We all have it coming, kid.
Posted on 11/13/2003 12:41:49 AM PST by kattracks
PONTEFICATIONS
UNDER OUR CONSTITUTION HE CAN NEVER BE PRESIDENT, but if any Democrat gets elected President in 2004 it will be because this foreign-born billionaire kingmaker, George Soros, pledged to raise $75 million to defeat incumbent Republican President George W. Bush.
“George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party,” said Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson.
Since he who pays the piper calls the tune, what tune will this international financier demand from the party and President his millions purchased? What hidden agendas and interests, domestic and foreign, might be served?
Can any American trust a Democratic Party whose strings are pulled by this controversial Radical Left-inclined puppet-master? Soros funds an army of leftist foundations and enterprises. He reportedly provided $20 million in seed money for the Center for American Progress, described by the Wall Street Journal as “a new liberal think-tank that is financing the likes of Bush-hating pundit Eric Alterman” (of The Nation magazine). He has also helped fund and coordinate anti-Bush tactics with the Democrat-aligned, Gore-supporting ultra-leftist group MoveOn.org.
Can parents keep their kids drug-free if a Democratic President must dance to the intoxicating tune of George Soros, who has donated millions to marijuana-decriminalization groups and initiatives? Democrat and former Jimmy Carter Administration Secretary of Health and Human Services Joseph Califano called Soros “the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization.”
Can Israel survive, given the hostility that Jewish-born Soros has expressed toward the Jewish State? A global philanthropist, Soros has rarely donated to Jewish charities or causes. But in a November 5 speech to a conference of the Jewish Funders Network, Soros blamed the policies of President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for the upsurge in worldwide anti-Semitism.
Soros also blamed himself for the rise in anti-Semitism because he is one of the “Jewish financiers” who, in his agreement with the vicious words of just-retired Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad, “rule the world by proxy.”
Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, called it “absolutely obscene” that Soros blames Israel and Jews for anti-Semitism and used the rhetoric of anti-Semites in doing so.
Said Foxman: “He buys into the stereotype…It’s blaming the victim for all of Israel’s and the Jewish people’s ills.”
And what happened to longstanding Democrat demands that we pass “campaign finance reform” to get the “corrupting influence” of wealthy contributors out of politics?
Days ago Democratic campaign frontrunner for the 2004 nomination Howard Dean, former Governor of Vermont, announced that he would decline public funding of his campaign to avoid the $45 million spending ceiling this would put on his primary campaign. (Dean has already raised $25 million.)
Dean urges two million supporters to send him $100 apiece, but he surely does not expect this to happen. Dean is willing to run without federal matching funds only because he knows that big money can and will be provided to him by billionaire George Soros, who last September hosted a fundraiser at Dean’s Vermont home.
(Dean’s wife and therefore children are Jewish, but he has moved away from America’s traditional bi-partisan support for Israel. This is probably part of what Soros likes about Howard Dean and would expect Dean to make U.S. policy if elected President.)
But will the American people vote for a candidate and Democratic Party that George Soros rules by proxy?
“A President Dean,” says a Wall Street Journal Editorial, “would owe far more chits to Mr. Soros than Vice President Dick Cheney has ever owed to Halliburton. All this gives the lie to the reform promise to get big money out of politics….”
Who is this shadowy, controversial man George Soros? Born in 1930 in Hungary, he watched Nazis march into his nation and kill relatives in a 1944 extermination of 440,000 Hungarian Jews. He survived by pretending to be Ayran, and then witnessed Soviet Marxists replace the Nazis. “My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule,” he says, “have sensitized me.”
Soros’ father Tivador, a lawyer/publisher/writer, changed the family’s real last name, Schwartz, to Soros in 1936. “Soros grew up in a family that was so detached from its Jewish roots,” summarized a Business Week reviewer of his biography, “that they even vacationed in Nazi Germany, with Tivador shrugging off ‘No Jews Allowed’ signs by telling his wife, ‘You are a foreigner, it’s not for you.’”
After World War II, Soros fled alone as a poor 17-year-old immigrant to London, where he worked at a variety of small jobs. “I broke my leg and was taken care of, free of charge, by the National Health Service,” recalled Soros with gratitude. “I depended on government assistance.” He also, with resentment, remembers from these years how little assistance various Jewish social welfare agencies he approached were willing to give him.
Although he would later become a naturalized American citizen, Soros remains in social outlook very much a European and believer in the paternalistic neo-feudalism euphemistically called “democratic socialism” or “social democracy.”
Soros in 1949 enrolled at the Fabian socialist London School of Economics (one of whose later students would be adept businessman Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones). Soros there became friends with Sir Karl Popper, philosopher and author of the 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies. He graduated LSE in 1952.
From his interpretation of Popper’s “open society,” Soros developed his own opaque philosophy. As described by former New York Times journalist (and Soros publication editor) Michael Kaufman in his 2002 biography Soros: The Life and Times of a Messianic Billionaire, “Soros had developed a contempt for tribal sectarianism of all kinds and found much of the zeal of pro-Israel Zionists to be unappealingly chauvinistic.”
According to Kaufman, Soros described his own Jewishness thus: “It did not express itself in a sense of tribal loyalty that would have led him to support Israel.”
As to Soros’ views concerning President Bush, Neil Hrab of the Capital Research Center has written, “Financial analyst and Soros friend Byron Wien thinks the financier may feel hostility toward all forms of ‘right-wing nationalism,’ perhaps as a consequence of growing up in Nazi-occupied Hungary. And Soros may believe a strong Left can be a good barrier to resurgent ‘far-right’ movements.”
What this overlooks, of course, is that the Nazis were a movement of the Left, not the Right. Nazi was a contraction of the German words for “national socialist.”
In the open society of America, young George Soros arrived on Wall Street in 1956 with $5,000 and quickly demonstrated a singular genius for investing others’ money and his own. This “Hungarian Horatio Alger” of financial sorcery came to be called “the greatest money manager in the world” by satisfied clients of his Quantum Fund.
Soros was chief among the creators of the modern “hedge fund” through which investors are protected by diversified simultaneous bets for and against the economy in a variety of ways.
But Soros also made a fortune by high-stakes gambles such as currency speculation in the world economy. In 1992, for example, he wagered $10 billion that by concerted attack he could devalue the British Pound. He won, pocketed at least $1.1 billion profit in a single day, and ever since has been called “the man who broke the Bank of England.”
(By this act of economic rape upon ordinary British working class savings accounts, Soros repaid Britain for the generosity and help it gave to him as a struggling young immigrant with a broken leg.)
In the process of destroying the purchasing power of the British Pound, Soros dealt a political blow to the government of British Prime Minister John Major from which the Tory Party has yet to recover. This is the same kind of damage he hopes to inflict in 2004 on America’s Republican Party.
Businesspeople tend to admire Soros for his power and skill, wrote Andrew Leonard at Salon.com, and liberals tend to applaud his generosity to leftist causes. But what if it had been Osama bin Laden using financial machinations to break the Bank of England? Soros’ “life raises some troubling questions about the autonomy of capital in the era of globalization,” writes Leonard. “Make enough money, and you don’t have to obey anyone’s rules.”
Similar high-roller global financial machinations by Soros over the years have led to accusations that he caused the economic collapse in Asia in 1997 and, according to one anti-Semitic publication, the near-50 percent devaluation of the Russian Ruble in 1998.
Soros “was involved in the Mexican bailout with their President Ernesto Zedillo,” reported the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last July, adding, “Most recently, Soros worked on the Euro, pushing the U.S. dollar down to a near all-time low.” Soros has, in other words, caused you to pay more for every imported product you buy.
Soros’ 1998 book The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered called for more government controls to prevent abuses and shortsightedness by “amoral” multinational capitalists. In effect, Soros’ message was, “Stop me before I kill again!”
But he was not so sanguine in 2002, when a French court found him guilty of insider trading and fined Soros 2.2 million Euros (roughly $2 million). He told reporters he would appeal the verdict but as of yet has not, dismissing the court’s ruling as “a queer decision.” To this multi-billionaire, a $2 million fine is a trifle, a mere slap on the wrist.
Today Forbes Magazine ranks him the 28th richest person in the United States, with an estimated fortune worth $7 billion. This comes after Soros has given away an estimated $5 billion to causes ranging from the Solidarity Movement in Poland to Vaclav Havel’s dissident movement in Czechoslovakia and to Leftist groups in the United States (including the Democratic Party).
continued...
(When another eccentric named Ross Perot in 1992 bought his own political party and used it in a rumored secret scheme with Bill and Hillary Clinton to divide the vote and thereby conquer incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush, Perot was only the 44th richest American after making billions on government contracts. Bill and Hillary were rumored to have promised him all the computer contracts for their socialized medicine system, thereby making Perot the single richest man in America.)
Soros is not just a nominal capitalist made rich through Communist connections, as was Armand Hammer (who we now know delivered millions of dollars from Moscow to the Communist Party USA). Soros may dislike President Bush and American dominance in the world, but he generally prefers private institutions to government bureaucracies and favors local governments over the United Nations.
In his own eccentric way, Soros appears to be an opportunistic, misguided idealist whose warped, surrealistic childhood produced a warped view of society.
And now what Soros calls “the central focus of my life” is defeating President Bush, an undertaking he deems “a matter of life and death.”
“America, under Bush, is a danger to the world,” Soros told Laura Blumenfeld of the Washington Post. “Then he smiled,” she wrote, “’And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.’”
Neoconservatives in the Bush Administration are viewed by Soros as “a bunch of extremists guided by a crude form of social Darwinism.”
“When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans,” said Soros, likening President Bush to the Nazis and their slogans such as “Der Feind Hort mit,” “The enemy is listening.”
“Bush feels that on September 11th he was annointed by God,” Soros told Blumenfeld. “He’s leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence.”
Soros puts these arguments in a new book titled The Bubble of Global Supremacy, due out in January. His publisher PublicAffairs Press promises an “intensely critical analysis of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.” An excerpt appears in the December issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine.
Because he wants “regime change” in the United States and opposes our intervention in Iraq, Soros is supporting Howard Dean in particular and the more left-wing Democratic candidates in general.
But what does it say about Dean and the Democratic Party that they have sold their souls to this strange Euro-billionaire? George Soros advocates legalized marijuana, hates and boycotts Israel, is regarded by many as anti-Semitic, is a recently-convicted inside trader and global financial manipulator who seeks an end to American supremacy – that is, the global debasement and weakening of the United States?
Is this who American voters want as the puppet-master and power behind the throne directing foreign and domestic policies of the United States of America?
Indeed, will voters support a party that only months ago was screaming for campaign finance reform to prevent the rich from dominating our politics – but that now has rejected all such reform and instead sold itself to a single eccentric billionaire whose anti-American views resemble those of France?
Is this what Democrats now call democracy? Perhaps they should end the pretense and just rename themselves George Soros' Party. Or the Democratic Party and its candidates can reassert their integrity by denouncing George Soros and refusing to take or benefit from this oddball's money.
Mr. Ponte hosts national radio talk show Monday through Friday Noon-2 PM Eastern Time (9-11 AM Pacific Time) as well as on Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6 PM Pacific Time) and on Sundays 9 PM-Midnight Eastern Time (6-9 PM Pacific Time) on the Talk America network . Internet Audio worldwide is at TalkAmerica.com. The show's live call-in number is (888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.
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The phrase "Open Society" was coined by Karl Popper. Don't blame Popper, though, he's a decent philosopher. And a heck of a harmonica player to boot.
The Open Society Institute (OSI) is a private operating and grantmaking foundation based in New York City that serves as the hub of the Soros foundations network, a group of autonomous foundations and organizations in more than 50 countries. OSI and the network implement a range of initiatives that aim to promote open societies by shaping government policy and supporting education, media, public health, and human and women's rights, as well as social, legal, and economic reform. To diminish and prevent the negative consequences of globalization, OSI seeks to foster global open society by increasing collaboration with other nongovernmental organizations, governments, and international institutions.
TAB
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