Big-money radicals give to Democrats

For those who think that there is too much money in politics (and think most of it is Republican) there is just one word -- Soros. That is George Soros, the left-wing radical billionaire who has pledged to personally spend tens of millions of dollars to try to unseat George Bush in 2004. Defeating the Bush administration -- which he recklessly likened to Nazis and communists -- has become an obsessive focus of Soros life.

His recent $10 million contribution to the new Democrat activist group America Coming Together was the largest single donation from an individual in history. Soros has thus made himself a real power broker behind the Democratic Party. This has some political analysts concerned because Soros is not your average liberal Democrat. He's a powerful, extremist megalomaniac.

The Hungarian-born Soros, known as the ''Man who broke the Bank of England'' through his currency speculation, claims to be driven by ''delusions of grandeur.'' He has said that his ''goal is to become the conscience of the world'' and that he fancies himself ``some kind of God or an economic reformer like Keynes, or even better, like Einstein.''

Ironically, the Democratic Party is now using billionaires like Soros to pump millions of dollars of soft money into new ''independent political groups'' as a way to circumvent the spirit of the recent campaign-finance reform law that they fought so hard to pass.

The McCain-Feingold law (in effect immediately after the 2002 elections) was intended to ban unregulated ''soft money'' in political campaigns. This unlimited cash was funneled to political parties, not specific candidate campaigns. While it had no limits, it was accountable.

Yet Democrats considered this ''big special-interest'' money corrosive to the political process. Meanwhile, ''hard money'' refers to the regulated donations given directly to candidates, donations now capped at $2,000 per individual and required to be disclosed immediately. Now the Democratic Party prefers funneling new unlimited soft money into a slew of groups with no accountability.

Hypocritically, Soros also reportedly spent upwards of $15 million to help pass McCain-Feingold. His Open Society Institute has given large grants totaling nearly $7 million to groups such as Common Cause, Public Campaign and Center for Public Integrity with the stated goal to ``dramatically reduce the role of big special-interest money in American politics.''

But Soros has his own big special interests. He has been accused of ''destabilizing world currencies and wrecking the economies of nations.'' A French court found him guilty of insider trading and fined him $2.3 million in 2002. He has been called the ''Daddy Warbucks'' of drug legalization, spending more than $15 million initiatives pushing the issue.

Soros is not the only billionaire Democrat financier. Peter Lewis, chairman of the aptly named Progressive auto-insurance company appears to be matching Soros dollar for dollar. Lewis recently pledged $10 million to Americans Coming Together and matched a $2.5 million Soros pledge to the far-left group MoveOn.org.

MoveOn.org is so far left it opposed any U.S. military response after the terror attacks of 9/11, asking instead for a ``peaceful response to break the cycle of violence.''

Meanwhile, Steve Kirsch, who made his fortune when he sold his Internet company, Infoseek, to Disney also plans to jump on the anti-Bush, big-money bandwagon by giving heavily to groups such as MoveOn.org. Kirsch has already donated nearly $10 million to the Democrats.

Though Republicans opposed McCain-Feingold, and have raised considerable sums in legal hard money, they generally have been following both the letter and the spirit of the law banning soft money.

Until now, there was no GOP equivalent to the deliberate Democratic effort at undermining the new campaign-finance laws. Sadly, the Democrats have now taken the idea of ''big special-interest'' money in politics to a whole new level.

Paul Crespo is a public policy analyst and University of Miami adjunct faculty member.

To security in retirement, including a Social Security system that provides an inflation-proof base;

To affordable and comprehensive health care;

To a high quality education at any age, with income posing no hurdle to advancement;

To a clean and healthy environment in which pollution is no longer a threat;

To complete reproductive privacy;

A foreign and military agenda that is responsible, achieves goals that are shared by our global allies, and promotes international cooperation; and

The promotion of freedom, democracy, justice and peace in world affairs.

We must invest in our children, to provide the best education system in the world, including:

Pre-school for every child.
After-school programs for every child.

http://www.progressivemajority.org/values/principles.asp

Progressive Majority's Advisory Committee

Progressive Majority's Advisory Committee is comprised of incumbent lawmakers who are currently waging the tough fights against the Bush Administration and the conservatives who control Congress. They are instrumental in helping us identify progressive leaders throughout the United States to run for office, and they advise us on the issues that are emerging as critical battlegrounds in the Congress and in the States.

Members:

Senator Jon Corzine
Senator Patty Murray
Representative Tammy Baldwin
Representative Sherrod Brown
Representative John Conyers, Jr.
Representative Peter DeFazio
Representative Rosa DeLauro
Representative Lane Evans
Representative Bob Filner
Representative Barney Frank
Representative Raúl Grijalva
Representative Luis Gutierrez
Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr.
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee
Representative Barbara Lee
Representative Betty McCollum
Representative George Miller
Representative Jerrold Nadler
Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton
Representative John Olver
Representative Nancy Pelosi
Representative Martin Sabo
Representative Jan Schakowsky
Representative Hilda Solis
Representative Pete Stark
Representative Chris Van Hollen
Representative Maxine Waters
Representative Diane Watson
Representative Henry Waxman
Representative Lynne Woolsey

Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left: Hillary Clinton and the "Third Way"***……….If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?

What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.

But you never had the honesty-then or now-to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual-both of which you despise.

It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.

Despite the homage contemporary leftists pay to post-modernist conceits, despite their belated and half-hearted display of critical sentiment towards Communist regimes, they are very much the ideological heirs of Stalinist progressives, who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves as civil libertarian opponents of McCarthy and victims of a political witch-hunt. (Only the dialectically gifted can even begin to follow the logic involved.)

To appreciate the continuity of communism in the mentality of the left, consider how many recent Hollywood promotions of the industry Reds and how many academic apologies for Stalinist crimes (in fact, the vast majority of recent academic texts on the subject) have been premised on the Machiavellian calculations and Hegelian sophistries I have just described.

Naturally, today's leftists are smart enough to distance themselves from Soviet Communism. But the Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev was already a critic of Stalin forty years ago. Did his concessions make him less of a Communist? Or more?

On the other hand, conservative misunderstanding of the left is only in part a product of the left's own deceits. It also reflects conservatives' inability to understand the religious nature of the progressive faith and the power of its redemptive idea. For instance, I'm often asked by conservatives about the continuing role and influence of the Communist Party, since they observe quite correctly the pervasive presence of so many familiar totalitarian ideas in our academic and political culture. Though still around and sometimes influential in the left, the Communist Party has been a minor player for nearly fifty years. How can there be a communist left (small "c" of course) without a Communist Party?

The short answer is that it was not the Communist Party that made the left, but the (small 'c') communist Idea. It is the idea, as old as the Tower of Babel, that humanity can build a highway to Heaven. It is the idea of returning to an Earthly Paradise, a garden of social harmony and justice. It is the idea that inspires Jewish radicals and liberals of a tikkun olam, a healing of the cosmic order. It is the Enlightenment illusion of the perfectibility of man. And it is the siren song of the serpent in Eden: "Eat of this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you shall be as God."

The intoxicating vision of a social redemption achieved by Them-this is what creates the left, and makes the believers so self-righteous.

And it did so long before Karl Marx. It is the vision of this redemption that continues to inspire and animate them despite the still-fresh ruins of their Communist dreams.

…………..And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.

Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left-by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.

Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them.***

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