REPLY: Didn't I.F. Stone and Lyle Stuart and George Seldes put out muckraking publications without relying on foundation subsidies? In recent years, I think 1/3 of Dollars & Sense magazine's operating funds have generally come from subscribers, 1/3 from its sale of textbook sales based on anthologizing the magazine articles and 1/3 from individual "major donors". Has the Left Business Observer recently tried exchanging subscription lists with Dollars & Sense? Perhaps some of the 6,000 Dollars & Sense subscribers who don't yet subscribe to Left Business Observer would be interested in your magazine?
Speaking of Ford Foundation-subsidized alternative journalism, did you notice the 2003 grants that the Funding Exchange has started to get from the Ford Foundation? Three grants, totaling $1.45 million,were given to the Funding Exchange in 2003. One of the $500,000 grants to the Funding Exchange from the Ford Foundation is for the Funding Exchange's "Media Justice Fund." Has any of this "media justice fund" money yet been redistributed to alternative publications like Left Business Observer that have been willing to critically scrutinize foundations in the past?
The Independent Press Association-NY Director who, ironically, used to be one of the editors at Dollars & Sense, also was recently given an individual "Leadership for a Changing World" grant of $100,000 by the Ford Foundation. A co-chair of the Leadership for a Changing World Selection Committee is a former Democratic Clinton Administration official.
Anti-corporate/anti-war activists who don't think that a political strategy of "recycled Browderism" would make any sense in 2004, might be interested in the following recycled quote from the platform of an anti-corporate party in 1952:
"The two-party system is the prison in which the political hopes of the American people have been traditionally confined. Today, both parties are committed to the bipartisan war program. Both support the war in Korea, the North Atlantic Pact, the huge arms budgets--the program of fattening the billionaires and of starving the people.
"The Republican Party carries out its support of the war program under the flag of `liberation.' The Democratic Party disguises its support of the war program under the banner of `peace through strength.' The end result of the programs of both parties would be world atomic holocaust...
"The Republican Party is the most open champion of the interests of the big trusts...
"The Democratic Party, disguising its big business war program with liberal trappings and demagogy, makes a special bid for the votes of labor and the Negro people. Its supporters include millions of working people, who are confused by its pretensions of liberalism and still view it as Roosevelt's party.
"Many workers, while skeptical of the Truman policies and mess of corruption, fear a Republican victory, and thus accept the Stevenson-Sparkman candidacy as the so-called `lesser evil.' This mood is actively stimulated by the surrender policies of the top officers of the AFL and CIO, by the leaders of the ADA and the leaders of the Liberal Party in New York. They are die-hard opponents of genuine independent political action by the American working people.
"The movement towards independent political action requires a determined fight against the two-party system and against the `lesser evil' alibi which keeps the workers tied to the parties of Wall Street."
bob