Free Republic

Do monsters get any meaner than Godzilla and King Kong? You bet. Charles and David Koch are ginormous and superbad. Just ask Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid. “These two brothers,” the Nevadan said Feb. 26 on the Senate floor, “are about as un-American as anyone that I can imagine.” Hedge fund billionaire and Democratic campaign contributor Tom Steyer told this month’s Men’s Journal that David Koch is “just a famously evil person.” “They make up the heart and the thinking in the minds of those who would belong to the Ku Klux Klan,” singer-activist Harry Belafonte fumed last November. “They...

A much-admired lady, who was raising funds for her NGO(Non-Governmental Organisation), once ask-ed me what I did for a living. I told her that I worked for a company. "Oh, but what do you really do — I mean for society?" she said. I became defensive and began to recount some of our philanthropic activities. "Is that all!" thundered the eminence grise. I was hurt by her dismissive attitude, and remembered this incident recently when Sonia Gandhi reminded fawning businessmen in the same imperious tone about their corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR has become a buzzword these days, and one...

The BB&T Charitable Foundation has donated $1 million to the Belk College of Business at UNC Charlotte to create a program for the study of the moral foundations of free enterprise. The foundation is the philanthropic arm of Winston-Salem-based BB&T Corp. (NYSE:BBT). The donation stems from discussion between BB&T Chairman and Chief Executive John Allison IV and Claude Lilly, dean of the school. "During a dinner meeting last year, our conversation turned from ethics and leadership to metaphysics, objectivism and Ayn Rand," Lilly says. "John and I discovered that we share an interest in how business schools discuss capitalism in...

Press Release (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031105/lnw015_1.html) Source: Library of Congress Library of Congress Announces Winner of First John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences Wednesday November 5, 11:13 am ET WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- The Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington, announced today the award of the first John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences to Leszek Kolakowski. Professor Kolakowski, who now resides in Oxford, England, was born in Radom, Poland in 1927, is a philosopher focused on important questions, an historian of human thought, an essayist of enormous range, and...