Ford Fdn

Green Revo?

TARGET KIRK SHOOT 9 25 MILLER JDV

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On Tuesday, September 16, prosecutors announced that Tyler Robinson — the 22-year-old suspect in the fatal shooting of MAGA activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk — is being charged with aggravated murder and said they will seek the death penalty.

The New York Times' Michael Barbaro discussed the case with reporters Jack Healy and Kenneth P. Vogel in a podcast posted on September 17. While Healy talked about the suspect's possible motives, Vogel got into what Barbaro described as a "rational for cracking down on left-wing groups across the country."

Vogel noted recent comments by Vice President JD Vance and White House adviser Stephen Miller calling for a crackdown on left-wing groups.

The Times reporter told Barbaro, "Miller (made) a really impassioned proclamation about how he and the federal government was going to use every resource at their disposal to go after and disrupt and dismantle and destroy these networks that he says, on the left, are making America unsafe."

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When Barbaro asked Vogel if there is "a sense" of "which groups specifically" Vance and Miller "are referring to," Vogel responded, "I think there are a number of groups that could probably fit into this category based on my conversations with people around the White House, around Trump's orbit."

"Two organizations specifically have come up," Vogel told Barbaro. "One of them is Open Society Foundations, and that's George Soros' philanthropic organization. And the other is the Ford Foundation. Now, they don't really do programming of their own. So, what seems to be at issue here is the organizations that they fund and what those organizations, in turn, are doing."

When Barbaro asked Vogel what groups Open Society and the Ford Foundation fund, the Times reporter explained, "Open Society, for instance — and, I believe, the Ford Foundation — were big funders of sort of racial justice groups around the Black Lives Matter movement. And some of those groups clearly were involved in organizing protests."

Vogel continued, "And it is theoretically possible that at some of the protests where some of these groups were involved in the organization, there may have been vandalism or violence…. But for people around the White House, it's really about what they think of as a broader network of liberal nonprofit groups and firms that administer them that they believe are stoking violence through really extreme rhetoric and polarization. And they attribute to these groups other seemingly disconnected acts of vandalism."

*Listen to the full New York Times podcast at this link (subscription required).

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eteran photojournalist David Hume Kennerly spent more than 20 years on the trustee board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, and he served as White House photographer for President Gerald Ford himself in the mid-1970s.

But on April 9, Kennerly resigned from the board to express his disgust after the Foundation decided against giving conservative former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) its Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service — a decision Kennerly slammed as an act of cowardice. The Ford Foundation, according to Kennerly, was afraid of offending former President Donald Trump.

In an article published by The Atlantic on May 1, Kennerly, now 77, stresses that his resignation was about more than "valiant" Cheney — it was about taking a stand against "authoritarianism."

"Each year, the Foundation awards its Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service, recognizing an individual who embodies Ford's high ideals: integrity, honesty, candor, strength of character, determination in the face of adversity, among other attributes," Kennerly explains. "Past winners have included John Paul Stevens, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Bob and Elizabeth Dole. This year, in my capacity as a trustee, I pushed hard for former Rep. Liz Cheney to receive the recognition."

The photojournalist adds, "After the January 6 insurrection, Cheney famously helped lead the push to impeach President Donald Trump."

Ford Foundation Executive Director Gleaves Whitney said that giving Cheney the award would not have been "prudent" — an explanation Kennerly considers weak and disingenuous.

"Translation: The Foundation was afraid," Kennerly argues. "In another statement, Whitney said that Cheney could be considered for the award in the future. That was not only totally embarrassing, but too late. I believe the Foundation did what it did because of the same pressures hollowing out many Republican institutions and weakening many conservative leaders across America — the fear of retaliation from the forces of Trumpism, forces that deeply loathe Cheney and the values she represents."

Kennerly adds, "Fear that President No. 45 might become No. 47. Fear that wealthy donors might be on Trump's team overtly or covertly and might withhold money from the Foundation. Fear of phantom circumstances."

When the Foundation decided against giving Cheney the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service, Kennerly laments, it "tarnished the image of its namesake."

"My resignation is about more than giving one valiant person an award," the photojournalist stresses. "America is where it is today because of all the people and organizations that have committed small acts of cowardice like that of the Ford Presidential Foundation's executive committee…. (Gerald R.) Ford could not have envisioned the threat to democracy that America now faces, but he would have been encouraged by a bright light named Liz Cheney — someone who is fighting hard, sometimes alone, for the Constitution that Ford defended just as courageously."

*David Hume Kennerly's full article for The Atlantic is available at this link (subscription required).

7 22 2nd civil war b/c of cancel?

The bitter tribalist divisions plaguing the United States in 2022are even more intense now than they were during the 2000s and 2010s. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, discusses those divisions in an op-ed published by the New York Times on the Fourth of July 2022 — and makes it clear that as worried as he is, he hasn’t given up on the United States’ ability to overcome them.

“The heart does not exactly swell with patriotic pride this Independence Day, as the gut absorbs one dizzying, disorienting blow after the next,” Walker laments. “Our sense of who we are, our very identity as Americans, feels assaulted and violated. Amid profound, painful regression on issue after issue, we are left gasping for breath. Our nation seems more irreparably divided than ever before in my lifetime, barreling down a parallel path, perhaps, to the one our forebearers traveled in the 1850s.”

Walker continues, “What we do now matters urgently. And the American identity that we still share matters too, not least because it must inform and inspire a common effort, across our differences, to find our way out and forward. I believe we still can agree on a set of ideas — values and aspirations — enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, 246 years on.”

The Ford Foundation president goes on to lay out some reasons why he hasn’t given up on the United States’ ability to find a common purpose.

“Our founders bequeathed to us something radical, something unprecedented: the tools with which to build a multiracial, multiethnic, pluralist democracy that extends the privilege of American identity to all,” Walker explains. “My love of America — of the American idea — is unwavering. This laboratory of liberty is worth saving, worth improving. But I fear we are mired in a culture of absolutism and tearing ourselves apart at the seams.”

Walker continues, “Everything right now, it seems, is black or white, all or nothing, perfect or unacceptable. Every venue has become a theater for performatively asserting our own virtue or righteousness, or for denying someone else’s.The so-called microaggressions keep getting smaller, the disproportionate penalties bigger. Nuance and complexity, let alone compromise, are nowhere to be found. In their place is a pervasive, paralyzing cynicism. And in turn, our extreme challenges remain extremely unsolved.”

The U.S., Walker warns, is suffering from “a toxicity that threatens to asphyxiate our democracy.”

“Across our country,” Walker observes, “a foul spirit of nihilism has displaced a forgiving spirit of grace. In our distorted media, the few loudest voices garner the most coverage and clicks, while the conglomerates and social networks reap the rewards.”

Walker adds, “These extremes beget more extremes, coarsening our discourse. In our politics, we delineate districts and finance campaigns and decide elections in a way that favors purity over persuasion, thus further dividing our national community.:{ Worse, a minoritarian stranglehold — a tyranny of the minority — is suffocating both our democracy and our trust in its institutions.”[NOT NAMING NAMES? WE ALL KNOW? THINKING PPL DO?]

:{Walker proposes that one way to counter this “toxicity” is to establish “new open places” where “people of good will, operating in good faith, can speak and listen…. without fear that they’re using the wrong word or phrase, without self-censorship.” [LEFT IS REAL PROBLEM, CANCEL CULTURE?!]

Walker wraps up his op-ed by stressing that Americans need to celebrate their “differences” rather than viewing politics as a “zero-sum game.”

“The road to enduring justice runs through reconciliation, and the road to reconciliation runs through truth,” Walker writes. “One of our hard truths is that, as the poet says, America has never been America. Another truth is that it can be still, and it must be, and it will be — if we renew our fidelity to the values that bind us, both despite and because of our differences.”

The story continues here (subscription required).

ARUNDHATI ROY: Rockefeller. Well, you know, I mean, in this, I’ve talked about the role not just in India, but even in the U.S. For example, how do they even—how do they deal with things like political people’s movements? How did they fragment the civil rights movement? I’ll just read you a part about what happened with the civil rights movement.

“Having worked out how to manage governments, political parties, elections, courts, the media and liberal opinion, the neoliberal establishment faced one more challenge: how to deal with the growing unrest, the threat of ’people’s power.’ How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into a blind alley?

“Here too, foundations and their allied organizations have a long and illustrious history. A revealing example is their role in defusing and deradicalizing the Black Civil Rights movement in the United States in the 1960s and the successful transformation of Black Power into Black Capitalism.

“The Rockefeller Foundation, in keeping with J.D. Rockefeller’s ideals, had worked closely with Martin Luther King Sr. (father of Martin Luther King Jr). But his influence waned with the rise of the more militant organizations—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations moved in. In 1970, they donated $15 million to 'moderate' black organizations, giving people grants, fellowships, scholarships, job training programs for dropouts and seed money for black-owned businesses. Repression, infighting and the honey trap of funding led to the gradual atrophying of the radical black organizations.

"Martin Luther King made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated, even his memory became toxic to them, a threat to public order. Foundations and Corporations worked hard to remodel his legacy to fit a market-friendly format. The Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, with an operational grant of $2 million, was set up by, among others, the Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Mobil, Western Electric, Procter & Gamble, U.S. Steel and Monsanto. The Center maintains the King Library and Archives of the Civil Rights Movement. Among the many programs the King Center runs have been projects that work—quote, 'work closely with the United States Department of Defense, the Armed Forces Chaplains Board and others,' unquote. It co-sponsored the Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture Series called—and I quote—’The Free Enterprise System: An Agent for Non-violent Social Change.’"

It did the same thing in South Africa. They did the same thing in Indonesia, you know, with the—General Suharto’s war, which all of us now know about because of The Act of Killing in Indonesia. And very much so in even places like India, where they move in and they begin to NGO-ize, say, the feminist movement, you know? So you have a feminist movement, which was very radical, very vibrant, suddenly getting funded, and not doing—it’s not that the funded organizations are doing terrible things; they are doing important things. They are doing—you know, whether it’s working on gender rights, whether it’s with sex workers or AIDS. But they will, in their funding, gradually make a little border between any movement which involves women, which is actually threatening the economic order, and these issues, you know? So, in the forest, when I went and spent weeks with the guerrillas, you had 90,000 women who were members of the Adivasi Krantikari Mahila Sangathan, this revolutionary indigenous women’s organization, but they are threatening the corporations, they are threatening the economic architecture of the world, by refusing to move out of there. So they’re not considered feminists, you know? So how you domesticate something and turn it into this little—what in India we call paltu shers, you know, which is a tame tiger, like a tiger on a leash, that is pretending to be resistance, but it isn’t.