2003-10-05 -- Who Is Ward Connerly?

WHO IS WARD CONNERLY?

“I voted for that piece of crap! It sounded good!” wailed an anti-racist Gray Panther.  He had submitted his absentee ballot, and then heard the truth about Proposition 54, Ward Connerly’s “racial privacy” initiative that is supposed to give us a “color-blind” society.

Are the disastrous effects of Prop 54 on public health, education, housing, and law enforcement just unfortunate side effects of a well-intended effort to move us beyond racism?  NO WAY!

The past 25 years of US politics has been an offensive to take back working people’s gains of the last 75 years, and to restore the extremes of poverty and wealth that existed before the New Deal.  Connerly’s career fighting affirmative action has been an integral part of that assault.

Connerly has no shame about this.  He said, ”Every day that I speak out as an ordinary citizen, I do so as a product, a disciple, of that Reagan revolution - a revolution that produced ... a host of other think tanks, talk show hosts, and activist organizations dedicated to making America better by completing the Reagan Revolution.”

Connerly’s organizations, The American Civil Rights Institute (ACRI) and American Civil Rights Coalition (ACRC), directed and funded campaigns to overturn affirmative action in state government contracting and university admissions in California (the 1997 California Civil Rights Initiative -  Prop 209), and Washington state (Prop I-200.)  Similar campaigns are under way in Michigan and beginning in Utah, Colorado, and Arizona.

Directors of Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute are managers of America’s most notorious right-wing think tanks.  Together, they:   * got voucher programs into schools in Milwaukee and Cleveland, and legally defended vouchers for religious schools in Wisconsin.   * campaigned for  Social Security privatization and a flat tax.   * fought against abortion, proportional representation, bilingual education, and gun laws.   * supported Ashcroft for Attorney General.   * directed Wm Buckley’s magazine “National Review.”   * wrote books like  “The Affirmative Action Fraud: Can We Restore the American Civil Rights Vision?”   * made statements like, "We will hunt [these liberal groups] down one by one and extinguish their funding sources."

Connerly’s activities are funded mainly by the Bradley and Olin Foundations, the largest and most influential right-wing foundations.  Bradley funded the notoriously racist books “The Bell Curve,” (Charles Murray) which maintains blacks are genetically inferior in intelligence to whites, and “The End of Racism,” (Dinesh D’Souza) saying slavery was a benign institution. This is the kind of color-blindness Connerly promotes.

Connerly’s funders at the Bradley and Olin Foundations financed organizations that developed:    * The Contract with America;   * the Balanced Budget Act;   * Welfare Reform;   * a $700 billion tax cut for the rich;   * enlarging the military to enable fighting 3 wars at once;   * developing tactical nuclear weapons and Star Wars;   * the doctrine of pre-emptive military strikes;   * tying Iraq to 9/11,   * promoting a voucher systems for private and religious schools;   * abandoning work safety and environmental controls;   * deregulating banking, media ownership, and corporate finance;   * privatizating and restructuring  Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security;   * limiting the right to sue corporations;   * restricting abortion;   * pushing through the war on drugs, mandatory sentencing, and mass incarceration of minority youth;   * and abolishing gun controls. 

This network of foundations, think-tanks, political action committees, university academics, media outlets, and, of course, corporations has an agenda of directly transferring wealth to the wealthy, reducing the political power of working people and their families, and finally, fragmenting us with racism and other divisive ideologies.  

The fact that they are willing to give Connerly millions of dollars each year to try to make us ignore racism only shows us how important fighting racism is.

This is published the San Francisco Gray Panthers Health Committee

This information is available on-line at http://www.mediatransparency.org ,

and a more complete version will be available at the Gray Panther office (415-552-8800)

Sign the petition to remove Connerly from the Univ. of California Regents.

see  http://www.bamn.com/resign.asp, or call the Gray Panther office.