Kochs Off Campus is hosting a panel discussion, “Dark Money, Charles Koch, and the UA Freedom Center,” Tuesday, April 3, 7pm, in Education Building 211 on the University of Arizona campus. I will be one of the panel members, along with: David Gibbs, Professor of History, Moderator; Samantha Parsons, UnKoch My Campus Grassroots Campaign Strategist; Douglas Weiner, Professor of History; and Jeremy Vetter, Associate Professor of History. The public is invited to attend.
The panel will discuss the history and current status of UA’s Freedom Center as well as the course it created, “Phil 101: Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship,” which is being taught in four local school districts.
Before setting up the panel discussion, Kochs Off Campus invited David Schmidtz, the founding director of the Freedom Center, to participate in a public forum where he and David Gibbs would debate the topic, “Is the Freedom Center an Asset or a Liability for the University of Arizona?” Schmidtz refused the invitation.
On a related topic, Kochs Off Campus submitted a public records request to the University of Arizona in September of last year asking for a number of documents related to the Freedom Center. Six months later, in late March, UA supplied the documents. Most interesting to me is a list of the donors to the Freedom Center and the amount of their donations. The Freedom Center had volunteered the names of two donors before this, though Michael McKenna, who was then the director of the Freedom Center, wrote in a column in the Weekly that “roughly two dozen donors” contributed $16 million. The UA documents list only 14 donors and a total of $8,325,000, meaning its list is incomplete. More on this in a later post.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2018.
In a simple twist of similarity it was made public that the son of Warren Buffet donated one third of a million dollars to Cochise County Sheriff’s Department and now opposes a border wall supported by Trump. Apparently they are growing producing in the Sulfur Springs area.
I would encourage you to bring that to the attention of the audience.
I think James Buffet is referencing a story about a book Howard Buffett has written about the border wall and immigration. I don’t see a reference to money to the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department or to “growing product” in the story. James, maybe you can explain this and give us a source. It’s all news to me. http://tucson.com/news/local/warren-buffet…
Meanwhile, back to my original post. Should be an interesting evening about the Kochs and the Freedom Center Tuesday night.
Freedom to pollute air and water, freedom to create a monopoly, freedom from the responsibility to shed light on political donations, freedom to treat consumers like dirt, freedom to subsidize coal companies with taxpayer dollars if the free market takes them under. Freedom to buy politicians. Freedom to be massive hypocrites.
Don’t forget the most fundamental freedom of all, for the Kochs, anyway: Freedom to be obscenely wealthy Old White Guys ruling the world.
I did find the info from above:
https://www.azpm.org/s/36761-for-sale-in-cochise-county-buffett-family-studyies-farming-near-willcox/
Cochise County: Water experts worry that increased interest in farm and ranch land could stress the aquifers that have supplied the area for decades. They warn that limiting water use may be necessary.
http://www.willcoxrangenews.com/news/article_a378de02-9be2-11e2-9f21-0019bb2963f4.html
Investigating further he found out, Willcox is the place you can both water stress plants and drought stress plants, which is what happens in large parts of the African continent, he said.
When it comes to most African nations they do not have anything similar to the United States, with land-grant colleges and associated agricultural research services, said Buffett. Monday, Buffett attended a groundbreaking ceremony for a new shooting range for the Cochise County Sheriffs Office, which he donated $900,000 for the facility.
The range will be named in honor of the late Sheriff Larry Dever, who proposed the idea to Buffett several years ago.
Wow, what a disgusting, putrid event. Here you have a family, the Kochs, that has created over 100,000 jobs and contributes millions every year to civic causes being pilloried just because they were a dominant force in stopping the U.S. in its slide to North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.
Our universities have degenerated so much in their abilities that now we have over 20% of our students who actually believe that North Korea, with their forced labor camps numbering in the millions, their starvation of children, their prevalence of the most backward of diseases, gut worms being held up as a model system and over a million college graduates buying into it.
Then, we have the Koch family, relentlessly making the simple and effective point that capitalism with its enormous sensing ability through supply and demand in the marketplace can create a society where no one goes to be hungry every night.
We know now that the millions who starved to death in China didn’t even starve because of lack of food. Enough food was available but there was no marketplace mechanism to get it to the places where it was needed most. The bureaucratic state that Marx believed would be so efficient can’t function at a fraction of the efficiency of the free market.
There’s a special place in hell for you David for lining up with the forces of evil.
Yes let’s all sit ina circle and pass the pipe and teach the students that they can all work for the government, because it’s somebody else’s money….the college course is titled “I hate capitalism 101.” Or how to become North Korea by noon on Saturday. Have fun hippies.
John, I usually let your comments fester in their own illogic, but your latest deserves a few responses.
The choice isn’t between Chinese communism and the Koch brothers’ brand of self-serving libertarianism. Well regulated capitalism is also an option.
As for there being “a special place in hell” for me for “lining up with the forces of evil.” I spent my professional career educating and tending to the needs of other people’s children. I never appealed to other people’s racism for personal or political gain. We Jews don’t think about the heaven-and-hell issue much, but if you and I ever have a “Meet your Maker” moment together, I like my chances.
“I never appealed to other people’s racism for personal or political gain. “
David, neither have I. Pointing out that the MAS classes were glorifying Che Guevara and that Guevara had 14,000 Hispanics shot in the back of the head can only be construed as racist if you conflate communism with Hispanic culture.
I don’t and the Hispanics I grew up with didn’t either.
What you do is defend a racist institution every day, every column – the district method of delivering education.
We now know the national numbers to perfection. The top 1% of all districts can’t make it happen for Blacks and Hispanics from poverty.
You can soap suds your way around the data any way you like but that is the blunt truth.
We also know that your favorite project, Tucson Unified, can’t get on a continuous improvement path necessary to rescue the Hispanics it is responsible for. Their only illusion of improvement comes from students leaving them changing the denominator of the excellence fraction. Less than a half percent per year of improvement. Not detectible year to year.