[lbo-talk] Schumann Prez Moyers & The Nation

Bob Feldman bob_jan at xensei.com
Wed Nov 26 07:11:36 PST 2003


Schumann Foundation/Schumann Center for Media & Democracy President Bill Moyers has given a number of grants to The Nation Institute in recent years. Moyers also is a board member of George Soros's Open Society Institute which, in 1999, gave a $50,000 grant to the Nation Institute "to support project to improve performance and reach of Radio Nation, weekly public radio news and commentary program." (A top executive at The Nation Institute, Hamilton Fish III, has also been George Soros' personal advisor for politics in recent years).

Schumann Foundation President Moyers was one of the Johnson White House officials responsible for the decision to send 23,000 U.S. troops to Dominican Republic in 1965 to crush a popular revolt and establish a regime more subservient to the Johnson White House. Following the Johnson Administration's 1965 invasion, "between...1966 and the end of 1971 over 1,000 political assassinations took place in the Dominican Republic," although "little of this was reported in the U.S. media," according to The Dominican Republic: Behind The Lighthouse by James Ferguson. By 1990 U.S. corporate investment in the Dominican Republic exceeded $650 million. Among the U.S. companies investing in the Dominican Republic in 1990 was IBM--the company from which the Schumann family obtained most of the grant money which Bill Moyers and his foundation's board has used to subsidize their stable of alternative media groups (which includes FAIR, Columbia Journalism Review, American Prospect, Mother Jones and former Schumann Foundation executive John Moyers' TomPaine web site, as well as The Nation magazine). In addition, Bill Moyers has been receiving a $200,000/year salary from the Schumann Foundation in recent years.

In the Dominican Republic, meanwhile, on November 11, 2003 ten people were killed, at least 60 wounded and more than a thousand detained during a 24-hour general strike against the neoliberal economic policies of Dominican President Hipolito Mejia, a social democrat. Unemployment is officially at 27-30 percent, poverty is around 70 percent and the value of the Dominican peso has shrunk from 17 to a dollar to 40 pesos to a dollar in the last two years.

But don't expect The Nation magazine's economics reporter to fully disclose the precise role that former Johnson White House official and Schumann Foundation Funder Bill Moyers played in promoting the 1965 U.S. military invasion of the Dominican Republic in articles that The Nation may decide to publish about the Dominican Republic's historical and current economic crisis.

bob



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