The New Jim Crow – At Least It Wasn’t Coors…

At the White House Beer/Love Fest last night –

Gates was the only one who drank a fully American beer, opting for a Sam Adams light. Obama drank Bud Lite, made by a Belgian company(Anheuser-Busch InBev), Biden had nonalcoholic Buckler (made by Heineken), brewed by Dutch Heineken, and Crowley chose Blue Moon, from Canadian Molson.

Well…at least one guy (Gates) was drinking a real American beer.

Expensive... But worth it!

And I gotta believe the guys over at Anheuser-Busch InBev, are licking their chops at this one. Interesting fodder for the Bud-Lite/Miller Lite advertising battle.

Why not Coors?

The Castle Rock Foundation, founded and funded by the Coors brewing empire funds many of the right wing hate organizations (along with the  Richard and Sarah Mellon Scaife’s family foundations, The John M. Olin Foundation, and the Linde and Harry Bradley Foundation.) in this country.

The Castle Rock Foundation (CRF), a major supporter of the Heritage Foundation and other rightist institutions and causes, is an outgrowth of the Adolph Coors Foundation, the philanthropic organization of the Colorado beer magnate family. The Coors Foundation, which largely restricts its funding to Colorado, allocated $36.6 million to establish Castle Rock in 1993…

While the Adolph Coors Foundation funds mainstream and geographically targeted causes, Castle Rock’s charitable giving more closely reflects the conservative ideology of the Coors family, which has been a key funder of the American Right since the early 1970s. Both foundations, however, are strongly under the control of the Coors family, according to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, which reports that the “two foundations have the same executive director and board of trustees.”3 Castle Rock’s politically driven agenda is evident from its charitable giving record. Major grantees have included Heritage and the Free Congress Foundation, both founded by New Right trail blazer Paul Weyrich.4

Adolph Coors Sr. founded the Coors brewing company in 1873. A century later, funds from the Adolph Coors Jr. Trust were used to create the Adolph Coors Foundation as a private family foundation. Family patriarch Joseph Coors backed Paul Weyrich‘s plan to establish a new conservative think tank called the Heritage Foundation in 1973. Later, Joseph Coors, who died in March 2003, also provided Weyrich with the seed money to create the Committee for the Survival of the Free Congress, now known simply as the Free Congress Foundation.5 In the mid-1990s, the Coors family received national scrutiny when an AFL-CIO boycott brought attention to homophobic, racist, and anti-labor practices and statements of the Coors Brewing Company and its owners. To improve its deteriorating public image, the company began to fund minority groups and improve worker conditions. However, the family continued to fund right-wing causes.6 According to researchers Russ Bellant and Chip Berlet, “The pattern of Coors family funding and activism stands in stark contrast to the mainstream image projected by the Coors Brewing Co., whose advertising and funding reach out to African-American, women’s, and gay communities.”7

Other grantees include the American Enterprise Institute,  the Landmark Legal Foundation, and David Horowitz.

Who funds most of the racist right to say what they say (along with the black coonservative Uncle Tom crew)?

The bulk of that comes from the Linde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but the Castle Rock Foundation is a close second, along with Scaife.  Some examples –

Bradley, whose recipients list “reads like a Who’s Who of the U.S. Right,” is a major funding source for the Center for Individual Rights, which brought the Hopwood v. Texas case that ended affirmative action at the University of Texas law school.

This was also the group behind the University of Michigan Affirmative Action Case, and developed the “racist” argument line parroted by Limbaugh and others againt Supreme Court Appointee Sonia Sotomayor. This group also recives heavy support from the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization dedicated in no small part – to the abolition of Civil Rights. Not surpeisingly, the largest funders of the Federalist Society, as well as the CIR are –

John M. Olin Foundation	$3,632,000
Sarah Scaife Foundation	$2,230,000
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation	$2,065,000

The Castle Rock Foundation donated $135,000.

Bradley played a major role in financing Pete Wilson and Ward Connerly’s Prop 209, and, through the Pacific Legal Foundation, Bradley “provided pro bono representation to Wilson in his challenge to five state statutes dealing with affirmative action …” Clint Bolick, vice president of the Institute for Justice, another recipient of Bradley money, “played a pivotal role in attacks on Lani Guinier, President Clinton’s nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Bolick’s Wall Street Journal opinion piece headlined ‘Clinton’s Quota Queen’ dredged up the worst racist and sexist stereotypes and helped throw the Guinier nomination on the defensive.”

Even more striking is that Bradley grants supported Charles Murray and the late Harvard psychologist Richard Hernstein while they wrote The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. According to PFAW, “the book was widely seen as a piece of profoundly racist and classist pseudo-science, and was denounced by the American Psychological Association. It had relied heavily on studies financed by the Pioneer Fund, a neo-Nazi organization that promoted eugenicist research. Immediately after its publication, Bradley raised Murray’s annual grant to $163,000.”

So that’s why BTx3 doesn’t drink Coors.