papers on privatizing city services and cutting the city budget. Bradley also funds the American Enterprise Institute--home to such pro-racist authors as Charles Murray ("Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve") and Dinesh D'Souza ("The End of Racism"). And Bradley funds a host of anti-labor, anti- poor "public-interest" law firms, state-based think tanks and conservative publications. Through organizations like the Philanthropy Roundtable, Bradley plays a key role in coordinating the activities of other conservative grant makers, such as the Olin, Sarah Scaife and Smith Richardson foundations. Bradley-funded "public-interest" law firms played pivotal roles in the recent overturn of affirmative action in the state university systems of California and Texas. Bradley- funded lawyer Clint Bolick drafted the legislation that would end affirmative action on the federal level. In an opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal, Bolick coined the term "Clinton's Quota Queen" to attack Lani Guinier when President Bill Clinton nominated the African American woman to head the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. Bolick has also defended Wisconsin's "school choice" program against legal challenges. Bradley is only the 51st biggest foundation in the country. But it's the biggest one that concentrates on promoting racist, anti-labor policies. THE WISCONSIN CONNECTION It's by far the biggest foundation of any kind in Wisconsin. And it maintains a close relationship with the state's reactionary Gov. Tommy Thompson. So Bradley has been able to use Wisconsin as a kind of social laboratory for its right-wing initiatives. This is particularly true with regard to "school choice" and welfare reform. It also includes the issues of prison labor and child welfare. AFDC, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and even the entire public-school system all fall under the heading of "the regulatory welfare state" that Bradley has targeted for destruction. The "Wisconsin Works" program--known as W-2--is designed to create a large supply of super-low-wage workers so businesses don't have to pay a living wage. What distinguishes W-2 from other welfare "reform" programs? The federal law that President Clinton signed in August 1996 requires that 25 percent of all single parents on welfare be working or looking for work at this time. As of Sept. 1, Wisconsin's law forces all welfare participants to either work or be actively engaged in job-hunting. No exceptions are allowed: not for the disabled, for students, for mothers of infants as young as 12 weeks, for teenaged mothers living with their parents, or for those with mental disabilities or alcohol or drug dependencies. All must work. Since there are few alternatives in poor, inner-city neighborhoods to welfare--or now workfare--people who are punitively removed from the program lose all income. This in turn can mean losing your children--since the county or state can take away the children of anyone with no visible means of support who has been "sanctioned" off the program. For this reason, the W-2 worker is really a captive worker. W-2 is a modern-day form of slavery. The Bradley-funded books "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve" helped prepare public opinion for destroying the welfare system. In Wisconsin, Bradley funded a bogus "study" that purported to show that many Illinois residents were illegally collecting welfare checks from Wisconsin. Then, through a grant to the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, Bradley funded the development of the W-2 program itself. Hudson is a right-wing think tank; its board of directors includes former Vice President Dan Quayle and former NATO commander and Nixon administration Chief of Staff Gen. Alexander Haig. Two of its priorities are dismantling the Social Security system and privatizing the public-school system. Using money provided by Bradley--and also the Stewart Mott and Annie E. Casey foundations--Hudson opened an office in Madison, Wis., and spent two years working with state officials to develop W-2. The Washington-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise is another Bradley-funded outfit. It has played a key role in implementing welfare reform, both nationally and here in Wisconsin. At the request of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the NCNE convened a "national task force" to make recommendations to Congress about how "burdensome government regulations" could be removed from the delivery of services to the poor--as if serving the poor is an important goal for Newt Gingrich. That task force met here in Milwaukee in a national conference jointly funded by Bradley and Milwaukee's Helen Bader Foundation. The resulting recommendations included ending requirements that organizations caring for young children be trained, certified, inspected or supervised. Milwaukee is now seeing the results of that particular recommendation. A system of "provisional" day-care centers for W-2 participants, staffed by other W-2 participants, is being set up in inner-city private homes. There are no inspections for the presence of lead paint, no formal training for the care givers and no oversight by responsible agencies. Women forced onto W-2, of course, may be excellent child- care providers. But the effort is systematically sabotaged by a lack of resources for nutritional programs, educational aids or structural improvements like proper fire escapes. RACIST PROGRAM The passage of W-2 in Wisconsin was directed as much by Democrats as by Republicans. It gave Bradley the chance to experiment with the lives of poor people. While most welfare recipients in the state are white, the biggest single concentration is in Milwaukee's Black community, making single Black mothers on welfare the prime target for W-2. Because Milwaukee is also one of the most segregated cities in the country, it makes a convenient, geographically defined laboratory for programs such as welfare "reform" and school "choice." As a result, a tremendous amount of attention has been paid to neutralizing any possible community opposition to W- 2. Heavy pressure is being exerted on churches and other institutions in the Black and Latino communities to cooperate with the W-2 system, primarily by "hiring" W-2 workers under the "community service" job category. These workers receive only their regular welfare grants, so the "employers" are receiving totally free labor under the guise of providing "work experience." This is in addition to the tremendous amount of money pouring into the agencies awarded the contracts to administer the W-2 program. Through these primary contracts and then a multitude of sub-contracts, a whole constellation of non-profit agencies and community-based organizations have been seduced--or forced--into the W-2 system. The message is: Get with the program, or find yourself another line of work. The number of children being taken from their mothers and placed in foster homes is skyrocketing. The state reduced the time period for severing these children's legal ties to their parents from one year to six months--then the county reduced it to three months. That means that just three months after a child is taken from her or his parents, he or she can be put up for adoption. And because the state recently took control of the child welfare system from Milwaukee County, Black children separated from their parents may well be routinely placed with white families outside their own community. Proposals for "group homes" and orphanages have also been raised. This has an historical parallel in the federal government's policy earlier this century of seizing Native children from their families and placing them mission schools to divorce them from their communities and culture. What's happening here in Milwaukee is more than just another form of welfare reform. It's an attempt to politically, economically and culturally transform an entire community in order to guarantee a smooth transition to a system of super-low-wage, captive labor for the benefit of big business. Fortunately, this attempt hasn't been without opposition. Strong voices in the Black community have spoken out against W-2 and in particular the dangers it poses for the children of W-2 workers. An Aug. 22 news conference outside the Bradley Foundation offices helped expose Bradley's role in W-2 to a wide audience. A 140-page investigative report on Bradley by the labor/community group A Job Is a Right Campaign has generated discussion in the community. And a new organization, W-2 Workers United, has raised the issue of unionizing of W-2 workers. The major battlegrounds over welfare reform, school "choice," Social Security, etc., will be in states like New York and California with the most poor and working people. Activists in those areas would do well to examine the prototypes of the programs now being developed in Wisconsin. [The writer is the author of the report "The Feeding Trough: The Bradley Foundation, `The Bell Curve' and the Real Story Behind W-2, Wisconsin's National Model for Welfare Reform." The 140-page report can be ordered by sending name, address and a check or money order for $12 to: A Job Is a Right Campaign, PO Box 06053, Milwaukee, WI 53206. Make check or money order payable to: AJRC/W2.] - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww@workers.org. For subscription info send message to: info@workers.org. 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