webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

Simon, Wm E Fdn

capt simomwm218

---

William Simon is on the advisory committee of AmeriCares and was on the national council of the Friends of the Democratic Center in Central America (PRODEMCA). Simon was also the chair of the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund and is a member of the Knights of Malta. (12,15,18)

---

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/why-has-the-white-house-obfuscated-trumps-medical-condition-because-the-right-thinks-it-can-make-its-own-reality/

salon

... Sunday morning, the medical team supervising President Trump's care at Walter Reed Medical Center returned to the microphones to address misinformation they had divulged the previous day. The president's physician, Dr. Sean Conley, admitted he had obfuscated the fact that Trump had been administered oxygen and explained his misleading statements by saying he was "trying to reflect the upbeat attitude" of Trump and "didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction…"

This bizarre episode capped off a truly strange weekend in which the condition of the president of the United States of America, the most powerful man in the world, was puzzled over as one conflicting account after another battled for precedence. It was reminiscent of the propaganda-laden crises of authoritarian states and failed nations, times in which leaders were either perfectly healthy or functionally dead and crises either under control or raging unabated.

The disturbing truth is that this seemingly inexplicable moment is the result of a decades-long war over the very nature of reality within America.I had struggled to understand this before writing "American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People" and finding that modern American history has been dominated by this conflict and the Republican Party's insistence on constructing an alternate reality to aid in its consolidation of power.

It is no accident that the Republican Party has evolved into Trumpism. After decades of manipulation, including the vilification of academics and experts and an all-out onslaught on science, it was sadly inevitable for the GOP to reach the point where even the medical condition of the president is subject to relentless propaganda and subjective pseudo-science.

In the post-Vietnam era, this project was best summarized by William E. Simon, a businessman who served as Richard Nixon's secretary of the Treasury, who wrote in his influential 1978 book "A Time for Truth" that liberals had so dominated cultural conversation with their array of academics and experts that it was necessary for conservatives to create their own "powerful counterintelligentsia." This followed on the heels of the civil rights, free speech and antiwar movements that found purchase on college campuses and among academic circles in the 1960s and '70s. What followed was a backlash against the academy itself and a desperate attempt to forge an alternate establishment that would protect Republican power and capitalist interests.

This would lead to the creation of an army of right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, bodies that offered opinions troubling scientific and academic consensus while preparing pundits to challenge experts in the public arena. Corporate and private donations were mobilized to tempt experts into espousing anti-establishment views. Even while major corporations internally distributed their own studies of scientifically-proven threats like climate change and carcinogenic products like cigarettes, large-scale discrediting operations were undertaken to inject doubt in the public mind.

To assist this effort, the American right founded a powerful media operation that began with print and moved to the airwaves with talk radio, cable news and eventually websites and social media networks dedicated to proliferating misinformation. With the death of the FCC's "fairness doctrine" in 1987 — a rule that had guaranteed equal time to opposing viewpoints in the media — the right was free to construct a self-sustaining, impenetrable alternate reality its supporters and adherents could reside within, beyond the reach of experts, science or even a passing conflicting opinion.

There is a line to be drawn fromSimon's urge to push "non-egalitarian" voices in order to protect Republican and moneyed interests to our peculiar moment. The reliance on politically favorable opinions and personally advantageous pseudo-science has given room to misinformation, disinformation and the proliferation of conspiracy theories that "feel real" to people while existing solely as weaponized narratives.

It is this war on science and expertise that gave rise to attacks on scientists urging the wearing of masks, and to the "miracle cures" of hydroxychloroquine, UV light and household cleansers, not to mention the empty promise by a president — who had been caught on tape admitting he knew better — that a generational pandemic might simply solve itself, saying, "One day, it's like a miracle, it will simply disappear."

But with more than 214,000 deaths so far during the coronavirus pandemic and the disastrous consequences of climate change as evident as the flaming maelstroms on the West Coast — not to mention an ailing president who is either all better, improving or gravely ill, or maybe all three at once — it is time to recognize the manipulation that has occurred and the necessity to move beyond a war on objective reality. As perhaps even President Trump's partisan doctors could be made to admit, propaganda simply does not exist at the microscopic level.

---

---

rick perlstein 3 --> bks on rt

simon on early school re-segregation? heritage involved?

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-february-19-2018/

==

sw

William E. Simon

"Mr. Simon was born in Paterson, New Jersey, where he spent most of his childhood. After service in the U.S. Army, he graduated from Lafayette College in 1952 and joined Union Securities the same year. He served as Vice President of Weeden & Company before becoming senior partner in charge of the Government and Municipal Bond departments at Salomon Brothers, where he served on the firm's seven-member executive committee.

"Appointed Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in 1973, Mr. Simon later that year also became the first Administrator of the Federal Energy Office. In 1974, President Nixonappointed him 63rd Secretary of the Treasury, a post to which he was re-appointed by President Ford and which he held until 1977.

"Following government service, Mr. Simon co-founded Wesray Corporation, a successful pioneer in mergers and acquisitions. Seven years later he launched WSGP International, which concentrated on investments in real estate and financial service organizations. In 1988, he established William E. Simon & Sons, a global merchant bank.

"During his remarkable career,Mr. Simon served on the boards of over 30 companies includingXerox, Citibank, Halliburton and United Technologies. In recognition of his visionary leadership in business, finance and public service, the Graduate School of Management at the University of Rochester was renamed the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration in 1986.

"Mr. Simon was an active member of the United States Olympic Committee for over 30 years. He served as Treasurer and later as President of the U.S. Olympic Committee for the four-year period which included the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. From 1985-1997, he served as the first Chairman of the U.S. Olympic Foundation, created with the profits of the Los Angeles games.

"As a man of faith and an active Knight of Malta, Mr. Simon considered the opportunity to serve those less fortunate than he a God-given privilege and responsibility. In the last years of his life, he served as a eucharistic minister to patients, many of whom were destitute and terminally ill, at several hospitals. He called this work "the most important thing that I do or have ever done." Mr. Simon was the first recipient, in 1996, of the Blessed Hyacinth Cormier Award for Outstanding Catholic Leadership. In May 1999, he received the Ignatian Medal from Gregorian University in Rome, as well as an honorary doctorate from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.

"Mr. Simon was a well-known philanthropist, and provided hundreds of scholarships for underprivileged students at both the high school and college level. He served on the boards of numerous colleges and universities, and received over 20 honorary degrees.

"Mr. Simon was committed to the American heritage of constitutional government and private enterprise. He sought to strengthen this heritage during his 23-year tenure as President of the John M. Olin Foundation and as a trustee of several think tanks, including The Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. He was the author of two best-selling books on the theme of freedom, A Time for Truth (1978) and A Time for Action (1980).

"Mr. Simon was married for 45 years to Carol Girard Simon, who died in 1995. He is survived by their seven children and 25 grandchildren, as well as by his second wife, Tonia Donnelley Simon.“ [1]

Related Sourcewatch articles

References

External links

Categories: Foundations | Democracy

William E. Simon Foundation

"Named after its principal benefactor, the William E. Simon Foundation supports programs that are intended to strengthen the free enterprise system and the spiritual values on which it rests: individual freedom, initiative, thrift, self-discipline and faith in God." [1]

Prizes

"The William E. Simon Prize in Social Entrepreneurship is awarded to an outstanding innovator, entrepreneur, or volunteer who has demonstrated the important role one person can have in improving the lives of others."[2]

"The William E. Simon Prize in Philanthropic Leadership is awarded to a prominent philanthropist who has taken great care in his or her charitable giving to ensure that his or her philanthropy supports causes and programs that not only have achieved positive results, but also, in the words on Andrew Carnegie, "help people to help themselves."" [3]

Prize Program Advisory Board

Source

Contact

Web:http://www.wesimonfoundation.org

Category: Foundations

---

wikifluff

William Edward Simon (November 27, 1927 – June 3, 2000) was a businessman, a Secretary of Treasury of the U.S. for three years, and a philanthropist. He became the 63rd Secretary of the Treasury on May 9, 1974, during the Nixon administration. After Nixon resigned, Simon was reappointed by President Ford and served until 1977 under President Carter. Outside of government, he was a successful businessman and philanthropist. The William E. Simon Foundation carries on this legacy. He was a strong advocate oflaissez-faire capitalism. He wrote, "There is only one social system that reflects the sovereignty of the individual: the free-market, or capitalist, system".[1]

As Treasury Secretary

In August 1974, he was asked to continue to serve at Treasury by President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., who shortly afterward appointed him chairman of theEconomic Policy Board and chief spokesman for the administration on economic issues.

On April 8, 1975, President Ford also named him chairman of the newly created East-West Foreign Trade Board, established under the authority of the Trade Act of 1974.

At the time of his nomination as Treasury Secretary, Simon was serving as Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, a post he had held from January 22, 1973. As Deputy Secretary, he supervised the Ford administration's program to restructure and improve U.S. financial institutions. He also served as the first Administrator of the Federal Energy Office.

From December 4, 1973, Simon simultaneously launched and administered the Federal Energy Administration at the height of the oil embargo. As such he became known as the high-profile "Energy Czar",[2] and represented a revitalization of the "czar" term in U.S. politics. He also chaired the President's Oil Policy Committee and was instrumental in revising themandatory oil import program in April 1973. Simon was a member of the President's Energy Resources Council and continued to have major responsibility for coordinating both domestic and international energy policy.

In 1977, Simon received the Alexander Hamilton Award, the Treasury Department's highest honor. In 1976, while serving as Secretary of the Treasury, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt presented Simon with the Collar of the Republic/Order of the Nile. Simon's term as Secretary of the Treasury ended on January 22, 1977.

As Treasury Secretary, Simon supported free markets and denounced government policies that either subsidize or penalize businesses. In Simon's own words:

"Throughout the last century the attachment of businessmen to free enterprise has weakened dramatically as they discovered they could demand--and receive--short-range advantages from the state.... I watched with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis, whining for handouts or protection from the very competition that has made this system so productive."[3]

Personal information

Simon was born in Paterson, New Jersey, on November 27, 1927, the son of Eleanor (née Kearns) and Charles Simon, Jr., an insurance executive.[4] He graduated from Newark Academy and, after service in the U.S. Army (infantry), received his B.A. in 1952 from Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. At Lafayette he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilonfraternity (Rho chapter).

He began his career with Union Securities in 1952. He served as Vice President of Weeden & Co. before becoming the senior partner in charge of the Government and Municipal Bond departments at Salomon Brothers, where he was a member of the seven-man Executive Committee of the firm.

Following government service, Simon was a Vice Chairman at Blyth Eastman Dillon for three years, then co-founded withRay Chambers, a tax accountant, Wesray Capital Corporation (Mr. Simon contributing the "Wes" and Mr. Chambers contributing the "ray" based on his initials), a leveraged buyout (LBO) firm. In 1982, Wesray invested approximately $1 million in equity capital (with Mr. Simon contributing $330,000) and borrowed another $79 million to take private a Cincinnati-based greeting card company, Gibson Greetings, for $80 million. Eighteen months later, the company was taken public again, with a value of $290 million, and Mr. Simon's $330,000 investment was worth $66 million.

In 1984, he launched WSGP International, which concentrated on investments in real estate and financial service organizations in the western United States and on the Pacific Rim. In 1988, together with sons William E. Simon Jr. and J. Peter Simon, he founded William E. Simon & Sons, a global merchant bank with offices in New Jersey, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. The firm is now[when?] extensively involved in providing venture capital. In 1990, he partnered with several investors to form Catterton-Simon Partners, a private equity firm focused on beverages and other consumer products, which today is known as Catterton Partners.

During his business career, Simon served on the boards of over thirty companies including Xerox, Citibank, Halliburton,Dart & Kraft, and United Technologies. In recognition of his leadership in business, finance and public service, the Graduate School of Management at the University of Rochester was renamed the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration in 1986.

William E. Simon Scholarship Fund

The William E. Simon Scholarship Fund provides financial assistance for academically highly qualified students of thePontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, *Angelicum* who live in Rome and who would otherwise lack the resources to cover their educational expenses. Each scholarship award provides no more than 40% of the total annual expense of tuition, room, board, and related fees and expenses. Annually, the William E. Simon Scholarship Fund allocates 50% of the scholarship fund for lay students.[5]

U.S. Olympic Committee

Simon was an active member of the United States Olympic Committee for many years. He served as treasurer from 1977 to 1981 and as President of the U.S. Olympic Committee from 1981 to 1985, which included the 1984 Games in Sarajevoand Los Angeles. He chaired the U.S. Olympic Foundation, created with the profits of the Los Angeles games, from 1985 through 1997, and was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1991. An additional athletics-related honor came on October 11, 1975, when Simon threw out the first pitch of the 1975 World Series at Boston's Fenway Park on behalf of President Ford.

Simon received numerous awards during his career in sports. Among them are the Olympic Torch and the Olympic Order, the highest honors, respectively, of the United States Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee. Simon served as an officer or on the board of the Jesse Owens Foundation, the Basketball Hall of Fame, the National Tennis Foundation and Hall of Fame, the U.S. Amateur Boxing Foundation, the Women's Sports Foundation, and the World Cup '94 Organizing and Executive Committees.

Simon's legacy

At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he established the William E. Simon Center for the Professional Military Ethic.

At the U.S. Air Force Academy, he established the William E. Simon Center for Strategic Studies, as well as a Simon professorship.

In 1976, Simon received the U.S. Senator John Heinz Award for Greatest Public Service by an Elected or Appointed Official, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.[6]

Simon served as President of the John M. Olin Foundation and as trustee of The John Templeton Foundation. He has also served on the boards of many of America's premier think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. He was the author of two best-selling books, A Time for Truth in 1978 (ghostwritten by libertarian author Edith Efron) and A Time for Action in 1980.

Simon was a resident of Harding Township, New Jersey.[7]

In referring to Simon, The Washington Post stated in its October 26, 2007 edition:

Mr. Simon is commonly acknowledged as a legendary architect of the modern conservative movement. But he was also legendarily mean, "a mean, nasty, tough bond trader who took no BS from anyone," in the words of his old friend Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation. Simon was known to awaken his children on weekend mornings by dousing their heads with buckets of cold water. Mr. Simon came away from the experience of Watergate with a disgust for the partisan character of the affair. The experience of Nixon impeachment convinced him, not that partisanship was necessarily poisonous, but that his opponents were far better at partisanship than his side was."[8]

Simon was a pioneer of the leveraged buyout (LBO) in the 1980s. He and his partner, Raymond G. Chambers, formed a partnership, Wesray, that bought and sold, among others, the Gibson Greeting Card Company, Anchor Glass, and the Simmons Mattress Company, typically investing tiny fractions of their own money and including significant debt to complete the purchase from prior shareholders, and then selling the companies whole or piecemeal after making changes that “often included job cutbacks and other short-term cost-reduction measures.”[9]

In the Anchor Glass case, Simon made millions more through deals with the company wherein the company leased its land, buildings, and equipment from Simon. Wesray also received banking fees for handling the subsequent purchase by Anchor of Midland Glass Company. Anchor Glass also bought casualty, liability, employee health and benefit insurance from a brokerage firm partially owned by Simon. The Anchor Glass corporate headquarters in Tampa was leased from Simon. Anchor Glass later admitted in an SEC filing, that “these arrangements...were not the result of arm’s length bargaining...[and] were not...favorable to the company”. Anchor Glass was finally bought by a Mexican company, Vitro, S.A.[10]

Simmons Mattress Company, a company founded in 1886, was bought by Wesray and partners bought in 1986 for $120 million and sold it in 1989 for $241 million. [The New York Times, “Buyout Firms Profited as a Company’s Debt Soared”, Julie Creswell, Oct 4, 2009].

By the late 1980s, Forbes magazine was estimating Mr. Simon's wealth at $300 million.

Simon married his first wife, Carol Girard Simon in 1950. William and Carol Simon had two sons and five daughters (William E., Jr., J. Peter Simon, Mary Beth, Carol Leigh, Aimee, Julie Ann, and Johanna Simon) and has many, twenty-seven grandchildren. She died in 1995. Simon married his second wife, Tonia Adams Donnelley in 1996.

Simon died of complications of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of 72, on June 3, 2000 in Santa Barbara, California. He was buried in Laurel Grove Memorial Park, Totowa, New Jersey. One of his sons, Bill Simon, was the Republican nominee for governor of California in 2002. A daughter, Mary Beth Simon, was married to Dana Streep, brother of actress Meryl Streep.

In 2004, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute dedicated a $40,000 cash prize in honor of Secretary Simon. Each year since, the William E. Simon Fellowship for Noble Purpose has been awarded to a college senior desiring to live a life dedicated to serving humanity.

Since 2001, the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership has been awarded to distinguished living donors, including John T. Walton, John Templeton, and Phil Anschutz.

Notes

  1. Jump up Simon, William E. A Time for Truth (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1978), 221. Cited in American Chameleon, Ohio Kent State University Press, 1991, p. 203
  2. Jump up Nixon's Decisive New Energy Czar. Time Magazine. December 10, 1973.http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,908276,00.html
  3. Jump up Bruce Bartlett, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, New York: Doubleday, 2006, pp. 105-106
  4. Jump up http://academicmuseum.lafayette.edu/special/simon/bio.html
  5. Jump up http://www.pustphilo.org/pust/borse/index.php Accessed May 27, 2012
  6. Jump up http://www.jeffersonawards.org/pastwinners/national
  7. Jump up Garbarine, Rachelle. "If You're Thinking of Living in: Harding", The New York Times, June 10, 1990. Accessed February 28, 2008. "Among its residents are William E. Simon, the former Secretary of the Treasury, and Robert P. Luciano, the chairman of Schering-Plough, the pharmaceutical company."
  8. Jump up "Giuliani's Policy Professor," Benjamin Wallace-Welles, Washington Post 26 Oct 2007
  9. Jump up America: what went wrong? By Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele p.16].
  10. Jump up America: What Went Wrong? By Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele p.16]