Using Race to Divide the Progressive Movement
When Bundy left government to run the Ford Foundation, he openly expressed concern about efforts by Martin Luther King and the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee to merge the struggle of the black community with the labor and antiwar movement. His response was to have the Ford Foundation use its grant making power to create factional divisions in an increasingly broad-based movement that was demanding an end to the Vietnam War. The result was a massive shift in the Foundation's grant making agenda. Over the next four years, it moved away from funding broad economic needs -- such as housing, education, mass transit and health care -- to focus on black and Latino organizations that specifically targeted blue collar racism as the cause of minority disadvantage. According to Heather MacDonald, education resources particularly were re-allocated to race-based organizations, whose share of grant funding went from 2.5% in 1966 to 40% in 1970. MacDonald and Salandria also describe some of the militant black and Latino organizations these grants went to and how they were used to launch divisive race-baiting campaigns against working class whites.
Another of Bundy's strategic moves was to break up the traditional black-Jewish progressive coalition in New York City. He did so by funding minority community coalitions to churn out rabidly anti-Semitic propaganda directed at leftist Jewish teachers and administrators, many of whom had radical New Deal backgrounds. The demand posed by these community groups (backed by $1.4 million from the Ford Foundation) for the right to arbitrary fire teachers was a blatant violation of their union contract and an important precipitant of the disastrous 1968 teachers' strike.
Richard Nixon: the Father of Affirmative Action
In 1968, Bundy, Richard Nixon and his secretary of labor George Schultz collaborated in pushing affirmative active and quota legislation (Martin Luther King had opposed affirmative action and quotas, due to their inherent divisiveness). In meetings with Republican Congressional leaders, Nixon acknowledged that his primary agenda in sponsoring mandatory hiring quotas was to "split the Democratic Constituency and drive a wedge between civil rights groups and organized labor." (Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era, New York: Oxford, 1990).
I find this extremely ironic. Exactly as Bundy, Nixon and Schultz predicted, these policies have created an enormous white blue collar backlash, which the Republicans have used very successfully to capture working class votes. Yet many progressives still mistakenly believe that affirmative action originated with the civil rights movement.
Infiltrating the Single Payer Movement
My own knowledge of left gatekeepers stems from fourteen years as a single payer activist (1988-2002) in Washington State. Our local single payer movement was launched by a group of doctors belonging to Physicians for a National Health Program. Our goal was to reduce health care costs and cover the uninsured by following the example of all other industrialized countries, by lobbying the government to create a Canadian style government-funded "single payer" health program to cover all Americans. Our group seemed to make the most progress in the first five years, when we were a primarily doctor-run organization focused on educating other doctors, lawmakers and community groups about the mechanics of a single payer health care system. In fact we were an important partner in a broader coalition that included the Washington State Medical Association and the Washington State Hospital Association and that pressured the government to appoint a blue ribbon commission to develop a proposal for a state based, publicly financed health care system.
In 1993, when we joined with Seattle Gray Panthers to form a broad based citizen's coalition, we began to have the same difficulties many of experienced in the antiwar and Central American solidarity movement, and which one African American member experienced as a Black Panther in Los Angeles. It started with the appearance, out of nowhere, of quirky strangers who disrupted and sabotaged our meetings, tampered with our database and seized control of our contact list to launch rumor and character assassination campaigns. In 1994 one of these "outsiders" managed to take control of the leadership and totally shut down the single payer for six months. After we learned he had done the same, seizing control of the database and the leadership and committee structure of two other groups -- the Anti-Gulf War Coalition and the Seattle chapter of Democratic Socialists of American, we logically assumed he was a Cointelpro agent and worked for the FBI.
Who Infiltrated Washington's Single Payer Movement?
In retrospect, some aspects of this "infiltration" of the single payer movement that strike me as distinctly different from classic the Cointelpro methodology. The first was a heavy reliance on the formation of "parallel" health care reform organizations, both to compete with us for new members and to discredit us. The second was a much higher level of sophistication and national coordination than is normally associated with the FBI operation. The FBI memos American Indian Movement activist Ward Churchill reproduces in the Cointelpro Papers suggest that J. Edgar Hoover's Cointelpro operation was quite decentralized -- that for the most part, he left it to field agents to devise their own strategies for infiltrating and sabotaging local Black Panther chapters.
In contrast, single payer activists in Washington State quickly discovered that single payer activists in Ohio, Oregon and California were experiencing the exact same problems that we were. As in our own state, short-lived "parallel" single payer organizations were being created by brand new left think tanks or left leaning foundations that claimed to support single payer health care -- but disagreed with grassroots organizing to mobilize public support for it. Despite their nominal support for nationalizing health care, their newsletters, brochures and publicly forums almost exclusively focused on arguments against lobbying for single payer health care. What was even more uncanny was the virtually identical rhetoric employed in state after state. All the arguments boiled down to "political climate" and "politically timing" being wrong for single payer and accusations about grassroots single payer activists being "inexperienced," "reckless," and "wrong-headed" to aggressively push for it. In some cases, these parallel organizations also launched competing proposals based on the private health insurance model.
Co-opting and Forming Parallel Organizations
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