Conservative think tanks are the answer to liberal academia. Myth or Truth ?

Be sure to read the whole link (anything blue) if you want to know the truth of how BM (Big Money) is used to influence us all ...

The rapid rise of far-right think tanks has been financed by wealthy conservative businessmen. Five donors especially stand out: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations and the Adolph Coors Foundation. (William Coors, you may recall, reportedly told a 1984 meeting of African-American businessmen that "one of the best things they [slave traders] did for you is to drag your ancestors over here in chains.") The amount of money they give to funding and promoting think tanks and other conservative academic endeavors is nothing short of astounding. In 1988, the Olin Foundation alone distributed $55 million in grants. The Scaife family has donated more than $200 million over the years. Million dollar annual grants to individual think tanks are routine. (8)

These Foundations have also been instrumental in creating the most famous think tanks. The Heritage Foundation, considered the leading think tank in America, was created in 1973 with $250,000 in seed money from brewery mogul Joseph Coors. The Cato Institute, the nation's leading libertarian think tank, was founded in 1977 by the Koch family foundations.

from the linked article ... note some of the "names" of the donors ... Koch family has bankrolled the Tea Party movement.

Great info. Jerry! Now, as I said years ago, Liberals need to start funding their own Univercities, schools, and think tanks. And PRONTO!

Thanks for reading Dorothy, the Liberals have few also, but their aims are far different than the Conservative ones, and the funding of the Liberal one's is nowhere close to that of the BM Right.

I think you can consider most universities as liberal think tanks. As the years have gone by the youth of america has become more liberal. Thats why you see the spread, slow as it is, of social justice. The right has always had, and will always have, their conservative groups and think tanks, but in the end, the country will continue its slow move to the left.

The linked article does make that distinction between the Liberal and the Conservative institutions/foundations. Many of us can only hope that the nation and the world works it's way towards a more peaceful nature as the world hopefully matures.

It is a myth that colleges and universities are "liberal". When the facts don't line up with conservative (a misnomer in itself, since so-called "conservatives" apparently don't believe in conserving anything) ideology, they claim the facts are "liberal". Case in point: climate change. The right-wing insists that climate change is a liberal conspiracy to establish one world government. BS! There's nothing left or right about every major scientific organization on the planet.

I agree that Conservatives tend to call anyone not like them, meaning all to their Left, Liberals ... and blame them for all of their imagined problems.

But there definitely are Think Tanks that have "Conservative " agendas ... and very scientific ones also ... the actual "working scientists" as individuals may well not be ideological oriented, but the money that funds them and determines the direction of the research and the use of the findings sure can be, and usually are, ideological.

PS ... Think tanks represent a variety of ideological perspectives. Some think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, are clearly aligned with conservative causes. Others, especially those focused on social and environmental reforms, such as the Tellus Institute, are viewed as clearly liberal. Still others, such as the Cato Institute, promote libertarian social and economic reforms.

A new trend, resulting from globalization, is collaboration between think tanks across continents.

Not tomention those such as The Rand Corporation* ... military weapons systems is more related to the Conservative Military Industrial than are Liberal TKs...

* The term think tank itself, however, was originally used in reference to organizations that offered military advice, most notably the RAND Corporation, founded originally in 1946 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_tank

CONSERVATIVE THINK TANKS ARE SECRET MANIPULATORS USED TO CONSPIRE AGAINST THE NAIVE TO CONTROL OVER AND PROFIT FROM, THEM ... (:-)) OR (:-() DEPENDING UPON ONE'S VIEWPOINT ... (this is a "test" comment to see if I can generate some interest in this subject)

No one interested ...

More in depth confirmation to this story ... what the right-wing avoids reading about:

Tea Party Inc.: The Big Money and Powerful Elites Behind the Right-Wing's Latest Uprising
The Tea Parties are billed as a people's movement. But they wouldn't exist without the help of deep-pocketed billionaires.

And the latest on this subject: What we do know for sure is that the far right has assembled a $6 billion interlinked machine of think-tanks, lobbyists, PACs, astroturf front groups, media sycophants, endowed professorships, state-based political fronts and now even their own centralized headhunter; all to throw us off the scent that the real threat to the poor and middle class in America is corporate domination. <<

Also, : In recent days, the media has turned its attention to Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas -- not for her troubling ties to right-wing extremist groups, but for her bizarre demand for an apology from the woman who accused her husband of sexual harassment more than a decade ago. Yet Mrs. Thomas' Tea Party think tank, Liberty Central, promotes the causes of groups that take pride in intolerance, including one right-wing Catholic group, Tradition, Family and Property, whose founder declared the Spanish Inquisition "the most beautiful page in the history of the Church."

Wealth Defense Industry: The Real Reason America's Oligarchs Can Squeeze the Rest of Us
How the richest of the rich stay on top.

"When you go to think tanks you say you'd like to do a study about poverty, they say, 'That's fine. That's great. We're happy to fund it,' because writing about poverty makes everybody feel good and feel that they're being charitable and beneficent. But if you say, 'Actually, I want to study income inequality,' and even most dangerously, 'I want to study what's happening at the very top of the distribution," what Branko Milanovi? said to me is the think tanks immediately pull away because they say, "Our donors won't like it."