Bradley Foundation

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a large and influential right-wing think tank with about half a billion US dollars in assets. According to The Bradley Foundation 1998 Annual Report, it was giving away more than $30 million per year. The Foundation has financed efforts to support welfare reform, to promote school vouchers, to deregulate business, and to privatize government services.

Criticism

Phil Wilayto of Media Transparency, a left wing website that tracks the funding of right wing politics, writes:

The overall objective of the Bradley Foundation, however, is to return the U.S. -- and the world -- to the days before governments began to regulate Big Business, before corporations were forced to make concessions to an organized labor force. In other words, laissez-faire capitalism: capitalism with the gloves off.

Wilayto also published a 140-page "investigative report" on the Bradley Foundation, The Feeding Trough, on behalf of the "A Job is a Right Campaign" in Milwaukee. The report attacks the Bradley Foundation for allegedly commissioning the studies that supported the Welfare Reform legislation in Wisconsin. Wiyalto, a social activist, has stated that the Wisconsin welfare reform is a draconian program that has increased the misery of the poor by supplying business with forced labor at wages inadequate to maintain a reasonable standard of living while bringing massive profits to private business and non-profit agencies. He has accused the Bradley Foundation of using the black community of Milwaukee as a laboratory to increase profits.

Past and present grantees

National organizations

• American Enterprise Institute
• Heritage Foundation
• Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace
• Potomac Foundation
• Council for the Spanish Speaking
• Child Abuse Prevention Fund
• Institute for Justice
• Children First America
• Black Alliance for Educational Options
• Children First America
• Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
• Heartland Institute
• Center for Education Reform
• Institute for Educational Advancement
• Corporation for National and Community Service
• Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability

Local charities

• Association of Midwest Museums
• Epilepsy Association of Southwest Wisconsin
• Child Abuse Prevention Fund
• Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee
• Milwaukee Public Library Foundation
• Milwaukee Public Museum
• Wisconsin Historical Foundation
• Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra
• Madison Center for Educational Affairs

Authors

• Charles Murray
• Dinesh D'Souza

Public officials

• Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
• Jack Kemp
• William J. Bennett

Jurists

• Robert H. Bork
• Antonin Scalia

Bold text== External links ==

• The Bradley Foundation -- Official website
• The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation -- An analysis and critique by Phil Wilayto
• The Feeding Trough: The Bradley Foundation, "The Bell Curve" and the Real Story Behind W-2, Wisconsin's National Model for Welfare Reform. -- Investigative report by Phil Wilayto
• Response from Michael Joyce, foundation president, to The Feeding Trough

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SCHOOLS