Bradley Foundation

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a large and influential right-wing foundation 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, a writer for the communist Workers World Party, and 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 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.