Uncle Tom Ward Connerly’s Payback
Ward Connerly has tried to end affirmative action programs in California. His Proposition 209 was passed by voters in 1996. Prop. 209 ended state government preferences based on race and gender. On February 16, Connerly received a payback for that and his more recent work: $250,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. An African American, Connerly is a Sacramento businessman and University of California Regent who founded the American Civil Rights Institute. His second state ballot measure was called the Racial Privacy Initiative, or Proposition 54. It would have banned many California agencies from gathering ethnic and racial data. Connerly’s message to voters this time? The best way to achieve racial justice is to end government documentation of racism. Voters defeated Prop. 54 in October 2003, when they also elected Arnold Schwarzenegger over incumbent Gray Davis in a gubernatorial recall vote. The Bradley Foundation, a $680 million philanthropy based in Milwaukee, also funds the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). A non-profit educational organization, the PNAC has been shaped by neo-conservatives. Two of these neo-cons are in the Bush administration: Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They are co-founders of the PNAC. Neo-cons paved the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Editor of the Weekly Standard, PNAC Chairman William Kristol began clucking for a U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1997. As the U.S.-led war on terror continues in Afghanistan and Iraq, the racial class conflict surges at home. Consider this. Sour job opportunities for blacks and Latinos connect with the poverty draft of the U.S. military. Wherever America’s armed forces are present, blacks and Latinos are over-represented. They are also the last hired and the first fired in the labor market. Jobless rates for blacks are twice that of whites. Latino unemployment is nearly double the white jobless rate. Abroad, blacks and Latinos, with working-class whites, are the foot soldiers of U.S. imperialism. Connerly’s lust for racial injustice feeds the empire. [
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