Special to WorldTribune.com, May 5, 2022
Corporate WATCH
Commentary by Joe SchaefferNow that the entirety of the American Left is frothing at the mouth over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade, perhaps this would be a good time to re-emphasize that when we use the term Big Abortion, we are not only talking about Planned Parenthood and assorted feminist radicals.
In actuality, there is a large, elaborate and frighteningly powerful and connected network that involves dominant media outlets, multinational finance, George Soros and more.
Big Abortion is always heavily funded by "philanthropic" foundation money.
An example is to be found at an organization called the Center for Reproductive Rights.
A look at its Board of Directors and top leadership tells all:
Board Chair:
Joseph A. Stern is a Managing Director in the Legal Department at Goldman Sachs and is the general counsel for the firm’s mergers and acquisition advisory practice. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Mr. Stern was general counsel, executive vice president and a member of the Board of Directors of Dow Jones & Company until News Corporation’s acquisition of Dow Jones in 2008. Previously, he was a corporate partner at the law firm of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson and a member of that firm’s governance committee. Mr. Stern previously served as a member of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund....
Vice Chair:Karla L. Martin is a Bay Area-based seasoned executive strategist and business advisor with a successful track record of helping CEOs on their most significant strategic and operating decisions. Currently, Ms. Martin is a Managing Director at Deloitte Consulting. She was previously the Director of Global Business Strategy at Google and prior to that, had a 17-year career at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she was a Vice President and led the North America Retail and Luxury practice and co-founded the Booz Allen Tech Incubator... Ms. Martin is a graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School.
President and CEO:Nancy Northup is President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global human rights organization whose game changing litigation and advocacy work have transformed how reproductive rights are understood by courts, governments, and human rights bodies....
Nancy was previously the founding director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where she litigated voting rights, campaign finance reform, and ballot access cases. From 1989 to 1996, she served as a prosecutor and Deputy Chief of Appeals in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Prior to that she was a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
She has held adjunct appointments at NYU Law School and Columbia Law School, and taught courses in constitutional and human rights law. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Nancy graduated magna cum laude from Brown University and received her J.D. from Columbia Law School. She is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Brown University recognizing her achievements as an attorney and global reproductive rights leader.
Board Member:Jamia Wilson is a feminist activist, writer, and speaker. She joined Random House as vice president and executive editor in 2021. As the former director of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York and the former VP of programs at the Women’s Media Center, Jamia has been a leading voice on women’s rights issues for over a decade.
Wilson, the executive editor of the largest publishing company in the world, has been sharing progressive rage tweets on her Twitter account over the Supreme Court leak of a draft document overturning Roe v. Wade ever since the story broke May 2.The Center's 2021 Annual Report reveals the extent of its foundation sugar daddy funding. The notorious Ford Foundation and the JPB Foundation are each listed under the $1,000,000+ category. A 2019 Inside Philanthropy article shows just how dirty Big Abortion money can be:
The JPB Foundation is a fascinating study in philanthropic contradictions. With nearly $4.4 billion in assets, it is among the 25 largest foundations in the nation, and yet it is largely unknown in nonprofit circles. The foundation’s vast wealth derives from a fortune associated with the Bernie Madoff scandal, which exemplified all the worst elements of capitalist greed, but JPB’s focus is on long-term, systemic approaches to economic and environmental justice that are rooted in the priorities of community leaders closest to the issues.
Yes, money derived from a man who profited enormously from an infamous swindle is being used to help murder babies worldwide:The JPB Foundation was established in 2011, after [Barbara] Picower and the estate of her late husband, Jeffry Picower, reached a settlement with the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan to benefit the victims of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme by returning $7.2 billion he earned through investments with Madoff. In a New York Times article detailing the settlement, the largest single forfeiture in U.S. judicial history, Barbara Picower said, “I am absolutely confident that my husband, Jeffry, was in no way complicit in Madoff’s fraud,” saying that she intended to use the bulk of her remaining inheritance from him to continue the couple’s philanthropic work. Since then, Picower — who is in her 70s — has attended to every last detail of building a major foundation.
The New York Times article on Jeffry Picower makes for a fascinating read. We'll only add this brief excerpt:“It was amazing,” said a former Goldman executive. “The guy was worth $10 billion, just at Goldman, and that alone would have made him one of the richest men in the country, yet he wasn’t in the Forbes 400,” the magazine’s annual roster of the rich and super-rich, until after the Madoff scandal.
An aggressive investor with an appetite for risk, Mr. Picower also borrowed heavily at Goldman to trade stocks, amplifying his profits. At one point, his Goldman accounts had more than $5 billion in margin loans against them, according to the people familiar with his account history.
Despite the moral stain on its greenbacks, the foundation has plenty of friends to work with, IP writes:One of the newest and most high-profile collaborations for JPB is a massive $250 million fund broadly seeking to mobilize women on the issues central to their daily concerns. The fund is housed at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and has commitments from JPB, Ford, Packard, Schusterman and an anonymous donor, each giving $10 million a year over five years. One of the earliest and largest beneficiaries of that fund is SuperMajority, led by Cecile Richards, Ai-Jen Poo of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), and Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matter and Black Futures Lab.
Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood, is listed as a board member at the JPB Foundation. Alongside her on the JPB Advisory Committee is Cecilia Munoz, a former top White House staffer to Barack Obama and ex-Advisory Board Chair for progressive globalist billionaire George Soros's Open Society Foundations. Abortion is a cause very close to Soros's heart.The Media Research Center noted May 3 that Soros "and his groups gave at least $25,274,455 collectively to 11 radical abortion groups like Planned Parenthood Action Fund and its affiliates between 2016 and 2020."
CBS News "reporter" Kate Smith made news of her own in April when she quit her allegedly unbiased journalism job to become "Senior Director of News Content" at Planned Parenthood.
In her ludicrously slanted reports for CBS, Smith continually leaned on the Center for Reproductive Rights as a source. April 2020 article on an America without Roe v. Wade:
Without Roe, states would be able to decide for themselves whether to legalize abortion. Abortion-rights group warn the effect would be a patchwork of access and service availability determined by a patient's zip code.
"This is exactly what you would see in a post-Roe world," said Nancy Northup, the chief executive officer of the Center for Reproductive Rights, one of the country's biggest law firms defending abortion access. "You'd see these very same states shut off access. It's terrifying."
In the piece, Smith puts the term pro-life in scare quotes and refers to pro-lifers as "anti-abortion rights activists." June 2020 article on abortion in El Salvador:There are no exceptions to El Salvador's strict abortion laws, which were adopted with the backing of the country's powerful Roman Catholic Church and declare that "life begins at conception."
[...]
The Center for Reproductive Rights estimates about 5,000 abortion procedures are performed every year on El Salvador's black market.
October 2019 feature Q&A article on abortion in Louisiana:For the first installment of "Abortion in America: Louisiana," CBS News reporter Kate Smith spoke to T.J. Tu, senior counsel for litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights and the lead counsel for June Medical Services v. Gee. Tu told CBS News the Louisiana law at the center of the Supreme Court case – the "Unsafe Abortion Protection Act" – isn't about safety, but rather is a way for the state to eliminate abortion access without having to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
A woman posing as a neutral reporter who now works for Planned Parenthood's media wing questioning a pro-abortion organization's senior lawyer. Shouldn't be any professional problems there. A couple of the hard-hitting questions posed by Smith:Smith: What you're describing doesn't seem to have anything to do with safety.
Smith: There has to be another side to this, there has to be a reason why someone in a state house would believe that admitting privileges would help someone seeking an abortion.
This is how networked power backed by lucrative money streams provided by the forces of concentrated wealth works. As Roe hangs in the balance, Big Abortion is very much ready for the battles to come.About . . . . Intelligence . . . . Membership
