Does the CIA Fund Both the Right and the Left?
Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
The Most Revolutionary Act: Memoir of an American Refugee describes how FBI harassment led a 54 year old psychiatrist, single mother activist, to close my 25 year Seattle practice to begin a new life in New Zealand. It begins by describing the fifteen years of covert harassment I experienced when I used my financial and social position, as a doctor, to assist two former Black Panthers who had occupied an abandoned school to transform it into an African American Museum. What began as unrelenting phone harassment and illegal break-ins, progressed to six attempts on my life and an affair with an undercover agent who railroaded me into a psychiatric hospital.
(April 16, 2011)
This first of two articles relates to links between left gatekeeping and so-called
“alternative” media.
How Left Gatekeeping Foundations Suppress Dissent
Ever since the October 2008 economic collapse, American workers have faced
unprecedented “austerity cuts,” with major hits on their livelihoods and labor and
pension rights. Yet Americans, unlike the rest of the world, don’t respond by taking to
the street. Why is this? Why is the typical American response apathy and passive
acquiescence instead of the militant protest, even rioting, that occurs everywhere else?
The Deep State, Peter Dale Scott’s term for shadowy network of government officials
and corporate elite that operates secretly behind the façade of democracy (see
http://www.voltairenet.org/article169316.html), seems to rely on two main strategies in
suppressing opposition to their agenda. The first involves rigid censorship of the
corporate controlled media. The second involves a large interlocking network of socalled
“left gatekeeping foundations” that play a major role in progressive organizing in
the US.
Media critics have written extensively about the corporate takeover of the mainstream
media that strictly censors anti-corporate news and saturates American lives with procorporate
messaging. The role of left gatekeeping foundations, which are also critical in
suppressing organized dissent, receives scant attention, even in the “alternative” media
outlets (The Nation, Mother Jones, Democracy Now!, and The Progressive, among
others). Some analysts believe this relates to the heavy reliance of these outlets on these
same left gatekeeping foundations for grant funding.
CIA Funding of Alternative Media
I first learned that the Nation was indirectly
”Attorney General Robert Kennedy was the first, in 1967, to investigate the use of the
Ford Foundation and other foundations as “conduits,” “pass-throughs,” and “fronts” to
disguise CIA funding for domestic operations (federal law prohibits the CIA from
operating on US soil). In 1976, the investigation was taken up by the Church
Committee, a Senate Select Committee formed in the aftermath of Watergate. The
Church Committee found that between 1963 and1966, 164 foundations gave out 700
grants over $10,000. Of these, 108 involved partial or complete funding by the CIA
(Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: the CIA and the Cultural Cold War)”
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