David Michael Miller
James Pope is the new board chair of Milwaukee’s Bradley Foundation, and he doesn’t like liberals.
Next to the Koch Brothers, James Arthur Pope is one of the most powerful wealthy conservatives working to transform the country politically. In North Carolina, his home state, he helped fund politicians who succeeded in cutting state university funding by 16 percent while providing supplementary private funding to help support faculty members with the right political views.
Nonprofits controlled by Pope donated more than half a million dollars for free-market-related programs in the economics department at North Carolina State University, Jane Mayer reported for The New Yorker. “A dozen members of the economics faculty have been listed as ‘John Locke Foundation Affiliates,’” meaning they get funding from this Pope-funded foundation.
What makes this of particular interest to Wisconsin is that Pope was elevated in April to board chairman of Milwaukee’s Bradley Foundation, which is the biggest funder of conservative policy making in the nation. It’s quite likely the new chairman will be looking for ways to fund privately funded centers within the UW System, with professors whose views are more palatable to Pope.
Indeed, Pope is described in Mayer’s story as a “my way or the highway” kind of guy who was widely disliked even by Republicans in North Carolina, where he served stints as a legislator and as state budget director. He is likely to be very controlling as board chair and direct supervisor of Bradley executive director Rick Graber, the former Republican state party chairman. Pope can also use his own foundation’s money as leverage to match Bradley grants to the causes he favors.
Unlike past Bradley board chairmen, who were more traditional business people, Pope is a politician first, with rabidly right-wing views, who used his family foundation money to almost single-handedly turn North Carolina into a red state and help bankroll a gerrymandering scheme the U.S. Supreme Court overturned as unconstitutional for targeting and reducing the impact of black voters with “almost surgical precision.”
Pope grew up in a very wealthy family that owned a retail chain now called Variety Wholesalers, whose website says it targets lower-income minority customers. One analysis notes its two criteria for opening a new store: “Minimum 25 percent African American population within five miles; Median household income of $40,000 or less.”
“Many workers at the stores are paid less than a living wage with few benefits and wind up relying on public assistance to support their families,” the group Democracy North Carolina charges. “Rather than creating good jobs, Pope’s business is heavily subsidized by government funds and traps its workers in near-poverty conditions.”
With the profits from these stores, Pope has spent heavily to oppose a higher minimum wage, which would require him to pay his workers more, and on policies to suppress the black vote, oppose affirmative action and slash spending on schools.
Pope was crucial in the 2010 election that placed both houses of North Carolina’s Legislature under GOP majorities for the first time since 1870, Mayer writes: “Of the 22 legislative races targeted by him, his family, and their organizations, the Republicans won 18” and three-quarters of the spending by independent groups in state races came from foundations linked to Pope.
The ads run by these groups were vicious and often deceitful, the story documents. “Pope created a climate of fear,” Chris Kromm, the executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, told Mayer. “He has a whole network that can reward or punish Republicans .... It enforces ideological conformity, and gets people in line.” As a prominent Republican in the state told Mayer, “There weren’t a lot of Republicans willing to cross Art after that.”
Pope also works closely with the Koch brothers, Mayer reports: “Pope has given money to at least 27 groups supported by the Kochs, including organizations opposing environmental regulations, tax increases, unions, and campaign-spending limits.”
“Of the $40 million that his network has spent in the past decade, $35 million has gone to half a dozen ostensibly nonpartisan policy groups, which he has been instrumental in creating and directing,” Mayer writes. Pope has been a leader in blurring the lines “between tax-deductible philanthropy and corporate-funded partisan advocacy,” she notes.
Which makes him the perfect fit for the Bradley Foundation. Internal foundation documents leaked to the press some months ago made clear just how overtly political the charitable entity has become, spending heavily to turn “Democratic-leaning blue states into Republican-leaning red states,” as the liberal Center for Media and Democracy concluded.
After Pope joined the Bradley board, the Milwaukee foundation gave a $1.5 million grant to fund a “Mapping the Left” website the Pope network helped create, “which profiles North Carolina liberals and tries to cast them in a negative light,” CMD reports. Soon we may see the same approach tried in Wisconsin. A new era has begun for the Bradley Foundation, and Pope’s history suggest the most vicious, scorched-earth politics will be promoted and practiced.
Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee.com.
