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| One of their most notorious recruits was billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. During World War II, Scaife's father served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. By his mid-twenties, both of Scaife's parents had died, and he inherited a fortune under four foundations: the Carthage Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Scaife Family Foundations and the Allegheny Foundation. In the early 1970s, Scaife was encouraged by CIA agent Frank Barnett to begin investing his fortune to fight the "Soviet menace. | | Submitted by fedup | 2007-05-03 12:20:42 | From 1973 to 1975, Scaife ran Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world. Shortly afterwards he began donating millions to fund the New Right.
Scaife's CIA roots are typical of those who head the new conservative foundations. By 1994 the most active were:
* Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
* Carthage Foundation
* Earhart Foundation
* Charles G. Koch
* David H. Koch
* Claude R. Lambe
* Philip M. McKenna
* J.M. Foundation
* John M. Olin Foundation
* Henry Salvatori Foundation
* Sarah Scaife Foundation
* Smith Richardson Foundation
Between 1992 and 1994, these foundations gave $210 million to conservative causes. Here is the breakdown of their donations:
* $88.9 million for conservative scholarships;
* $79.2 million to enhance a national infrastructure of think tanks and advocacy groups;
* $16.3 million for alternative media outlets and watchdog groups;
* $10.5 million for conservative pro-market law firms;
* $9.3 million for regional and state think tanks and advocacy groups;
* $5.4 million to "organizations working to transform the nations social views and giving practices of the nation's religious and philanthropic leaders." 19
The political machine they built is broad and comprehensive, covering every aspect of the political fight. It includes right-wing departments and chairs in the nation’s top universities, think tanks, public relations firms, media companies, fake grassroots organizations that pressure Congress (irreverently known as "Astroturf" movements), "Roll-out-the-vote" machines, pollsters, fax networks, lobbyist organizations, economic seminars for the nation’s judges, and more. And because corporations are the richest sector of society, their greater financing overwhelms similar efforts by Democrats.
Besides creating foundations, the CIA helped organize the business community. There have always been special interest groups representing business, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, and the CIA has long been involved with them. However, after 1973, a spate of powerful new groups would come into existence, like the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission. These organizations quickly became powerhouses in promoting the business agenda.
Their efforts clearly succeeded. With the 1975 SUN-PAC decision, corporations persuaded government to legalize corporate Political Action Committees (the lobbyist organizations that bribe our government). By 1992, corporations formed 67 percent of all PACs, and they donated 79 percent of all campaign contributions to political parties. 20 In two landmark elections — 1980 and 1994 — corporations gave heavily and one-sidedly to Republicans, turning one or both houses of Congress over to the GOP. Democratic incumbents were shocked by the threat of being rolled completely out of power, so they quietly shifted to the right on economic issues, even though they continued a public façade of liberalism. Corporations went ahead and donated to Democratic incumbents in all other elections, but only as long as they abandoned the interests of workers, consumers, minorities and the poor. As expected, the new pro-corporate Congress passed laws favoring the rich: between 1975 and 1992, the amount of national household wealth owned by the richest 1 percent soared from 22 to 42 percent. 21
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| Scaife owned Forum World Features. And Forum World Features was financed by the CIA. | | Submitted by ck4829-2 | 2005-10-10 13:26:12 | | | Edit |
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