Media

Always follow the money

The Tyee online political journal has struck up some interesting associations in connection to a new investigative journalism prize, the funds for which lead back in time and place to suspicious roots

By Kevin Potvin

In her groundbreaking 2001 work, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and World of Arts and Letters, Frances Stonor Saunders laid out with stark clarity how the US government and its biggest allies in the corporate world secretly curried favour with artists and writers of the “soft left” throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s. Using sometimes even very small grants, awards, tours and art shows funded secretly through philanthropic foundations, the CIA poured money out to these “lefties” in order to cleave a wedge in intellectual and artistic communities between those dissenters who could accommodate burgeoning American hegemony, and others who would not. The CIA operatives in this strategy identified the first group as the “soft left,” and distinguished them from the second group, which they labeled “radicals” and “communists.”

Writers and artists generally did not know they were receiving money from the CIA that had been secretly channeled through philanthropic foundations, a technique which served to deliberately obscure the original source of the money. Those foundations included the Ford Foundation, The Kellogg Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation, to name only a few. These foundations were ostensibly set up to support arts and letters in America, Europe, and Canada, to advance ideals of democracy, freedom and justice by underwriting shows and grants for painters and musicians, and by funding the creation of new magazines and newspapers in the US, Canada, and Europe that supported new emerging writers.

But as Saunders makes evident, the real purpose of these philanthropic organizations and the money they distributed on behalf of the CIA was to obscure the CIA’s deployment of these unwitting artists as an intellectual bulwark against radical dissent aimed at American global hegemony. By separating the “soft left” from the “communists” and “radicals” in the intellectual and artistic worlds with largesse and attention, the CIA strategy was to divide the left with resentments and jealousies, thereby subverting the chances the left as a whole could pose a challenge to the hegemonic path the US government and its corporate allies had planned for the world. This is all admitted in the CIA’s own journal Studies in Intelligence, which reviewed Saunder’s book (see cia.gov/csi/studies/vol46no1/article08.html).

This “hearts and minds” strategy evolved into a key component of America’s Cold War battles, meant to defeat what was interpreted as foreign Soviet influence in the West—but which was actually bona fide home-grown radical dissent. Saunders’ book leaves off in the 1950s because the documents necessary to her research only became available through declassification which takes place 50 years after the creation of the documents. But given how the US believes the Cold War lasted until 1990, and how that nation views the outcome as a victory for the US, there is little reason to suppose that the CIA strategy of supporting “soft left” arts and letters through the false fronts of philanthropic foundations would have been abandoned in the meantime.

The US government is today back in a position of having to curry favour with dissenters in the intellectual and artistic communities who are critical of a resurgent and violent American global hegemony, especially after the current White House administration’s recent wholesale destruction of American military and diplomatic credibility. As many speeches and essays produced by administration-friendly think-tanks and journals have pointed out, the US now runs the risk of seeing Western-based intellectual and artistic dissent against the rising American empire becoming sympathetic to the radical opposition to that empire, presently pinning down US military forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, and labeled as “terrorism.”

Anti-Americanism, as measured by the Pew Foundation, is at historic highs in every corner of the globe, particularly among intellectual and artistic elites even in countries considered most closely allied to the US—Canada most especially. The American corporate elite knows that those who disapprove of American war-mongering will never be persuaded to accept it by anyone friendly to the current US administration. Instead, the strategy today is to create the impression in the minds of those who dissent against American empire that there are two Americas, one that is the rabid rightwing we all know and loath, and another America, filled with thoughtful, caring, left-leaning, anti-war, environmentalist types, and that there are enough of the latter type spreading good deeds and money around to preclude anyone saying with conviction that America is monolithically a bad actor in the world. The strategy is intended to staunch growing anti-Americanism in traditionally allied countries by using philanthropic foundations to bathe today’s “soft left” humanitarian and journalistic activists in largesse and to thereby steer them away from support for radical “terrorist” anti-globalization and anti-Americanist ideas.

II

Saunders outlined the strategy in the 50s, which, for example, produced a tour of Europe by Dizzy Gillespie. Sure, America has had bad race relations and a virtual apartheid system lingering from a violent slavery-built past, dissenters on the “soft left” were encouraged to say, but America also has rich companies and wealthy liberal families that finance a great black musician and singer like Gillespie to tour Europe to share his inspiring beauty abroad. Can America be all that bad, was the conclusion the CIA hoped would be formed by “soft” European and American dissenters, many of whom were also being showered by CIA largesse.

A similar effort can be detected today. Those same foundations active with the CIA in the cultural Cold War of the 40s and 50s—The Ford Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Kellogg family, and the Carnegie, Mellon and Heinz families—are all today major donors to an outfit called the Tides Foundation, created in 1976. The biggest donor to Tides by far is The Pew Foundation (responsible for those famous surveys of global opinion), created by the children of Joseph N Pew, the founder of the Sun Oil Co., now the $25 billion Sunoco energy company, with extensive interests in Alberta’s tar sands, one of the largest deposits of fossil fuels in the world.

The Tides Foundation works by coordinating those families and foundations that have money to donate to a cause with groups that fight for those causes. Sometimes if a cause does not have an organization fighting for it, Tides will help create such an organization for the benefit of the family or foundation that has money to donate for it. It also serves to insulate donors from immediate identification with the causes and groups they support, if that is preferred by the donor—which, in the case of Tides, could be the Kellogg family, The Ford Foundation, or the Rockefeller Foundation, for example, who are all listed as major donors to Tides at the Tides website, and all of whom have a long track record in the past of secretly funneling CIA money to “soft left” intellectuals and artists.

Tides has now spread its American colonizing activity to Canada. The foundation recently set up an office in Vancouver, called Tides Canada Foundation. That foundation has become busy reaching out to Canada’s vast array of non-radical, “soft left” organizations and foundations throughout this country. For one small but not insignificant local example, Tides Canada has been enlisted by The Tyee online political journal to look after the funds raised by The Tyee for four fellowship prizes of $5,000 each, which are to be awarded to the most promising investigative journalists in BC who enter The Tyee’s contest. David Beers, editor of The Tyee, told The Republic that $36,000 was raised mostly from readers to support the Fellowship Fund prizes, but that $15,000 of that amount was provided in matching funds by Endswell, a BC grant-distributing foundation. Endswell, established in the early 1980s, has only recently become a direct client of Tides Canada Foundation, and in fact, is falling prey to the same seduction: according to its website, it is now in the process of collapsing its whole organization into the Tides family.

III

The Tyee under David Beers has cultivated a left-leaning tone, some might say a “soft left” approach, but has among its listed regular columnists the former Socred government minister Rafe Mair, the Council of Canadians’ Murray Dobbin, as well as Will McMartin, a prominent right-wing political consultant.

Perhaps a sign of where association with outfits like Tides leads an organization like The Tyee is best revealed in what public talks The Tyee is now beginning to sponsor. On April 2, The Tyee sponsored the appearance of Ethan Gutmann at a rented room at SFU’s downtown Harbourside campus. Gutmann came to Vancouver to talk about “Doing business in the New China.”

Guttman recently published a book called Losing the New China, about his personal failures on a business trip at inciting regime change in the communist empire. Gutmann was recently a visiting fellow at The Project for a New American Century, the primary neo-conservative think tank in America. His book was published by Encounter Books, whose founding editor, Peter Collier, recently wrote—along with notoriously rabid right-wing screecher David Horowitz—a book called The Anti-Chomsky Reader. The publisher of Encounter Books is Roger Kimball, the publisher of New Criterion, a leading neo-con journal. Encounter Books, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, is supported by such right-wing foundations as the John M Olin Foundation, the Charles G Koch Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation—all of whom are strongly identified with the American far right.

Beers explained The Tyee’s sponsorship of Gutmann’s appearance in Vancouver by saying “Guttman [sic] is a neo-conservative with a counter-intuitive message. He has written a book laying out how American corporations support repression of free speech in China. We at The Tyee believe that is a worthy point of view to be heard, and were happy to alert people to Guttman’s talk.”

In the opening page of his book, the sometime contributor to the right-wing magazine The Weekly Standard writes of his business venture to China, “I was more motivated by the idea of changing China than by the prospect of profit.” China, of course, was named by Gutmann’s Project for a New American Century as the leading enemy of America, and a prime target for American hegemony-inspired regime change.

So, now we have The Tyee, which started life as an ostensibly “soft left” local journal, to thank for welcoming an American neo-con from the PNAC group to Vancouver to spread his anti-Chinese regime-change message, just as The Tyee begins to fish about in local waters for bright new investigative journalists using hooks baited with $5,000 cheques provided in part by the Tides Foundation, and by extension, The Ford, The Rockefeller, and The Pew Foundations, which were created by some of the world’s biggest American automotive and oil companies in order to undermine dissent against American military and economic hegemony, not incidentally aimed today directly at China.

Prospective investigative journalists entering The Tyee’s investigative journalism contest should do what all seasoned pros do: follow the money. And always have a good look above the water line at who’s on the other end of that tasty-looking hook being dangled just below the ripples.