RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
July 9 to July 15 Featured Investigation American colleges and universities are extremely broad-minded when it comes to taking money. The communist Chinese government, for example, supports more than 100 Confucius Institutes on U.S. campuses. Kuwait and Qatar, which have been accused of supporting terror groups, endow chairs in Middle Eastern studies. But there is one benefactor that gives our thought leaders pause - often just before they cash the check: Charles and David Koch. As Richard Bernstein reports for RealClearInvestigations, donations from the conservative billionaires have inspired their own form of resistance: UnKoch My Campus uses funds from other liberal organizations to convince schools to reject their money. Not surprisingly, its members and sympathetic faculty members deny any attempt to limit the diversity of ideas. The problem is not the Koch's "conservative libertarian ideology," Jay Ford, a professor in the Wake Forest Department of Religions, wrote to a campus newspaper, defending [an] anti-Koch faculty petition. It's the Koch practice of "co-opting education for their own political and commercial purposes," he asserted. Bernstein examines the Kochs' grants to higher education in the wider context of such philanthropy. He writes: The Charles Koch Foundation's most recent annual report shows a total of $44 million in grants to more than 300 schools in 2016, a small fraction of the $41 billion in charitable donations that pour into American universities each year. Far bigger grant giving institutions, like the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, donate greater sums, and mostly to mainstream liberal projects. "The Koch Foundations are doing what foundations have always done," said Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor of public policy and philanthropy at Indiana University. "If they want X and if a place is doing X, they will give their money to that place." For years, Ford and MacArthur have given millions to advance diversity -- black studies, women's studies, gay studies -- yet there's no UnFord or UnMacArthur My Campus movements. Read Full Article
Other Noteworthy Articles A First-Class Retirement Funded by You, but Not for You
RealClearInvestigations
Modern ex-presidents get gilded nest eggs by piling up post-White House earnings from the speaking circuit, publishers and the like. And from one other noteworthy revenue source: taxpayers. But do former leaders of the free world really need their big government pensions? Many think not, although somehow reform hasn't happened. Russian Dirt on Clinton? ‘I Love It,' Trump Jr. Said
New York Times
It's hard to keep up with the coverage that flowed this past week from this New York Times chronicle of how a June 2016 meeting of Donald Trump Jr. , a Kremlin-connected lawyer and others came about. Emails beforehand suggest Trump was eager to accept what he was told was Russian government help. Trump says the meeting led to nothing, and nothing has emerged to gainsay him. Yet the story took a turn when it emerged that the Obama Justice Department allowed the Russian lawyer into the U.S. without a visa. Many were scandalized, if not all for the same reason, even as many others wondered anew what exactly the scandal was, and who was the villain. Probe Afoot Into Russian Funding of Green Front Groups
Wall Street Journal
Republican lawmakers see mounting evidence that Russia has waged a long-term campaign to disrupt the energy agenda now promoted by Donald Trump. They are asking Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to investigate whether Russia engaged with green groups opposing shale gas to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas. This blog post suggests light could be shed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and John Podesta, who served on the board of a solar energy startup in which Russia invested. Kaspersky Tied to Russian Intelligence
Bloomberg
Kaspersky Lab has 400 million users worldwide, and that global reach is starting to worry U.S. national security officials. Its boisterous boss, Eugene Kaspersky, insists that claims of ties to the Kremlin are "total BS." But now internal company emails show that the company has maintained a much closer working relationship with Russia's main intelligence agency, the FSB, than it has publicly admitted. Indiana Senator, Outsourcing Critic, Profits From Mexican Labor
Associated Press
Joe Donnelly, one of the most vulnerable Democratic senators up for re-election next year, has long blasted free-trade policies for killing American jobs. But he has profited from his family's arts and crafts company, which ships material to Mexico for cheap production. After the AP disclosed this, he said he was divesting. Fed Arts Funding Subsidizes Rich Nonprofits
OpenTheBooks
The National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities gave $20.5 million to nonprofits with assets of $1 billion or more in 2016 alone, a government transparency group reports. Grant money went to support the flush Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, whose annual celebrity gala is dubbed an "ATM for the Met." Also funded were a play about going back in time to kill Christopher Columbus, and the publisher of "The Feminist Porn Book." OpenTheBooks asks: "Do charities have a right to public funding no matter how strong their balance sheet?" Hollywood, Where Rape Choreographers Are Necessary
L.A. Weekly
That's not a game of Twister — it's a choreographed rape. From "Game of Thrones" to "The Handmaid's Tale," narratives of sexual assault have become particularly common in film and TV lately. How do filmmakers, actors and crew feel about staging rape scenes? Are they tired of them? Can the societal risks of such portrayals be justified? Those involved profess to be conflicted as they go about performing the foul deed for millions. | 
