The Kochs vs. Soros: Free markets vs. state coercion

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Palm Springs, California -At the front gates of the Rancho Las Palmas resort, a few hundred liberals rallied Sunday against "corporate greed" and polluters. They chanted for the arrest of billionaires Charles and David Koch, and their ire was also directed at the other free market-oriented businessmen invited here by the Koch brothers to discuss free markets and electoral strategies.

Billionaires poisoning our politics was the central theme of the protests. But nothing is quite as it seems in modern politics: The protest's organizer, the nonprofit Common Cause, is funded by billionaire George Soros.

Common Cause has received $2 million from Soros's Open Society Institute in the past eight years, according to grant data provided by Capital Research Center. Two panelists at Common Cause's rival conference nearby -- President Obama's former green jobs czar, Van Jones, and blogger Lee Fang -- work at the Center for American Progress, which was started and funded by Soros but, as a 501©4 nonprofit "think tank," legally conceals the names of its donors.

In other words, money from billionaire George Soros and anonymous, well-heeled liberals was funding a protest against rich people's influence on politics.

When Politico reporter Ken Vogel pointed out that Soros hosts similar "secret" confabs, CAP's Fang responded on Twitter: "don't you think there's a very serious difference between donors who help the poor vs. donors who fund people to kill government, taxes on rich?"

In less than 140 characters, Fang had epitomized the myopic liberal view of money in politics: Conservative money is bad, and linked to greed, while liberal money is self-evidently philanthropic.

Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker magazine, for instance, that the Kochs' anti-regulation, anti-bailout, low-tax agenda "dovetail with the brothers' corporate interest." Mayer quoted a Soros spokesman saying "none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests."

This is the Obama campaign's tune, too. While decrying Republican campaign contributions in an Obama fundraising e-mail, someone at Organizing for America apparently got self-conscious about the irony and tagged the e-mail with a subject line saying: "Our Donations Are Different."

So, is Soros' money really different from the Kochs' money?

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/01/kochs-vs-soros-free-markets-vs-state-coercion#ixzz1CisjPBi3

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