On the right side is an article written by Berkeley Professor Robert Reich, a op-ed that accuses "big money" buying off nonprofit organizations. That's a good question to ask. But then Reich doesn't talk about big money. Instead he goes on a singular attack against who? The Koch Brothers, of course, supporters of conservative values.
Heard of the Koch name before? Can you guess what political organization brings up the Koch Brother's name ALL THE TIME?
Here's a big hint:
Brave New Films attacks the Koch Brothers, yet we hear nothing about billionaire George Soros. - BraveNewFilms
America is not about the collective. It's about many individual ideas that allow the best ones to come forward and why the country has survived for well over 200 years to become the greatest nation in the world. But when one large progressive organization can use huge donations to control what speech is to be heard while purposely suffocating the speech of others, we all lose a little more freedom to our right to know.
To be a victim of attacks on your beliefs through the availability of huge donations is the antithesis of our founder's intent for individual freedom, (reminding us of the 1930's and the dark worlds of Margaret Sanger and Bernard Shaw), donations Reich might say of today, Move along, nothing to see here.
For instance, it was Reich who helped to push a socialist healthcare system on America, basically saying old people needed to get out of the way in getting healthcare benefits to the young, reminding us of the warning from the movie, Logan's Run. The movie's theme seemed to be a foreign world to its viewers when produced in 1976. But not so much today, forty years later in our new digital world.
The movie is about a 29-year-old future bounty hunter, who lives in a fully digital world going after citizens who have refused to submit to state-mandated euthanasia when they hit the age of 30, has himself now reached his 30th birthday. - Logan's Run
And here is what Reich said in 2007 about the elderly in America:
Robert Reich in 2007 pushed a socialist healthcare system on America saying: What An Honest President Would Say About Health Reform. - YouTube
We see Reich's progressive rantings continue in his 2015 article on the right side where you can read Reich's reference to Koch's donations to New York City's Museum of Natural History, his reporting that environmental groups pushing the socialist global warming debate had demanded that the museum cut all ties with fossil fuel companies and contributors such as "from the Koch brothers."
With Al Gore buying an eight-million dollar home in California next to the Pacific, a body of water he claimed for years to be a rising ocean, the hypocrisy almost laughable if not for the seriousness of progressive trying to control the lives of free people with revised 1930's socialist-run Technocracy.
And then there is this article that appeared in the New York Times on September 2013, written by a global warming progressive and a professor of physics at Berkeley:
"As for the recent plateau, I predicted it, back in 2004. Well, not exactly. In an essay published online then at MIT Technology Review, I worried that the famous “hockey stick” graph plotted by three American climatologists in the late 1990s portrayed the global warming curve with too much certainty and inappropriate simplicity. The graph shows a long, relatively unwavering line of temperatures across the last millennium (the stick), followed by a sharp, upward turn of warming over the last century (the blade). The upward turn implied that greenhouse gases had become so dominant that future temperatures would rise well above their variability and closely track carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. I knew that wasn’t the case." - Richard Muller / NewYorkTimes
So what party gets the most contributions and where does the Koch Brothers sit on that list? See for yourself. (List is from the FEC, February 2015, and provided by OpenSecrets.)
Rank
Organization
Total Contribution
To Dem
To Rep
% Dem
% Rep
Note in the above FEC chart on donations to political parties, the number 1 ranked SEIU donated $220,583,547 million to the Progressive Democrat Party while the Koch Brothers were ranked 50, donating $26, 552,172 million to the Establishment Republican Party.
Mr. Reich had conveniently left out a few other details on the wealthy contributions of big money . . . that is to liberal progressives.
Finally, what about liberal socialist George Soros, an Obama supporter, who is also not mentioned by Professor Reich? You can see that Soro's organization donated $43, 360,590 million to Reich's favorite political party.
So who is George Soros, not mentioned by Reich as part of the "big money?" Here is part of a report from the Web site, Discover The Networks, which is run by David Horowitz. Horowitz would know, a former Communist turned conservative after Marxist thugs murdered his best friend years ago.
Can someone say we know who "Barack Obama" is after reading some of Horowitz's research?
"
In 1993 Soros established the flagship of the Soros foundation network—the New York City-based Open Society Institute (OSI). While OSI's philanthropy extends to a number of nations around the world, it is chiefly devoted to injecting capital into American groups and causes. In his book Open Society:
'Reforming Global Capitalism, Soros explains that the 'open society' which he seeks to advance by means of philanthropy, 'stands for freedom, democracy, rule of law, human rights, social justice, and social responsibility as a universal idea.' But of course, abstract concepts like these, draped in vestments of lofty rhetoric, can mean radically different things to different people.'
Entrusted with the task of defining the foregoing terms for the Open Society Institute, and for articulating the Institute's agendas from the outset, was Aryeh Neier, whom Soros appointed to serve as president not only of OSI, but of the entire Soros Foundation Network.
Thirty-four years earlier, Neier had created the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which became the largest and most important radical group of the 1960s. SDS aspired to overthrow America's democratic institutions, remake its government in a Marxist image, and undermine the nation's war efforts in Vietnam. (A particularly militant faction of SDS would later break away to form the Weather Underground, a notorious domestic terror organization with a Marxist-Leninist agenda.)
Following his stint with SDS, Neier worked fifteen years for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)—including eight years as its national executive director.* After that, he spent twelve years as executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), an organization he founded in 1978." - DiscoverTheNetworks
For biographies on other liberal progressives and in similar detail, visit the Discover The Networks Web site today and select your progressive storyteller of choice.
* Note: Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a former executive of the ACLU, was voted onto the court by John McCain and all but three Establishment Republicans in the Senate in 1993. You can click here to read her bio, early on seeing the separation of organizations such as boy and girl scouts as undesirable.
- Webmaster
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Donations To Cancer Research in America By The Koch Brothers You May Not Know About
- $100 million to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital to help build the David H. Koch Center, a new ambulatory care center, plus $28 million to other research causes
- $20 million to Johns Hopkins University for the David H. Koch Cancer Research Center
- $66.7 million to support cancer research at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City
- $26.5 million to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for the David H. Koch Center for Applied Research of Genitourinary Cancers and other causes
- $26.2 million to The Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City for the 'Building on Success' campaign and other causes
- $10 million to Jaffe Food Allergy Institute at the Mount Sinai Medical Center to create the David H. and Julia Koch Research Program in Food Allergy Therapeutics.
For more details on the Koch Brothers organization from their Web site, click here.
"It’s bad enough big money is buying off politicians. It’s also buying off nonprofits that used to be sources of investigation, information, and social change, from criticizing big money."- Robert Reich
"Not long ago I was asked to speak to a religious congregation about widening inequality. Shortly before I began, the head of the congregation asked that I not advocate raising taxes on the wealthy.
He said he didn’t want to antagonize certain wealthy congregants on whose generosity the congregation depended.
I had a similar exchange last year with the president of a small college who had invited me to give a lecture that his board of trustees would be attending. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t criticize Wall Street,” he said, explaining that several of the trustees were investment bankers.
A Washington think-tank releases a study on inequality that fails to mention the role big corporations and Wall Street have played in weakening the nation’s labor and antitrust laws, presumably because the think tank doesn’t want to antagonize its corporate and Wall Street donors.
A major university shapes research and courses around economic topics of interest to its biggest donors, notably avoiding any mention of the increasing power of large corporations and Wall Street on the economy.
It’s bad enough big money is buying off politicians. It’s also buying off nonprofits that used to be sources of investigation, information, and social change, from criticizing big money.
Other sources of funding are drying up. Research grants are waning. Funds for social services of churches and community groups are growing scarce. Legislatures are cutting back university funding. Appropriations for public television, the arts, museums, and libraries are being slashed.
So what are non-profits to do?
'There’s really no choice,' a university dean told me. 'We’ve got to go where the money is.'
And more than at any time since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, the money is now in the pockets of big corporations and the super wealthy.
So the presidents of universities, congregations, and think tanks, other nonprofits are now kissing wealthy posteriors as never before.
But that money often comes with strings.
When Comcast, for example, finances a nonprofit like the International Center for Law and Economics, the Center supports Comcast’s proposed merger with Time Warner.
When the Charles Koch Foundation pledges $1.5 million to Florida State University’s economics department, it stipulates that a Koch-appointed advisory committee will select professors and undertake annual evaluations.
The Koch brothers now fund 350 programs at over 250 colleges and universities across America. You can bet that funding doesn’t underwrite research on inequality and environmental justice.
David Koch’s $23 million of donations to public television earned him positions on the boards of two prominent public-broadcasting stations. It also guaranteed that a documentary critical of the Kochs didn’t air.
As Ruby Lerner, president and founding director of Creative Capital, a grant making institution for the arts, told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, ''self-censorship' practiced by public television … raises issues about what public television means. They are in the middle of so much funding pressure.'
David Koch has also donated tens of millions of dollars to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and sits on their boards.
A few weeks ago dozens of climate scientists and environmental groups asked that museums of science and natural history “cut all ties” with fossil fuel companies and philanthropists like the Koch brothers.
'When some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions … they undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting scientific knowledge,' their statement said.
Even though gift agreements by universities, museums, and other nonprofits often bar donors from being involved in decisions about what’s investigated or shown, such institutions don’t want to bite hands that feed them.
This isn’t a matter of ideology. Wealthy progressives can exert as much quiet influence over the agendas of nonprofits as wealthy conservatives.
It’s a matter of big money influencing what should and should not be investigated, revealed, and discussed – especially when it comes to the tightening nexus between concentrated wealth and political power, and how that power further enhances great wealth.
Philanthropy is noble. But when it’s mostly in the hands of a few super-rich and giant corporations, and is the only game available, it can easily be abused.
Our democracy is directly threatened when the rich buy off politicians.
But no less dangerous is the quieter and more insidious buy-off of institutions democracy depends on to research, investigate, expose, and mobilize action against what is occurring." - Robert Reich
