Bradley Foundation

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a large and influential foundation with about half a billion US dollars in assets. According to the Bradley Foundation 1998 Annual Report, it gives away more than $30 million per year. The Foundation has financed efforts to support federal institutes, publications and School choice and educational projects.

History

When Rockwell International Corporation bought Allen-Bradley in 1985 a significant portion of the proceeds went into the creation of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. In an attempt to preserve and extend the principles and philosophy used by the Bradley brothers.

During their life, they were commited, to preserve and defend the tradition of free representative government and private enterprise, that according to them, "the good society is a free society. The Bradley Foundation is likewise devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles and values that sustain and nurture it."

The foundation supports Limited government, a dynamic marketplace where economic, intellectual, and cultural activity can flourish. It also defends te American ideas and institutions. Next to that it recognizes that responsible self government depends on informing citizens and creating a well informed public opinion. The foundation tries to accomplish that by financing scholarly studies and academic achievements. [1]

The Bradley Foundation's former president, Michael S. Joyce, was instrumental in creating the Philanthropy Roundtable, The goal of the Roundtable's founders was to provide a forum where donors could discuss the principles and practices that inform the best of America's charitable tradition. Currently, there are more than 600 Roundtable Associates.

In the early 1990s the foundation helped support The American Spectator magazine, which at the time was researching damaging material on President Bill Clinton. In the March 1992 issue of the magazine, David Brock called Anita Hill "a bit nutty and a bit slutty", and in January, 1994, it published Brock's article regarding Troopergate and Clinton's alleged extramarital affairs. David Brock later recanted both articles.

The Bradley Foundation has provided funding for Project for a New American Century, a group that advocated invading Iraq as a response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, which it first called for in 1997.

Criticism

Phil Wilayto, a writer for the communist Workers World Party and MediaTransparency, a left wing website that tracks the funding of right wing politics, writes:

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

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

People for the American Way alleges that the Bradley Foundations underreports its giving to right-wing organizations. [2]

Governance

Current members of the board of directors of the Bradley Foundation are: William Armstrong, Reed Coleman, Terry Considine, Pierre du Pont, Michael Grebe, Thomas Smallwood, Bob Smith, and David Uihlein.

Past and present grantees

List of grants and cumulative amounts given from 1985-2002 [3].

National organizations

These are a few of the many donations that have been granted by the Foundation.

Over $10 million

American Enterprise Institute
Heritage Foundation, for support to the Domestic Studies Policy Program and Bradley Resident Fellows Program.Project on Federalism and the states: $853,125 [4]

Over $5 million