By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: July 23, 2018
Stanley Fischer, Former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve
According to a report at Reuters yesterday, while Stanley Fischer (the former head of the Israel Central Bank) was sitting in the curious position as Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve in 2015 (the U.S. central bank), he took a meeting with Maria Butina, whom U.S. prosecutors charged last week with being a Russian spy.
That’s pretty embarrassing. But that turns out not to be the most interesting part of the Reuters story.
The newswire reports that the meeting was arranged by “the Center for the National Interest, a Washington foreign policy think tank….” As it turns out, foreign policy is not exactly all that this taxpayer-subsidized nonprofit does. According to Greenpeace, based on very solid evidence, this is a “Koch Industries climate denial front group.”
The Center for the National Interest publishes a magazine, National Interest, which Greenpeace says in 2015 and 2016 “featured the writing of Nick Loris of the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation, a longtime aid to corporations seeking to undermine public trust in science.” Greenpeace explains further:
“Heritage has underwritten much of President Trump’s energy agenda. Loris himself is an economist with no scientific qualifications, nor any experience publishing scientific research. Loris has used the National Interest to deny the validity of data published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to denounce international climate treaties, to advocate for the Keystone XL pipeline….”
Apparently, freedom of opinion is not one of the things this “think tank” prizes. ForeignPolicy.com reported in May 2016 that the nonprofit had fired an employee, a junior fellow named Alexander Kirss, the same day he published an article criticizing the Center for inviting Donald Trump to deliver a foreign policy speech. Kirss wrote: “Whether intended as an endorsement or not, the Center’s invitation is tantamount to tacit, if not explicit, approval of Trump’s positions,” adding that Trump’s positions contain “logical flaws and errors.”
