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 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
List of grants and cumulative amounts given from 1985-2002 [1].
National organizations
- Over $10 million
- American Enterprise Institute
- Heritage Foundation
- Over $5 million
- Freedom House
- National Affairs
- Over $2 million
- Federalist Society
- Center for the Study of Popular Culture
- Over $1 million
- Brookings Institution
- Intercollegiate Studies Institute
- Institute for American Values
- Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace
- Institute for Educational Advancement
- Institute for Justice
- Over $500,000
- Black Alliance for Educational Options
- Over $100,000
- Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability
- Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
- Heartland Institute
- Less than $100,000
- Children First America
- Council for the Spanish Speaking
- Potomac Foundation
- Unknown
- Center for Education Reform
- Child Abuse Prevention Fund
- Corporation for National and Community Service
- Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Local charities
- Over $5 million
- Wisconsin Policy Research Institute
- Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
- Over $1 million
- Madison Center for Educational Affairs
- Over $500,000
- Milwaukee Public Library Foundation
- Unknown amount
- Association of Midwest Museums
- Epilepsy Association of Southwest Wisconsin
- Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra
- Milwaukee Public Museum
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