The Big Money Behind
Ward Connerly
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In
a decisive victory for progressive activist groups, on May 18th
Ward Connerly was forced to divulge the names of the key financial
backers of California’s Proposition 54. Prop 54, which would
have prevented the state of California from collecting vitally
important racial data, would have devastated the state’s ability
to address disparities by race or ethnicity in health care, educational
resources and academic achievement, and hate crimes and discrimination.
Connerly, fronting for a wealthy all-white group of top funders,
led the campaign to adopt it.
A
critically important initiative in the right wing’s decades-long
strategy to roll back the gains of the racial justice movement,
Prop 54 was massively rejected by California voters in 2003 after
an intensive education and organizing campaign that successfully
mobilized broad opposition across the state.
The
disclosure of Connerly’s financial backers was forced under a
legal settlement with California’s Fair Political Practices Commission.
FPPC had sued Connerly’s preposterously-named American Civil Rights
Coalition in response to a complaint filed by California Common
Cause, the League of Women Voters of California, the Mexican American
Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Greenlining Institute, Californians
for Justice and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. Connerly,
who raised $1.6 million to wage the ballot fight, was fined $95,000
for violating campaign finance disclosure laws. According to IRS
documents, Connerly was paid $1 million in compensation by his
two organizations in 2003.
The
victory demonstrates that progressives can win these kinds of
legal battles to lift the veil on big right wing money if they
are willing to fight them. The settlement and disclosures also
provide hard evidence that the assault on racial justice is not,
as Connerly would have it, the product of some groundswell of
mass anger against equal opportunity measures in major institutions,
but of political action by a small group of wealthy and powerful
right wing corporate tycoons who are trying to turn back the clock
on civil rights. 95% of Connerly’s pro-Prop 54 campaign was paid
for by seven individuals with powerful connections to the California
and national right wings.
Some
interesting names are on the list of contributors, including John
Moores, Sr., University of California Regents board member and
owner of the San Diego Padres ($400,000); Rupert Murdoch,
head of the Fox News empire ($300,000); Joseph Coors, the
late Colorado beer baron and longtime financial angel to the right
wing, who in one of his last acts of reactionary activism weighed
in with $250,000; William J. Hume, head of the anti-labor
San Francisco-based company Basic American Foods, who gave $200,000;
Kansas City businessman John Uhlmann, $190,000; Harlan
Crow, a Dallas financier $140,000; and Peter Schaeffer,
a Texas-based investor, who gave $62,703.
Moores,
a multimillionaire software businessman who served on the UC Board
of Regents with Connerly before the latter stepped down earlier
this year, ignited a firestorm of controversy in 2003 while, as
a sitting Regent, he commissioned a private study criticizing
UC admissions policies as favoring minorities. UC Chancellor Robert
Berdahl wrote to Moores that his flawed report had done a “great
disservice to the university” and that Moores had shown “shown
open contempt for reasoned discourse about complex issues.” Moores
was censured by the Regents for his action.
Two
Texas software entrepreneurs who co-sponsored a $500-per-head
fundraiser in January 2002 at Moores’ Santa Fe estate, Peter Schaeffer
and James Woodhill, also contributed to Prop 54, according to
the data Connerly was forced to release. Joseph Coors and former
Governor Pete Wilson were also listed on the invitation as sponsors,
according to the weekly San Diego Reader.
Though
Moores has contributed to Democratic candidates, he apparently
harbors a special animus towards racial justice programs, and
was singled out by Connerly as “my primary ally” in the Prop 54
battle in a speech Connerly delivered when he received a $250,000
prize from the right wing Bradley Foundation earlier this year.
Bradley has funded the major right wing organizations that have
led the decades-long battle to gut diversity programs and outlaw
affirmative action, such as the Center for Individual Rights.
Charles Murray, author of the infamous The Bell Curve,
which tied educational performance to racial genetics, is a Bradley
Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Connerly
had been nominated for the prize by Thomas L. Rhodes, the co-chair
of Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute and chair of the
board of the Bradley Foundation. At the awards banquet Connerly
recalled that Rhodes told him after their victory in the 1996
battle for Prop 209 (which outlawed affirmative action in California),
“Ward, our work is not yet done. Preferences need to be challenged
nationally, and I believe you are the man to do it.”
In
his autobiography, Connerly writes that Rhodes accompanied him
to a crucial meeting with Rupert Murdoch (the second largest contributor
to the Prop 54 campaign) in the run-up to the vote for Prop 209,
where Connerly was able to secure a $1 million contribution to
back the campaign. Rhodes is president of National Review
and co-chairman of the Club for Growth, whose recently departed
president Stephen Moore set up a nonprofit organization, the Free
Enterprise Fund, to lead the political battle to privatize social
security. “There are a lot of donors who don’t want their names
in the newspapers,” Moore told the Washington Post.
Paul
Singer, a New York businessman, contributed $20,000 to Connerly’s
Prop 54 campaign and according to the Wall Street Journal has
also donated $500,000 to Progress for America, which has played
a major part in the battle for social security privatization.
Rhodes
was a board member of the Heritage Foundation, one of the premier
think tanks of the far right, from 1993-1999. Heritage, which
was co-founded by Richard Mellon Scaife, Paul Weyrich and Joseph
Coors, hired former Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese, one of
the “four horsemen” now overseeing the judicial nominations wars
for Karl Rove (the other three are C. Boyden Gray of the Committee
for Justice, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and Jay Sekulow
of Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice).
William
J. “Jerry” Hume, another of the major contributors to Connerly’s
Prop 54 campaign, serves on the board of trustees of the Jaqueline
Hume Foundation. Hume’s mother Jaquelin, who died in 1991, was
one of the early major financial backers of the extensive infrastructure
of right wing think tanks and organizations now attempting to
drive the country to the far right. Her Jaqueline Hume Foundation,
of which Jerry is treasurer, has pumped over $20 million into
this infrastructure in just five years according to mediatransparency.org.
The Humes were major funders of California’s defeated Prop 226,
a major 1998 initiative to force unions to get
permission from each member before contributing their dues to
political campaigns. Jerry Hume has been on the board of trustees
of the Heritage Foundation since 1993.
John
Uhlmann, whose name also appears on the documents disgorged by
Connerly, gave $100,000 to support Prop 209, and $190,000 to support
Prop 54. Uhlmann created the Access Communications Group of Kansas
City along with Richard Nadler, who claims to have placed more
than 11,000 pro-Republican issue ads on Black radio and BET-TV
in 8 states. He was also a significant contributor to David Horowitz’
now-defunct politicalwar.com, as was Harlan Crow, another major
Prop 54 financial supporter. Susan Arcenaux, a staff member of
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, was the custodian of records for
politicalwar.com. Horowitz, who now runs the Scaife-funded Center
for the Study of Popular Culture, has regularly published articles
by James Lubinskas, a contributor of racially inflammatory articles
to far right publications such as Chronicles, The AIM
Report, American Renaissance, The Social Contract,
VDARE, The Nationalist Times, and American Patrol.
Horowitz was also listed as a sponsor of the early fundraiser
for Prop 54 at the Moores estate.
With
friends like these, Connerly’s next moves bear watching. Hopefully
the disclosure of his financial backers will give voters pause
before supporting other well-heeled efforts to turn back the clock
on racial and gender justice. As the late Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis, whose life’s work is now in the crosshairs of
the right wing, once said, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
--Lee
Cokorinos
Lee
Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing movements
and organizations. He is the author of The Assault on Diversity:
An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman &
Littlefield), and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.
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