Organizations Right, Left and Other; Past and Present


American Conservative Union Foundation [ WIKI ]

Sponsor of CPAC.

American Enterprise Institute [ WIKI ]

    AEI grew out of the American Enterprise Association, which was founded in 1938 by a group of New York businessmen led by Lewis H. Brown. AEI’s original mission was to promote a "greater public knowledge and understanding of the social and economic advantages accruing to the American people through the maintenance of the system of free, competitive enterprise." AEI’s founders included executives from Eli Lilly, General Mills, Bristol-Myers, Chemical Bank, Chrysler, and Paine Webber. To this day, AEI’s board is composed of top leaders from major business and financial firms.
   Some AEI scholars are considered to be some of the leading architects of the second 's public policy. More than twenty AEI scholars and fellows served either in a Bush administration policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions. Among the prominent former government officials now affiliated with AEI are former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, now an AEI senior fellow; former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities;

Americans for Prosperity [ WIKI ]

Capital Research Center [SourceWatch ] [ WIKI ]

www.capitalresearch.org/
conservative think tank whose stated mission is to do "opposition research" exposing the funding sources behind consumer, health and environmental groups. (Source: Wikipedia)

Cato Institute [ WIKI ]

  Founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane, who remains president and CEO, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the oil conglomerate Koch Industries
  5th-ranked institution in the world for 2009 in a study of leading think tanks by James G. McGann, Ph.D. of the University of Pennsylvania, based on a criterion of excellence in "producing rigorous and relevant research, publications and programs in one or more substantive areas of research".
    Founded in San Francisco; Moved to Washington DC in 1981.
    In the years immediately following the Republican Revolution, the Cato Institute was often seen as a standard-bearer of the U.S. conservative political movement.
   Cato President Ed Crane has a particular dislike for neoconservatism. In a 2003 article with Cato Chairman Emeritus William A. Niskanen, he called neoconservatism a "particular threat to liberty perhaps greater than the ideologically spent ideas of left-liberalism."
Source: WIKI

Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress [ WIKI ]

Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy (no wiki article)

(U. Chicago professor and mentor of the following) ..arranged for his students Wolfowitz, Wilson, and Richard Perle to join the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy which was set up by Cold War architects Paul Nitze and Dean Acheson. Ref: WIKI (Wolfowitz article)

Conservative Caucus [ WIKI ]

Conservative Political Action Conference or CPAC [WIKI ]

  Founded in 1973 by the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom as a small gathering of dedicated conservatives. Over the years it has grown to thousands of annual attendees. Roughly half of those in attendance in the past few years have been college-aged.

CPAC (see Conservative Political Action Conference)

Economic Freedom of the World

 is an (annual survey) produced by the Fraser Institute, a libertarian think tank which attempts to measure the degree of economic freedom in the world's nations.

Fraser Institute

Canadian Conservative/Libertarian Think Tank

GAP (Government Accountability Project)

Government Accountability Project

 United States' leading whistleblower protection organization.[citation needed] Through litigating of whistleblower cases, publicizing concerns and developing legal reforms, GAP’s mission is to protect the public interest by promoting government and corporate accountability. Founded in 1977, GAP is a non-profit, non-partisan advocacy organization in Washington, D.C..

Heritage Foundation

Institute for Humane Studies [ WIKI ]

  Founded in 1961.  Each year, IHS awards over $600,000 in scholarships to students from universities around the world.  Est. in Menlo Park, CA; in Fairfax, Virginia since 1985 and associ. with George Mason University.
  In 2004, IHS launched aBetterEarth.org, a student-oriented website for "pragmatic approaches to solving environmental problems." The site discusses "alternative environmental approaches, including locally based 'eco-innovation,' outcome-based regulations, quasi-market pricing strategies, corporate and individual stewardship, property rights enforcement as a means of protecting the environment from polluters, and the cultivation of environmental aesthetics." The site criticizes traditional environmentalists for being anti-capitalist and for pushing counterproductive government regulations.
  In 2005 IHS added aWorldConnected.org, which promotes a cosmopolitan free-trade approach to globalization issues and criticizes cultural and economic nationalism. IHS has also produced a series of interactive games (link is to "Tragedy of the Bunnies") to illustrate the functioning of spontaneous orders.
   The chair of its board of directors is Charles G. Koch

National Conservative Political Action Committee [ WIKI ]


a New Right political action committee in the United States that was a major contributor to the ascendancy of conservative Republicans in the early 1980s, including the election of Ronald Reagan as President, and that innovated the use of independent expenditures to circumvent campaign finance restrictions.
  Acronym NCPAC, pronounced "Nick-Pack"
   In 1979 Time magazine characterized NCPAC, the Conservative Caucus and the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (headed by Paul Weyrich) as the three most important ultraconservative organizations making up the New Right.        NCPAC was founded in 1975 by conservative activists John Terry Dolan, Charles Black and Roger Stone, with help from Richard Viguerie and Thomas F. Ellis.
  The group got its start through  solicitations. "The shriller you are, the better it is to raise money," explained co-founder Terry Dolan. NCPAC became one of the first groups to circumvent the contribution limits of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) by exploiting the "independent expenditure" loophole permitted under a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Although federal law restricted political action committees' expenditures to $10,000 per candidate, an organization could spend unlimited amounts of money supporting or opposing a particular candidate as long as their campaign activity was not coordinated with a candidate. NCPAC pooled independent contributions in order to make independent expenditures on campaign attack ads. Not only did this circumvent campaign finance restrictions, but it prevented candidates from being associated with advertising created on their behalf. NCPAC Chairman Terry Dolan was quoted as saying, "A group like ours could lie through its teeth, and the candidate it helps stays clean."[Source: WIKI

National Republican Congressional Committee [ WIKI ]

NCPAC (See National Conservative Political Action Committee).

NRCC (See National Republican Congressional Committee)

POGO (Project on Government Oversight)

PNAC (Project for the New American Century)

Project for the New American Century [ WIKI ]

an American think tank based in Washington, D.C. that lasted from early 1997 to 2006. It was co-founded as a non-profit educational organization by neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan. The PNAC's stated goal was "to promote American global leadership.  Supported "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity."
High point and Dissolution: In 2003, during the period leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the PNAC had seven full-time staff members in addition to its board of directors. By the end of 2006, PNAC was "reduced to a voice-mail box and a ghostly website", with "a single employee"
Subordinate to AEI?  [Look for statement by Gary Schmitt]
   PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan: "...Even the Russians knew they could surrender after the Cold War without being subjected to occupation." [Hal: (gasp): This and the rest of the paragraph by Kagan seems quite out of touch with reality. Russia didn't surrender, and the idea of our occupying them is absurdly unthinkable]
Source: Wiki

Project On Government Oversight [ WIKI ]

YAF

Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) [ WIKI ]

YAF's founding statement of principles, the Sharon Statement, was written on September 11, 1960, by M. Stanton Evans with the assistance of Annette Kirk, wife of the late Russell Kirk.