George Soros and Charles Koch collaborated on a U.S.-bashing think tank?
George Soros is rightly regarded as one of the most consequential advocates of freedom in Central and Eastern Europe. Years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Hungarian-born financier began investing his fortune in democratic dissidents. Once the Berlin Wall fell, his Open Society Foundations rapidly opened offices across the region, providing crucial support to independent journalists, civil-society activists and liberal-minded politicians.
It is this steadfast support for democracy that makesSoros’s latest gambit so confusing. The liberal philanthropist has joined forces with fellow billionaire Charles Koch in founding a foreign policy think tank, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.Disparaging “the foreign policy community in Washington” for having "succumbed to intellectual lethargy and dysfunction,” the institute will advocate “a new foreign policy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint.” On most issues, the liberal Soros and the libertarianKoch exist on opposite ends of the political spectrum.??== That they are collaborating on foreign policy may be a harbinger of a new left-right consensus favoring isolationism.
News of the institute’s creation was broken by Boston Globe columnist Stephen Kinzer, a former New York Times reporter who has become a radical left-wing critic of U.S. foreign policy, publishing highly tendentious books on the 1953 coup in Iran as well as one calling upon the United States to abandon its traditional allies in the Middle East and cozy up to the Khomeinist regime. Lately, Kinzer has been parroting Assadist propaganda on the Syrian White Helmets, a group of courageous relief workers, whom he labels “an arm of the terror movement” and slanders as “heroes to #ISIS but not to any humanitarian.” Kinzer touted theKoch-Soros collaboration as “one of the most remarkable partnerships in modern American political history.”
How the Koch brothers built the most powerful rightwing group you've never heard of
Americans for Prosperity is a little-known, billionaire-funded organization that has pushed US politics to the right. How did it happen?
Where did Walker’s ultra-conservative labor agenda come from? As a candidate, Walker barely mentioned collective bargaining or union busting. And we know this plan did not come from voters. Before the legislation popped up on the agenda, Wisconsinites generally supported collective bargaining. Nationally, only about 40% of American adults favor curbs to public sector bargaining rights, and in Wisconsin, this minority level of support was about the same.
Instead, to understand what happened in Wisconsin – and what is happening in states across the country – we need to look to the underappreciated organization that is at the center of the political network created and directed by the billionaire conservative industrialists, Charles and David Koch.
We are a group of Columbia and Harvard-based researchers who for the past five years have been investigating precisely how theKoch brothers work to influence US politics and the role played by AFP.In recent years, AFP has quietly pushed behind the scenes for many of the most important conservative victories across the nation, including the anti-union bills that passed in former union strongholds such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/27/why-are-george-soros-charles-koch-collaborating-us-bashing-think-tank/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/26/koch-brothers-americans-for-prosperity-rightwing-political-group
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd6c6CsW4-k&feature=youtu.be
When the peace wants war, who benefits?