In The Pay Of Foundations Revisited: How US Power Elite Funds "Parallel Left" Media (1)

In 1991, the militaristic U.S. power elite's MacArthur Foundation, that began subsidizing Isay’s Sound Portraits Productions in 1997, also gave the Pacifica Foundation, whose WBAI News Department in NYC was then headed by Amy Goodman, a $5,000 [equivalent to over $11,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] grant “to support a radio documentary on East Timor.”

Within 1960s and 1970 New Left Movement antiwar organizing circles in New York City prior to the 1980s, it was then considered morally and politically contradictory and hypocritical for individuals on the U.S. left, who claimed to be working to build a grassroots-based U.S. left antiwar Movement in political opposition to the U.S. power elite, to rely on grant money from foundations--like the Carnegie Corp. of NY and the Ford Foundation—of this same U.S. power elite, to fund their “Movement” work projects.


In addition, individuals on the U.S. left who were into upper middle-class professional “Movement careerism,” left celebrity/”Movement media super-star” status-seeking, individual monopolization of radio-tv media and left-wing microphone access, censorship and exclusion of dissident grassroots antiwar New Left political viewpoints, individual “Movement empire-building” entrepreneurial work projects or “Movement profiteering”, were generally then seen as acting in an undemocratic and politically contradictory way.


As the radical feminist journal "Women In Revolution" reported in its Summer 1970 issue, the Class Workshop was formed “as a reaction to the oppression working class women experienced in the Movement” and proposed a radical feminist media strategy “in the interests of most women, not in the interests of the privileged few who want to make it on our backs.” Among the media strategy proposals made by the Class Workshop in 1970, for example were the following:


“Anyone who appears in the media is to be drawn by lot from her group. No one is to participate in the media alone…No member of a group can appear as an independent feminist…No individual or group can earn a living by writing or speaking about women’s liberation…Anyone who wants to write should write for the Movement.”


Yet for nearly 30 years, the "Democracy Now!" media group accepted foundation money from U.S. power elite foundations and was mainly hosted and produced by just two professional upper middle-class journalists: Amy Goodman and a then-columnist of the "New York Daily News" mainstream newspaper (and former "Philadelphia Daily News" mainstream newspaper columnist), Juan Gonzalez.


A daughter of Multimillionaire New York City real estate developer Bruce Ratner (whose personal worth was estimated to be $400 million in 2017), Lizzy Ratner, worked at "Democracy Now!" from September 2001 to July 2002: and, after subsequently being hired to be a senior editor at "The Nation" magazine, noted in a May 2005 article in "The Nation", titled “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’,” that “Goodman grew up in the cozy middle-class suburb of Bay Shore” on Long Island, “her father was an ophthalmologist” and “her mother was a social worker and teacher of women’s literature and history.”


Like her brother, journalist David Goodman, "Democracy Now!" Productions president Goodman is a Harvard University graduate, who received a Harvard-Radcliffe B.A. in anthropology in 1984. Not long afterwards, according to the “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’” article, “Goodman landed an apprenticeship” at WBAI-FM and “started out making documentaries, then moved to covering local news stories, and two years later she was running the WBAI newsroom.”


According to WBAI’s Australian-born and raised program director between 1989 and 1994, a former Australian Broadcasting Corporation mainstream journalist named Andrew Phillips, after migrating to New York City in late 1975, he “introduced Amy to WBAI in 1985” when he “was teaching radio documentary production at Hunter College.”


While “running the WBAI newsroom” in 1987, “Goodman encouraged” David Isay “to produce his first radio piece,” according to the “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’” article. The same May 2005 "Nation" article also quoted Isay as saying that "for the first couple of years, Amy was the person I learned everything from.”


Subsequently, Isay produced a radio piece for corporate and foundation-sponsored National Public Radio [NPR] in 1989, was given a “Livingston Award for Young Journalists” money grant by the Molly Parnis Livingston Foundation (whose grant money was obtained from the profits of a fashion designer’s New York City garment industry firm) in 1990, and set up his own “non-profit” media firm Sound Portraits Production in 1994—the same year he was also given Guggenheim Fellowship money (from the foundation whose tax-exempt wealth originally came from money the Guggenheim family obtained, historically, in the late 1800s and early 1900s by owning Kennecott Copper, Anaconda and Asarco mines and smelters, utilizing cheap labor and making windfall profits from the lifting, refining and marketing of metals during World War I).


In addition, a July 1, 2003 "Transom" article that Sydney Lewis edited, titled “David Isay and Sound Portraits,” quotes Goodman’s former colleague as recalling in 2003:


“I’ve been doing radio since a year out of college – fell into it through a series of strange, wonderful, serendipitous events that happened over a 24-hour period, and never turned back. I was fortunate to get a [U.S. government-funded] CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] grant early on, so had the time to make stories that I could use to snag more CPB grants. I…eventually formed a non-profit so I could get foundation money (only CPB gives to individuals, everyone else gives to non-profits). The Company started to grow and it’s the best thing that ever happened….”


After forming his “non-profit” Sound Portraits media firm “so” he “could get foundation money” in 1994, Isay’s then-Brooklyn-based radio segment production firm was given a $50,000 [equivalent to over $100,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] grant by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation to fund his “StoryCorps” oral history project--one year after the Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation gave Pacifica its $25,000 grant to launch Goodman’s "Democracy Now!" radio show. Three years later, Goodman’s former colleague at WBAI was given a $500,000 [equivalent to over $940,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] individual MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2000--payable in $100,000 [equivalent to around $165,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] chunks a year, in each of the following five years.


As David Plotz noted in a July 7, 2000 "Slate" website article, the then-$4 billion MacArthur Foundation “ is the estate of John D. MacArthur, a skinflint who became the second-richest American” and “his son Rod grabbed control of the trust after John's 1978 death and pushed the genius project.” Plotz also described the secretive and undemocratic way recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s big money individual “genius grants” were then chosen:


“…Several hundred talent scouts, whose identities are secret, suggest nominees to the selection committee. The committee, whose members are also secret, covertly gathers dossiers on the nominees and selects two-dozen-odd winners….”


In 2003, the same year the Sound Portraits Productions was renamed “StoryCorps,” the MacArthur Foundation gave the StoryCorps media firm of the 2000 MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Isay a $75,000 [equivalent to around $132,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] grant “in support of StoryCorps.” The following year, “to help create a cash flow reserve fund,” another grant of $50,000 [equivalent to over $85,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] was given to Isay’s “StoryCorps” by the MacArthur Foundation; and in 2006, yet another $200,000 [equivalent to over $321,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] in MacArthur Foundation grant money was shifted to Goodman’s former WBAI colleague “in support of general operations” of his StoryCorps media business.


In addition, five more MacArthur Foundation grants, totaling $2.6 million, were collected between 2009 and 2016 by StoryCorps; prior to Isay’s media firm being given a $1 million grant by the Rockefeller Foundation in October 2017.


In the Rockefeller Foundation’s October 26, 2017 press release announcing this $1 million [equivalent to over $1.3 million in 2025 U.S. dollars] grant to StoryCorps, Rockefeller Foundation President Rajiv Shah claimed that ”Our partnership with Story Corps’ is `one small step’ toward rebuilding trust among the American people through transparency, respect and candor” and “We can think of no more appropriate a partner to fund in this effort than Story Corps.”


As the 2005 “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’” article recalled, “in 1990 Goodman headed over with fellow journalist Allan Nairn” to East Timor for the first time and, during her second trip to the Indonesian military-occupied island country in November 1991, “she and Nairn were nearly killed in a massacre of at least 271 Timorese” by Indonesian soldiers that became known as the Santa Cruz Massacre.


But, also in 1991, the militaristic U.S. power elite's MacArthur Foundation, that began subsidizing Isay’s Sound Portraits Productions in 1997, also gave the Pacifica Foundation, whose WBAI News Department in NYC was then headed by Amy Goodman, a $5,000 [equivalent to over $11,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] grant “to support a radio documentary on East Timor.” (end of part 2)

A program funded by duPont Awards Foundation gave Pacifica Foundation’s WBAI station a “silver baton” Alfred I. duPont-Columbia U. Award in Broadcast Journalism” that "Democracy Now!" show anchor-newscaster personally accepted, at a Jan. 27, 1994 ceremony in Columbia’s Low Library.

In its 1991 edition, "Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac" then estimated, historically, that “the duPonts" were then "the wealthiest and most powerful dynasty in the United States.” As Gerard Colby also observed, historically, in the 1984 edition of his "DuPont Dynasty: Behind The Nylon Curtain" book:


“No family in America has been richer longer than duPonts…The family has developed many ruses for avoiding any public control over its wealth. Besides their 11 personal trusts, the duPonts have established 37 tax-free foundations…Most of the duPonts, plus the first line of their in-laws and a few of the second line, make up the 250 `big’ duPonts…These are the duPonts who comprise the richest family in the world…These are the duPonts who own more estates, more thoroughbred horses, more yachts, more servants than the Queen of England and the royal family…It has been precisely by `hard bargaining,’ by exploitation of labor at home and abroad, by fat government contracts, that the duPonts amassed their $10 billion [equivalent to over $31 billion in 2025 U.S. dollars] fortune.”


Yet since 1996, "Democracy Now!" has not seemed eager to produce many radio or tv news show segments that critically examine how the super-rich duPont dynasty members specifically obtained their wealth, historically, and have, specifically, retained their individual wealth since 1996.


One reason might be because a Columbia University School of Journalism-administered program funded by the Alfred I. duPont Awards Foundation gave the Pacifica Foundation’s WBAI station a “silver baton” Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award in Broadcast Journalism, for the MacArthur foundation grant-subsidized 1991 “radio documentary on East Timor” that Democracy Now! Productions president Amy Goodman produced; which the long-time Democracy Now! show anchor-newscaster personally accepted, at a Jan. 27, 1994 ceremony in Columbia’s Low Library, from the [now-deceased] corporate media journalist Mike Wallace of CBS News, who was the Columbia University JSchool event’s MC.


DuPont Awards Foundation “silver baton” awards were also then distributed, historically, to the news departments and professional journalists of mainstream corporate media organizations like ABC, NBC, CNN and PBS-affiliated television stations at this same ceremony, which was, historically, then broadcast nationally by PBS-affiliated stations.


And according to the Jan. 28, 1994 issue of "Columbia Daily Spectator", “hundreds of radio and television news professionals” from the U.S. mainstream corporate media world “gathered in the rotunda of Low Library” for this annual self-promotional event to celebrate the “reporting” of mainly U.S. Establishment media journalists.


Created in the early 1940s by Jessie Ball duPont in memory of her deceased husband, Alfred I. DuPont, the Alfred I. duPont – Columbia University Awards in Broadcast Journalism program, which Columbia University’s School of Journalism has administered since 1968, is funded by the Alfred I. DuPont Awards Foundation that, in turn, receives grants from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund.


For example, between July 1, 2013 and June 30, 2016, the Alfred I. duPont Awards Foundation gave Columbia University’s School of Journalism 3 grants, totaling $1,220,000, to fund the duPont awards program; and the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, whose assets exceeded $291 million in 2013, in turn, gave 3 grants, totaling $807,000, to the Alfred I. duPont Awards Foundation. And one year before Goodman was presented with her “silver baton” duPont-Columbia award, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, itself, was directly given a $1.25 million gift in January 1993 by the Jessie Ball duPont Fund, to continue the Alfred I. duPont Columbia University Awards and other duPont awards program-related activities at Columbia.


As the Jessie Ball duPont Fund website notes, Jessie Ball duPont “re-established an earlier friendship with Alfred I. duPont, a member of one of America’s most distinguished families and a man of great wealth” in 1920; and “they were married in 1921 and by 1927 had built their estate, Epping Forest, in Jacksonville, Florida.” In a 2004-published book, titled "Dream State", University of Alabama Professor of English Diane Roberts indicated why Alfred I. duPont apparently moved from Delaware, the state in which economic and political life has been dominated by duPont dynasty members for over a century, to Florida, after Florida amended its state constitution in 1924:


“…In 1924 the state amended its constitution to outlaw income tax. Even better, the constitution also prohibited inheritance taxes. If you had it, Florida would let you keep it. So Alfred du Pont, of the more money than Croesus duPonts, cast an eye on Florida and saw potential….Delaware was run by a cabal of his megabucks with whom Alfred did not get along…Alfred packed up his young wife Jessie Ball duPont, her business savvy little brother, Edward Ball and a few bank accounts, and moved south…”


In a 1989-published book, "Some Kind Of Paradise: A Chronicle of Man and Land in Florida", Mark Derr described what happened after Alfred I. duPont--for whom the “silver baton” award that "Democracy Now!" producer Goodman accepted in Columbia University’s Low Library in 1994 is named—moved to Florida with his wife and brother-in-law Ed Ball, who later became one of the first trustees of the Jessie Ball duPont Fund that funds the Alfred I. duPont Awards Foundation:


“From the start of the Depression, Alfred I. duPont, traveling with his brother-in-law Ed Ball, bought played-out north Florida farmland, cut-over pine forests, and failing banks. He wanted to establish across the land-and water-rich, transportation-poor Panhandle and north peninsula, from Pensacola to Jacksonville, a quasi-feudal state…After duPont’s death…Ball became sole trustee of the duPont estate and the most powerful man in Florida, a racist, union-busting anti-communist vilified by his opponents, fawned over by the people he supported until his death…During his 30-year reign in the state, Ball became so powerful that it was, in the words of his biographer, `difficult to go 50 miles in any part of Florida without coming in contact with a portion of the empire [he] built.’


“DuPont started the St. Joe Paper Company in Port St. Joe, and his estate eventually came to own one million acres of pineland in the Florida Panhandle and south Georgia, along with 23 box plants in the United States and Europe, 31 banks in Florida, the Florida East Coast Railway, and its assorted properties. Ball bought the railroad’s bonds at 16 cents on the dollar when it was in receivership in the 1930s and gained control of it…Ball broke the railroad unions in Florida during the 1960s by provoking a strike noteworthy for its duration, violence, and lack of substantive negotiations.


“For three decades the duPont estate, as a `testamentary trust’ was exempt from provisions of the federal Bank Holding Act prohibiting banks from owning other major businesses, a bit of largesse that allowed Ball to purchase the railroad…’


According to Diane Roberts’s "Dream State" book, former Jessie Ball duPont Fund trustee Ed Ball “admired J. Edgar Hoover and may have been an FBI informant;” and among the failed banks that Ball acquired for Alfred I. duPont in the late 1920s, were banks in Miami, St. Petersburg, Daytona and Orlando.


The same book also noted that, as late as 2004, the 1 million acres of Florida Panhandle and south Georgie pineland, equal to the land area of Delaware, that Ball had purchased for duPont was still nearly all owned by a company controlled by the Alfred I. duPont estate; and “Ball and others of his ilk had terrorized the Florida legislature when, in 1935, lawmakers had flirted with repealing the state’s prohibition on an income tax.”


In 2013, the Jessie Ball duPont Fund was still then earning over $3.8 million in dividends and interest from the over $101.5 million in corporate stock, over $56.1 million in corporate bonds and over $123.5 million in mutual funds shares that it then owned, according to its Form 990 financial filing for 2013.


The same 2013 financial filing indicated, for example, that it then owned over $140,000 worth of Comcast stock, over $220,000 worth of Google stock, over $91,000 worth of Facebook stock, over $90,000 worth of Occidental Petroleum stock, over $134,000 worth of Halliburton stock, over $165,000 worth of Amazon stock, over $321,000 worth of Apple stock and over $180,000 worth of Starbuck’s stock in 2013.


The Alfred I. duPont Awards Foundation, which also funded the duPont-Columbia awards program that gave its “silver baton” award to Goodman in 1994, still then owned over $700,000 in corporate bonds and over $2.1 million in corporate stock in 2016, including over $5,000 worth of Chevron stock, over $5,000 worth of ExxonMobil stock, over $6,000 worth of Comcast stock, and over $6,000 worth of Northrop Grumman stock, according to its 2015 Form 990 financial filing for the period between July 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016.


And nine years after the CIA-backed 1965 military coup (that established a right-wing military dictatorship under Suharto and quickly led to the massacre of between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesian leftists by right-wing death squads) and one year before the Indonesian military invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975 (and then killed over 25 percent of East Timor’s inhabitants by the time Goodman accepted her 1994 duPont journalism award), the Delaware-based duPont dynasty’s E.I. DuPont company also, historically, had then established a subsidiary in Indonesia, PT.DuPont/PT DuPont Indonesia, which then invested more than $100 million in Indonesia during the next four decades of the 20th-century. (end of part 3)

Between 1984 and the year before the future "Democracy Now!" show co-host accepted, historically, a duPont-Columbia “silver baton” award at the 1994 Low Library ceremony on Columbia University’s campus, the former president of the CBS News corporate media organization, Bill Leonard, was then, historically, the director of the Alfred I duPont—Columbia University Awards in Broadcasting Journalism program.


Between 1984 and the year before the future "Democracy Now!" show co-host, Amy Goodman, accepted, historically, a duPont-Columbia “silver baton” award at the 1994 Low Library ceremony on Columbia University’s campus, the former president of the CBS News corporate media organization, Bill Leonard, was then, historically, the director of the Alfred I duPont—Columbia University Awards in Broadcasting Journalism program.


A CBS News radio and television show producer during the 1950’s McCarthy era, Leonard apparently had participated in the blacklisting and exclusion from the radio airwaves and tv screens of antiwar leftist U.S. citizens in the 1950s by the CBS mass media conglomerate, on whose board of directors had then sat former Columbia University trustees William Paley and William A.M. Burden.


As the former Alfred I. duPont—Columbia University Awards in Broadcasting Journalism director recalled in his 1987 autobiography, titled "In The Storm of the Eye: A Lifetime At CBS":


“…We were all asked to sign what amounted to—hell, what was—a loyalty oath. CBS was the only network to require such an oath…The paper did not say one would be fired for not signing. But…I signed…There was not only the loyalty oath but a system whereby every guest on my several programs had to be cleared in advance through an appointed CBS executive to make sure he or she was not on a blacklist…”


In the same book, Leonard also noted that “in January 1965 I found myself a vice-president of CBS News” and was a CBS “vice-president of programming” who “was involved with everything at CBS News” between 1965 and 1975, when he then began representing the CBS media conglomerate’s special economic interests in Washington, D.C. as CBS’s vice president for government relations between 1975 and 1977.


In his autobiography, former duPont-Columbia awards Director Leonard noted that his job as CBS’s vice president for government relations made him “CBS’s chief lobbyist with Congress, the Federal Communications Commission [FCC], the White House—its major interests in Washington” and that he “learned more about how government really works in my…years as a Washington lobbyist.”


A year after then-Columbia University President (and former member of the Texaco oil company board of directors) William McGill gave the then-Shah of Iran’s wife, Empress Farah Pahlavi, a Columbia University presidential citation in July 1977, former duPont-Columbia awards Director Leonard returned to New York City in July 1978, as CBS News’ executive vice president and chief operating office. And while visiting Iran during the same year--when the dictatorial Shah of Iran unsuccessfully tried to retain political power in Iran by ordering his troops to shoot down unarmed Iranian civilian demonstrators and killing over 60,000 Iranian civilian demonstrators—Leonard was honored at a reception held in the Tehran home of the Shah of Iran regime’s ambassador to the United States. As the former duPont-Columbia awards Director wrote in his 1987 autobiography:


“The situation was already quite tense in Iran in December [1978]…but I decided to stop there. I was pretty well connected in Iran, albeit primarily with the Shah’s regime, through his Washington ambassador, Ardeshir Zahedi. I had known our own ambassador, Bill Sullivan, over the years, and I now arranged a couple of talks with him in Tehran…Through my connections with Zahedi, I managed to arrange an interview with the Shah’s wife, Empress Farah Dibah…Later that evening, I set up a circuit to New York and reported on my interview with the Empress over the CBS Radio Network. The next day a reception was given in our honor by Ambassador Zahedi in his magnificent home, not far from the palace…”


The U.S. ambassador who, “over the years,” Leonard “had known” and “arranged a couple of talks with” in Tehran in December 1978, William Sullivan, was described in the following way in an obituary of him that appeared in the "London Telegraph" newspaper’s Nov. 4, 2013 issue:


“William Sullivan, who has died aged 90, was the American diplomat who directed the `secret war’ in Laos, and later, as the US ambassador to Iran during the Islamic Revolution, recommended that Jimmy Carter reach out to Ayatollah Khomeini… From 1964 to 1973 US bombers dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos, making the country the most heavily bombed country per capita in history…. As American Ambassador to Laos from 1964 to 1973, Sullivan served as field commander of the operation and, although his precise role remains undocumented, one former colleague was quoted as saying that `there wasn’t a bag of rice dropped in Laos that he didn’t know about.’


“As late as October 1978, a couple of months before the Shah fled into exile, Sullivan sent a cable backing the vacillating monarch. Two weeks later…he changed his mind. The Shah, he now argued, was finished, and America should reach out to Khomeini to maintain its influence in Iran….”


While presiding over the Establishment’s CBS News mainstream media organization between 1979 and 1982, Leonard also had hired a former Johnson White House press secretary and chief of staff between late 1963 and 1967--when LBJ sent U.S. troops to the Dominican Republic and escalated U.S. military intervention in Vietnam in 1965--named Bill Moyers, to again work, historically for the CBS commercial media conglomerate’s news department between 1981 and 1986.


But after leaving CBS in 1986, the now-deceased Moyers was mostly then seen on U.S. television hosting the programs that his U.S. power elite foundation-funded Public Affairs TV Inc. media firm, historically, produced for foundation, corporate and U.S. government-funded PBS-affiliated television stations to broadcast.


In addition, at the same time he was the executive director of his own foundation-funded media firm, the now-deceased Moyers also was, historically, the president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy/Schumann Foundation and a trustee of billionaire speculator George Soros’ Open Society Institute foundations, that each dished out millions of dollars in grants to various “parallel left” alternative media groups between 1990 and 2018.


So, not surprisingly, the duPont-Columbia awards program jury, on which then- duPont-Columbia awards program director and former CBS News president Leonard sat next to former CBS News correspondent Marlene Sanders (along with folks like then-Columbia Journalism School Dean Joan Konner and then-Hearst media conglomerate president for new projects Philip Balboni), gave the former CBS News journalist that Leonard had hired to work for him in 1981, Bill Moyers, a duPont-Columbia “gold baton” award in 1992, “for the body of his work over 20 years in broadcasting,” according to a Feb. 7, 1992 "Columbia Record" website article.


And, also not surprisingly, the duPont-Columbia awards jury that, historically, awarded then-Public Affairs TV In. Executive Director Moyers a “golden baton” in 1992 was chaired by a former business partner of Bill Moyers: then-Columbia University Journalism School Dean Joan Konner, who was the Public Affairs TV Inc. president between 1986 and 1988, before being hired as the Columbia’s journalism school dean in 1988; and, subsequently, later becoming board chair of Bill Moyers’s Schumann Foundation.


After retiring as CBS News’s president in 1982 and beginning to direct the duPont-Columbia awards program in 1984, that a decade later gave a “silver baton” award to future "Democracy Now!" Productions president Goodman (a year after Leonard stopped directing the duPont-Columbia awards program) in 1994, Leonard was a consultant to both CBS and the National Association of Broadcasters [NAB] lobbying organization of U.S. commercial broadcasting corporations after 1982.


In addition, during the 1980s he was also a board member of the corporate and foundation-funded NPR and a member of the World Press Freedom Committee’s board (during a decade in which this organization opposed UNESCO’s 1980’s call, historically, for a New World Information Order and democratization of the global mass media and newsgathering system; apparently because it felt UNESCO’s call threatened the, historically, then-dominant position of global news agencies such as Reuters, Associated Press and AFP and the commercial interests of privately-owned corporate media conglomerates, like CBS).


In 1993, a year after Leonard’s duPont-Columbia awards program gave Bill Moyers its “golden baton” award in 1992, Moyers, not surprisingly, then hosted the annual duPont-Columbia awards ceremony in Low Library in which Moyers’s former Public Affairs TV Inc. business partner, Joan Konner, presented Leonard, himself, a “silver baton” duPont-Columbia award, prior to the former CBS News president’s 1993 retirement as director of the duPont awards program at Columbia University.


According to a Feb. 5, 1993 "Columbia Record" article Leonard was purportedly given his award “for his service to the awards and to broadcast journalism in a career spanning five decades” in the corporate media world.


Yet three years before the Low Library ceremony at which future long-time "Democracy Now!" Productions Inc. president Goodman was, historically, given a duPont-Columbia award (for producing the MacArthur Foundation-subsidized Pacifica/WBAI radio documentary about the U.S. government-armed Indonesian military’s 1991 massacre in East Timor), 200 grassroots antiwar movement demonstrators had picketed the 1991 duPont-Columbia awards ceremony. As Danny Franklin noted in an article, titled “Anti-media protest held outside Low,” that appeared in the "Columbia Daily Spectator"’s Jan. 30, 1991 issue:


“About 200 people gathered outside the duPont Awards for Broadcast Journalism held in Low Library last night to protest the media's coverage of both the war in the Persian Gulf and the antiwar movement. After marching around Low Library, the crowd gathered at the top of the steps where Columbia Security guards blocked the entrance to the building….A few shoves were exchanged between a security guard and one protester as she approached the building. Tova Wang, CC '91, a spokesperson for the Barnard-Columbia Anti-War Coalition, said that a security guard pushed her with the long end of his nightstick… Protesters chanted `Two, four, six, eight. Separate the press and state’ and `TV news, you can't hide. We know you don't show both sides.’…” (end of part 4)

During most of 21st-century the "New York Daily News" owner who employed `Democracy Now!'s then-co-host was honorary president of American-Israel Friendship League [AFIL]; an organization whose “sole purpose is to make friends for the State of Israel through activities intended to improve the general perception of Israel,” according to the AFIL’s website.

By the early 1990s, the then-producer at Pacifica Foundation’s WBAI radio station in Manhattan who had produced that station’s late 1980s daily evening news show, Amy Goodman, was, instead, now the producer of WBAI’s daily morning news show in New York City; because, according to the former Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio journalist who was program director at WBAI between 1989-1994, Andrew Phillips, he, historically, had “instituted substantial program changes” at WBAI during this period, “including moving Amy Goodman to morning drive.”


Then, two years after accepting a “silver baton” duPont-Columbia award of the Jessie Ball duPont Fund-subsidized Alfred I. duPont Awards Foundation at the ceremony in Columbia University’s Low Library, Goodman joined with Juan Gonzalez—a then-columnist of the "New York Daily News" non-alternative, mainstream daily newspaper which a pro-Zionist and neo-con real estate developer, Mort Zuckerman, then owned—to produce and co-host the "Democracy Now!" daily radio news show that the Pacifica network launched in early February 1996; utilizing the $25,000 [equal to over $50,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] in grant money the Pacifica Foundation had obtained from the Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation in 1996.


Prior to being appointed Secretary of State by Columbia University SIPA Professor Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, in the early 1990s, a former Carnegie Corp. of NY trustee, Warren Christopher, was the chairman of the “Clinton Transition Team,” that helped determine, before the Democratic president’s Jan. 20, 1993 inauguration, which people should be appointed to U.S. federal government posts during the first term of the Clinton administration. And another early 1990s Carnegie Corp. of NY trustee, then-Goldman Sachs co-chair Robert Rubin, was appointed U.S. Treasury Secretary by Clinton in 1995, a year before the Carnegie Corp. of NY grant to launch "Democracy Now!" was given to the Pacifica Foundation.


In addition, according to the Carnegie Corp. of NY’s 1995 Annual Report, a $200,000 [equal to over $425,000 in 2025] grant was given between 1994 and 1995 to the WNYC Foundation, on whose board sat then-Carnegie Corp. of NY trustee Wilma Tisch (a grandmother of current New York Police Department [NYPD] Commissioner Jessica Tisch) ; and 5 grants, totaling $2.7 million [equal to over $5.7 million in 2025], were given during the same period to Stanford University, whose then-provost was Carnegie Corp. of NY trustee Condoleezza Rice and whose university board of trustees included then-Carnegie Corp. of NY trustee Henry Muller.


Yet since 1996, "Democracy Now!" listeners and viewers have not been provided with much specific information about the role the Carnegie Corp. of NY and its trustees have, historically, played in U.S. political and economic life; or how the foundation’s board of trustees has, historically or currently, obtained and distributed its "charitable" grant money.


While continuing to write columns for the corporate media world’s "New York Daily News" mainstream newspaper and continuing to collect a regular paycheck from Zuckerman’s newspaper during the next two decades, Gonzalez also remained the part-time co-host on over 1,000 radio broadcasts of the “parallel left” "Democracy Now!" radio show during the same two decades; including the years after 2001 when it became a “parallel left” cable television show as well.


And, not surprisingly, during the past thirty years, few radio or tv segments that were specifically critical or unflattering about either Mort Zuckerman, Mort Zuckerman’s specific historic real estate business operations or the specific news content of Mort Zuckerman’s stable of non-alternative media reporters were aired on "Democracy Now!".


Yet between 2001 and 2003, for example, the Canadian-born Zuckerman was the Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations anti-Palestinian self-determination rights lobbying group; and during most of the 21st-century the "New York Daily News" owner who employed Gonzalez was the honorary president of the American-Israel Friendship League [AFIL]; an organization whose “sole purpose is to make friends for the State of Israel through activities intended to improve the general perception of Israel,” according to the AFIL’s website. The same website also posted an article indicating how Zuckerman became involved in this pro-Israeli government group:


“The teamwork forged between Zuckerman, [American-Israel Friendship League Chairman Kenneth] Bialkin, and the rest of the AIFL team coalesced almost two decades ago, when a high-level request came in. ``Sometime in the late ‘90s each of us was contacted by the [Israeli] consul general of New York to ask if we would come in to help with the promotion of the AIFL,’ Bialkin remembers.


"Zuckerman views the work of the AIFL, in fostering better understanding between Israel and America, as a vital element in keeping the world safer. `I’ll put it this way: I think it is very important that there is more than one audience we should focus on. Number one: senior government officials. Number two: public opinion. Some would say the latter is the foundation of what affects the former. We need to continually develop that relationship.’”


An article by Christopher Walsh, titled “Pro-Israel Pundits Speak Out on Middle East,” that appeared in the September 4, 2014 issue of the" East Hampton Star", described how the "New York Daily News" owner, whose newspaper Gonzalez continued to work for while co-hosting "Democracy Now!" for two decades after 1996, supported the Israeli war machine’s 50-day war against people in Gaza in the summer of 2014 (that killed 1,462 Palestinian civilians, including 551 Palestinian children, according to a June 2015 UN Human Rights Council report):


“…At the Jewish Center of the Hamptons… pro-Israel panelists from the worlds of media and academia discussed the seven-week war in Gaza…Mortimer Zuckerman, an East Hampton resident who is the publisher of the `New York Daily News' and editor in chief of `U.S. News and World', expressed the panelists’ united defense of the Israeli military’s conduct in the war….He also sought to provide context to reports that more than 2,000 Palestinian civilians had been killed in the war by noting that 378,000 German civilians and 580,000 Japanese civilians were killed in World War II. `This is not a moral strike against Israel,’ he said….”


While still owning the "New York Daily News" and also employing a "Democracy Now!" co-host as one of his newspaper’s columnists/reporters in 2012, Zuckerman also made and pledged to make big tax-exempt monetary “donations” to Columbia University, prior to Columbia U. establishing its institutional partnership with Tel Aviv University (which performs weapons research for the IDF) in early 2023.


But after antiwar students on Columbia University’s campus began holding campus protests, following the start of the U.S. government-armed IDF’s post-Oct. 7, 2023 military attacks on civilians in Gaza, which demanded that Columbia divest itself of its stock in companies doing business in Israel and end its institutional affiliation with Israeli institutions like Tel Aviv U., former "New York Daily News" Owner Zuckerman expressed his support for the IDF’s war on people in Gaza.


As Gila Isaacson noted in an article, titled “Billionaire Mort Zuckerman Pulls $200 Million donation from Columbia University”, that was posted on the "JFeed" website on July 18, 2024:


“…Billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman has suspended millions in donations to Columbia University…Zuckerman, the…former owner of the `New York Daily News', had pledged…$200 million in 2012 to establish Columbia’s Mind Brain Behavior Institute…The billionaire’s decision follows months of dialogue with Columbia’s leadership…Zuckerman’s move aligns with…high-profile donors. Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, and Leon Cooperman, a…hedge fund manager, have also withdrawn…financial support from Columbia…”


Yet during the over two decades that Zuckerman owned the "New York Daily News", antiwar and Palestinian solidarity movement activists in the United States were rarely invited to appear on "Democracy Now!" to specifically highlight and criticize the role that Zuckerman may have personally and specifically played, historically, in supporting Israeli militarism and war crimes in the Middle East. (end of part 5)

Besides having worked for a Philadelphia newspaper owned, in part, by the Knight Foundation during the 1980s, a long-time `Democracy Now!" co-host also helped establish the National Association of Hispanic Journalists [NAHJ] in 1984; and was president of Ford and Knight foundation-funded NAHJ between 2002 and 2004.

The career of "Democracy Now!"s part-time co-host for many years, Juan Gonzalez, as an upper-middle-class professional journalist in the U.S. corporate media world began in 1979, after his journalism course instructor at Temple University, who was then a moonlighting editor at the "Philadelphia Daily New"s evening newspaper of the then-Knight-Ridder corporate media firm, which also then owned the "Philadelphia Inquirer" morning daily newspaper, encouraged Gonzalez to apply for a clerical job at the "Philadelphia Daily News" in late 1978; and Gonzalez was soon then promoted to be a full-time reporter for the newspaper by early 1979.


Prior to merging with the super-rich Ridder family dynasty’s newspaper chain in 1974, to create a newspaper chain of 35 daily and 25 Sunday newspapers that, historically, made Knight-Ridder the largest U.S. corporate newspaper chain at that time, the super-rich Knight family dynasty had purchased its two Philadelphia newspapers from the super-rich Walter Annenberg’s corporate media conglomerate for $55 million [equivalent to over $485 million in 2025] in 1969.


When Gonzalez began working for the Knight-Ridder corporate media firm’s "Philadelphia Daily News" in 1979, John “Jack” Knight and James "Jim" Knight then owned 30 percent of Knight-Ridder’s stock, three Ridder family dynasty members owned 7 percent of Knight-Ridder’s stock and the Knight-Ridder board of directors included John Knight, James Knight and the three Ridder family dynasty members.


After John “Jack” Knight died two years later, much of the $200 million [equivalent to over $712 million in 2025] worth of Knight-Ridder/Philadelphia Daily News stock which he owned in 1981 was left to the “non-profit” Knight Foundation, to avoid payment of heavy estate taxes. As the Knight Foundation’s 1995 Annual Report noted:


“When John S. Knight died in 1981, he left to the Foundation most of his holdings in Knight-Ridder…James L. Knight succeeded his brother as chairman, and Lee Hills, former Knight-Ridder chief executive officer, was put in charge of planning the transition from a small foundation to one of the largest in the United States…The number of trustees was increased to 13, including two of James Knight’s daughters…”


And when Gonzalez left the "Philadelphia Daily News" between late 1987 and early 1988 to begin working for the "New York Daily News" (which was then still owned, historically, by the Chicago-based "Tribune" corporate media conglomerate that also then owned the WPIX-TV station in New York City), the Knight Foundation still owned a big chunk of Knight-Ridder stock, James Knight personally still owned 14 percent of Knight-Ridder’s stock, now worth about $439 million [equivalent to over $1.2 billion in 2025], and the three Ridder family dynasty members also continued to own Knight-Ridder newspaper chain stock.


Then, when James “Jim” Knight died in February 1991, he also left $200 million [equivalent to over $475 million in 2025] to the Knight Foundation.


So by early 1996, when Knight-Ridder’s former "Philadelphia Daily News"-turned"New York Daily News" columnist/reporter became, historically, "Democracy Now!"’s co-host, the Knight Foundation then owned “2,630,451 shares…of common stock of Knight-Ridder Inc., which represented 17.2 percent…of the Foundation’s assets,” which was then worth around $165 million [equal to around $340 million in 2025], according to the Knight Foundation’s 1995 Annual Report.


In addition, in 1996 the “non-profit” Knight Foundation also then owned $409 million [equal to over $840 million in 2025] worth of of stock in other profit-oriented corporations, as well as $52 million [equal to $107 million in 2025] worth of real estate. And according to its 1995 Annual Report:


“Overall, Knight Foundation’s portfolio returned 25.7 percent in 1995…The Foundation’s assets totaled $957.5 million [equal to over $2 billion in 2025] at the end of 1995, an increase of $212 million from the previous year…Investments added $195 million in value.”


Yet “the Foundation” was “not subject to federal income tax;” and only $26 million of the Knight Foundation’s $212 million increase in assets were redistributed to its grant recipients, according to the same annual report.


Besides having worked for a Philadelphia newspaper owned, in part, by the Knight Foundation during the 1980s, Gonzalez also helped establish the National Association of Hispanic Journalists [NAHJ] in 1984; and, while a co-host of "Democracy Now!" show, he was also the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ president between 2002 and 2004.


And coincidentally, between 2003 and 2011, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists group received grants of $240,000 from the “Challenge Fund for Journalism” program begun in 2003 by the Ford Foundation and the Knight Foundation-- which had owned part of the institutionally racist Knight-Ridder newspaper that employed Gonzalez in the 1980s, but had generally failed, historically, to have then hired many other Hispanic journalists from the Latinx community or from Latinx national ethnic backgrounds between 1979 and 2003. (end of part 6)

“...`Non-profit' Robert R. McCormick Foundation...gave a $1 million grant in 2004 to the NAHJ organization that Democracy Now!’s longtime co-host headed between 2002 and 2004..."

While one of Democracy Now!’s two, then upper middle-class co-hosts, Juan Gonzalez, was, historically, also the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ president, a grant of $1 million [equal to over $1.7 million in 2025] was also given to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists [NAHJ] in 2004 by the Chicago-based Robert R. McCormick Foundation to expand a “parity project” Gonzalez had created to improve coverage of Latinos nationwide by the, historically, institutionally racist U.S. corporate media industry; in which Gonzalez had, by that time, worked as a professional newspaper columnist/reporter during the previous 24 years.


The historically institutionally racist Gannett media conglomerate’s Gannett Foundation had previously helped launch this National Association of Hispanic Journalists group in the early 1980s with “$50,000 [equivalent to over $150,000 in 2025] in seed money” according to the NAHJ’s website. As the NAHJ recalled on its website:


“The beginnings of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) can be traced back to a 1982 convention in San Diego….After obtaining $50,000 in seed money from the Freedom Forum (then the Gannett foundation), an organizing committee was formed…After two years of arduous work, the articles of incorporation for NAHJ were finally signed in February of 1984…. In 1985, NAHJ established its headquarters in the National Press Building in Washington, D.C….Today, there are more than 2,000 members nationwide. More funds were also attracted, from $150, 000 in the first year, to an annual budget of over $800,000 by the end of 2012.”


NAHJ’s president in 2018, Brandon Benavides, was then also the executive producer of the "Good Morning San Antonio" corporate media show of the Graham Media Group’s KSAT-12 television station in Texas.


The Graham Media Group was then a subsidiary of Graham Holdings, whose corporate board, historically, then included former Washington Post Company corporate media conglomerate CEO Donald Graham, former "Washington Post" newspaper CEO Katharine Weymouth, then-Columbia University President Lee Bollinger (who spoke in opposition to the BDS campaign and affiliated Columbia University institutionally with Tel Aviv University, which does weapons research for the IDF, when he was Columbia U.’s president), former General Motors CEO Richard Wagoner, former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, former Delaware Governor Jack Markel and a former vice-president for government affairs, Larry Thompson, of PepsiCo ( a U.S. corporation that also gave a contribution of $50,000 to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in June 2011).


Besides then owning the corporate media television station that employed the NAHJ’s then-president, Graham Holdings also, historically, then owned the Slate Group corporate media firm that then published both the "Slate" online magazine and "Foreign Policy" magazine.


After receiving a $1 million grant from the Robert R. McCormick Tribune/Robert R. McCormick Foundation in 2004, the NAHJ also was later given a $100,000 grant by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation in 2010, according to the foundation website’s grants data base.


The "New York Daily News" mainstream newspaper that former National Association of Hispanic Journalists [NAHJ] president Gonzalez began working for, eight years before Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation funds were used to launch the “parallel left” "Democracy Now!" daily news show that he co-hosted, had been owned by the Chicago-based "Tribune" corporate media conglomerate since--in imitation of British press baron Lord Northcliffe’s "London Daily Mirror" tabloid newspaper--the "Chicago Tribune" newspaper firm began publishing the tabloid newspaper in 1919.


The newspaper remained linked to the "Chicago Tribune" until it was sold by the "Tribune" Company for $295 million [equal to over $700 million in 2025] to British global media baron Robert Maxwell (whose daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, was apparently involved in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal) in 1991; prior to the "New York Daily News" being subsequently purchased in 1993 for around $36 million [equal to around $80 million in 2025] by the early 21st-century Columbia University big donor and neo-con Zionist real estate dealmaker and owner of "U.S. News and World Report" magazine, Mort Zuckerman--an opponent of full national self-determination rights for the Palestinian people and the U.S. antiwar movement’s Palestinian solidarity activism; who expressed his support for the IDF’s 2023-2024 war on Gaza by opposing 2023-2024 student antiwar protests being held on Columbia University’s campus.


Between 1919 and his death in 1946, day-to-day management of the "Chicago Tribune"’s "New York Daily News" tabloid subsidiary was handled by Joseph “Captain” Patterson from his Manhattan office building; while his cousin, Robert “Colonel” McCormick—with whom Patterson had jointly managed the "Chicago Tribune" between 1914 and his 1919 move to New York City—continued, in an autocratic way, to manage the day-to-day operations of the Tribune in Chicago until McCormick died in 1955.


During the 27 years when Patterson managed the "Chicago Tribune" newspaper tabloid subsidiary, that "Democracy Now!"’s future co-host began working for after 1987, the "Chicago Tribune" first entered the U.S. radio broadcasting world. As John Tebbel recalled in his 1947 book, "An American Dynasty":


“One of the astute moves that Colonel McCormick made in building his empire was to get in on the ground floor of radio, at a time when most publishers scoffed at the idea that it could ever be a serious rival of the newspaper….As early as 1921…he began the negotiations which ended in June 1924 with the purchase of WDAP, then Chicago’s most powerful station. Less than a month later the station had its call letters changed to WGN, meaning of course, `World’s Greatest Newspaper’…In 1934…WGN joined WOR, Newark, WLW, Cincinnati, and WXYZ, Detroit, in a network which expanded in time to the powerful 268-station…Mutual Broadcasting System. The Colonel owns 24 percent of Mutual stock, and W.E. MacFarlane, Tribune business manager, was president of the chain for several years…”


Around the time "New York Daily News" founder Patterson died, the value of the Chicago Tribune media empire, which he and McCormick had inherited, was worth about $100 million [equal to about $1.6 billion in 2025] and the "Chicago Tribune"’s newspaper chain, along with William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper chain and Roy Howard’s Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, was, historically regarded by many people in the USA as a dangerous corporate media propaganda tool of the U.S power elite’s right-wing faction. As George Seldes observed in his 1943 book, "Fact and Fascism":


“If the reader thinks of our chain newspaper owners, Hearst, Howard, Patterson and McCormick, as merely four of America’s 15,000 publishers, he fails to see the danger to America from an anti-democratic, anti-American press. These four publishers put out one fourth of all the newspapers sold daily on our streets, they own forty of the 200 big city papers which make American public opinion, they run not only the three biggest newspaper chains in the country, but two of the three big news services which supply news to a majority of America’s dailies, and because they have always been anti-labor, anti-labor, and anti-democratic…they constitute what I believe is the greatest force hostile to the general welfare of the common people of America…They are animated by nothing above their pocketbooks...”


After Robert “Colonel” McCormick died in 1955, leaving an estate of around $55 million [equal to over $664 million in 2025], the McCormick Charitable Trust/Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation was established; and the McCormick Patterson Trust—which then controlled the Tribune Company and its "New York Daily News" subsidiary—was placed under the control of this newly-established foundation for the next two decades, until the Tribune Company was reorganized in 1975. Then, in the early 1980s, the Tribune Company corporate media conglomerate was again re-organized; and in 1983 Tribune Company stock began to be sold to investors other than Tribune Company executives, members of the McCormick-Patterson dynasty or the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation.


According to a May 16, 2008 "Chicago Tribune" article, “at one time,” the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation “was the largest shareholder” of the Tribune media conglomerate.


But three years after the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation gave its $1 million grant to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists [NAHJ] in 2004, to expand the “parity project” that "Democracy Now!" co-host Gonzalez had created during his 2002 to 2004 term as NAHJ president, the foundation “sold all its shares” of Tribune media conglomerate stock “as the part of Tribune Co.’s process of going private, which was completed in late 2007;” and in 2008 the foundation’s board of trustees voted to drop “Tribune” from its name and just call itself the “Robert R. McCormick Foundation.”


Yet despite the name change, according to the same article, in 2008 “neither its governance nor operation” was “to change as a result” of the name change; and “the foundation’s board always has consisted of current and former Tribune Co. executives.”


The foundation may no longer have owned stock in the Tribune corporate media conglomerate after 2008. But in 2018 the Robert R. McCormick Foundation board chairman, former Tribune Company Chairman/CEO and then Northwestern University Trustee Dennis FitzSimons, still, historically, sat on the board of directors of corporate media firms like Time Inc. and Nexstar Media Group/Media General Incorporated, according to the foundation’s website; and in 2016, the over $1.2 billion in Robert R. McCormick Foundation assets included investments in hedge funds ($411.4 million), private equity funds ($164 million), international equity funds ($124.5 million), domestic equity funds ($63.1 million) and publicly-traded corporate stocks and bonds ($180.3 million), from which $35.5 million in investment income was obtained in 2016, according to the foundation’s 2016 Form 990 financial filing.


The same Form 990 financial filing also revealed that the “non-profit” Robert R. McCormick Foundation then paid former Tribune Company Chairman/CEO and then Northwestern University Trustee FitzSimons an annual compensation of $61,900 for working just 5 hours a week as the foundation’s board chair in 2016; and, for working just 4 hours a week, the four other members of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation board of directors each received an annual compensation of $55,000 in 2016.


In addition, the Robert R. McCormick Foundation’s then-president/CEO, a former "Los Angeles Times" and "Chicago Tribune" corporate media CEO named David Hiller, then received a total annual compensation of $550,000 in 2016; and at least 12 other executives of the same “non-profit” foundation also were paid total annual compensations that were well above $150,000 in 2016.


Not surprisingly, the university on whose board of trustees the Robert R. McCormick Foundation board chair then sat, tax-exempt Northwestern University, also, in 2016, received 8 “charitable” grants, totaling $2.1 million from the “non-profit” Robert R. McCormick Foundation which previously gave a $1 million grant in 2004 to the NAHJ organization that "Democracy Now!’"s longtime co-host headed between 2002 and 2004. (end of part 7)

J.M. Kaplan Fund foundation, in 1997, gave the Pacifica Foundation a $13,000 [equal to over $26,000 in 2025] grant to “support Democracy Now! show;” and in 1998 an additional $10,000 [equal to over $19,000 in 2025] grant to help fund "Democracy Now!" was given to the Pacifica Foundation by the J.M. Kaplan Fund foundation.

After the then-"NY Daily News" newspaper owner, who employed one of the "Democracy Now!" show’s upper-middle-class co-hosts for over two decades, expressed his support, in a late 2008 television interview, for using public funds to bail out the Wall Street banks, whose involvement in unethical subprime mortgage lending helped trigger the “Great Recession” of 2008, [the now-deceased] Wayne Barrett noted, in a Nov. 25, 2008 "Village Voice" article, that “when Zuckerman isn’t running his media properties…he’s the chairman of Boston Properties, the largest office real estate company in the country;” and “that Citigroup rents more than a million square feet from Zuckerman’s company — trailing only the federal government and Lockheed Martin on its list of top 20 tenants.”


So one reason Mort Zuckerman (later a post-2012 pro-IDF big donor to Tel Aviv University-affiliated Columbia University), historically argued on television that “we cannot allow a major institution like” Citigroup “to collapse,” and his "NY Daily News" newspaper argued in a November 2008 editorial that the U.S. government should “prevent major banking houses like Citigroup from collapsing,” was apparently because the commercial rental income that Zuckerman’s real estate deal-making firm gained from its Citigroup tenant would be lost, if Citigroup, despite having made $300 billion in unethical “toxic” subprime mortgage-related loans, was allowed to collapse, according to Barrett’s "Voice" article.


When Zuckerman had purchased his "NY Daily News" newspaper in 1993 for $36.3 million [equal to over $81 million in 2025], his personal worth was then $265 million [equal to over $594 million in 2025]. And during the 20 years that the weekly salary of the part-time co-host of the “parallel left” Democracy Now! show was being provided by Zuckerman’s tabloid corporate newspaper, Zuckerman’s personal wealth increased to around $2.8 billion by early 2018.


Yet, not surprisingly, not many news segments examining how Zuckerman, who also then sat on the board of trustees of both NYU and New York City’s WNET-TV affiliate of PBS during these two decades, was accumulating more personal wealth through his commercial real estate deal-making firm as the gentrification of the Big Apple intensified (while Zuckerman was also being a chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and a president of the America- Israel Friendship League lobbying groups at the same time), were apparently aired or broadcast on a sustained, regular basis by the "Democracy Now!" producers during these two decades. But in just the one year alone of 1999, the gross profits of the pro-IDF then-"NY Daily News" owner’s Boston Properties’ firm jumped by 50 percent.


After moving into his "NY Daily News" office in early 1993, Zuckerman had immediately “fired 180 out of 540 members of the Newspaper Guild” at the "NY Daily News", had “axed two-thirds of the African-American reporters, including all Black males,” and had “dismissed [the now-deceased] veteran reporter Dave Hardy, who was one of the Black journalists who won a racial discrimination suit against the newspaper in 1987” when it was still then owned by the "Tribune" media conglomerate, according to the Daily News Workers Campaign for Justice.


So, not surprisingly, the Daily News Workers Campaign for Justice, historically, had then urged people in New York City to boycott Zuckerman’s "NY Daily News" in 1993.


Yet one of the “parallel left” Democracy Now! show’s co-hosts had continued to work as a columnist/reporter for Zuckerman’s newspaper until 2016; in the year before Zuckerman, a white Canadian migrant who didn’t become a U.S. citizen until he reached the age of 40 in 1977, finally sold the "NY Daily News" in September 2017, while still continuing to then own his "U.S. News & World Report" corporate media outlet.


Also, historically, a year after the Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation gave the Pacifica Foundation the $25,000 grant in 1996 to launch the "Democracy Now!" show, the J.M. Kaplan Fund foundation, in 1997, gave the Pacifica Foundation a $13,000 [equal to over $26,000 in 2025] grant to “support Democracy Now! show;” and in 1998 an additional $10,000 [equal to over $19,000 in 2025] grant to help fund "Democracy Now!" was given to the Pacifica Foundation by the J.M. Kaplan Fund foundation.


And, not surprisingly, few radio or cable tv segments examining either how the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s founder obtained the money he needed to establish his foundation or how the J.M. Kaplan Fund, historically, acted as a conduit for the Central Intelligence Agency [C.I.A.] during the Cold War era were aired by "Democracy Now!" during the last 28 years.


Yet as U. of California-Santa Cruz Professor G. William Domhoff noted, historically, in his 1970-published book, titled "The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America":


“The CIA did not exhaust its labor organizing efforts with its involvement in unions and training organizations related to the AFL-CIO. It also speculated in the activities of the `democratic left'. Through the J.M. Kaplan Foundation, which was founded originally through the beneficence of the president of Welch Grape Juice Company, the CIA gave $1,048,940 between 1961 and 1963 to socialist Norman Thomas’ Institute of International Labor Research…”


In a Sept. 3, 1964 article, titled “Kaplan Fund, Cited as C.I.A. `Conduit,’ Lists Unexplained $395,000 Grant,” the "New York Times" also, historically, observed:


“Charges that the J.M. Kaplan Fund Inc. of 55 Fifth Avenue has acted as a `secret conduit’ for transmission of funds abroad for the Central Intelligence Agency has met a wall of silence at the fund.


“A copy of the report made by the Kaplan Fund…for 1963, however, shows an unexplained grant of $395,000 [equal to over $4.1 million in 2025] for that year to an Institute operated by a man who has long been identified with anti-communist causes in Europe and Latin America. The grant was by far the largest made by the Kaplan Fund last year in a total of $1,645,390 [equal to over $17.4 million in 2025].


“The recipient of the $395,000 was the Institute of International Labor Research Inc….Its secretary-treasurer is Sacha Volman…For years in Paris he headed a group called Free Trade Unions in Exile that worked with underground anti-communist forces in Eastern Europe…Norman Thomas is listed as chairman of its board of directors…Mr. Volman denied by telephone from Washington last night that he knew of any C.I.A. connection…It was his recollection that the fund had also made grants in 1960, 1961 and 1962…


“The charge that the New York…organization was being used as a `secret conduit’ for C.I.A. funds was made…by Representative Wright Patman…The Kaplan Fund has been under investigation both by the House and by the Internal Revenue Service. Mr. Patman had charged the fund with using some of its monies in business operations…”


In the 2012-published book, "Philanthropy In America: A History", University of Virginia Commonwealth Professor of History Olivier Zunz (who was “grateful also for the support” he “received from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation”—while writing a book about foundations like the ones supporting him) indicated why Rep. Patman initiated his Congressional investigation of foundations like the J.M. Kaplan Fund in the 1960s:


“Patman pursued his investigation of foundations throughout the 1960s. He argued that the proliferation of foundations was evidence not of increased…generosity but rather of growing fiscal abuse, which removed `over $11.5 billion [equal to over $121 billion in 2025]’ from taxation. He was determined to expose philanthropy as yet another pretext the wealthy used to avoid inheritance taxes, keep control of companies from one generation to the next, and receive handsome tax deductions when dumping unwanted assets. He also believed philanthropy was a means to avoid antitrust legislation, hide dubious financial transactions from scrutiny and influence the public through the funding of media…Patman was…the first person to reveal that the CIA had been using private foundations as fronts to channel money to anti-communist activities in Europe…Embarrassed, the White House quickly pressured the congressman to abandon that part of his investigation…”


The J.M. Kaplan Fund, that gave the Pacifica Foundation $23,000 [equal to around $45,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] in grant money in 1997 and 1998 to help fund "Democracy Now!", was established in 1945 by a former New School for Social Research/New School University board of trustees chair and former Freedom House trustee named Jacob “Jack” Kaplan, who lived between 1893 and 1987; and “much of its asset base came from the sale in the 1950s of the Welch Grape Juice Company, long headed by Mr. Kaplan, to a grape growers’ cooperative in New York State and Pennsylvania,” according to the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s website. From the sale of his Welch Grape Juice Company corporate stock in 1956, for example, Kaplan received $28.5 million [equal to over $339 million in 2025].


A historical profile of Kaplan’s company posted on the fundinguniverse.com website recalled how the Kaplan Fund’s founder increased the Welch Grape Juice Company’s profits during World War II and first gained control of the Welch Grape Juice Company:


“…Jacob `Jack’ Kaplan…had garnered…a multi-million dollar fortune in commodities trading and retailing in the early 20th century. In 1933, Kaplan and his brother Maurice [purchased]…the grape processing operation of the Chautauqua and Erie Grape Growers Cooperative (CLE) in Brockton, New York…He changed the company name to National Grapes Corporation [in 1939]…In order to circumvent wartime restrictions on corporate profits and price controls, Jack Kaplan spearheaded the creation of a large grape growers cooperative in 1945. The new organization would not only be immune from federal corporation taxes and pricing dictates, but would also guarantee his processing company a reliable supply of grapes…Kaplan and his team convinced 900 growers to join the newly formed National Grape Co-Operative…Jack Kaplan purchased a controlling interest in [Welch’s parent] company [American National]…By the mid-1950s, National Grape farmers—whose numbers had swollen to over 6,000 in the meantime—were supplying 90 percent of the grapes processed by Welch…”


According to Frances Stoner Saunders’ 1999-published book, "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters" book, the same year that Kaplan sold his Welch Grape Juice Company stock for the $28.5 million, from which much of the J.M. Kaplan fund’s asset base was derived, he secretly offered his services to the Central Intelligence Agency. As "The Cultural Cold War" book recalled:


"In 1956...J.M. Kaplan, president of the Welch Grape Juice Company, and president and treasurer of the Kaplan Foundation (assets: $14 million), wrote to Allen Dulles offering his services...Dulles subsequently arranged for a CIA `representative' to make an appointment with Kaplan. The Kaplan Foundation could soon be counted as an asset, a reliable `pass-through' for secret funds earmarked for CIA projects, amongst them the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and an institute headed by veteran socialist and chairman of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, Norman Thomas.”


In the second decade of the 21st-century, the J.M. Kaplan Fund, that helped fund Pacifica Foundation’s then-more directly-affiliated "Democracy Now!" media group in the late 1990s, was still then controlled by members of Jack Kaplan’s family (whose last names were now more frequently “Davidson” or “Fonesca” rather than “Kaplan,” as a result of marriage by Kaplan’s daughters, including the oldest one, Joan Davidson, who still then owned an 85-acre estate in Germantown, New York in 2013).


In 2010, for example, eleven grandchildren, children or other relatives of Kaplan were each then being paid between $4,000 and $9,000 for only 3 to 5 hours of “weekly work” sitting on the J.M. Kaplan Fund board of trustees, according to the foundation’s Form 990 financial filing for 2010.


And in 2016, Kaplan’s surviving children and grandchildren were then being paid between $5,000 and $10,000 for only 3 to 5 hours of “weekly work” sitting on the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s board, according to the Form 990 financial filing for 2016.


The market value of the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s assets in 2010 still then exceeded $139 million, including its investments of over $72 million in limited partnership shares, over $56 million in corporate stock and over $800,000 in corporate bonds. And over $16 million of the foundation’s inherited wealth was then invested in Westgate Associates, over $13 million in Brookside Capital and over $8 million in Emerging Markets Growth Fund, for example, by the J.M. Kaplan Fund; and the dividends and interest obtained from the corporate securities then owned by the “non-profit” foundation produced a net investment income of over $2.1 million in 2010.


In 2010, the J.M. Kaplan Fund apparently then used some of the money it obtained from investments in corporations that exploit working-class people and middle-class consumers around the globe to provide “charitable grants” to U.S. university book publishing firms like Princeton University Press, University of North Carolina Press and Penn State University Press, as well as to “parallel left” publishers like The New Press (which was then given a $5,000 grant “for `The World According To Monsanto’), according to its 2010 Form 990 financial filing.


And during that same year, the “non-profit” J.M. Kaplan Fund also then paid $459,000 to Brandywine Management Services “for investment services” (of apparently speculating with the foundation’s money on stock markets around the globe) and then paid a total annual compensation of over $291,000 to the J.M. Kaplan Fund’s executive director, according to the same 2010 financial filing.


In 2016 the market value of J.M. Kaplan Fund’s assets still then exceeded $130 million, including the over $97 million it invested in hedge funds, according to its 2016 Form 990 financial filing. And from its investments in the stocks and bonds of corporation and governments that still exploit working-class people and middle-class consumers around the globe, the J.M. Kaplan Fund received over $1.8 million in dividends and interests in 2016.


According to the same 2016 financial filing, the market value of J.M. Kaplan Fund’s investment in the Brandywine Mutual Strategy hedge fund then exceeded $54 million and the market value of its investment in the Brandywine Global hedge fund was over $35 million in 2016; and, in that same year, J.M. Kaplan Fund paid the Brandywine Management Company stock and bonds speculation firm $563,934 for its “investment services” on behalf of the “non-profit” foundation.


Since the J.M. Kaplan Fund gave a $10,000 grant to Pacifica in 1998, Brandywine Management Company/Brandywine Global Inc. had been a subsidiary of Legg Mason Inc., that, with its 9 subsidiary investment affiliates managed over $779 billion worth of assets in early 2018, including over $216 billion worth of stock in corporations that exploit workers and middle-class consumers around the world. As the Brandywine Global website, historically, then noted:


“Brandywine Global incorporated in 1986 as Brandywine Asset Management, LLC….In January 1998, Legg Mason, Inc., a New York Stock Exchange-listed company which has been providing investment services to institutions and individuals since 1899, acquired Brandywine Asset Management…. “


In late 2017, over $74 billion in corporate stocks, corporate bonds, corporate senior notes and government bonds were then being managed by Brandywine Global; and in late December 2017, $7.4 million worth of Apple stock, $7.4 million worth of JP Morgan Chase stock, $7.2 million worth of Citigroup stock, $6.3 million worth of Disney/ABC corporate media conglomerate stock, $6.3 million worth of Comcast corporate media conglomerate stock, $4.4 million worth of United Technologies stock, $3.9 million worth of Goldman Sachs stock, $3.9 million worth of Lockheed Martin stock, $2.7 million worth of General Dynamics stock, $2.4 million worth of Exxon Mobil stock, $2 million worth of Chevron stock and $2.1 million worth of CBS corporate media conglomerate stock were then contained in the stock portfolio that provides “investment services” for the J.M. Kaplan Fund which had helped fund "Democracy Now!" in 1997 and 1998. (end of part 8)

Besides receiving the $10,000 grant from the J.M. Kaplan Fund in 1998 to support its then-affiliated "Democracy Now!" show, Pacifica was also given a $25,000 [equivalent to nearly $50,000 in 2025] grant in that same year by the Public Welfare Foundation to help fund the news reporting of the "Democracy Now!" show.

Besides receiving the $10,000 grant from the J.M. Kaplan Fund in 1998 to support its then-affiliated "Democracy Now!" show, Pacifica was also given a $25,000 [equivalent to nearly $50,000 in 2025] grant in that same year by the Public Welfare Foundation to help fund the news reporting of the "Democracy Now!" show. So, not surprisingly, during the last three decades the "Democracy Now!" producers have not aired many radio or cable tv news segments that examine how the Public Welfare Foundation (whose current assets exceed $583 million) obtained its grant money historically or how this “non-profit” foundation currently obtains its grant money.


Yet, as the Public Welfare Foundation website indicates, the foundation was established in 1947 after an Austin, Texas corporate media baron named Charles E. Marsh “made a formal commitment to philanthropy by incorporating the Public Welfare Foundation and designating it to receive his newspapers’ assets upon his death;” and “Marsh oversaw the Foundation’s work until his health began to decline in 1953.” In addition, after Charles Marsh died in 1964, his third wife. Claudia Haines Marsh, “was the Foundation’s president from 1952 to 1974, and she remained a guiding influence until her own death, at the age of 100, in the year 2000.”


Until late 2011, “a granddaughter of Claudia Marsh” and “the daughter of Donald Warner who chaired the foundation’s Board for 10 years,” named Beth Warner, “was a valued member of the Board’s Finance committee,” according to a Nov. 8, 2011 Public Welfare Foundation press release; and Beth Warner’s 21st-century presence on the Public Welfare Foundation’s board of trustees continued “a tradition of family members and close associates of Charles Marsh serving on the board,” according to the same 2011 press release.


In the 2009 book, "The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes", Bryan Burrough indicated how the Public Welfare Foundation founder who owned both the "Austin-American" and "Austin Statesman" newspapers (which later merged into the Austin American-Statesman newspaper in 1973), Charles Marsh, was a business associate of ultra-rich Texas oilman Sid Richardson during the 1930s:


“Charles E. Marsh, co-owner of several Texas newspapers, including the politically influential Austin-American…was using his spare cash to bankroll several Texas wildcatters… It is a measure of how totally Sid Richardson cloaked his business in secrecy that the name of Charles Marsh, the man whose backing made Richardson’s fortune possible, remained unknown to Richardson’s family…


“Marsh…had begun negotiating a complicated deal involving First National Bank of Dallas… It appears that Marsh agreed to guarantee Richardson’s debt to the bank. In return, the bank agreed to loan Richardson an additional $210,000 [equal to over $3.8 million in 2018], followed by another $150,000 [equal to over $2.7 million in 2018]… By the summer of 1935 Richardson had used most of Charles Marsh’s investment to buy land all around Gulf’s drill sites…"


Marsh also loaned Richardson $30,000 [equivalent to over $560,000 in 2018] in 1934 and when Richardson’s oil firm discovered oil in 1935 on its drill sites, the profits were split between Marsh and Richardson. But then, according to the same book:


“In 1938, Marsh encountered a sudden…financial reversal… From a single mention in a letter to Richardson — contained in Marsh’s papers at the Johnson Presidential Library — it appears that the Internal Revenue Service served Marsh with a request for $1.2 million [equal to over $20.5 million in 2018] in overdue taxes… Marsh was forced to repay much of the money. To raise it, he ended up selling all his Texas newspapers.”


Coincidentally, like Sid Richardson, former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson also apparently was backed by the founder of the Public Welfare Foundation (that helped fund Pacifica’s "Democracy Now!" show with a $25,000 grant in 1998) during the 1930s, when LBJ (also using $10,000 [equal to over $176,000 in 2018] that was given to him by the father of former First Lady Claudia “Ladybird” Johnson) decided in 1937 that he wanted to get himself elected as Austin’s representative in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1938. As Ronnie Dugger observed in the 1982 book "The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson":


“Johnson had a special advantage: the partisanship of the Austin newspapers. Charles Marsh… was owner and publisher of the `Austin American-Statesman' as well as the dailies in 4 or 5 other Texas cities, and he was for Lyndon from the first. Marsh…had been in oil deals…since as early as 1934… Marsh was also… a director and president of Richardson Oils, Inc., which gave Johnson a direct connection to oilman Sid Richardson…


“Although the Austin dailies did not formally endorse anyone, Marsh turned them into Lyndon’s harmonicas. `These papers went all-out for him’ said Edmonds Travis, one of their earliest editors… From the time the Johnsons arrived in Washington they frequented `Longlea,’ the plantation home of their friend, publisher Charles Marsh, in Culpeper, Virginia…The publisher also flew Johnson about in his private plane….”


From the profits he obtained by co-owning a chain of newspapers in Austin, Waco, Wichita Falls, Breckenridge, Brownsville, Cisco, Cleburne, Corpus Christi, Eastland, Harlingen, Laredo, McAllen, Mineral Wells, Paris, Port Arthur, Ranger and Texarkana after World War I, Public Welfare Foundation founder Marsh had become a millionaire by the time he was in his early 40’s during the late 1920s. A biographical entry for Charles Marsh on the Spartacus-educational.com website noted that, according to Robert Caro, the author of the 1982 book "The Path To Power: The years of Lyndon Johnson", by 1936:


"Marsh owned newspapers in fifteen Texas cities, and in another dozen cities in other states... He was Richardson's partner in some of the most profitable oil wells in West Texas, and the sole owner of other profitable wells of his own. And in Austin, he owned the streetcar franchise and the largest single bloc of stock in the Capital National Bank, as well as vast tracts of real estate.”


The Spartacus-education.com website also recalled another way that the Public Education Welfare foundation founder helped the future Democratic President (who would later be responsible for the post-1964 escalation of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam that caused the deaths of millions of Vietnamese people, as well as the wounding of over 153,000 and deaths of over 57,000 members of the U.S. military, during the 1960s and early 1970s):


“Johnson complained that he found it difficult managing on his Congress salary. Marsh arranged for Johnson's wife to buy nineteen acres on Lake Austin for $8,000, which he knew was an area that was likely to be developed and would increase dramatically in value. Lady Bird Johnson later sold the land for $330,000. He also provided the money for Johnson to buy the Fort Worth radio station that he said would be `some day worth $3 million’. “ (end of part 9)

Besides sitting on Public Welfare Foundation board of directors when that foundation gave Pacifica Foundation its $25,000 grant in 1998 to help support "Democracy Now!", Peter Edelman also, at the same time, sat on board of directors in late 1990s of the liberal Zionist New Israel Fund (that in more recent years has expressed opposition to the U.S. antiwar and Palestine solidarity movement’s BDS campaign).

Sitting on the Public Welfare Foundation’s board of directors when the foundation, which super-rich Texas corporate media baron Charles Marsh established, gave the Pacifica Foundation its $25,000 [equal to nearly $50,000 in 2025] grant in 1998. to help fund its then-"Democracy Now!" media group subsidiary, was a long-time Democratic Party political operative, a long-time friend of current Columbia University SIPA Professor and Co-Director of Tel Aviv U.-affiliated Columbia U.’s Institute of Global Politics Hillary Clinton and a former government official in the Democratic administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Bill Clinton. named Peter Edelman.


Between 1994 and 2012 Edelman sat, historically on the Public Welfare Foundation’s board of directors, as a member of either its grant review, finance, appropriations, nominating or policy and planning committees; and between 2007 and 2012 Edelman chaired the Public Welfare Foundation’s board.


And, in a 1998 book (that was subsidized by the MacArthur Foundation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation), titled "The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: Brothers In Arms", a then-contributing editor of "The Nation" magazine,, Kai Bird, recalled that in June 1968, the former Johnson White House National Security Affairs Advisor (who shared responsibility for the decision to begin overtly bombing North Vietnam in early 1965) and then-Ford Foundation President McGeorge "Bundy arranged fellowships totaling $131,000 [equal to over $1.2 million in 2025] for eight members of" the then-recently mysteriously-slain Robert F. "Kennedy's campaign staff."


Bird also, historically, noted that recipients "included Frank Mankiewicz ($15,000 for a study of the Peace Corps in Latin America), Adam Walinsky ($22,200 for a study of community action programs) and Peter Edelman ($19,090 [equal to over $177,000 in 2025] for a study of community development programs around the world)."


As longtime Public Welfare Foundation board member Edelman recalled in a May 24-24, 2004 oral history interview with the University of Virginia-affiliated Miller Center:


“When RFK died, [McGeorge] Mac Bundy gave about eight senior members of Bobby’s staff, including me, a year of Ford Foundation support….Number one, the Ford Foundation is very generous to us, so we come back six months later and… it says in the `New York Times' that we were going on a honeymoon courtesy of the Ford Foundation…It said Marian [Wright Edelman] and I were getting married and we were going on a honeymoon courtesy of the Ford Foundation….”


Prior to working as a presidential campaign staff person for RFK and then receiving a Ford Foundation fellowship from former National Security Affairs advisor Bundy, Public Welfare Foundation board member Edelman had worked as a law clerk to a Supreme Court Justice named Arthur Goldberg in 1962, as a special assistant in the Democratic Kennedy and Johnson Administration’s Justice Department in 1963 and 1964, as a political operative in RFK’s successful campaign in 1964 for New York’s seat in the U.S. Senate and as RFK’s legislative assistant in the U.S. Senate between 1965 and 1968.


According to the 1982-published book by Joan Coxsedge, titled" Rooted In Secrecy: The Clandestine Element in Australian Politics", “Arthur Goldberg, the General Counsel of the CIO engineered the expulsion of the Left from this organization;” and “after the left-wing purge of the CIO, Goldberg worked to achieve union with the conservative American Federation of Labor [AFL] headed by rabid anti-communist and long-time CIA stooge, George Meany, and what was left of the CIO."


Yet as longtime former Public Welfare Foundation board member Edelman noted in his 2004 oral history interview:


“My relationship with Justice Goldberg was wonderful…. Goldberg was this warm, effusive person. Anybody who had anything to do with him was invited to his home….Passover Seder was a cast of 30 or 40 people at Justice Goldberg’s house….Anyway, he became a friend for life, and I ran the issues in his campaign for Governor in 1970 if you want to get to that. So we had a wonderful relationship…”


And in an interview that appeared in the April 2008 issue of "Washington Lawyer" magazine, Edelman also recalled:


“At the suggestion of Justice Goldberg, I went to work in the U.S. Justice Department. This was 1963, the third year of the Kennedy administration, and I remember Justice Goldberg telling me, `There won’t be many administrations like this in your lifetime. You need to be part of this.’”


But when the then-U.S. Attorney General Bobby “Kennedy decided to run for the Senate” in 1964, Edelman “said to John Douglas [the Assistant Attorney General for whom Edelman then worked as a special assistant], `Do you think I could get involved in the campaign?’,” according to the text of the longtime Public Welfare Foundation board member’s May 24 and 25, 2004 interview with the University of Virginia-affiliated Miller Center.


And in RFK’s successful 1964 campaign (to occupy one of New York’s seat in the U.S. Senate until RFK was eliminated, historically, after winning the 1968 Democratic presidential primary in California in early June 1968) Edelman “was assigned to Bill vanden Heuvel, the chief issues person on the research side” of RFK’s 1964 campaign, according to the text of the same 2004 interview.


Coincidentally, Bill vanden Heuvel was the father of Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor, publisher and part-owner for over two decades, historically, of "The Nation" magazine, one of whose senior editors, historically, Lizzy Ratner, had worked at "Democracy Now!" from September 2001 to July 2002.


And then-Nation editor-publisher vanden Heuvel’s father was mentioned in Frances Stoner Saunders’ "The Cultural Cold War" book, in the following reference to the CIA-linked Farfield Foundation:


"First president of the Farfield [Foundation], and the CIA's most significant front-man, was Julius `Junkie' Fleischmann, the millionaire heir to a high yeast and gin fortune...He had helped finance `The New Yorker' [magazine]...`The Farfield Foundation was a CIA foundation and there were many such foundations,' Tom Braden went on to explain...Other Farfield directors included William vanden Heuvel a New York lawyer who was close to both John and Bobby Kennedy."


Besides working as a staff person for Democratic candidate RFK’s 1964 and 1968 election campaigns and Democratic candidate Arthur Goldberg’s unsuccessful 1970 election campaign for New York’s governorship , Edelman also, historically, had worked as a political operative in the unsuccessful presidential campaigns of Democratic candidates Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988. As the longtime Public Welfare Foundation board member and former board chair said in a 2004 oral history interview:


“…In any case, I was very close to Fritz [Walter] Mondale. I had met him the day he was sworn into the Senate, because I’m from Minnesota, as we said…When he was thinking about running for President in ’74 and I was living in Boston, I would drive him around New Hampshire. We were really very close….Yes, I was co-chair of a task force on employment issues [in his 1984 presidential campaign]….I was the chief coordinator of speechwriting in the Dukakis campaign [in 1988] after Labor Day….”


Edelman also apparently, historically, “tapped” current Columbia University SIPA Professor Hillary Rodham Clinton (despite her previous work in election campaigns for 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater and in Republican Nelson Rockefeller’s unsuccessful campaign to obtain the presidential nomination at the 1968 GOP national convention),as a possible future leader in the Democratic Party in the late 1960s; before Edelman was later appointed to a position in current Columbia Professor Clinton’s husband’s Democratic administration in the early 1990s. As Edelman noted in his 2004 oral history interview:


“…In 1969 the League of Women Voters asked me to coordinate a conference….In fact I think it was my idea and somebody asked me what to do. Younger leaders would come together with older leaders….So there was a steering committee and we identified various elected and non-elected people over 30 who we thought would be admirable for younger people to meet, and we identified some younger people.


“Hillary graduates from Wellesley and she makes that speech where she upbraids Senator [Edward] Brooke…It gets into `Time' and `Newsweek' and so on….So I called her up and I said, How do you do, I’m—and would you come to my conference? She says Sure. So that’s where it started…. Marian [Edelman’s wife] then gets appointed to be on the Carnegie Council on Children, which was a big thing that the Carnegie Foundation invested in….And Hillary comes to work summers and part time for the commission…She goes through law school, comes to work for Marian as her first full-time job out of law school…Then we hear that she’s gone off to Arkansas to marry this guy…In ’78, he’s elected Governor… We’re seeing Hillary right along. By this time she’s on Marian’s board, and after we move back to Washington in ’79 she comes and stays with us and we talk on the phone quite a lot….


“All the way through the ’80s we saw each other a lot, saw her more than him, but saw each other a lot... We had some meetings in Little Rock. I stayed at the mansion. I would go see him...We thought he was a person of great integrity…. I put her on the board of something called the New World Foundation that I was on the board of in about 1983 or ’84. We served on that board together for four or five years…. I really did want to be involved in the administration...”


But a year after the Public Welfare Foundation gave its $25,000 grant to the Pacifica Foundation to help fund the "Democracy Now!" show, the Clintons’ Democratic administration ordered the Pentagon to attack Yugoslavia/Serbia; and, in his late 1999 article, titled “The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia,” antiwar writer Michael Parenti described what happened:


“In 1999, the U.S. national security state…launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for 78 days, dropping 20,000 tons of bombs and killing thousands of women, children, and men….Up until the bombings began in March 1999, the conflict in Kosovo had taken 2000 lives altogether from both sides, according to Kosovo Albanian sources. Yugoslavian sources had put the figure at 800. In either case, such casualties reveal a limited insurgency, not genocide. The forced expulsion policy began after the NATO bombings, with thousands being uprooted by Serb forces mostly in areas where the KLA was operating or was suspected of operating…During the bombings, an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Serbian residents of Kosovo took flight (mostly north but some to the south), as did thousands of Roma and other non-Albanian ethnic groups….


“NATO's attacks on Yugoslavia have been in violation of its own charter, which says it can take military action only in response to aggression committed against one of its members. Yugoslavia attacked no NATO member. U.S. leaders discarded international law and diplomacy…While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and progressives were convinced that “this time” the U.S. national security state was really fighting the good fight… Even if Serbian atrocities had been committed, and I have no doubt that some were, where is the sense of proportionality? Paramilitary killings in Kosovo (which occurred mostly after the aerial war began) are no justification for bombing fifteen cities in hundreds of around-the-clock raids for over two months, spewing hundreds of thousands of tons of highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals into the water, air, and soil, killing thousands of Serbs, Albanians, Roma, Turks, and others, and destroying bridges, residential areas, and over two hundred hospitals, clinics, schools, and churches, along with the productive capital of an entire nation..”


Yet in his 2004 oral history interview, former Public Welfare Foundation board member and board chair Edelman said he still thought that the Clintons “did the right thing in Kosovo.”


Coincidentally, after antiwar MIT Professor Noam Chomsky asserted, historically, in an interview on "Democracy Now!"’s April 12, 1999 show that “other effects” of the U.S./NATO bombing “were to wipe out a very promising and courageous democratic movement in Belgrade, which was the best hope for getting rid of this gangster Milosevic, with whom we’d been dealing,” longtime "Democracy Now!" co-host Goodman did not then question either the moral and political basis or the accuracy for Chomsky’s assertion. But as Michael Parenti wrote in his late 1999 “The Rational Destruction of Yugoslavia” article:


“During my trip to Belgrade in August 1999, I observed nongovernmental media and opposition party newspapers going strong. There are more opposition parties in the Yugoslav parliament than in any other European parliament. Yet the government is repeatedly labeled a dictatorship. Milosevic was elected as president of Yugoslavia in a contest that foreign observers said had relatively few violations. As of the end of 1999, he presided over a coalition government that included four parties. Opposition groups openly criticized and demonstrated against his government. Yet he was called a dictator…”


And in the same late 1999 article Parenti also had, historically, observed:


“The propaganda campaign against Belgrade has been so relentless that prominent personages on the Left — who oppose the NATO policy against Yugoslavia — have felt compelled to genuflect before this demonization orthodoxy. Thus do they reveal themselves as having been influenced by the very media propaganda machine they criticize on so many other issues. To reject the demonized image of Milosevic and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim they are faultless or free of crimes. It is merely to challenge the one-sided propaganda that laid the grounds for NATO's destruction of Yugoslavia….”


Besides sitting on the Public Welfare Foundation board of directors when that foundation gave the Pacifica Foundation its $25,000 grant in 1998 to help support "Democracy Now!", Edelman also, at the same time, sat on the board of directors in the late 1990s of the liberal Zionist New Israel Fund (that in more recent years has expressed opposition to the U.S. antiwar and Palestine solidarity movement’s BDS campaign). As Edelman recalled in a 2004 oral history interview:


“In the late 1980s I got involved with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians…I was actually recruited to be the co-chair of the board...I’ve been very active on Israel ever since. I’m now the board president of something called the New Israel Fund, which is quite a substantial organization, a $20 million organization…”


The former longtime Public Welfare Foundation board member and chair is no longer the board president of the New Israel Fund, but in more recent years Edelman has continued to, historically, sit on the board of the New Israel Fund, whose annual revenues in 2016 exceeded $26.9 million, according to the “non-profit” organization’s 2016 Form 990 financial filing.


Of the over $26.9 million in revenues it obtained in 2016, over $9.9 million was used by the tax-exempt New Israel Fund to pay “salaries, other compensation and employee benefits,” including a total annual compensation for its Executive Director/CEO, a former Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties executive director named Daniel Sokatch, of $422,758. And, not surprisingly, the New Israel Fund [NIF] website, historically, posted a March 10, 2015 press release on its website which stated that “The NIF does oppose the global (or general) BDS movement” and “NIF will not fund global BDS activities against Israel nor support organizations that have global BDS programs.”


Coincidentally, former New Israel Fund board president and Public Welfare Foundation board member Edelman apparently sat on a plane near the long-time "Democracy Now!" co-host Gonzalez’s then-employer, then-NY Daily News Owner Mort Zuckerman, when both men flew on the Clinton White House’s Air Force One in November 1995 to attend the funeral of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who was assassinated by a right-wing extremist Zionist a few days before the funeral). As Edelman recalled in his 2004 oral history interview:


“The phone rings and it’s Hillary. She says, A seat has opened up on Air Force One because Jim Baker I think, has a bad back. She said, I’d like you to go…I said, Yes, of course, I’d be delighted. She said, Somebody will call you, you appear at such-and-such a place at Andrews Air Force Base. So that’s how I came to go….Was in a back compartment with former Secretaries of State and with the congressional leadership and a couple of other people like Mort Zuckerman….On the way over they had had everybody in that big conference room in the center of the plane to have a briefing about the political situation, what might some of them want to say if they’re asked by the press, and so on and so forth….I walk up there and sitting in that room are Clinton and Bruce Lindsey and Mort Zuckerman...”


And, not surprisingly, in his 2004 oral history interview, former longtime Public Welfare Foundation director and Clinton Administration official Edelman noted that “I’m the Board President of the New Israel Fund” and Bill Clinton “came just last week, May 10, 2004, to New York City and was our speaker at our 25th anniversary;” and “I was ecstatic that he did that, and he was pleased to do it.”


By 2018, New Israel Fund board member Edelman no longer sat on the board of directors of the Public Welfare Foundation that gave the Pacifica Foundation its $25,000 grant in 1998 to help fund Democracy Now!.


But in 2018 the Public Welfare Foundation board was then chaired by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom corporate law and lobbying firm partner Cliff Sloan, who is a former Associate Counsel to Democratic President Bill Clinton, a former Assistant to the Solicitor General in GOP President George W. Bush’s administration, a former Washington Post Online subsidiary’s General Counsel and a former "Slate" magazine website publisher. Other members of the Public Welfare Foundation board in 2018 then included, historically, the following other U.S. Establishment folks:


1. Former Goldman Sachs Foundation President Stephanie Bell-Rose, who was also then a Knight Foundation trustee, a Stephen Rose Foundation trustee, a Council on Foundations board member and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations;


2. Nation Insurance corporate board member Lydia Marshall, who is also a former Citibank/Citigroup vice-president;


3. Former Democratic Obama Administration Under-Secretary of State Maria Otero, who was also then a Kresge Foundation board member and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations;


4. A former Deputy Assistant to Democratic President Bill Clinton and Deputy Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton named Shirley Sagawa; and


5. Former Hogan and Hartson/Hogan Lovells corporate law and lobbying firm partner Eric Washington, who was also then a D.C. Court of Appeals judge.


In addition, the then-president of the Public Welfare Foundation, Candace Jones, was a former program officer at the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation.


For sitting on the Public Welfare Foundation board of directors for just 1 hour per week between Oct. 1, 2015 and Sept. 30, 2016, each member of the foundation’s board was then paid $6,000, according to the Public Welfare Foundation’s 2015 Form 990 financial filing. In addition, during that same period the “non-profit” Public Welfare Foundation then paid its president a total annual compensation of $400,569, according to the same financial filing.


Between Oct. 1, 2014 and Sept. 30, 2016, the Public Welfare Foundation then gave at least two grants, totaling $160,000, to help fund the “parallel left” Institute for Public Affairs/In These Times magazine/website media organization, according to the foundation’s Form 990 financial filings for 2014 and 2015. Yet much of the grant money used to help then fund "In These Times" magazine (whose editor and publisher, Joel Bliefuss, was paid an annual compensation of $83,194 in 2016, according to the Institute for Public Affairs' Form 990 financial filing for 2016) was, historically, obtained by the Public Welfare Foundation’s investments in the corporate stocks and bonds of corporations that profit from the exploitation and manipulation of workers and middle-class consumers in the USA and around the globe.


On Sept. 30, 2016, for example, the “non-profit” Public Welfare Foundation’s assets then exceeded $488 million, including over $126 million invested in corporate stock, over $137 million invested in corporate bonds and over $204 million invested in private equity or hedge funds; and $264,322 was then paid by the Public Welfare Foundation to Common Fund for its “investment management”/stock speculation services, according to the foundation’s 2015 Form 990 financial filing.


Over $99 million, for example, was then invested by the Public Welfare Foundation on Sept. 30, 2016 in the private equity or hedge funds of the Boston-Based Adage Capital Partners LP stock speculation firm, whose portfolio of over $44.2 billion worth of corporate stocks on Dec. 31, 2017 thenincluded (according to the http://www.nasdaq.com website):


1. Over $1.2 billion worth of Apple corporate stock;


2. Over $1 billion worth of Microsoft corporate stock;


3. Over $938 million worth of Amazon corporate stock;


4. Over $749 worth of Deere & Co. corporate stock;


5. Over $668 million worth of Facebook Inc. corporate stock;


6. Over $582 million worth of Berkshire Hathaway corporate stock;


7. Over $579 million worth of Bank of America corporate stock;


8. Over $569 million worth of JP Morgan Chase corporate stock;


9. Over $500 million worth of Johnson and Johnson corporate stock;


10. Over $491 million worth of Aetna corporate stock;


11. Over $300 million worth of Boeing corporate stock;


12. Over $293 million worth of Chevron corporate stock;


13. Over $296 million worth of Comcast corporate media stock;


14. Over $264 million worth of United Technologies corporate stock;


15. Over $239 million worth of Philip Morris Int’l corporate stock;


16. Over $228 million worth of Citigroup corporate stock;


17. Over $210 million worth of McDonald’s corporate stock;


18. Over $193 million worth of Walt Disney/ABC corporate media conglomerate stock;


19. Over $186 million worth of Time Warner corporate media conglomerate stock;


20. Over $183 million worth of Walmart corporate stock;


21. Over $178 million worth of Altria corporate stock;


22. Over $155 million worth of Caterpillar corporate stock; and


23. Over $151 million worth of Exxon Mobil corporate stock. (end of part 10)

A Ford Foundation trustee in recent years, Henry Ford III, also, in recent years, sat on board of Ford Motor, that sold weapons-related goods to IDF and had a Tel Aviv research center in recent years. And between 1998 and 2004, $300,000 in Ford Foundation grants funded "parallel left" media group, "Democracy Now!".

In his 1971-published book, titled "The Higher Circles: The Governing Class In America", University of California-Santa Cruz Professor G. William Domhoff observed that “all power elite foundations” are “involved in ideological combat” and “all power elite foundations” are “propaganda fronts which are involved in maintaining the legitimacy and respectability of the present Establishment, even if in some cases this involves no more than giving some bright-eyed novice a few thousand dollars with which to amuse himself;” and “if the” CIA-funded “Farfield Foundation” was “a conduit, so is the Ford Foundation (which is also a tax dodge).”


And as Joan Roelofs wrote in her 2003-published book, titled "Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism":


“The cultural Cold War initiated concerted action by foundations and the CIA…Ford, the Kaplan Foundation, and others became `pass-throughs’ for the CIA project, Congress for Cultural Freedom [CCF]. In addition, starting in 1957, Ford provided funds for the CCF…Ford established a U.S.-type economic program at the Indonesian university and trained faculty at the U.S. universities to run the Indonesian program…When the coup [in September 1965] was instituted to overthrow [the then anti-imperialist Indonesian political leader] Sukarno, well-trained leadership was available to run the country and negotiate reasonable deals with multinational corporations…”


Yet during the last three decades the long-time "Democracy Now!" show co-hosts have generally not provided their listeners or viewers with many news segments that examined in a critical way: (1) the role that Ford Foundation founder Henry Ford and his heirs or former Ford Foundation president McGeorge Bundy played in 20th-century history; (2) the political role at home and abroad that the Ford Foundation has played historically or in recent years; (3) what the special corporate connections and economic interests of Ford Foundation’s present and past board members and the Ford Foundation have been; (4) how the multi-billion dollar Ford Foundation obtained and retains its assets and the grant money it distributes each year; and (5) how a Ford Foundation trustee in recent years, Henry Ford III, has also sat, in recent years, on the board of directors of a company, Ford Motor Company, which sold weapons-related goods to the IDF and, between 2019 and late 2023, had a Ford Israel Research Center in Tel Aviv.


One reason might be because, between 1998 and 2004, $300,000 [equal to around $514,000 in 2025] in Ford Foundation "charitable grant" money was used to help fund "Democracy Now!"; and a $50,000 [equal to around $82,000 in 2025] Ford Foundation "charitable grant" was given to then-"NY Daily News" columnist/reporter, former National Association of Hispanic Journalists [NAHJ] president and long-time "Democracy Now!" co-host Gonzalez in 2005 to support the research for the "News for All the People" book.


In addition, in 2003--during the period when "Democracy Now!"’s part-time co-host was also the NAHJ president—the Ford Foundation joined the Knight Foundation, historically, in establishing a “Challenge Fund for Journalism” program that provided $240,000 in grant money to NAHJ between 2003 and 2011; and in 2008 a separate grant of $100,000 [equal to over $150,000 in 2025] was given to the NAHJ group by the Ford Foundation.


The Ford Foundation’s historical funding of "Democracy Now!" began in 1998 when it gave the Pacifica Foundation a $75,000 [equal to over $149,000 in 2025] grant “toward marketing consultancy, promotional campaign and program development activities for radio program, DEMOCRACY NOW!”.


Yet after listener-activists at Pacifica’s 5 radio stations pressured Goodman and Gonzalez in 1999 to finally break Pacifica Radio’s “gag rule,” and finally provide their listeners with news about Pacifica’s firings between 1995 and early 1999 in California of KPFA and KPFK volunteer or paid staff show producers who opposed the “NPRization” and corporatization of Pacifica’s programming and radio stations, the Pacifica Foundation’s then-WBAI station managers stopped the "Democracy Now!" co-hosts, historically, from broadcasting from Pacifica’s then-Manhattan studios.

But in 2002, however, the U.S. power elite’s Ford Foundation then continued to help fund "Democracy Now!" by giving a grant of $75,000 [equal to over $135,000 in 2025] to Deep Dish TV “for the television news series, DEMOCRACY NOW!, to continue incorporating the aftermath of the September 11th attack into future broadcasts.
”

And according to its Form 990 financial filing for 2000, that Deep Dish TV submitted in June 2001, a few months before the September 11, 2001 collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, in 2000 Deep Dish TV had previously spent $42,427 of a $46,050 grant from some unidentified foundation, on “Democracy Now Live Coverage of the Democratic and Republican Political Conventions.”


Coincidentally, prior to receiving Ford Foundation money in 2002 to help fund the airing of "Democracy Now!", Deep Dish TV had previously been given 9 grants, totaling $335,000, between 1990 and 2000 by the same MacArthur Foundation that had given the Sound Portraits media firm of Goodman’s former WBAI colleague, David Isay, a $50,000 grant in 1997; and then, only three years later, had given an individual MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” of $500,0000 to the "Democracy Now!" producer-host’s former WBAI colleague, David Isay, in 2000.


In addition, the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation--that the son of the MacArthur Foundation’s billionaire founder had established—gave the Institute for Media Analysis a grant of between $60,000 and $85,000 in 2001 to “support the production of Democracy Now!’, according to the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation’s Form 990 financial filing for 2001.


The wealthier MacArthur Foundation, that the father of J. Roderick MacArthur had established, is named for John D. MacArthur, who owned 410 Park Ave., 61 Broadway, the Gulf & Western Building and the Lincoln Tower Apartments in Manhattan, the Exchange Park Office Complex in Dallas, the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas and property in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, on which he persuaded RCA to build a computer plant.


Billionaire John D. MacArthur’s “real estate activities were carried on largely through two private companies, Royal American Industries, Inc., and the Southern Realty & Utility Co.;” other holdings” included “an oil drilling company, and broadcasting and printing interests,” according to "The National Cyclopedia of American Biography".


And in its 1988 pamphlet, "John D. MacArthur: The Man and His Legacy", the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation indicated how much of the “charitable grant” money, that was later used to fund parallel left media groups like Deep Dish TV in the 1990’s, was originally obtained during the 1960s Vietnam War era by John D. MacArthur:


“His new interest was real estate…At one point, he owned 100,000 acres of land in Florida and was the largest individual landowner in the state. He also owned a dozen insurance companies, several development companies and shopping centers, paper and pulp companies, 19 commercial office buildings in New York City, 6,000 apartments in Manhattan, several publishing enterprises, hotels, radio and television stations, and banks. By the 1970s, MacArthur was one of the nation’s two billionaires…”


But in his 1993-published book, titled "The Assassination Of New York", Robert Fitch indicated how additional money for “charitable grants” was then unethically obtained by the “non-profit” MacArthur Foundation, in the 1980s, from the real estate assets in Manhattan that “were part of the original bequest from John D. MacArthur,” (according to the foundation’s 1995 Annual Report):


“One of the biggest industries in the city had been throwing people out of their apartments--`condo conversion’ it was called…The MacArthur Foundation…got involved. A team from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation converted thousands of apartments in the boom years. MacArthur managed to unload its total inventory in 1985 for about $500 million [equal to over $1.5 billion in 2025).”


In the May 2005 article, titled “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’,” by the then-"Nation" magazine senior editor who worked at "Democracy Now!" from September 2001 to July 2002, Lizzy Ratner described how Goodman’s media firm, after obtaining its $75,000 grant from the Ford Foundation “toward marketing consultancy, promotional campaign and program development activities for radio program” in 1998, began, historically, producing its soon-to-be Ford Foundation-subsidized daily cable-television show in September 2001:


“It was a few days before 9/11, and Goodman had just been forced from the studios of WBAI, the local Pacifica station...In the scramble to keep broadcasting on affiliate stations, she had landed at the firehouse, a small limestone castle of a building owned and operated by Downtown Community Television. The independent media collective also rented space to Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a cable access channel [whose CEO in the second decade of the 21st-century, Dan Coughlin, was, coincidentally, both the former news and executive director of Pacifica Radio and a former WBAI colleague of Goodman], and in early September a MNN producer had the notion of switching on the TV cameras and videotaping Goodman's radio broadcast. The idea was to air the show on MNN once or twice a week….”


Also, coincidentally, sitting on the Downtown Community Television Center’s board of directors, when "Democracy Now!" began broadcasting, historically, in September 2001 from Downtown Community Television’s building at 87 Lafayette St. in Manhattan a televised version of its “parallel left” daily radio news show, according to the Downtown Community Television Center’s 2001 Form 990 financial filing, was Tom Brokaw--the then-anchor and managing editor of the NBC Nightly News show, which the NBC corporate media network, that GE owned at that time, broadcast each evening.


Brokaw, the then-husband of longtime Gannett corporate media conglomerate board member Meredith Brokaw, continued to sit, historically, on the Downtown Community Television Center’s board of directors until 2004, the same year he retired as the long-time NBC Nightly News anchor.


Like Deep Dish TV, the NBC Nightly News-linked Downtown Community Television Center was the recipient of MacArthur Foundation funding, in the years before Goodman and her "parallel left" radio show “landed at the firehouse, a small limestone castle of a building owned and operated by Downtown Community Television” and from which the "Democracy Now!" show was broadcast between 2001 and late 2009.


For example, between 1986 and 2000 the MacArthur Foundation gave 8 "charitable grants," totaling $475,000, to the Downtown Community Television Center (including a $100,000 [equal to around $273,000 in 2025] grant in 1988 to “rehabilitate” the building that "Democracy Now!" would later be broadcasting from), as well as a loan of $375,000 whose loan repayment schedule had been suspended, according to the television center’s 2001 financial filing.


Coincidentally, "Democracy Now"! Productions, itself, would later, historically, receive in December 2007 “an interest free loan” of $6 million [equal to over $9.3 million in 2025] “from a private foundation, due on July 1, 2012…to finance the acquisition of their new office and production studio” at 207 W. 25th Street in Manhattan, according to its 2007 Form 990 financial filing.


And “as part of the loan agreement” with this “private foundation,” whose name the "Democracy Now!" Productions firm did not fully disclose on its financial filing, “the Organization received a conditional promise to give of $2 million dollars from this private foundation, which” was “contingent upon the organization’s meeting the loan repayment terms of $4 million dollars by July 1, 2012,” according to the same 2007 financial filing. (end of part 11)

During the decade that the foundation, which in later decades helped fund "Democracy Now!", collaborated with the CIA in support of U.S. power elite foreign policy goals, it apparently did not use its special political influence and economic power in the 1950s to eliminate Jim Crow laws and legalized racial segregation in the southern region of the United States. As the "Philanthropy In America: A History" book observed, “the Ford Foundation did not come out in favor of racial integration until the 1960s.”

In the same year that the U.S. power elite’s Ford Foundation gave the historically MacArthur Foundation-funded Deep Dish TV a “charitable grant” of $75,000 [equal to over $133,000 in 2025] “for the television news series, DEMOCRACY NOW!, to continue incorporating the aftermath of the September 11th attack into future broadcasts,” Pacifica Radio’s "Democracy Now!" co-hosts and producers transformed themselves into the “Democracy Now!" Productions Inc.” media firm that was now defined as being separated from the Pacifica Foundation. As "The Nation" magazine senior editor who worked at "Democracy Now!" from September 2001 to July 2002, Lizzy Ratner, noted in her May 2005 “Amy Goodman’s `Empire’” article:


“…In June 2002 Goodman reached an agreement with Pacifica to turn "Democracy Now!" into a separate nonprofit organization that would continue to broadcast on the network but would also be free to build up its TV program. The deal generated some grumbling at the time from those who felt that "Democracy Now!" was abandoning Pacifica…”


Yet according to the same article, in 2005 Pacifica continued “to provide the show with $500,000 in operating support,” although the "Democracy Now!" Productions firm also then collected money “from its TV broadcasters, Link TV and Free Speech TV, as well as through foundation grants, individual donations and sales from its online store.” In April 2004, for example, the U.S. power elite’s Ford Foundation gave "Democracy Now!" Productions Inc. a $150,000 [equal to over $254,000 in 2025] grant “to produce, broadcast and distribute a series of radio, television and internet reports,” according to the Ford Foundation’s 2004 Form 990 financial filing. And the following year, the Ford Foundation also gave a $50,000 [equal to around $82,000 in 2025] grant to "Democracy Now!" co-host Gonzalez to support the research for the "News for All the People" book that the then-"NY Daily News" mainstream corporate media columnist and former National Association of Hispanic Journalists [NAHJ] president co-authored with former NAHJ deputy director Joseph Torres. Gonzalez’s "News for All the People" book co-author, in recent years, has been the senior external affairs director of the "parallel left" Free Press media group—which, coincidentally, received 9 grants, totaling $9.5 million, from the Ford Foundation between 2006 and 2017, according to the Ford Foundation website’s grants data base.


At an Oct. 2, 2010 board of directors meeting of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers [NALIP], former NAHJ deputy director Torres was also unanimously nominated to sit on the NALIP board of directors; and a “Spotlight” item that appeared in the Oct. 18, 2011 issue of the NALIP’s “Latinos In The Industry” newsletter, titled “NALIP Board Member Launches National Book Tour,” described how the "Democracy Now!" show-linked authors of the Ford Foundation-subsidized "News for All the People" book, not surprisingly, apparently promoted and marketed their book at events in some of the cities where "Democracy Now!" was being aired or televised on a daily basis in 2011:


“NALIP Board Member Joseph Torres' new book `News for All the People'…,co-authored with Juan Gonzalez, is being launched with a national book tour, starting in NYC with multiple stops in California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado and Washington, DC.


“The first stop will be on Thursday, Oct. 20, in NYC. Joseph and Juan will be interviewed by Amy Goodman on the stage of the Great Hall of Cooper Union. 7-9 pm…This will be followed by events in San Francisco and Oakland on Friday, Oct. 21. Stops after that include Santa Cruz, Fresno, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Northridge, San Diego, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Houston, Denver, and Washington DC.”


"Democracy Now!" host Goodman had also used the daily "parallel left" media show on Oct. 13, 2011 to help promote and market the Ford Foundation-funded book of the show’s "NY Daily News" corporate media columnist co-host and the Ford Foundation-funded Free Press "parallel left" media group’s senior external affairs executive director; by staging an interview with Gonzalez and Torres on its Oct. 13, 2011 broadcast which ended with the following promotional sales pitch by Goodman:


“Well, this is part one of our conversation. Congratulations on this remarkable work, `News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media' , by Juan Gonzalez and Joe Torres. They’re traveling across the country. They will be in New York next Thursday night. We’ll be having a major event with them at Cooper Union, then to Friday it will be in Oakland. You can go to our website for all the dates—Santa Cruz, Fresno, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Northridge, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, San Antonio, Houston, Denver and Washington, D.C. Go to democracynow.org for all of those details that document the book tour of Juan Gonzalez and Joe Torres.”


And, also not surprisingly, when Torres noted that “we got some funding from the Ford Foundation, and it led to—to work on this book,” Goodman, whose own daily news show had been funded with $300,000 in Ford Foundation "charitable" grant money between 1998 and 2004, failed to ask Torres and Gonzalez how much “funding from the Ford Foundation” they got “to work on” their “book;” or whether or not the Ford Foundation still obtains its grant money by investing in corporations that exploit workers and middle-class consumers of all racial backgrounds at home and abroad.


Yet the Ford Foundation was created in 1936 by an early 20th-century exploiter of automobile industry workers and middle-class consumers named Henry Ford, who also apparently provided support for Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany during the 1920s. As a muckraking journalist named George Seldes observed in his 1943 book "Facts and Fascism":


“Henry Ford’s picture for years hung over Hitler’s desk in the Brown House in Munich. The Nazis in their early days boasted that they had the moral and financial support of the richest man in America…

“To many persons Ford has always been our No. 1 Fascist. (Newspapermen usually give that spot to William Randolph Hearst, and there is an unending argument as to which of the two has done more harm to the mind of America, but no one doubts that both have spread more fascist poison in this country than any other pair of prominent men…)


“It was general knowledge in the early 1920s, when it was not treason to aid Hitler, that Henry Ford was one of his spiritual and economic backers…The most credible evidence regarding Ford’s financing of early Nazism was given in the treason trial of Herr Hitler himself…On Feb. 7, 1924, Herr Auer, vice-president of the Bavarian Diet, testified in the Hitler trial as follows:


“`The Bavarian Diet has long had the information that the Hitler movement was partly financed by an American anti-Semitic chief, who is Henry Ford. Mr. Ford’s interest in the Bavarian anti-Semitic movement began a year ago…Herr Hitler openly boasts of Mr. Ford’s support…A photograph of Mr. Ford hangs in Herr Hitler’s quarters...’”


The reason Billionaire Ford established the Ford Foundation was to enable his family members to both retain control over his Ford Motor Corporation and avoid paying a fair share of federal taxes after he died. As University of Virginia Commonwealth Professor of History Professor Oliver Zunz recalled in his 2012 book, "Philanthropy In America: A History" (that he wrote with “the support” he “received from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation”):


“The New Deal inheritance tax was directly responsible…for the creation and vast expansion of the biggest American philanthropic institution of the postwar era—the Ford Foundation…The act went into effect on Jan. 1, 1936. The same month, Henry and his wife Clara, and their son Edsel incorporated the Ford Foundation…The foundation gave the Fords the means simultaneously to avoid the huge inheritance tax and to pass on the company to the next generation without losing control of it…


“…In 1947, the foundation received about 90 percent of the non-voting stock in the company. By this means the Ford family avoided much of the tax burden and Henry II, Edsel’s son, kept full control over the automobile company his grandfather was leaving behind. If it had not been for the foundation, Henry and his two brothers would have paid an estimated federal estate tax of $321,000,000 [equal to over $4.6 billion in 2025] and lost control of the company…Hence the commonly heard charge that the leading American foundation of the 1950s began as a tax-dodge…”


Carl Bakal’s 1979 book, "Charity USA: An Investigation into the Hidden World of the Multi-Billion Dollar Charity Industry", also observed:


“All the stock that was given to the foundation was nonvoting. The 10 percent retained by the family had total voting power, maintaining the family domination of the company. Moreover, the voting stock passed to the family tax free, saving another $42 million [equal to around $604 million in 2025], because the wills of Henry and Edsel provided that the taxes on the bequest be paid by the foundation.”


In the late 1940s and 1950s, during the Cold War era of U.S. history, the Ford Foundation began to collaborate with the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] in support of the U.S. power elite’s anti-communist and economically imperialist foreign policy objectives. As "Philanthropy In America: A History" noted:


“…America’s largest foundations provided funds and collaborated in organizational strategies with the U.S. government…In devising Cold War strategies, the alliance between American diplomats, intelligence agents, and a small group of foundation officials was held together not only by common institutional goals but also by a tight professional and social network linking them. The early history of the Ford Foundation—then a newcomer to the big philanthropic scene…suggests the closeness of these ties….Ford officials conferred directly with officials from the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency…”


In the 1999 book "The Cultural Cold War", Frances Stoner Saunders also recalled how the Ford Foundation collaborated with the CIA in the past--on behalf of the Ultra-Rich families of the U.S. Establishment's power elite--to perpetuate a globalized corporate economic system which denies political, economic and cultural freedom and equality to the majority of humanity:


"The foundation had a record of close involvement in covert actions in Europe, working closely with…CIA officials on specific projects...On 21 January 1953, Allen Dulles, insecure about his future in the CIA under the newly elected Eisenhower, had met his friend David Rockefeller for lunch. Rockefeller hinted heavily that if Dulles decided to leave the Agency, he could reasonably expect to be invited to become president of the Ford Foundation. Dulles need not have feared for his future...Allen Dulles was to become Director of Central Intelligence.


"The new president of the Ford Foundation was announced shortly after. He was John McCloy...By the time he came to the Ford Foundation, he had been Assistant Secretary of War, president of the World Bank...In 1953 he also became chairman of the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank, and chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. After John F. Kennedy's assassination, he was a Warren Commission appointee...McCloy took a pragmatic view of the CIA's inevitable interest in the Ford Foundation when he assumed its presidency. Addressing the concerns of some of the foundation's executives, who felt that its reputation for integrity and independence was being undermined by involvement with the CIA, McCloy argued that if they failed to cooperate, the CIA would simply penetrate the foundation quietly by recruiting or inserting staff at lower levels. McCloy's answer to this problem was to create an administrative unit within the Ford Foundation specifically to deal with the CIA. Headed by McCloy and two foundation officers, this three-man committee had to be consulted every time the Agency wanted to use the foundation, either as a pass-through, or as cover…


"With this arrangement in place, the Ford Foundation became officially engaged as one of those organizations the CIA was able to mobilize for political warfare...The foundation's archives reveal a raft of joint projects. The East European Fund, a CIA front in which George Kennan played a prominent role, got most of its money from the Ford Foundation...The foundation gave $500,000 to Bill Casey's International Rescue Committee [of which former "Nation" editor Vanden Heuvel's father was also an official], and substantial grants to another CIA front, the World Assembly of Youth. It was also one of the single largest donors to the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent think-tank which exerted enormous influence on American foreign policy, and which operated (and continues to operate) according to strict confidentiality rules which include a twenty-five-year embargo on the release of its records...McGeorge Bundy, became president of the Ford Foundation in 1966 (coming straight from his job as Special Assistant to the President in Charge of National Security, which meant, among other things, monitoring the CIA)...The Congress for Cultural Freedom...was one of Ford Foundation's largest grantees, receiving $7 million by the early 1960s..."


A Ford Foundation executive in the early 1950s named Richard Bissell--who later became the CIA Deputy Director For Plans responsible for the unsuccessful 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and a “president of the Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA], a think-tank that had been formed by a dozen universities (including MIT and Columbia University] to recruit scientific personnel for the evaluation of weapons systems” between 1962 and 1964, according to Bissell’s autobiography "Reflections of A Cold Warrior"—simultaneously worked, for example, as a CIA consultant. As Bissell recalled in his 1996 book:


“In January 1952 I joined the Ford Foundation…I worked out of a small office in Washington…The arrangement allowed me to work for the foundation while engaging in outside consulting assignments…Working in Washington…enabled me to maintain my close professional relationships…with people like Frank Wisner, Sherman Kent, Desmond Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes and Max Milliken, all of whom were in the CIA and close to Allen Dulles…


“In the fall of 1952, I became part of the CIA’s Princeton Group of consultants (so named because it met on the university’s campus)…In late 1952…Max Milliken resigned as an assistant director of the CIA…to become director of MIT’s Center for International Studies [CENIS]…I was able to get the trustees of the Ford Foundation to fund research at CENIS.”


And during the same decade that the foundation, which in later decades helped fund "Democracy Now!", collaborated with the CIA in support of U.S. power elite foreign policy goals, it apparently did not use its special political influence and economic power in the 1950s to eliminate Jim Crow laws and legalized racial segregation in the southern region of the United States. As the "Philanthropy In America: A History" book observed, “the Ford Foundation did not come out in favor of racial integration until the 1960s.” (end of part 12)

After 1998-2004 funding by Ford Foundation, Democracy Now!'s revenues increased. Yet previously, in 1988, Ford Foundation still had $1.32 billion invested in companies profiting from doing business in Apartheid South Africa in 1988.

After the U.S. power elite's Ford Foundation began to provide funding for the parallel left "Democracy Now!" daily news show in 1998, the total and net revenues of the tax-exempt, "non-profit" "Democracy Now!" Productions media firm and the annual total compensation received by "Democracy Now!" host-producer Goodman increased.

Between December 2003 and December 2006, for example," Democracy Now"! Productions’ total annual revenues increased from over $2.2 million to over $3.9 million, according to its Form 990 financial filings for 2003 and 2006; and the amount that the “non-profit” media firm’s total annual revenues exceeded its total annual expenses increased from over $900,000 to over $1 million during the same period.


In addition, between December 2003 and December 2006, Goodman’s annual total compensation for her alternative media work increased from $58,204 to $61,137 [equal to over $97,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars].


In a 2000 interview with "Philanthropy Magazine", then-Trilateral Commission member and then-Ford Foundation president Susan Berresford gave the official version of how the Ford Foundation, which helped fund the "Democracy Now!" show with $300,000 in "charitable" grant money between 1998 and 2004, operated during that historical period:


“We have a senior management team that meets every Monday morning in my office...I approve all grants over $100,000. Grants up to $100,000 can be made by staff at various levels. We budget on a two-year basis, and we work with our board...Every grantmaker writes what we call a program office memo. That is ultimately approved by his or her immediate supervisor and then by someone at a vice-presidential program level. Then, all grants that they make under $100,000 pursuant to that memo, they and their immediate supervisors approve. And anything over that needs my approval. We meet every other week for an entire morning; and all the grants over $100,000 that have been recommended in the prior two-week period are on a list and we talk about them.


“I get a write-up on every single grant. There may be 50 on the list, or ten on the list. I read them all, think about them all, and we discuss some of them...The meeting is really a group discussion. I lead it, and I have to put my signature on the grant in the end, but all the officers of the foundation are there, and any program officer or any staff member who wants to attend can attend and participate.


“...We make grants of $1,000 and we make $50 million grants. We make endowment grants and project grants and general support grants...”


Besides being the Ford Foundation approver of “all grants over $100,000” (including the $150,000 grant given to "Democracy Now!" Productions Inc. in 2004) in the early 21st-century, former Ford Foundation president Berresford was a former member of the board of directors of Chase Manhattan Bank and a member of the North American Committee of David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission--sitting, historically, next to other U.S. Establishment figures, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeline Albright.


In addition, Berresford was also, historically, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, to which the Ford Foundation gave a grant of $100,000 "for the development of a Council Task Force on Terrorism" in 2002.


Yet featured on the Council on Foreign Relations web site at http://www.cfr.org on 9/26/02 was an advertisement for "a New Council book," which stated "Invasion Is the Only Realistic Option to Head off the Threat from Iraq, Argues Kenneth Pollack in The Threatening Storm."


In the 2000 interview with "Philanthropy Magazine", Berresford also indicated that the Ford Foundations’ board of trustees [which has included a member of the Ford Motor Company board of directors, Henry Ford III, in the current decade of the 21st-century] was “a policy-making board” that “set foundation policy” and “set the budget level and broad allocations,” during the 1998 to 2004 period when the foundation helped fund the parallel left "Democracy Now!" show.


In the 1990s and early 21st-century, the Ford Foundation board of trustees historically then included two former CEOs and former board chairmen of the Xerox Corporation, the CEO and board chairman of ALCOA, an executive vice-president and general counsel of Coca Cola Company, the chairman and CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., the chairman of Reuters Holdings, PLC, the senior partner of the Akin, Gump, Straus Hauser and Feld lobbying firm, and the president of Vassar College.


Other corporations with directors who sat on the Ford Foundation board of trustees in the late 1990s or after 2000 included Time Warner, Chase Manhattan Bank, Ryder Systems, CBS, AT & T, Adolph Coors Company, Dayton-Hudson, the Bank of England, J.P. Morgan, Marine Midland Bank, Southern California Edison, KRCX Radio, the Central Gas and Electric Corp. DuPont, Citicorp and the New York Stock Exchange.


The Ford Foundation's Board of Trustees' Education, Media, Arts and Culture Committee in the late 1990s, for example, then included the president of Vassar College, the chairman of Reuters Holdings PLC, the former chairman and CEO of Xerox and a then-crony of Columbia University SIPA Professor Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton named Vernon Jordan-- who was also then a director of Revlon, American Express, J.C. Penney, Sara Lee, Xerox, Bankers Trust, Dow Jones, Union Carbide and Ryder Systems. Jordan, in addition, also was then the chair of the Ford Foundation Board of Trustee's Audit and Management Committee in the late 1990s.


And in 2002, the wife of the Bush II White House's presidential historian (Michael Beschloss] and a former World Bank managing officer and then CEO/president of the Carlyle Asset Management Group, named Afsaneh Mashayerkhi Beschloss, sat, historically, on the Ford Foundation board of trustees.


President Bush II's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, former Secretary of Defense and former Deputy CIA Director Frank Carlucci, former Secretary of State James Baker and Billionaire Speculator George Soros had also previously been involved, historically, in the Carlyle Group that early 21st-century Ford Foundation Trustee Mashayerkhi Beschloss managed in the early 21st-century.


Historically, this then-Ford Foundation board-linked Carlyle Group received $1.3 billion in Pentagon war contracts in 1999, was the 11th-largest recipient of Pentagon war contracts in 2000 and invested heavily then in war stock.


And also, historically, in the early 21st-century the former Texaco vice-president/general counsel and former Coca-Cola executive vice-president/general counsel (who later in the 21st-century was a Democratic Party governor of Massachusetts, prior to joining in 2015 the Bain Capital private equity investment/stock speculation firm, that former GOP Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had previously founded—as Bain Capital’s “Double Impact Business Managing Director) then sat on the Ford Foundation board of trustees.


In the 2000 interview with "Philanthropy Magazine", the then-Ford Foundation president Berresford also indicated where some of the Ford Foundation grant money was coming from, when it helped fund "Democracy Now!" in the early 21st-century:


“We set our budget at 5.8 percent of a three-year rolling average of our portfolio value. Then, depending on our judgment about the stock market and other things, we may move around a little bit from that...Linda Strumpf is the vice president for investment [in 2000] at the foundation. We have an investment committee of the board. They are in touch regularly and Linda and I talk frequently. We all think hard about asset allocation and the broad investment choices we make...In recent years, we have put a significant amount of money into venture capital and a lot of that in technology, and have done very, very well with those investments....We do not, other than in a very few cases, screen investments…”


Besides managing, historically, the Ford Foundation's multi-billion dollar unscreened investment portfolio and the rest of the Ford Foundation's $10.7 billion in assets in 2000, then-Ford Foundation Vice-President for Investments Strumpf was also then a member of the investment committee of the Ford Foundation-funded Ms. Foundation for Women.


In addition, the then-Ford Foundation Vice-President for Investments was also then a member of the investment committee of Penn State University—which, historically, received over $58 million in war research contracts from the Pentagon in 1999. And in 1999, the "non-profit," tax-exempt Ford Foundation paid its then vice-president for investments an annual salary of $852,911 [equal to over $1.6 million in 2025].


During the 6 years that the Ford Foundation helped fund "Democracy Now!", the show may not have generally provided its listeners and viewers with much information about which transnational corporations the Ford Foundation invested in historically or currently. Yet In the December 1988 issue of "Multinational Monitor", Jim Donahue had reported, in an article titled "The Foundations of Apartheid and The Nuclear Industry," that in 1988, during the apartheid era, the Ford Foundation, historically, had $1.32 billion invested in companies doing business in South Africa, accounting for 43 percent of its total investment value at that time.


"Multinational Monitor" also had observed in 1988 that "Nuclear Weapons-Linked Investment Corporations that receive government contracts to build components for nuclear weapons are popular among leading foundations" and "the Ford Foundation...holdings account for 16 percent of Ford's total investment value, or $496 million, with the largest holding being in nuclear-contract-linked IBM and General Electric."


In 2001, one of the years in which the Ford Foundation helped fund "Democracy Now!", over $4 billion of the Ford Foundation's $10.7 billion in assets was invested in U.S. corporate stock and over $1.3 billion in foreign corporate stock. And from its billions of dollars in corporate stockholdings in 2001, the "non-profit" Ford Foundation received $343 million in dividends and interest income and earned an additional capital gains income of $992 million. Yet on its 2001 annual income, the "non-profit" Ford Foundation only then paid a 1% excise tax.


Yet despite the great power that control over such excess wealth gives to Establishment foundations like the Ford Foundation to influence world history and manage social change on behalf of Ultra-Rich power elite interests, the parallel left "Democracy Now!" show, historically, has generally not provided its listeners or viewers with very much critical reporting on the world of Big Foundations during the last 29 years
.

But without an understanding of the political economic and cultural role that Big Foundations play in global politics, one can't more fully understand how the System operates or how world history is determined. Or how U.S. Movement history and U.S. Movement political priorities are specially influenced by the U.S. power elite. So one's political and intellectual consciousness and analysis might tend to remain incomplete and partial, in a politically and morally significant way.


And in an article, titled "Getting Behind the Media: What are the subtle tradeoffs of foundation support for journalists?", Rick Edmunds characterized the ethical issues that develops when journalists--even alternative media journalists--begin to rely on subsidies from the Big Foundation to fund their alternative media work:


“In research published...by the Poynter Institute on the rising number, scope, and dollar amounts of foundation grants for journalism, I found that media recipients are becoming ever more comfortable--and perhaps less reflective--about taking the money...When they show up with much-needed funding for an investigative series or pay the freight for a reporter working on an underreported beat, foundations don't receive the same due-diligence scrutiny for hidden subtext that journalists apply to a corporate press release or a politician's statement. The effect that foundation money may have on the news business is subtle but real, and increasingly troubling on the ethical front...


“...The lack of overt editorial should not blind us to the more subtle, one might say cultural, ties that bind these news organizations to their funders. There are, for example, any number of opportunities for grant makers to shape the editorial product as it is developed...If the foundations' and recipients' goals have been properly `aligned' not much more may be needed to see that the intent is carried out...


“Lost in the benevolent fog that surrounds most foundations is the notion that they may have more of an agenda, not less, than a sponsoring corporation...Cultural affinity can sometimes make it difficult for editors and journalists to draw the distinction between accepting a grant and accepting a funder's point of view...” (end of part 13)

When the Ford Foundation helped fund "Democracy Now!" between 1998 and 2004, not much historical information about Henry Ford, the Ford Foundation or past Ford Foundation presidents--like a former Kennedy and Johnson White House National Security Affairs Advisor during the Vietnam War Era named McGeorge Bundy-- was generally provided to "Democracy Now!" listeners and viewers.

When the Ford Foundation helped fund "Democracy Now!" between 1998 and 2004, not much historical information about Henry Ford, the Ford Foundation or past Ford Foundation presidents--like a former Kennedy and Johnson White House National Security Affairs Advisor during the Vietnam War Era named McGeorge Bundy-- was generally provided to "Democracy Now!" listeners and viewers.


Yet, as a (now-deceased) U.S. antiwar Movement organizer, David Dellinger, wrote, historically, in a 1993-published autobiography, "From Yale to Jail":


“Given the U.S. preoccupation with Vietnamese war crimes trials, when [Telford] Taylor [the U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials] returned from his visit to [North Vietnam], he was pressed by Dick Cavett on Cavett’s popular TV show to say whether under Nuremberg statutes…McGeorge Bundy…would be adjudged guilty off war crimes. His answer was, `Yes, of course.’”


Yet for 13 years McGeorge Bundy, was, historically, the Ford Foundation's president. As the [now-deceased] James Ledbetter recalled in the 1997-published book, titled "Made Possible By…"
:

"The Ford effort took a new twist in 1966, when the Foundation began plotting a system that would unite satellite communication with educational broadcasting. McGeorge Bundy, the former national security advisor who had personally ordered American bombing raids on North Vietnam in early 1965, left the government and moved to the Ford Foundation to oversee this plan...Bundy obtained his position without being knowledgeable about, or even comfortable with, the medium of television..."


And in a Sept. 26, 1996 press release, that was issued by the Ford Foundation only two years before the foundation issued its 1998 grant of $75,000 [equal to over $147,000 in 2025] to the Pacifica Foundation “toward marketing consultancy, promotional campaign and program development activities for radio program, DEMOCRACY NOW!,” following McGeorge Bundy’s death, the Trustees of the Ford Foundation stated:


"The Trustees of the Ford Foundation are deeply saddened by the death of McGeorge Bundy on September 16 [1996]. Mr. Bundy served as President of the Foundation from 1966 to 1979. He forged new lines of work in such critically important areas as civil rights, overseas development, and security and arms control. His intellect, candor, and high standards left an indelible mark on the Foundation's culture. The work of the Foundation today builds on Mac's legacy and we are in his debt."


Yet evidence then existed that former Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy was apparently one of the White House officials historically responsible for planning crimes against humanity during the Vietnam War Era of the 1960’s, in violation of the Nuremberg Accords.


On May 11, 1961, for example, former Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy signed "National Security Action Memorandum 52" which approved a program for covert action against North Vietnam that included forming "network of resistance, covert bases and teams for sabotage and light harassment" in North Vietnam. And on Sept. 10, 1964, former Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy signed "National Security Action Memorandum No. 314," which approved the resumption of naval patrols and covert maritime operations off the coast of North Vietnam.


According to "The Pentagon Papers", each maritime operation against North Vietnam after October 1964 had to be approved in advance by former Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy. And among the maritime operations approved in advance by the now-deceased former Ford Foundation president were "ship-to-shore bombardment of North Vietnam radar site" and "underwater demolition team assaults on bridges along coastal roads, bridges and rails" in North Vietnam.


In a Feb. 7, 1965 memorandum to then-U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, former Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy next recommended that the U.S. adopt "a policy of `sustained reprisal'" against North Vietnam; and on March 2, 1965 the Johnson White House's "Rolling Thunder" bombing campaign against North Vietnam was begun.


And on Apr. 6, 1965, former Ford Foundation President Bundy signed "National Security Action Memorandum No. 328," in which he stated:


"We should continue roughly the present slowly ascending tempo of ROLLING THUNDER Operation...We should continue to vary the type of target, stepping up attack on lines of communication in the near future, and possibly moving in a few weeks to attacks on the rail lines north and northeast of Hanoi.


"Leaflet operations should be expanded to obtain maximum practicable psychological effect on the North Vietnamese population.


"Blockade or aerial mining of North Vietnamese ports needs further study and should be considered for future operations...Air operations in Laos...should be stepped up to the maximum remunerative rate..."


By the time McGeorge Bundy retired as Ford Foundation president in 1979, millions of people in Indochina and over 57,000 U.S. military personnel had lost their lives, as a result of the militaristic actions authorized by the "National Security Action Memorandum" which the former Ford Foundation president had personally signed.


And a few years before Bundy’s death in 1996, the former Ford Foundation president had been named as a "Scholar-in-Residence" by the same Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation which was to give a $25,000 [equal to over $50,000 in 2025 U.S. dollars] grant to the Pacifica Foundation in 1996 to launch the "Democracy Now!" show.


As the Carnegie Corporation of New York's "Scholar-in-Residence," former Ford Foundation President Bundy had co-authored a 1993-published book with then-Stanford University Professor Sidney Drell and a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, William J. Crowe (who also then sat on the board of directors of a Big Oil company called Texaco in the early 1990s), titled "Reducing Nuclear Danger".


In the acknowledgement section of their book, Bundy and the co-authors noted that "the book is the product of a decision in 1990 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to invite the three of us to work as co-chairmen of a Carnegie Commission on Reducing the Nuclear Danger;" and "we must express our warmest personal thanks to Dr. David A. Hamburg, the president of the Carnegie Corporation" and "the staff of the Carnegie Corporation has helped with unfailing kindness and understanding."


Yet in this Carnegie Corporation of New York foundation-supported book, former Ford Foundation President Bundy and co-authors then, historically, expressed their support for the immoral 1991 high-technology U.S. government’s military attack on the people of Iraq (on behalf of Big Oil, AIPAC/Israeli Establishment and Kuwaiti royal family, U.S. imperialist/military-industrial-complex special interests, etc.), which was opposed by U.S. Antiwar Movement organizers and U.S. Antiwar Movement supporters in the 1990s, by writing:


"Saddam Hussein has provided a sharp reminder of a different nuclear danger--that nuclear weapons may come into the hands of unpredictable and adventurous rulers. We learned in Iraq that when international awareness, will, and capability are all three sufficient, it is possible to take effective action against such danger...The case of Saddam is unique both in the breadth of the international judgment that a bomb under his control would be unacceptably dangerous and in the strength of the American presence and engagement created by his aggression against Kuwait. Multinational action against the Iraqi bomb has been effective, at least in the short run…


"It is now evident that if Saddam's effort had not been interrupted by the war he provoked, he would probably have had nuclear weapons sometime in the 1990s--quite possibly in the first half of the decade. Knowing Saddam as it now does, the world has been shocked by this narrow escape. It is not surprising that an effective consensus has developed, growing in strength as the process of inquiry and dismantling has continued in Iraq, that the international community should see to it that leaders such as Saddam do not get the bomb."


Yet three years after former Ford Foundation President Bundy joined co-authors in morally rationalizing a pro-war policy in relation to Iraq (which helped provide the pretext for the second attack on Iraq in 2003 by the U.S. War Machine), the Ford Foundation board of trustees still historically asserted in 1996 that "the work of the Foundation today builds on Mac's legacy and we are in his debt."


Former White House National Security Affairs Adviser Bundy’s successor as Ford Foundation President, between 1979 and 1996, was a former U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command Captain and former New York City Deputy Police Commissioner in charge of legal matters, named Franklin A. Thomas.


And during his 17 years as the Ford Foundation’s president in the late 20th-century, Thomas also, simultaneously, served as the GOP Reagan Administration’s chairman of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on South Africa and sat on the corporate boards of ALCOA, Cummins Engine, CBS and Citicorp/Citibank;, whose special corporate interests the "Democracy Now!" show co-hosts claimed to be generally opposing during the 1998 and 2004 period, when their show received Ford Foundation funding.


But in its 1980-published edition, the "Everybody’s Business: An Almanac" book, that Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz and Robert Levering edited, indicated who were some of the co-directors that president of the Ford Foundation between 1979 to 1996, Franklin Thomas (who had continued to serve as a Ford Foundation consultant during the late 1990s period when the foundation initially helped fund "Democracy Now!") had, historically, sat next to on the Citicorp/Citibank corporate board:


“Citicorp’s board of directors is about as powerful a group as you’re ever likely to find gathered in one place at one time. In 1980 they included the chairmen of Exxon, Standard Oil of California [Chevron], DuPont, Xerox, Monsanto, Union Pacific, Kimberly-Clark, United Technologies, J.C. Penney, Corning Glass Works…and Franklin A. Thomas, president of the Ford Foundation. Citicorp’s top executives sit on the boards of such giant companies as General Electric, J.C. Penney, United Technologies, Beatrice Foods, and Sears, Roebuck…”


"In addition, in its 1980-published edition, the "Everybody’s Business" book had also observed, historically, that, not surprisingly, at the Levi Straus Corporation in 1980, “Franklin A. Thomas, a trustee of the Ford Foundation is a director, as is Mary Lothrop Bundy, an educator and wife of the former president of the Ford Foundation, McGeorge Bundy.” (end of part 14)

Between 2001 and 2024, 24 "charitable" grants, totaling over $1.5 million, were accepted from former Microsoft VP and later RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser's Glaser Progress Foundation by "Democracy Now!" show co-hosts/producers.

In his 2012-published book, "Philanthropy In America: A History", University of Virginia Commonwealth Professor of History Oliver Zunz indicated why most politically progressive, U.S. Antiwar Movement people in the United States have, historically, been usually reluctant to accept U.S. power elite foundation funding of their politically left Movement projects and public libraries:


“…Muckrakers frequently denounced those who gave money away as hypocrites and their philanthropies as fronts to distract the public from illegal corporate strategies…In the 1890s, many communities…were reluctant to accept Carnegie libraries. Twenty of the 46 solicited towns in Pennsylvania turned down the offer…Social gospel minister Washington Gladden denounced `tainted money’…


“The [Rockefeller] foundation was denounced…as a `Trojan Horse’ ready to undo democracy. U.S. Attorney General George W. Wickersham criticized it as `an indefinite scheme for perpetuating vast wealth, ` believing it to be `entirely inconsistent with the public interest.’ Attorney Frank Walsh—who was pro-labor, denounced the Rockefeller family’s `huge philanthropic trusts as a menace to the welfare of society’…”


But between 2001 and 2024, 24 “charitable" grants, totaling over $1.5 million, were accepted from the then- Glaser Progress Foundation of Seattle-based RealNetworks/Progressive Networks Inc. founder, chairman of the Board and CEO Rob Glaser by the parallel left "Democracy Now!" show producers-hosts.


Yet, according to the RealNetworks website, before establishing his Glaser Progress Foundation in 1993 and “prior to founding RealNetworks, Inc.” in 1994 ”Mr. Glaser worked for” Multi-billionaire Bill Gates’s “Microsoft for 10 years in a number of executive positions, including Vice President of Multimedia and Consumer Systems.”


As Robert H. Reid’s 1997-published book, "Architects of the Web", historically recalled:


“…A lot about Rob said Microsoft, where he had spent …10 years of his career…College was Yale…During Rob’s senior year, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen came to town…Rob…signed up to interview and was soon offered a job…


“He started out by managing the company’s relationships with some outside engineering teams that were helping it develop products. After about a year of that he was staffed to relaunch Microsoft Word…By 1987, Rob’s responsibilities were touching on product planning for all of the company’s application software.


“Around that time…he was invited to join Microsoft’s networking group…He spent 2 years there. Then in the summer of 1989 CEO Bill Gates put him onto a project in the then-new area of multimedia computing…Rob’s task was to help IBM develop the specification of an MPC [Multimedia-enabled Personal Computer]…By the time it was over, Rob was Microsoft’s vice president of multimedia and consumer systems, and a de facto direct report to Gates himself…”


According to James Wallace’s 1997-published book, "Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race To Control Cyberspace":


“…In mid-September 1993, Gates called Glaser, who at the time was on a leave of absence and arranged a meeting at which he asked Glaser to prepare an analysis of how the Internet might affect the Marvel project, Microsoft’s…effort headed by Russ Siegelman to develop an online service…


“Glaser…had arrived at Microsoft in 1983, at age 21…He quickly became one of the key people in the organization who advised Gates...It was Glaser who pioneered Microsoft’s push into multimedia and oversaw Microsoft’s transformation from a software company focused primarily on Windows and DOS to one where content became increasingly important.


“`One of my jobs at Microsoft was to be something of an advance scout,’ said Glaser. `And one of the reasons that I had so much fun at Microsoft was there was a…role to play for being…one of the people who figured out how to get there from here.’


“…After a decade at Microsoft, Glaser…took his millions in stock options…A year earlier, Glaser…dipped into those stock options to buy a multimillion-dollar percentage of the [Seattle] Mariners baseball team…”


Besides using some of the big money he obtained, from his 1980s and early 1990s involvement in helping Bill Gates build his for-profit Microsoft business empire, to buy part of a baseball team and start his RealNetworks/Progressive Networks Inc. for-profit company in 1990s, former Microsoft VP Glaser also used some of his Microsoft-obtained wealth to establish the Glaser Progress Foundation that has, historically, helped fund "Democracy Now!" Productions since 2001.


And, not surprisingly, not many news segments letting listeners and viewers know how either Glaser, Bill Gates or Microsoft acquired their personal or corporate wealth during the 1980s and 1990s have generally been aired or broadcast by "Democracy Now!" since 2001.


Yet as Gary Rivlin’s 1999-published book, "The Plot To Get Bill Gates", historically observed:


“…Rob Glaser, a trusted lieutenant of Gates until he left to start his own company…described [in a 1993 "Business Week" interview] what he labeled the `Machiavellian poker games he had played as Gate’s designated negotiator on many a deal. `You hid things even if it would blindside people you were working with,’ he confessed.” (end of part 15)

"Democracy Now!" Productions' longtime historical funder Glaser, historically, worked with IBM during his 10 years as a Microsoft “company man” and as Billionaire Bill Gates’s “trusted lieutenant” during 1980s.

Multi-billionaire Bill Gates and "Democracy Now!" Productions' longtime historical funder Rob Glaser’s Microsoft had personally enriched both businessmen during the 1980s period, when Microsoft partnered with the transnational corporation, IBM, for 9 years; and when Microsoft apparently also engaged in monopolistic business practices. According to Gary Rivlin’s 1999-published book, "The Plot To Get Bill Gates":


“IBM and Microsoft weren’t that different. At Microsoft they were still company men…IBM…had taken Gates’s measure and deemed him…its kind of man…The chairman of IBM knew Gates’s mother because both served on the national board of United Way…So eager was Gates to remain on good terms with IBM that in 1985 or 1987 he offered Big Blue a 30 percent stake in Microsoft. Executives at IBM brushed aside the offer…”


James Wallace and Jim Erickson’s 1992-published book, "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire", also historically recalled:


“…IBM chief executive John Opel…knew Mary Gates, having served with her on the national board of United Way…Whether this United Way connection helped Microsoft get the IBM deal is not clear. Opel…won’t talk…In early November of 1980, the corporate…couple officially signed the paperwork. Microsoft would develop the `software for IBM’s first personal computer and supply the vital disk operating system or DOS…Chairman Bill sold 5 percent of Microsoft for a million dollars to Technology Venture Investors, a venture capital firm in Menlo, California…David Marquardt, a general partner in TVI, was made a director of Microsoft’s new board…The company went public…in 1986…As the IBM PC gained in popularity, more and more programmers wrote software for that machine and for the operating system Gates had acquired…”


And according to Randall E. Stross’s 1996-published book, "The Microsoft Way":


“The great stroke of luck that provided Microsoft with 10 very good years came in 1980 when it signed a contract with IBM to provide the operating system that would be used on the IBM Personal Computer, introduced the next year…Microsoft, which itself did not have an operating system to offer, bought another, still smaller company’s operating system software to adapt for the project. The contract…worked greatly in Microsoft’s favor. The terms permitted Microsoft to sell the operating system to other companies and to consumers, but IBM, effectively could not…Microsoft’s rivals have raised questions of monopoly that staff members of the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department have largely accepted…Gates is remembered as the precociously outspoken advocate for commercializing the distribution of software.”


James Wallace’s "Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race To Control Cyberspace" book also noted in 1997:


“…Microsoft and IBM…in August of 1985…signed a long-term joint agreement that guaranteed the continuation of DOS and IBM…At the time, Gates said it was `the biggest contract’ Microsoft had ever signed…Microsoft had become the computer industry’s Standard Oil in the late 20th century…During…November 1989…Microsoft and IBM had jointly issued a…news release, titled `IBM and Microsoft expand partnership…’…FTC staff believed that the agreement between IBM and Microsoft smacked of anti-competitive collusion, and the investigation was on…”


"The Microsoft Way" book provided an example of how "Democracy Now!" Productions' longtime historical funder Glaser, historically, worked with IBM during his 10 years as a Microsoft “company man” and as Multi-Billionaire Gates’ “trusted lieutenant” during the 1980s:


“In late 1988, IBM executives told Microsoft they wanted to try once again to crack the home personal computer market…Gates suggested that the machine be equipped with an integrated CD-ROM drive and sound card…IBM accepted the suggestion…Gates assigned a team of Microsoft software engineers to work with IBM…Gates had assigned Rob Glaser to be his principal multimedia advisor…He was given senior responsibility by Gates soon after joining the company…Glaser suggested to Gates that Microsoft should launch what Glaser called a `virtual standard’ for multimedia that could be used in all-IBM compatible personal computers…Gates gave his approval…Gates…sent Rob Glaser…off on assignments to learn about new strategic problems--go figure it out’ was the injunction Gates would use—and then report back to him…”


Charles Ferguson’s 1999-published book, "High Stakes, No Prisoners", described how Microsoft, historically, had apparently increased its profitability and power during the 1980s and early 1990s, when longtime "Democracy Now!" historical funder Glaser was a Microsoft vice-president:


“The ultimate source of Microsoft power is its monopoly control of the software platform used by PC applications—Windows… Microsoft even owns an equity stake in Apple, has rights to all of Apple’s intellectual property…and holds at least 50 percent market share in application software for the MAC…Microsoft…exploits its monopoly positions ruthlessly…Microsoft’s predatory behavior…, false dealings, and strategic use of monopoly power are integral to its ability to create further monopolies…”


And James Wallace and Jim Erickson’s "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" book had, historically, noted in 1992:


“…By mid-April of 1991, Microsoft was forced to acknowledge…that the FTC was looking into allegations that the company `has monopolized or attempted to monopolize the market for operating systems, operating environment, computer software and consumer peripherals for personal computers’…Microsoft has become notorious…not just for capitalizing on the technological advances of others, but, as some claim, for predatory pilfering. They complain that Microsoft repeatedly approaches small companies promising new products, ostensibly to talk about a partnership. After Microsoft is given a glimpse of how the software works, it suddenly loses interest in the deal—only to announce later that it has been working on surprisingly similar, but competing software…At the heart of the FTC probe is…whether or not Microsoft’s dominant position has chilled competition and thus hurt consumers…” (end of part 16)

Between 2019 and 2024, former Microsoft VP Glaser’s foundation gave 6 “charitable” grants, totaling $301,100, to help fund "parallel left" "Democracy Now!" show.

Between 2019 and 2024, former 1980’s and early 1990’s Microsoft Vice-President Rob Glaser’s Glaser Progressive Foundation gave 6 “charitable” grants, totaling $301,100, to help fund the parallel left "Democracy Now!" show, including a $50,000 grant in 2020 for “COVID-19 Pandemic Related Expenses.”


Yet even after longtime "Democracy Now!" historical funder Glaser finally historically left Microsoft in 1993 to establish his own for-profit company which, according to Robert Reid’s "Architects of the Web" book, he “started ramping up” in 1994, that was initially called “Progressive Networks” (but renamed RealNetworks Inc. in 1997), the former Microsoft VP continued to be connected on a business level to Gates, Microsoft and current or former Microsoft executives in the late 1990s.


As Randall Stross’s "The Microsoft Way" book historically noted in 1996:


“…Among Gates’s advisors, Rob Glaser made the biggest early bet on the Internet…In late 1993, after 10 years, he left Microsoft as a full-time employee and temporarily continued on a part-time, contractual basis while he founded Progressive Networks…”


And according to James Wallace’s 1997-published book, "Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race To Control Cyberspace":


“[In September 1993]…Gates phoned, and the two met at Gates’s office to talk about Glaser doing some consulting work on the Marvel project headed by Siegelman. Gates said the work would be only for a few months and no more than 10 to 15 hours a week. Glaser accepted the assignment, even though at the time he was busy preparing a business plan for his own company. He had helped recruit …Siegelman to Microsoft…


“But Gates had another assignment for Glaser in addition to the consulting work on what would become the Microsoft Network. He wanted Glaser to work directly for him, helping evaluate whether Microsoft should create an alliance with cable-TV titans Time Warner and Tele-Communications Inc….Now, Gates’s vision of Microsoft’s dominance included the home television using Microsoft’s software, too…Glaser made 2 rounds of recommendations to Gates… At Microsoft’s insistence, Glaser would not be…specific in an interview about his recommendations…Even though Glaser was no longer working at Microsoft, he and Siegelman had talked several times since that day in mid-September when Gates had asked Glaser to evaluate Microsoft’s on-line service and how it fit with the Internet…Glaser…formed his own company, called Progressive Networks. Several of his Microsoft pals…became investors…”


In addition, Charles Ferguson’s 1999-published book," High Stakes, No Prisoners", also historically recalled:


“In August 1995…Rob Glaser, who had just resigned from Microsoft, visited the Electronic Frontier Foundation…Glaser used Mosaic and the Web for the first time and was impressed. A month later, Glaser was hired by Gates as a consultant to advise on Web/Internet issues…Then Rob Glaser founded Progressive Networks to develop `streaming’ audio technology to permit large-scale audio distribution over the Internet. Glaser was a former Microsoft executive who had recently consulted to Gates on precisely these subjects…Microsoft bought an equity stake in RealNetworks…”


And according to the 1997-published book, "Architects of the Web":


“Rob’s vice president of software development was Phil Barrett…Phil…ran `a couple of product development teams’ over at Microsoft…Rob called a compression-expert that he knew from Microsoft days…The core notions behind Real Audio were fixed in no time…Rob settled firmly on the notion that Progressive would be a for-profit company…He decided that the company…would sell the software that served Real Audio files over the Internet (the Real Audio Server)…Real Audio debuted on the Web on April 10, 1995, along with content from ABC News, National Public Radio [NPR] and others…Within 2 days of Real Audio’s launch, Progressive announced that Microsoft…had agreed to distribute the Real Audio Player with their browser software…By the summer of 1996, Real Audio accounted for an extraordinary 85 percent share of the Web’s audio content…


“Rob…works hard to position himself as a partner, not competitor, to…two important companies. Microsoft is in fact one of Progressive’s biggest customers. This, plus its crosstown location and the fact that Rob has 10 years of relationship to draw on there (including one with the Boss), makes it easy for him to keep the lines of communication and diplomacy open…”


Coincidentally, a co-founder of Glaser’s Progressive Networks/RealNetworks Inc. in 1993 and 1994, David Halperin, had previously worked as former Democratic Johnson Administration Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s research assistant in 1985 and 1986; and, between 1991 and 1993, the historical co-founder of Glaser’s Real Networks firm had worked as a counsel to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.


In addition, between 1997 and 2001, Halperin later worked as the special assistant to the president for national security affairs and director for speechwriting at the National Security Council in the Clinton White House.


According to an Aug. 1, 1999 "Wired" magazine historical article by Randall Rothenberg about later longtime "Democracy Now!" historical funder Rob Glaser:


“The product of a suburban New York prep school favored by…liberals… Glaser may have seemed like an atypical Microsoftie…. In 1993, after rising to become the company's youngest vice president and gaining a reputation as a demanding boss, Glaser lost a bureaucratic tussle over control of the company's multimedia operations to Nathan Myhrvold, prompting Glaser to resign.


“With a Yale friend, David Halperin, Glaser hatched vague plans for a company that would link television to the nascent Internet...Glaser, with some of his Microsoft millions, quickly hired a trio of engineers to develop the software…. Not long after, the two demonstrated the system to an informal group of liberal advisers at a Washington, DC, hotel…. his friends convinced him to drop the politics, focus on streaming, and donate the resulting profits to their favored causes….Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and Mike Slade, who'd left Microsoft…were early investors. Kapor also introduced Glaser to the venture capital firm Accel Partners. Glaser, who retains 40 percent of his company (currently valued in excess of $1.5 billion [in 1999]), sold more than 10 percent to Accel for $5 million….Shares …have risen almost tenfold since the public offering in late 1997… In fiscal 1998, software licensing fees - primarily from server software - were $47 million. Eighty-five percent of streaming media broadcasts, Real says, use its technology [in 1999]…"


Later, in a Sept. 4, 2000 "Fortune" magazine article, Amy Kovner indicated how Glaser’s RealNetworks Inc. firm, historically, made some big money in the late 1990s (when its co-founder, David Halperin, was working as a special assistant to Corporate Democratic President Clinton for national security affairs):


“…Glaser has been expanding RealNetworks' reach into every nook and cranny of the digital-media terrain….Real firmly dominates the $900 million streaming-media business. Over 85% of the streaming content on the Web comes in Real's format. The company has at least four revenue sources, ranging from digital-media players to content-delivery networks. Its sales have grown 135% a year, reaching $131 million in 1999, when Real managed the undot-commy feat of turning a $7 million profit….


“If you're wondering how RealNetworks makes any money at all, you're not alone. … First off, more than 1% of the people who download the RealPlayer…actually buy a souped-up version known as the RealPlayerPlus. At $29.99 a pop, Real has raked in about $40 million from that tiny sliver of users. Real also makes money from the Websites whose songs you listen to….About 600,000 Websites use Real to deliver their audio and video content, accounting for about a quarter of Real's revenues…Last quarter, Real's ad revenues…increased by 350%, to more than $14 million. …`We've really benefited from being able to show streaming-media ads,’ says Lucy Mohl, the head of programming for RealNetworks and a former movie critic for NBC…So Real is rolling in dough. …CNN.com and ABC are both major buyers of Real technology….”


But Randall Rothenberg’s previously-written "Wired" magazine historical article also had contained the following reference in 1999 to the RealNetworks Inc. CEO whose tax-exempt Glaser Progress Foundation has been funding the parallel left "Democracy Now!" show since 2001:


“Here's what else Glaser knows: The downloadable revolution isn't simply about music…Anything so disruptive is, ultimately, about power, and Glaser is perfectly comfortable with that: His goal is nothing less than ruling the multibillion-dollar future of broadband…. Rob Glaser built his streaming empire...in no small part upon a mastery of the politics necessary…”


And, as David Postman’s July 26, 2004 "Seattle Times" article, titled “RealNetworks CEO Donates Big Bucks To Politics,” had historically observed in 2004:


“…So far this year, Glaser has given more than $1 million…making him the top donor in Washington state and one of the most generous givers of any political persuasion in the nation...Through his representatives, Glaser declined to be interviewed for this story….Glaser was an early supporter of America Coming Together (ACT), one of the biggest of the new independent political groups allying themselves with Democrats this year. Glaser has donated $750,000 to ACT and persuaded friends to give as well. When Bill Clinton visited town to promote his book, he had dinner with Glaser...His friends work for the State Department — or did during the Clinton-Gore years…Glaser met with Soros at his Long Island home to discuss funding America Coming Together...RealNetworks has been a political incubator of sorts. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., worked there between her 1994 loss of a congressional seat and her 2000 Senate victory. She largely financed her campaign using money she made at RealNetworks… In 2000, Glaser began to give more serious money — about $95,000, including $50,000 to the Democratic National Committee….He has helped fund `Democracy Now'…” (end of part 17)