posted June 16, 2006 01:43 PM            

I'm sure it won't be any surprise to Americans the democrat party is the Soros vehicle of choice to accomplish that objective. Democrats have been working on that for more than 40 years. That's what's behind their surrender to terrorist and terrorism tendencies, their attacks on business, their kooky tax raising schemes and their attempts to turn US sovereignty over to the United Nations.

Like Madam NonBright, Soros thinks it's not fair America is the worlds only super power and King George is putting his money where his treasonous ass is to change it.

This is the same George Soros convicted in French courts of insider trading and who just lost an appeal at the highest court in France.

The same George Soros who spent more than 27 Million dollars to defeat George Bush in the last election.

The same George Soros who finances every leftist kook group in America including MoveOn.org...MoveOn.Org, the group of leftist kooks and morons who now say they OWN the democrat party, "We bought it and we own it".

Kooky as MoveOn.org is, there's some truth in what they say. The current group of Congressional democrats are standing so close to the "left" edge of the earth they have one foot dangling in space. Something to be proud of democrats.

George Soros is an enemy of America. He should be arrested for treason, striped of his naturalized US citizenship and deported. He is in the United States for an illegal purpose. The overthrow of the United States and the laws of the United States. His name should be placed on a permanent list of those not permitted to enter the United States.

March his sorry ass to the nearest border and give him the boot...preferably a size 13 where it would do the most good.

Tyranny, George Soros and the Dinocrats
Lowell Ponte
Saturday, June 17, 2006

When the puppet master-owner of the Democratic Party speaks, we ought to listen. And this party's Daddy Warbucks, billionaire international money manipulator George Soros, is again speaking to promote his new book, "The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror."

In a June 11 New York Times Magazine interview, Soros acknowledged giving "something like $27.5 million" to "anti-Bush" groups such as MoveOn.org with the aim of defeating President George W. Bush in 2004.

Soros, whose personal fortune exceeds $5 billion, said his foundation gives away $400 million each year. Times interviewer Deborah Solomon asked: "Why didn't you give more money to Democratic causes?"

"You can't buy elections," replied Soros. But he certainly tried.

The Democrats lost in 2004, said Soros, because Republicans "are much better at ... distorting the truth." Mr. Soros apparently believes his money will give Democrats parity.

Soros has been forthright about why he wants President Bush and Republican lawmakers removed from power. Mr. Bush makes America "too powerful" in the world, Soros has said, and this is "dangerous." Soros wants America reduced from sole global Superpower to a weakened nation no stronger than Russia, Germany or England, thereby producing what his new book calls "equilibrium condition."

In an earlier book he vowed to "puncture the bubble of American supremacy," and Soros sees the election of Democrats as the fastest way to diminish American power.

In his new book Soros also attacks "market fundamentalism," which, he told Solomon, "is the belief that the common interest is best served by allowing individual participants to pursue their self-interest." In other words, Soros despises individualism, the social benefit of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" in the marketplace, and free-market capitalism.

Who is George Soros? He was born George Schwartz in 1930 in Hungary, but with the rise of Nazism his lawyer-publisher father forged documents that changed the Jewish family's name to Soros. To this day Soros says he feels little kinship with Jewish "tribalism."

At age 17 Soros escaped Communist-controlled Hungary. In England he attended the Fabian socialist London School of Economics (as did Rolling Stone singer Mick Jagger). Soros fell in love with the "Open Society" philosophy of his professor Karl Popper.

In 1956 Soros arrived in America with $5,000 in his pocket, but he soon acquired a reputation on Wall Street as a skilled money manager. He pioneered the modern "hedge fund," which protects investors through diversified simultaneous bets for and against the economy.

In 1992 Soros wagered $10 billion in a concerted financial attack to drive down the value of the British pound. He won, pocketed $1.1 billion profit in a single day, and ever since has been known as "the man who broke the Bank of England." His scheme also devastated Britain's ruling Conservative Party. Russia has accused him of attempting to undermine its currency and economy.

In 1993 Soros used his new wealth to create the Open Society Institute, which funds a wide variety of activities around the world. Its "subversive" money has been used to influence politics and, according to investigative reporter Richard Poe, to fund "abortion, atheism, drug legalization, sex education, gay marriage ... and other radical causes."
***Note** Not to mention Euthanasia

As Poe noted in his May 2004 NewsMax Magazine cover story about Soros, the eccentric billionaire, in a November 30, 1994 speech, announced that he wished to "do something about ... the distortion of our electoral process by the excessive use of TV advertising."

Thereafter, Soros quietly funded foundations and groups working for "campaign finance reform" to reduce the influence of "the rich" in politics. Out of his secretly orchestrated campaign came the campaign reform law named for its authors, Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

This Soros-bankrolled new law prohibited ordinary citizens from putting their own political ads on television to promote or criticize candidates during the decisive 60 days prior to a federal general election or 30 days before a primary. The law exempted from such gagging only the candidates themselves, the ruling political parties, the mostly liberal news media and "527s."

These "527s" were legally concocted entities, many of which had been funded by Soros. While other Americans were gagged, these mostly left-wing groups were allowed to attack Republican candidates.

Through these groups Soros and a few fellow left-leaning billionaires, including Progressive Insurance chairman Peter Lewis, have created a "Shadow Party" to manipulate American politics. Their ongoing effort is nothing less than a cash-and-carry coup d'état to seize control of the U.S. government.

Soros said he "would probably lose out" if the anti-capitalist regulations he advocates became law. "So you think you have made too much money?" asked Solomon. "No. Not enough," replied Soros. "Not enough." How does Soros intend to make more billions by politically controlling the United States?

In his tyrannical "open society," conservatives are prohibited from speaking but plutocrats like Soros built a loophole into the law that allows them to tilt elections by giving $27.5 million to one side.

Is hypocritical George Soros a megalomaniac? Apparently so, as investigative reporters Rachel Ehrenfeld and Shawn Macomber have written:

"If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble," Soros once wrote. When asked to elaborate on that passage by The Independent of London, Soros said, "It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of God, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out."

"Next to my fantasies about being God, I also have very strong fantasies of being mad," Soros once confided on British television. "In fact, my grandfather was actually paranoid. I have a lot of madness in my family. So far I have escaped it."

posted June 16, 2006 02:00 PM            

It is however typical acoustic, that you see no problem with someone like George Soros...or anyone else attempting to overthrow the United States.

posted June 16, 2006 02:34 PM            

I don't honestly know a lot about George Soros. The messianic fantasies are a bit disturbing I'd have to agree. Of course if he were on Republican's side there'd be no issue made of it.

It's kind of ironic that one who plays Capitalism so well, and who indeed wants more money would be working toward Socialism.

I find this statement to be a bit out of context:

quote:

---

In his tyrannical "open society," conservatives are prohibited from speaking but plutocrats like Soros built a loophole into the law that allows them to tilt elections by giving $27.5 million to one side.

---

posted June 18, 2006 01:41 AM            

Read some interesting stuff about Soros today, most of which would contradict the tone of what's been posted.

Having been a Jew who's escaped both the Nazis and the Soviets he's given millions and millions of dollars to defeating the Soviets and promoting democracy.

posted June 18, 2006 10:28 AM            

I wonder why you can never connect the dots acoustic? Is it because you're just so ill informed about everything that things as simple as definitions go right over your head.

George Soros was convicted of insider trading and that conviction was upheld in the highest court in France.

What George Soros did, is the dictionary definition of "insider trading" acoustic and "trading on insider information" is illegal, not only in the United States but other western nations as well.

What is it you don't understand?

George Soros admits he came into possession of information about a planned takeover of a French Bank. It's not illegal to be in possession of such information. It is however, illegal to act on such information, such information not being made public and therefore not available to others in the marketplace...including existing stockholders of the bank's stock. The public did not know of the planned takeover, Soros did know. It was not illegal for someone to tell Soros about the planned takeover. It was illegal "insider trading" for George Soros to buy, within days of finding out, 95,000 shares of that bank's stock knowing when the takeover occurred, the value would rise. Those shares were bought from other stockholders who had no idea someone was planning a takeover of the bank. If they had known, they wouldn't have sold their shares to George Soros..or anyone else at the price they were sold.

Smarten up.....if possible.

Oh, and when you get around to it, you can provide the names of the others who were privy to the same information and acted on that information who were not charged and/or convicted of "insider trading". You did say this...didn't you acoustic?

quote:

---

Yes, he was the only one amongst those who did the same or similar things to get convicted....acoustic

---

posted June 18, 2006 04:10 PM            

I'm not certain of the title of the book I was reading, but what it said is evidenced on the internet for those who look beyond NewsMax for news.

The names of the other people who weren't convicted?

quote:

---

Two of his co-defendants, Lebanese financier Samir Traboulsi and Jean-Charles Naouri, an aide to former finance minister Pierre Beregevoy, were acquitted.

...

Mr Soros and three other defendants, the court found, bought Societe Generale stock when it was cheap, and cashed in their investment when the price rose after the bid became public.

Two other businessmen implicated in the scandal - Edmond Safra and Robert Maxwell - have since died. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/2594273.stm

---

posted June 18, 2006 05:49 PM            

“If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me in trouble,” Soros once wrote. When asked to elaborate on that passage by The Independent, Soros said, “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of God, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”

“Since I began to live it out.” For those who have followed his career and socio-political endeavors, this pretentious statement is not taken lightly. Soros has proven that with the vast resources of money at his command he has the ability to make the once unthinkable normal. His work as a self-professed “amoral” financial speculator has left millions in poverty. He has overthrown governments throughout the world, pumping so much cash into shaping former Soviet republics to his liking that he has bragged that the former Soviet Empire is now the “Soros Empire” (although that “Empire” did not last for very long; when he no longer served the former Soviets’ purposes, his Empire was taken away from him).

Now that “god” – Soros – has decided that George W. Bush has to go. The controversial billionaire has been proclaiming that defeating George W. Bush is the “central focus” of his life. He has written that he always “felt that modern society in general and America in particular suffer from a deficiency of values.” Only fundamental changes in our way of life will satisfy him, and he is spending millions to make those changes a reality.

With Soros’ pal Hillary Clinton promising the New York Post that the 2004 election, will be decided by “outside forces – something unforeseen that suddenly happens – that tilts the election one way or the other,” one wonders to what, or whom, she is referring.

“Of course what I do could be called meddling because I want to promote an open society,” he told Hemispheres magazine. “An open society transcends national sovereignty.” [emphasis added] And he has more tools at his disposal than you’d suspect. “Although I remain a champion of losing causes, how much closer I have come to realizing them than when I first started!” he wrote a few years ago.

Soros attempts at self-exposition can get pretty creepy at times, like in this passage from Underwriting Democracy: “I feel I must maintain a separation between myself and my persona. Without it I and my persona would be endangered…I hold my persona in high regard, from both a subjective and an objective point of view.”

Soros summed himself up this way while talking to biographer Michael Kaufman: “I am kind of a nut who wants to have an impact.”

This is not Soros’ only fantastic admission.

“Next to my fantasies about being God, I also have very strong fantasies of being mad,” Soros once confided on British television. “In fact, my grandfather was actually paranoid. I have a lot of madness in my family. So far I have escaped it.”

DIARY OF A MADMAN

Growing up in Nazi-occupied Hungary, a 14-year-old George Soros once saw two dead bodies hanging from lampposts. “This is what happens to a Jew who hides,” read a sign attached to one of the bodies. The other body carried the warning, “This is what happens to a Christian who hides Jews.” Soros may have met the same fate if his father had not obtained fake identities for himself, his wife, and his two sons. The family spilt up and George survived the war under the assumed identity of a gentile boy, Sandor Kiss. At 17, just as the Iron Curtain was descending, George and his father managed to get out to Switzerland, where they became delegates to an Esperanto Conference. (Esperanto is the artificial language invented in the Twenties to unite a fractured world, which Soros until recently lobbied the European Community to adopt as its common language.)

From Bern, bright little George, again with the help of his father, managed to reach London and to enter the London School of Economics. He slipped out of a Russian-occupied section of Austria and headed for London

It’s a harrowing tale, filled with many close calls. Which is all the more reason why reading Soros’ latest book, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, is so disconcerting. Soros has adopted strange and hyperbolic language in describing today’s America as a fascist Fourth Reich with September 11 serving as our Reichstag fire. “How could a single event, even if it involved three thousand civilian casualties, have such a far-reaching effect?” he writes. We are now, Soros writes, a nation of “victims turning perpetrators,” likening our reaction to the terrorist attacks to the crimes committed by the Germans because of their nation’s mistreatment at Versailles.

Soros is so worried that we might use the horror of September 11 as an excuse to fight terrorists that he raises the specter of America as a neo-Nazi state, thus demeaning both the horrors of September 11 and the Holocaust. “When I hear Bush say, ‘You're either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans,” Soros told the Washington Post, adding that Bush’s rhetoric reminded him of Nazi slogans such as, Der Feind Hort mit (“The enemy is listening”). Today’s America is a “threat to the world,” run by a Republican Party which is the arbiter of an unholy alliance between “market fundamentalists” and “religious fundamentalists.” We have become a “supremacist” nation, Soros contends, led by a man who “has a simplistic view of what is right and what is wrong.”

Even more shocking is Soros’ apparent attempt to have the Americans denied the right to defend themselves. “Usually when victims turn perpetrators, they are unaware of what they are doing,” Soros, the armchair psychiatrist, condescendingly posits. “That is the case with the American public today. Most people believe that terrorism poses a threat to our personal and national existence” – Is there some any proof to the contrary? – “and that in waging war on terrorism we are acting in self-defense. The idea that we may have been transformed from victims to perpetrators must be rather shocking to most of us.” The financier’s cherished principles of open society “recognize that we may be wrong.”

Some Americans might take issue with Soros’ implication that there is a very real chance that al-Qaeda is right and we are wrong. But Soros is black-and-white on the issue of George W. Bush. During a speech at Columbia University’s commencement ceremonies, Soros, per usual, prattled on about his hatred for George W. Bush, but without his much-beloved caveat about his own fallibility. “If President Bush is reelected, we must ask the question, ‘What is wrong with us?’” he said. According to George Soros, we must accept the possibility that al-Qaeda is right, but anyone who votes for Bush is wrong without fail.

“When President Bush says, as he does frequently, that freedom will prevail, in fact he means that America will prevail,” he writes, leading one to wonder who Soros would prefer to see “prevail.” Saddam Hussein? Osama bin Laden? Bush endorses “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise.” Soros dismisses this as “Orwellian Doublespeak,” which he recognizes because he “grew up with it in Hungary first under Nazi and later Communist rule.”

However, Soros has recently purveyed the very “Orwellian Doublespeak” he condemns in others. Take, for example, the following transcript from a CNN appearance earlier this year with Wolf Blitzer.

SOROS: I have also been accused of comparing Bush to a Nazi. And I did not do it. I would not do it, exactly because I have lived under a Nazi regime. So I know the difference. But how come that I'm accused of that?

BLITZER: Who accused you of that?

SOROS: The Republican National Commission [sic.], or whatever, and a number of newspaper articles. And I -- you know, I think I really -- I'm upset about being accused of that. And I'm upset that I have to defend myself against this kind of accusation.

The first half of his new book is spent pointing out the alleged similarities between the Bush administration and Nazi Germany. CNN, as usual, worked overtime looking for a way to spin his talking points for the Left.

BLITZER: I think what the articles that I read suggested, because of you having lived through the Nazi era, you have a special responsibility to educate people who didn't live through that. And I think the suggestion -- at one point, you had made some sort of allusion to your own personal background in explaining why you were so critical of the president.

SOROS: That's exactly right. And then that has been distorted that I'm comparing the president to a Nazi.

Let’s go to the book: Early in The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros argues that September 11 removed the obstacles to Bush’s long-planned “unilateral American dominance” of the world. “President Bush declared war on terrorism, and the nation lined up behind its president,” Soros explains. “Then the Bush administration proceeded to exploit the terrorist attack for its own purposes. To silence criticism and keep the nation united behind the president, the administration deliberately fostered the fear that had gripped the country.”

Less than a half dozen pages later, Soros gives us the following short history of Nazi Germany: “Hitler rose to power by capitalizing on a wave of resentment caused by an onerous peace treaty and runaway inflation. He appealed to the German people’s sense of being victimized…Whether the German’s sense of being victimized was imaginary or not.”

The two sound quite similar. Why else would he use Hitler, Stalin, and George W. Bush as his three examples of proponents of “Orwellian Doublespeak”? The Soros-funded pressure group MoveOn.org posted ads on its website that explicitly compared Bush to Hitler. And the campaign is working. One Democrat who refused to be named, told U.S. News and World Report that – coming from Soros – the claim that Bush is a Nazi was more credible. “I’m not sure I disagree with him,” he said. “I’m not going to second-guess someone like Soros who has lived through the Holocaust.”

Soros has always had a fear of being called out, however, which is why he often prefers to fly under the radar. “With publicity you become wedded to your words,” Soros said. “They become difficult to retract.”
***Duh

Soros’ use of his personal story to further his political agenda is nothing new. The international philanthropist routinely ties the causes he christens as worthwhile into the struggle of his early life in Hungary, and his crusade against Bush is no exception. Soros’ memory of those days spent under Nazi occupation is a bit sunnier than one might expect. “For me, this was the most exciting time of my life,” Soros has said many times. “For an adolescent to be in real danger, having a feeling he is inviolate, having a father acting as a hero and having an evil confronting you and getting the better of it, I mean, being in command of the situation, even though you’re in danger, but basically maneuvering successfully, what more can you ask for?”

His own father, too, would not escape his scorn late in life. Soros told The New Yorker that he was disappointed his father chose to fight death when he found out he had terminal cancer. Soros’ father, the man who saved Soros’ own life, “unfortunately wanted to live,” he said, adding that he was “kind of disappointed in him” and “wrote him off” over the whole issue. When his father did not die on George Soros’ terms, George let him die alone. Soros’ mother disappointed him severely on this point. After a rather vigorous questioning by Nazi authorities, Soros’ mother had an understandable near nervous breakdown, a show of weakness that Soros told the same magazine made him furious.

Later in life, running his philanthropic foundations in Eastern Europe, Soros once again couldn’t ask for anything more. “It was heroic, exciting, rewarding – and it was great fun,” Soros once told a reporter. “We were in the business of undermining the system. We would support anything.” [emphasis added.] His opposition to President Bush’s re-election and support for the Left makes perfect sense when viewed through this prism.

Soros says, “I don't give to charity.” Indeed, while The New York Times, time and again, has described him as the world’s greatest philanthropist, he has denounced “philanthropy [which] goes against the grain because our civilization is built upon the pursuit of self interest, not any preoccupation with the interest of others.”

Thus, Soros has become the go-to guy for the Democratic Party.

From Robert Slater’s unauthorized biography:

“When Soros believed he was right about an investment, nothing could stop him. No investment position was too large. Holding back was for wimps. The worst error in Soros’ was not being too bold, but too conservative. ‘Why so little?’ was one of his favorite questions.”

If one thing is sure in American politics today, it’s that no one is going to ask Soros “Why so little?” Soros has dropped more than $15 million so far to defeat George W. Bush next November, and he has made it clear he is willing to spend more –much more. Soros, it seems, is approaching the 2004 election much the same way he would any other investment. The man has donated millions to MoveOn.org, a group originally formed to denounce what it termed the excessive public focus on Clinton’s personal life; to former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta’s new think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP); and to America Coming Together, a get-out-the-Democratic vote operation headed by former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal and Ellen Malcolm, president of the pro-abortion EMILY’s List. Malcolm, belying her feminist slant, confided to the Washington Post that the Soros donation was like, “getting his Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.” At the CAP launch party, Hillary Clinton was as hysterical as George Soros, announcing to the crowd that Bush and the Republicans were seeking to “erase the 20th Century.”

Although the above mentioned organizations are all 527s, and, therefore, not supposed to coordinate with any party or candidate, they and Soros leave little doubt in what they are attempting to do. Announcing the ACT donation, Soros explained that he made the donation because the group was an “effective way to mobilize society” and “convince people to go to the polls.” In other words: Get out the vote. But Soros and his ego couldn’t let it lie there and keep up the appearance of non-partisanship:

“I believe deeply in the values of an open society,” Soros said. “For the past 15 years I have focused on fighting for these values abroad. Now I am doing it in the United States. The fate of the world depends on the United States and President Bush is leading us in the wrong direction.”

As Foundation Watch reports, Soros may complain about President Bush’s “Pioneers” and “Rangers” who solicit and bundle $2000 donations from friends, but his friends bring quite a bit more cash to the table:

“Soros’ donation to ACT became a catalyst for more donations. The morning after the announcement, Peter Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Insurance Corporation, a heavy contributor to other Soros pet initiatives, such as drug legalization, pledged $10 million to ACT; Rob Laser, founder and CEO of Real Networks, promised $2 million; Rob McKay, president of the McKay Family Foundation donated $1 million; and Lewis and Dorothy Cullman pledged $500,000. Other donors include Patricia Bauman, head of the Bauman Family Foundation, and Anne Bartley, former president of the Rockefeller Family Fund. Thanks to Soros and his wealthy network, ACT raised $23.5 million in 24 hours.”

These organizations crow about being political “think-tanks” poised to become the next Heritage Foundation or CATO Institute, but as Defense Advisory Board member Richard Perle pointed out in Newsday, these 527s are more political than ideological. “George Soros says publicly that he wants to defeat George Bush,” Perle said. “These are not scholars.”

ACT, for example, a group that steadfastly denies it is violating federal law by working on behalf of the Kerry campaign, brags on its website that it is currently, “laying the groundwork to defeat George W. Bush and elect Democrats.”

It certainly appears the Kerry campaign is coordinating with these groups – or at least sharing resources with them. Former ACT staffer Rodney Shelton is now Kerry’s Arkansas state director seems a bit odd. Isolated incident? Nope. Kerry’s former campaign manager Jim Jordan is now on staff at ACT. And Zach Exley recently left the upper echelons of MoveOn.org to work for Kerry. “It's inevitable that Exley is going to be using MoveOn folks and information for the Kerry campaign. The guy was their opposition research guy,” a Bush campaign staffer told the Washington Prowler. “The RNC has been saying all along that these guys have been working together, so now the guy responsible for all those anti-Bush ads on TV and the Web is essentially doing the same thing for the Kerry camp? Soros probably has an office in Kerry campaign headquarters by now.”

Republican operatives, predictably, see Soros’ activities in a similar light. “It’s incredibly ironic that George Soros is trying to create a more open society by using an unregulated, under-the-radar-screen, shadowy, soft-money group to do it,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said. “George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party.”

Some of this might seem strange in light of the fact that a mere two years ago Soros described the influence of large cash donations in politics as “a fundamental crisis in democratic self-government.” At that time, Soros doled out more than $18 million to various campaign finance groups to get large donations out of politics. Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a group that received donations from Soros, expressed disappointment to Foundation Watch at the news of the big donations. “I’m sorry that Mr. Soros chose to make such a huge contribution for a specific effort to defeat Mr. Bush, given the very valuable role he played in supporting efforts to enact the soft-money ban.” Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity went further, telling Foundation Watch, “I have a hard time seeing what the difference is between a soft-money donor to a party and a big 527 donor, especially when both give million-dollar checks.”

Was Soros being facetious when he okayed a 2000 Open Society Institute report that claimed one of the group’s major goals was to get “states to experiment with various approaches to reduce the pressure of money on elections and legislation, ranging from improved disclosure to full public financing of campaigns”?

Soros’ 1995 book Soros on Soros contains a clue as to what he may be thinking: “I do not accept the rules imposed by others...I am a law-abiding citizen, but I recognize that there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted. And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don’t apply.” Clearly, Soros considers himself as someone who is able to determine when the “normal rules” should and shouldn’t apply – including Campaign Finance Reform laws.

Democrats are so hungry for a win in 2004, they don’t care whether George Soros is following the rules this time around or not. One “Democratic operative” told U.S. News & World Report, “[Republicans] don’t accept the legitimacy of political opposition. These people will do anything to gain and hold power. So I’m not exactly feeling full of ethical scruples as we fight for survival.”

This is the George Sorosization of the Democratic party. As we will see, this idea of “scruples” being for the other guy has been central to Soros’ philosophy in business, philanthropy, and foreign policy.

The Bush administration has apparently yet to take Soros’ threats/promises seriously. In September 2003 Soros was invited to speak at one of the State Department’s Open Forums. During his speech he got big laughs with several joking references to his plans for George W. Bush’s defeat come next November before turning on the hyper-internationalist rhetoric, including his proposed “modification of the concept of sovereignty,” because “sovereignty is basically somewhat anachronistic.” Supporters and defenders of the United States Constitution should take note.

Soros’ newfound love for the United Nations is a perfect example of how Soros used macro-level institutions for his own purposes. These days he criticizes Bush for failing to get UN approval for U.S. actions in Iraq and elsewhere. He wants the body to serve as a restraint to American power. But when the UN held back Soros’ foundation in the mid- and late-90s he had a very different view:

“I see the United Nations as ineffective and wasteful. In my philanthropic work whenever I come up against any United Nations agencies, I give them wide berth with one exception: the UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees). Since the intervention in Bosnia, my feelings have become even more negative. I regard the role of the United Nations as positively evil.” [emphasis added.]

When the U.S. bombed the Serbs without a UN authorizing resolution, Soros praised it as a victory for his cherished “open society.” Four years later when the U.S. went to Iraq without an explicit UN resolution (there was, after all, an authorizing resolution passed in 2003), Soros condemned working outside of the UN in the strongest terms.

And some conservatives are looking at Soros’ words and cash warily, recommending a more cautious approach to the “nut.” American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene calls Soros the “Daddy Warbucks of the radical Left” who “opposes everything President Bush stands for.”

“He opposed the war in Iraq and he bankrolls every wacko liberal cause from population and gun control schemes to drug legalization, radical feminism, and one-world globalism. Soros makes Ted Turner look conservative by comparison,” Keene said.

Indeed, Soros’ unadulterated hatred of George W. Bush has led him to use his vast fortune to prop up the other side in the War on Terror.

“George Soros’ funding is hardly reserved to the mainstream,” FrontPage Magazine editor Ben Johnson writes. “[Soros’] Open Society Institute [has] funded the fantasies of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Research Institute. This is the same group that falsely accused the Justice Department of inhumane treatment of a Muslim prisoner, claiming they forcibly extracted numerous teeth, brutalized him and forced him to eat pork – all later proven to be lies. ADC Communications Director Hussein Ibish has defended Palestinian suicide bombers (as long as they don’t target ‘civilians’; how big of you, Hussein!), praised Hamas for ‘running hospitals and schools and orphanages,’ defended Sami al-Arian and praised Mao Tse-tung.”

Soros, through more than $13 million in donations to the Tides Foundation (which it is worth noting is also a major recipient for Soros’ many liberal projects as well as one of potential first lady Teresa Heinz Kerry’s favorite foundations, with $4 million in donations and counting), has also supported the Council for American-Islamic Relations, a group that serves as an apologist for nearly every terrorist group in existence. One joint venture between the Tides Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Institute is the Democratic Justice Fund, which, as Ben Johnson explains, “seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration to the United States, particularly from countries designated by the State Department as ‘terrorist nations.’”

Soros also gave $100,000 to People for the American Way, which, along with the openly communist group, International ANSWER helped create the over-the-top “peace” rallies last year. “PAW created United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and chose as its ‘mainstream’ leader Leslie Cagan, who was a member of the Communist Party after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Ben Johnson noted. “She describes Castro’s Cuba as the ideal state.”

Over the last six years Soros has also given more than $120,000 to the Center for the Study of Constitutional Rights (CCR), a group that not only openly opposes the War on Terror and America’s right to defend herself, but has also lobbies directly to reduce hurdles for people seeking U.S. visas from terrorist hotspots around the globe. In official literature, the CCR contends that “Bush’s quest for world domination” is not “an acceptable ambition.” Our foreign policy, they write, should be focused on “eradicating hunger, poverty, disease, homelessness, and environmental degradation and pollution.” “Polices that promote and achieve racial, economic and social justice,” CCR claims, “are the best deterrents to hatred, violence, terrorism and war.”

Cavorting with such organizations allows Soros to get applause rather than ridicule for his perverse take on America. For example, at a recent “Take Back America” conference put on by the far-left Campaign for America‘s Future, Soros compared prisoners being made to wear women’s underwear at Abu Ghraib prison to the Sept. 11 attacks.

After being introduced by Hillary Rodham Clinton (“We need people like George Soros, who is fearless and willing to step up when it counts,” she said), Soros dramatically told the cheering crowd that, “There is, I'm afraid, a direct connection between those two events [9/11 and Abu Ghraib], because the way President Bush conducted the war on terror converted us from victims into perpetrators.”

The idea that Soros found “most galling” was that the United States “went to war in Iraq for the sake of the Iraqi people.” Of course, the fact that the antiwar Soros obviously hadn’t cared a whit about the very real atrocities committed in that same jail for decades under Saddam went unnoticed by him, his open society and in this savagely anti-Bush forum. No amount of good done in Iraq will ever be enough for Soros and his Democratic cronies. They eagerly wait for American blood, American defeat, and are the first to see the hint of either in a given day’s headlines.

Nevertheless, these organizations at their core are the logical end of Soros’ sordid thought processes, of course. Soros, in order to fight Bush, must see him as evil. By nature, this must mean Bush’s (i.e. America’s) enemies have the moral high ground. Soros has a hero complex. As he wrote in Underwriting Democracy, “Doing good may be noble, but fighting evil can be fun.” And Soros is having a delusional blast.

“Frankly, I don't think I'll need to do a lot more,” Soros recently bragged to USA Today. “I now take the defeat of Bush more or less for granted.”

A QUESTION OF INFLUENCE

George Soros has built George W. Bush up in his mind as a modern day personification of the threats he faced as a child. Psychologically, Soros needs to do that because he won’t allow him to get involved in anything short of epic. But what is the real problem with the Bush administration? The evidence suggests it has much less to do with the Bush Doctrine and much more to do with his Soros’ loss of influence in the post-Clinton world.

“I am particularly interested in changes in the rules of the game,” Soros once said. “I am looking for that new game and the new rules. I can anticipate these periods of regime change when something really new is happening. In the United States we say that, ‘These things are self-evident.’ Well, nothing is self evident.”

Soros’ main concern is that someone be elected who is indebted to him enough to pick up the phone when he calls. John Kerry is obviously willing to be that guy: While both Soros and Kerry were on vacation at their neighboring estates in Sun Valley, Idaho, they chatted on the phone, but avoided a personal meeting “because of how it would be interpreted,” Soros told USA Today. Thus they kept up the appearance that they are not violating the IRS code, which forbids non-profits from intervening “directly or indirectly, in any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

The OSI website continues this pathetic charade: “George Soros’ private political activities are wholly separate from the Open Society Institute,” it reads. “OSI is a nonpartisan, nonpolitical entity in accordance with U.S. laws for tax-exempt organizations. Soros, as a private individual, is entitled to use his after-tax personal funds to support political candidates or parties within the parameters of U.S. election law. Any public statements on political issues are also made solely in his personal capacity. The Open Society Institute is not consulted or otherwise involved, and OSI is neither able nor permitted to comment.” Nothing in Soros's life is “wholly separate” from everything else, of course.

But Soros does not want to be president. He wants to find “a new game,” because Soros has learned that a world in flux offers many opportunities for folks as powerful as himself. He makes no bones about this, consistently mocking world leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan who refused to meet with him. In books and speeches, Soros speaks endlessly of how much better off the world would be if only those in power had listened to him.

In Underwriting Democracy he writes, for example, of “desperately” trying to “reach President Bush” in 1991 before his meeting with Gorbachev in Malta. “But I only got as far as Under Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger,” he laments. “That is when I decided to write Opening the Soviet System.”

One of the reasons why Soros might hate Bush the Younger so much is that he spurned Soros’ advances while his father was in power. Harken Energy was partially owned by George Soros when the company bought George W. Bush’s Spectrum 7 in 1986. Queried about the reasoning behind this buyout by Nation reporter David Corn (himself author of a best-selling Bush-bashing book), Soros claimed the deal was about influencing American policy: “Bush was supposed to bring in the [Persian Gulf] connection,” Soros said. “But it didn’t come to anything. We were buying political influence. That was it. Bush was not much of a businessman.” [emphasis added.] Admitting to purchasing political influence is an odd tack for a proponent of “campaign finance reform” to take.

Although these days, Soros’ connections are getting quite a bit more attention than they did in the 1990s, he was nevertheless a high profile figure by the end of the Clinton reign. In fact, Soros and Hillary Clinton became allies. One of the few people Hillary would see when the Lewinsky scandal broke was George Soros. During his interview with 60 Minutes footage of Soros and Hillary Clinton walking through a Haitian village flitted across the screen, complete with Hillary Clinton introducing Soros to everyone who came within five feet of them. In 1998, Newsweek suggested that after her husband’s time in the Oval Office came to an end, Hillary would probably seek employment in the non-profit sector: “Friends daydream about [Hillary] becoming head of UNICEF, or even UN secretary-general,” political insider Howard Fineman wrote. “More likely: Some sort of global foundation, aided by friends such as financier George Soros or World Bank president James Wolfenson.” Instead we ended up with Senator Hillary, a cause Soros likewise contributed heavily to, both with a maximum contribution to Friends of Hillary and tens of thousands of dollars to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as well as the Democratic National Committee, which considers Hillary its shining star and possible 2008 presidential candidate.

But she was by far not his only admirer.

“I like to influence policy,” Soros told television talk show host Charlie Rose in 1995. “I was not able to get to George Bush. But now I think I have succeeded with my influence…I do now have great access in [the Clinton] administration. There is no question about this. We actually work together as a team. Forget NATO now.” Soros went on to brag to Time magazine in 1997 that, “my influence has continued to grow and I do have access to most people I want to have access to.”

Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, called Soros “a national resource – indeed, a national treasure” and described the billionaire as a sort of shadow arm of the State Department. “I would say that it [Soros’ foreign policy] is not identical to the foreign policy of the U.S. government, but it’s compatible with it,” Talbott told The New Yorker. “It’s like working with a friendly, allied, independent entity, if not a government. We try to synchronize our approach to the former Communist countries with Germany, France, Great Britain, and with George Soros.” When Soros opened his own D.C. office to be close to the action, one of his minions explained that it would serve as “his State Department.”

Soros wrote memos on every foreign policy and monetary issue imaginable, and these memos were read widely at the very highest echelons of the Clinton White House. Soros was has also used the services of the Washington lobbying firm Raffaelli, Spees, Springer & Smith, where he was represented by none other than current Democratic National Committee Chairman and Clinton hack Terry McAuliffe. Between his payments to McAuliffe the lobbying executive and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he rained down on various official Democratic PACs, Soros was clearly able to purchase himself quite a bit of clout in the Democratic Party, and adoration/co-dependency that continues to this day. Soros needs the Democrats in office to be taken seriously as a State Department unto himself, and Democrats needs Soros’ dollars to win elections.

“If I spend enough, I will make it right,” Soros is known to say. And true to his words he is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to remodel society. Often, his giving is contingent upon matching grants, as is his October 21th well publicized $500 million “conditional” offering to Russia. A fact the New York Times managed to ignore while praising “Citizen Soros” for “reflecting American values” with his grand international philanthropy.

“My biggest risk lies in the process of acknowledging that I am becoming powerful and influential because I have a lot of money,” Soros once said, although one wonders what good the supposed self-delusion does if he can articulate the reality of the situation.

And indeed, Soros often prefers to paint himself as an outsider on a mission to change the dominant paradigm. But, clearly, he is an insider. As journalist Neil Clark pointed out in the New Statesman, not exactly a bastion of conservative thought, Soros has invested more that $100 million in the Carlyle Group, where he’s rubbed shoulders with movers and shakers including, “former secretary of state James Baker and the erstwhile defense secretary Frank Carlucci, George Bush, Sr. and, until recently, the estranged relatives of Osama Bin Laden.” Still not convinced? Soros’ Open Society Institute's office in Washington, D.C. was manned until recently by Morton H. Halperin, who worked in the Clinton, Nixon and Johnson administrations, serving as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy at the National Security Council under Clinton. Where is Halperin now? He’s vice-president at the Soros funded Center for American Progress, which is not coordinating its attacks on Bush with Kerry or the Democrats, of course. These are all mere coincidences. Behind the curtain, paying for all this, is Soros.

Soros has written that none of this matters, that he is only contributing to “independent organizations that by law are forbidden to coordinate their activities with the political parties or candidates.” MoveOn.org compares George W. Bush to Hitler and that is simply, according to Soros, a mere coincidence, and that he, Soros, is only “getting more people involved in the national debate over Bush’s policies.” Soros is too smart to really believe his own words when he writes that McCain-Feingold, “minimizes or eliminates the ability to purchase influence in exchange for” his contributions. More laughably Soros adds, - forgetting his earlier claims that he gives to buy influence - that he doesn‘t, “seek such influence. My contributions are made in what I believe to be the common good.”

As we have already seen, Soros believes the common good would be best served by defeating George Bush, electing John Kerry and the implementation of the “Soros Doctrine.” So explain to us again how these donations are not baldly political?

Can Democrats still possibly believe Soros’ millions come without strings attached? Indeed, he says quite forthrightly in his latest book that he intends to replace the Bush Doctrine with the “Soros Doctrine.” Since Soros is not registered as a lobbyist, yet is nevertheless trying to influence politicians with mounds of cash, this seems a bit suspicious. Further, does that sound like the kind of man who is planning to help defeat Bush and then step back and let a new Democratic president do as he wishes? In a 1994 interview with the New York Times, for example, Soros was extremely candid about why he does what he does in business, philanthropy, life. “I still consider myself selfish and greedy,” Soros said. “I am not putting myself forward as any kind of saint. I have very healthy appetites and I put myself first.”

During an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, liberal journalist Douglas Brinkley, author of the recent fawning tribute to John Kerry “Tour of Duty,” suggested Soros was interested in something bigger than this one election. “Soros is just somebody who has not just a lot of money but also has a large ego, and…wants to be seen as somebody who not just ousts President Bush, but becomes a kind of savior of a new progressive America.”

posted June 18, 2006 06:33 PM            

No, George Soros is a real loony-tunes nut who owns the democrat party. Not only that but Soros is a Marxist nut who, like the radical leftists he runs with and funds are attempting to overthrow the United States. As are all the so called "Progressive Marxists" which is the only kind of "progressives" there are.

Up theirs.

The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker, Part II
By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Shawn Macomber
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 29, 2004

THE AMORAL ANTI-CAPITALIST CAPITALIST

Democrats looking to George Soros as a moral compass may want to check to see which direction the needle is pointing. The billionaire might actually be able to help them out on that count: In the mid-1990s he posited that there was “something both phony and pompous about a financial speculator inveighing against the moral crisis of our age.”

Much has been written about Soros’ vast fortune. Indeed, the man is a visionary in the world of business. Since his arrival on Wall Street in 1956 at age 26, Soros has remained consistently ahead of the curve. A shrewd observer of gaps in the international financial scene, he saw opportunities in postwar Europe that others completely missed. He became involved in the embryonic stages of the globalization of markets trading international securities. The more successful he became the more cash he had on hand. The more cash he had on hand the more influence he had over events.

At a certain point, Soros stopped reacting to situations and began instigating them. His consolidated financial power has always been used to benefit himself, of course, even when that meant crashing the markets of entire countries, indeed, sometimes entire hemispheres. In 1969 Soros started the Quantum Fund to trade securities at higher volumes, with around $5 million. By the 1990s the fund was worth nearly $6 billion. Governments and powerful individuals alike began taking heed of his every move. Institutional Investor magazine called Soros “The world’s greatest money manager.”

On September 16, 1992, Soros made his fund a cool billion dollars in a single day betting against the British sterling, helping to usher in what the Brits refer to as Black Wednesday. On that day, British citizens saw their currency lose 20 percent of its value. Trying to stave off the challenge to its currency, the British government had borrowed heavily before finally accepting defeat and allowing the devaluation of the pound. Soros was dubbed the Man Who Broke the Bank of England, a designation in which he seemed to take perverse pride.

Perhaps what is most interesting about the episode, considering Soros’ recent professions of moral outrage at the Bush economic plan, is his blasé attitude toward social mores in business. “If I abstain from certain actions because of moral scruples then I cease to be an effective speculator,” Soros told the London Guardian shortly after the incident. “I have not even a shadow of remorse for making a profit out of the devaluation of the pound.” Pushed further, Soros gave an example. “Let’s suppose speculation went on to push the franc,” he said. “That would be wrong and bad. But it wouldn’t stop me.”

Later on 60 Minutes, when asked whether he felt any complicity in the financial collapses in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan or Russia, Soros was similarly blunt. “I think I have been blamed for everything,” he said. “I am basically there to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.” A few minutes later, he reiterated the point in even stronger language. “I don’t feel guilty because I am engaged in an amoral activity which is not meant to have anything to do with guilt,” he said. Worse was Soros’ contention that, despite the fact that a single letter from him to the Financial Times recommending a 25 percent devaluation of the country’s currency sent Russia into an economic tailspin, “I am actually trying to do the right thing.”

Well, try harder, George. You’ve plunged half the world into depression to line your own pocket.

Soros weeks later remained unrepentant about the havoc he’d wreaked, going so far as to explain how the “instability” he’d caused worked to his advantage:

“The net effect is a breakdown of the system, instability, and a negative effect on the economy, the size of which we don’t know, but it could be very, very serious. I mean, Europe is going to go into a very serve recession. Business is practically collapsing in Germany, also very bad in France. … Instability is always bad. It may be bad – it may be good for a few people like me who are instability analysts, but it’s really bad for the economy.” And when the economy suffers, society suffers too. How, then, does this sit with his claim of working to better the situation of each individual and the greater, “open” society.

More recently Soros has been very publicly betting against the dollar. In an interview with CNBC last May, Soros explained, “I now have a short position against the dollar … we continue to sell the U.S. dollar against the euro, the Canadian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and gold.” A real patriot, hell-bent on making cash off yet another market crash – ours. Could this be a part of the Democrats’ 2004 strategy? Journalist Richard Poe believes it could be:

“In view of the catastrophes Mr. Soros has inflicted on so many foreign lands, his sudden rise to prominence in U.S. politics deserves closer inspection,” Poe writes. “Bellicose charges of vote-rigging and calls for UN intervention such as we have heard lately from high-ranking Democrats fall strangely on American ears. Yet, for George Soros, such overheated rhetoric constitutes business as usual. The Democrat strategy taking shape in America this year strongly resembles a ‘velvet revolution’ in the making. Every piece of the puzzle has fallen into place. Only the exact time and nature of the final provocation – the signal for action – remains unknown.”

From a purely cold-hearted perspective, this all might be kosher. But now that Soros is a billionaire, his sudden pangs of conscience over the role of capitalism in the U.S. seem a bit too convenient and contrived to help foster the hero image he is so obviously attempting to create for himself. “I am not so optimistic about capitalism,“ he told Charlie Rose. “It is built on false foundations.” Then where, one wonders, did all of Soros’ cash come from? He claims he is no “neo-Marxist,” but his writings throughout the 1990s have certainly had that flavor. He has declared himself, for example, “at odds with the latter-day apostles of laissez faire” and, further, doubts the markets’ ability to allocate goods properly.

“I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society,” Soros, the thirty-eighth-richest man in the world, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1997. “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.” Later in the same article Soros writes, “Laissez-faire ideology … is just as much a perversion of supposedly scientific verities as Marxism-Leninism is.” In his more recent book The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros asserts that the Communist doctrine failed “only because the free enterprise model has been pursued in a less dogmatic, extremist way than the Communist one.”

At one point in The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros laments that “international income distribution is practically nonexistent.” Haughty words from a man with a bank account larger than the GNP of some Third World countries. If the rich getting richer pains Soros so, why not go ahead and stop accumulating massive amounts of money by raiding the treasuries of entire nations and making them poor?

“It is exactly because I have been successful in the marketplace that I can afford to advocate these values,” Soros said candidly in Soros on Soros. “I am the classic limousine liberal.”

Nevertheless, Soros blames capitalism for the coarsening of American culture. He apparently is the only one able to handle wealth properly. The rest of us savages couldn’t be trusted with his fortune:

“Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value,” Soros writes in The Capitalist Threat. “What is more expensive is considered better. The value of a work of art can be judged by the price it fetches. People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. [Why does Soros think people respect him???] What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationship postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor.”

Tough talk for the man who also has boasted, “I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of what I do.” The word hypocrite doesn’t even begin to describe what Soros is involved in here. Schizophrenia may come closer.

Although widely credited as the penultimate example of an anti-communist, Soros has chafed at the term in the past. In fact, Soros told the New York Times in 1990, “I feel more comfortable with Soviet intellectuals than I do with American businessmen.” Soros also complained to The New Yorker in 1995 about a newspaper that had had the gall to call him an anti-communist in the late 1980s. “It was highly embarrassing and damaging to me, because I had a foundation in China, where I said I was a supporter of the Open Door Policy,” Soros said. “‘I’m not an anti-communist,’ I said to them. So you would have to say different things in different countries.”

Soros was also no fan of the Reagan administration’s hard-line stance against communism. “Anti-communism as it is professed and practiced by the Reagan administration runs a great risk,” Soros wrote in the Financial Times in 1984. “If we interfere in the internal politics of countries within our orbit in order to prevent them from falling into the Communist orbit, we must deny them the privilege of choosing their own form of government.”

This is interesting in hindsight, what with Soros proudly taking credit for overthrowing regimes and – in his own words – proudly “meddling in the affairs” of other nations. Soros goes on in the same article to try and foment fear and mistrust in the economy, writing that the only way to find an “alternative to economic and political calamity in 1985” required “a thorough revision of U.S. economic and foreign policy.” Soros went so far as to repeat the age-old mantra of the far left that communist nations failed economically not because of ideology, but because of U.S. hegemonic ambitions, accusing the Reagan administration of developing “a new form of economic imperialism” to the detriment of the rest of the world: “Under the present arrangements we are … denying them [communist countries] economic prosperity,” Soros wrote.

His statement is eerily similar to what Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Islamist, anti-American lobby is claiming today. For example, in bin Laden’s so-called “Open Letter to America” he wrote: “You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.” These two men who use vast wealth to influence world events are not so far apart in thought.

Thank God George Soros didn’t get his way in the 1980s; otherwise we might still be waiting for communism to collapse. We now know that strength brought us peace, and tax cuts and deregulation brought us hitherto unknown prosperity before the dawn of the 1990s.

“Insofar as there is a dominant belief in our society today, it is the belief in the magic of the marketplace,” Soros wrote in The Capitalist Threat.

Not so fast, wrote Robert Samuelson in a retort published in Newsweek magazine. “If that were so, governments everywhere would be shrinking radically,” he wrote. “They aren’t.” In fact, Samuelson said, in most rich democracies, “the central problem of the political economy is the reverse of what Soros says. It is not how to curb rampaging markets. It is how to maintain a large welfare state without suffocating a productive economy.”

With millions of people’s fates riding on his every whim, here is one of Soros’ secrets of finance: “You know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him,” his son told biographer Michael Kaufman. “It has nothing to do with reason. He literally goes into a spasm, and it’s this early warning sign.”

UNDER WRAPS

Of course, we’ll have to take Soros’ word for whatever he’s doing, since, for most of their existence, his hedge funds operated overseas outside the purview of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “We are not registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission,” Soros acknowledged on 60 Minutes in 1998. “We find it more convenient to operate without it.”

“So in some ways, it’s to escape regulation?” reporter Steve Kroft asked. To which Soros brazenly replied, “Yeah, that’s right.”

Soros could not even join the board of his own Quantum Fund because he was an American citizen. If the fund were actually run by him it would be subject to U.S. laws on insider trading and taxes. As an offshore fund, Quantum avoids the Investment Company Act, which, according to economics writer Andrew Tobias, “severely restricts the ability of funds to sell short or to make big undiversified bets – betting half the fund’s assets on the collapse of some foreign currency, say. Offshore fund shareholders are not subject to U.S. taxation, though their American fund managers are. Some Americans do invest in offshore funds, but they must perjure themselves to do so. Many use foreign trusts, with non-U.S. in-laws or non-U.S. institutions as administrators.”

Doesn’t quite sound aboveboard, does it? Investment lore says Soros started offshore because in the beginning only people outside the United States would invest in his fund, but that doesn’t quite jibe with the reality of today. It is clear Soros is strictly attempting to avoid American investment law with his funds these days. Take Quantum Realty, his one attempt at a U.S.-based investment house, for which Soros was given assurances “at high levels” that non-U.S. investors would be exempt from U.S. taxes. “Politics then demanded this decision be reversed after the fund had been operating for over a year,” Tobias writes. “It had to be disbanded to protect the non-U.S. investors.”

The offshore fund faced little serious regulation, leading one of Soros’ colleagues to explain to The New Yorker that “George has his own rules – they’re different, larger. He is unencumbered.” The same article went on to describe Soros as “a consummate games man, adept at finding every tax loophole and operating in gray areas where there is no oversight and maneuverability is wide. … Indeed the sums of money that he manages not to pay the I.R.S. in taxes put his present gift giving in a different light.”

The irony of that insight is that Soros would probably make no bones about it. Deception and smoke and mirrors are all an acknowledged part of his personality and business plan. “I am sort of a deus ex machina,” Soros told the New York Times in 1994. “I am something unnatural. I’m very comfortable with my public persona because it is one I have created for myself. It represents what I like to be as distinct from what I really am. You know, in my personal capacity I’m not actually a selfless philanthropic person. I’ve very much self-centered.”

Even Soros’ semi-authorized biographer couldn’t get a grip on exactly what was going on over at the Quantum Fund: All Gary Gladstein, the managing director of Soros Fund Management, could say was that the total number of investors in Quantum and the other five funds Soros established “probably” never exceeded 1,000. “They are all very rich individuals, and many have interests in several or even all of Soros funds,” Kaufman writes. “Under the laws of Curacao, where the fund is legally chartered, it is illegal for any of its directors or representatives to identify any shareholder by name, even to the people at Soros Fund Management, the New York part of the operation that determines and carries out investment decisions as the fund’s adviser.” Many of these investors are known only by “coded Swiss bank accounts or by financial advisers serving as their nominees.” Kaufman notes, “It is quite likely that Soros does not know or, for that matter, care to know all of his shareholders.”

The general idea is that he doesn’t have to care, because he is the primary investor. But for Americans this setup poses an interesting quandary. Since Soros is dumping so much money into social causes and political campaigns in the U.S., is it to prevent us from knowing who so we do not know who the nameless, faceless investors in America’s future are? And do their agendas tie in with Soros’ agendas? Is there a particular wealthy investor who has a specific interest in drug legalization or euthanasia, for example? Could a certain Russian investor have a vested monetary interest in seeing the ruble crash – a crash, it is worth noting, Soros was able to precipitate in the late ‘90s with a single letter to a newspaper? Soros, who spends so much time talking about the need for “transparency” and “openness,” runs one of the most secretive and powerful investing firms in the world. And it affects us all.

Occasionally, even with all his deceptions, hidden agendas and personas, Soros has still gotten nailed. In 1979 he was charged with stock manipulation for buying a large amount of a computer company’s stock, selling it off quickly to drive down prices, then buying a greater amount at an “artificially low price.” Soros signed a consent decree in which he neither admitted nor denied complicity in the act. Then in 1986, he was fined $75,000 by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for using several private accounts to hold positions well above speculative limits.

Soros’ most infamous brush with the law was in France, where a court convicted him; Jean-Charles Naouri, former aide to France’s then-Finance Minister Pierre Beregovoy; and Lebanese businessman Samir Traboulsi of insider trading. (Perhaps now that Soros is an enemy of the hated Bush, the French government will find it in its heart to pardon him?) Soros met the decision with predictable bluster. “I have been in business all my life, and I think I know what is insider trading and what isn’t,” he said.

Nevertheless, there is little political will to put Soros in his place stateside. When pulled in front of the House Banking Committee ostensibly to testify on hedge funds and the fatal danger international currency speculators like himself posed to the economy, House Democrats were all too willing to let any serious questions fall by the wayside.

“The members of the Banking Committee led by their chairman, Henry Gonzales, were indeed ready to blame the hedge funds for kicking the markets downhill and risking the banks with their heavy borrowing,” business writer Irv Chapman said on Lou Dobbs’ Moneyline after the hearing. “But they wound up treating George Soros as an expert witness on world markets and currencies instead of a man whose heavy high-risk trading keeps them awake at night.”

Why? Because right off the bat Soros was willing to tell them what they wanted to hear. After Soros’ opening statement, which was but a cruder, shorter rehashing of his Atlantic Monthly article, Minnesota Democrat Bruce Vento praised Soros for the “heresy you may have committed here by admitting that Adam Smith’s invisible hand has some fingerprints.”

Typical anti-capitalist, pseudo-populist rethoric was all it took to throw Congress off his scent. Committee members inexplicably took Soros at his word, even in the face of all the evidence, when he assured them that his unregulated Quantum Fund was not a “destabilizing” force. “I see no imminent danger of a market meltdown or crash,” Soros breezily told the committee. “Frankly, I don’t think hedge funds are a matter of concern to you or the regulators. There is really nothing to regulate on hedge funds.”

Soros is smooth enough to know, however, that there has to be some red meat too, so he sent the committee off in another, more vague direction: derivatives traders. “There are so many of them, and some of them are so esoteric that the risk involved may not be properly understood even by the most sophisticated investor, and I’m supposed to be one,” Soros said. “Some of those instruments appear to be specifically designed to enable institutional investors to take gambles which they would not otherwise be permitted to take.”

No one seemed to pick up the irony of that last bit: Soros was essentially describing what he did every day. But because he was willing to say capitalism was bad, the Dems let him slide. Perhaps his newfound distaste for laissez-faire is more thought-out and self-interested than most suppose.

Somewhere in the love fest, everyone forgot the part where they were supposed to fact-check what the billionaire was telling them. For example, Soros told the committee that “The only thing [hedge funds] have in common is that managers are compensated on the basis of performance and not as a fixed percentage of assets under management.” This, as it turns out, was a ludicrously false statement.

As Forbes writer Dyan Machan later pointed out:

“Soros forgot to add that whether they perform or not, most hedge funds also get paid a fee based on assets under management. In Soros’ case, we are talking about $90 million last year on the $11 billion he managed – nearly a cool quarter-million a day, counting Saturdays and Sundays. Maybe Soros forgot about that $90 million because it was dwarfed by the half-billion or so he collected in fees from his 15 percent share of the trading profits.”

In a story for the Ripon Forum, writer Jeffrey Kuhner suggested Soros’ anti-capitalism went hand in hand with his “ideological kookiness.”

“The 20th century is littered with examples of messianic visionaries – Lenin, Hitler and Castro – whose megalomania and absolute desire for power have wreaked unimaginable havoc,” he writes. “Mr. Soros’ brand of neo-Marxism is no different. His one-world globalism and hostility to capitalism are part of the radical left’s long-term ambitions to alter human reality through social engineering. … If implemented, Mr. Soros’ utopianism would eventually lead to a form of one-world authoritarianism and economic collectivism.”

THE PHILOSOPHER KING

Another factor that sheds light on Soros’ behavior is that he believes he is continuing and furthering the ideas of his hero, Sir Karl Popper, generally considered one of the greatest philosophers of science in the whole of the 20th century and a man he had nominal contact with while studying at the London School of Economics. Popper’s best-known concept was that of “open society” – that is, a society that would “maximize the freedom of individuals to live as they wish.” Soros has borrowed the term in the titles of two of his books, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism and The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. His massive philanthropic endeavors operate under the umbrella of the Open Society Institute.

In practice, then, anything Soros endorses becomes a boon for “open society,” while anything he disagrees with – Bush, immigration policy, the war on drugs, even the United States itself – becomes its greatest enemy. Hence, the war in Kosovo was a justified defense of “open society,” while the war in Iraq is a tyrannical plot devised by George W. Bush, destined to bring about the apocalypse and destroy freedom for everyone.

Soros has been jabbering on about “open societies” for decades now, but he is still unable to give a reasonable explanation of what one is. When he tries to define it, it comes out as the sort of pseudo-sociology one would expect from a starry-eyed college freshman. An “open society,” to George Soros, is “a different conception of how society ought to be organized” and it is “really more sophisticated than the democracy or Communistic systems.” The “little people” would be hard pressed to understand Soros’ genius, his tone suggests. Apparently we should just collectively hand the keys over to the Soros Godhead and let him drive us where he will.

But this is about more than money. Soros’ heroes have always been philosophers and intellectuals, not businessmen. He’s been known to pay graduate students in philosophy to just walk aimlessly around with him discussing “ideas.” He puts on elaborate weekends at his home, inviting prominent intellectuals and philosophers to debate the philosophical tracts he has toiled on, writing and rewriting them throughout his life.

Biographer Michael Kaufman spoke to Jonathan Wolff, from University College, London, who had attended one of Soros’ philosophy discussion parties. “He had apparently read no philosophy since the fifties and had made clear that he did not think that much of significance has occurred in the field since then,” Wolff told Kaufman, adding that Soros, “did not think any of us really understood his ideas. He had some of the typical features of an autodidact – an impatience with anyone who mentioned a text he had not read, and a tendency to change the track of discussion when things got hard.”

Soros himself noticed this tendency in his own work, writing in his unpublished essay, The Burden of Consciousness, that, “I have tried to be concise but occasionally I have slipped into verbosity – especially when I did not have anything original to say.”

At points, The Burden of Consciousness, could get downright weird:

“I have very definite ideas about the relationship between my mind and the outside world,” Soros writes. “I realize that there is a world of which I am a part. That world has existed before I became a part of it and will continue to exist after I have ceased to exist. I can influence the outside world through my actions and of course the outside world impinges on my existence in an infinity of ways.”

Huh? Is this a newsflash for Soros? Yet this was the drivel he felt important enough to take a leave of absence from the business world to pursue.

This romantic vision of himself, not as a world-class financier, but as a first-rate intellectual, is a major part of George Soros’ myth of himself.

“I have had these illusions, or perhaps delusions, of grandeur and they have driven me,” Soros told biographer Michael Kaufman. Far from making light of these delusions, Soros embraces them. Explaining his self-proclaimed role as a “stateless statesman,” Soros told Kaufman, “Yes, I do have a foreign policy…my goal is to become the conscience of the world.” The man who couldn’t be bothered with morality in business, is convinced that he can steer the entire world on the correct moral course. And he isn’t joking. In a 1995 speech, Soros hinted at his ultimate hope of philosophical vindication:

“There is more to my existence than money. I focused on it in my career mainly because I recognized that there is a tendency in our society to exaggerate the importance of money, to define values in terms of money. We appraise artists by how much their creations fetch. We appraise politicians by the amount of money they can raise; often they appraise themselves by the amount of money they can make on the side. Having recognized the importance of making money, I may yet come to be recognized as a great philosopher, which would give me more satisfaction than the fortune I have made.”

Others have caught the scent of something other than philosophy in the air around Soros. His son Robert, in an interview with Kaufman, said, “My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that. But I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking, Jesus Christ, at least half of this is ******** .” His father is driven more by “temperament” than anything else, Robert said. “He is always trying to rationalize what are basically his emotions. And he is living in a constant state of not exactly denial, but rationalization of his emotional state.”

Soros, despite his wealth, never passes up an opportunity to downplay its influence in his life as if to say, I am not one of THEM. Really, I am not. “I used to collect but actually I don’t have great material needs,” Soros once said. “I like my comfort. But, really, I am a very abstract person.” Soros defines modesty a bit differently than most Americans. In addition to his mansion in Sun Valley, Idaho, he owns many homes across America and the world, including, according to USA Today, “an apartment, a beach house and a country house in the New York area.” Soros’ repeatedly has pointed to the fact that he doesn’t collect art as proof of his lack of “material needs,” meanwhile the billionaire is collecting houses. That’s some Average Joe, alright. Not to mention modesty is something other people are supposed to point out about a person, not something one points out about themselves. Such is the Soros charm, however. Like Arafat, who accumulated billions he stole from the Palestinian people, which enables him to be in power while wearing apparently the same uniform for decades, Soros, too claims that his lack of “materialism” is the driving force behind his success. “I did not really want to identify myself with moneymaking to the extent that was necessary in order to be successful. I had to deny my own success in order to maintain the discipline that was responsible for that success.”

No matter how many times Soros brazenly boasts about his success in Business Week or Forbes, he never seems to tire of warning against it in his “philosophical” writings.

“Our sense of right and wrong is endangered by our preoccupation with success as measured by money,” Soros wrote in the Atlantic Monthly. “Anything goes as long as you can get away with it.” And yet, this sort of amoral pursuit of success is what Soros practices and encourages in his “other” life.

In the end, Soros’ philosophy is really a kind of non-philosophy gibberish. He wants the world to follow him on the basis of his discovery that he is probably wrong about everything.

“We have now had 200 years of experience with the Age of Reason, and as reasonable people we ought to recognize that reason has its limitations,” Soros writes in his article, The Capitalist Threat. “The time is ripe for developing a conceptual framework based on our fallibility. Where reason has failed, fallibility may yet succeed.”

Yeah, right. Failure is not only an option, it’s our only option according to this madman.

One thing is sure: Do not expect any apologies, ever, from George Soros.

“When it comes to protecting your own life or saving the system, I know which one I would do first,” Soros told The Guardian. “It’s much better to be a successful speculator and then apply your moral priorities elsewhere.”

But at what cost? And what would is Sir. Karl Popper’s view think of that?

“One of the main arguments of The Open Society is directed against moral relativism,” Popper wrote in his philosophical autobiography, The Unended Quest. “The fact that moral values of principles may clash does not invalidate them. Moral values or principles may be discovered, and even invented. They may be relevant to a certain situation, and irrelevant to other situations. They may be accessible to some people and inaccessible to others. But all this is quite distinct from relativism; that is, from the doctrine that any set of values can be defended.”

Soros’ incessant utopianism, his lack of respect for any opinion other than his own, and the way he drowns out other voices with a flood of cash, would likely not have sat very well with his hero either. Once again, from The Unended Quest:

“There can be no human society without conflict: such a society would be a society not of friends but of ants. Even if it were attainable, there are human values of the greatest importance which would be destroyed by its attainment, and which therefore should prevent us from attempting to bring it about. On the other hand, we certainly ought to bring about a reduction of conflict.”

The message is clear, we can and should work to alleviate conflict, but it cannot be eliminated and utopian schemes usually destroy the human spirit rather than set it free. This is why Popper referred to The Open Society as his “war effort.” It was openly influenced by his fears that, “freedom might become a central problem again, especially under the renewed influence of Marxism and the idea of large-scale ‘planning.’”

If “large-scale planning” without the consent of the general population isn’t Soros’ shtick, what is?

Although Popper met with Soros once or twice while Soros was a student at the London School of Economics, and sent a note with short comments on The Burden of Consciousness, Soros failed to make much of an impression on the old philosopher. According to Kaufman’s biography, when Soros contacted Popper in 1982 to let him know about how he’d been naming funds, foundations, and various other entities after the concepts enshrined in The Open Society, Popper wrote back: “Let me first thank you for not having forgotten me. I am afraid I forgot you completely; even your name created at first only the most minute resonance. But I made some effort, and now, I think, I just remember you, though I do not think I should recognize you.”
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=977

posted June 18, 2006 09:11 PM              

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Gemini sun, Cancer ascendant, Taurus moon *29, Taurus venus, Libra mars
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Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eye, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.