Soros blasts Hastert over drug allegation (crybaby Soros says his "character's" defamed)

George Soros, the billionaire financier who has given millions of dollars to liberal and Democratic-leaning advocacy groups, launched a blistering counterattack on Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) yesterday, saying he should be “ashamed” of allegations he made Sunday.

Hastert had suggested that Soros’s wealth came from criminals, and in a letter Soros challenged the Speaker to substantiate his claims or publicly apologize.

In a tartly worded demand faxed to Hastert, Soros wrote: “Your recent comments implying that I am receiving funds from drug cartels are not only untrue, but also deeply offensive. You do a discredit to yourself and to the dignity of your office by engaging in these dishonest smear tactics. You should be ashamed.

“I must respectfully insist that you either substantiate these claims — which you cannot do because they are false — or publicly apologize for attempting to defame my character and damage my reputation.”

The spat began in an interview on Fox News with anchor Chris Wallace, in which Hastert said, “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where — if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from. …”

Asked if Soros had earned money from drug cartels, Hastert added, “Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years — George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there. … I’m saying I don’t know where groups — could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know.”

Soros, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant, earned billions from investments and currency speculation. In 1992, he bet $10 billion that the British central bank would devalue the pound. The gamble paid off and Soros earned $650 million that year. Soros Fund Management LLC was hammered in the late 1990s and Soros has since retired, although he remains chairman.

In 1993, he started the Open Society Institute, which promotes democracy in Eastern Europe and around the world. He began funding programs to reform the U.S. justice system several years later. As part of that effort, he has funded marijuana-legalization referendums in California and Arizona. Besides the Open Society Institute, Soros is also a major contributor to the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based operation that monitors violence in global hot spots.

But he is most widely known in this election season as a big contributor to MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank, and America Coming Together, a so-called 527 political outfit that is exempt from limits on campaign contributions.

John Feehery, a spokesman for Hastert, said, “George Soros has an agenda. He supports the legalization of drugs, and the statement stands. [Hastert] has been fighting Soros on this for years because it is a character flaw. The Speaker thinks legalizing drugs is wrong.”

Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) say that no company official in Soros’s investment fund is involved in a criminal proceeding or a party to a civil proceeding.

Feehery cited no evidence and would not comment on whether Hastert would ask law enforcement to investigate.

Soros told The Washington Post last year: “America, under Bush, is a danger to the world. … And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”

Conservatives have sought to discredit Soros by attacking his foreign and Jewish roots and his support of liberal causes, and by saying that his currency speculation actually hurt the very people he claims to want to help.

“No other single person represents the symbol and the substance of globalism more than this Hungarian-born descendant of Shylock. He is the embodiment of the Merchant from Venice,” wrote GOPAC, an organization that helps elect GOP candidates, on its website last year.

In William Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice,” Shylock was the Jewish banker whose venality would not stop him from cutting human flesh to repay loans.

Tony Blankley, the editorial-page editor of The Washington Times, said Soros is “a robber baron, he’s a pirate capitalist, and he’s a reckless man” in an interview on Fox News.

Democrats were quick to criticize Hastert’s latest suggestion. “That’s totally absurd. It fits a pattern of simply throwing out whatever slander occurs to them,” the Republicans, said Matt Bennett, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee in New York. “This is what the Republican leadership does. They lie about people.”

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Why You Don't Want To
Take George Soros's Money
October 29, 2003

Recent reports that mega-speculator George Soros is putting millions of dollars into funding think-tanks for the Democratic Party (Center for American Progress, and America Coming Together are two notable recipients), in a not-so-veiled effort to buy up the party, should raise the question: Just how does George Soros make his money? Years of investigation by LaRouche's associates have answered that question in grisly detail: Soros's money comes from impoverishment of the poor countries against whose currencies he speculates, and from deadly mind-destroying, terrorism-funding drugs.
We provide below a brief dossier on the low-lights of Soros's history of theft and drug-promotion.* If, after reading this, you still want to take Soros's money, at least have the decency to put the truth on your website: "I support drug-pushing. I'm pushing cocaine."

SOROS THE SPECULATOR:
Hungarian-born George Soros has been involved in financial speculation since the late 1960s, at which time he established the Quantum Fund, N.V., which manages the money of leading British and Swiss financiers, including the British Royal Household. The Quantum Fund is a private investment body called a hedge fund, which is headquartered in one of the leading centers of money-laundering internationally, the Netherland Antilles.
1990: With the opening of the East Bloc, Soros moves into Poland and Russia, with "advice" for devastating economic "shock therapy," to be administered by his associate, economist Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs' major claim to fame was his "rescue" of the Bolivian economy, by shutting down industry, and building up the cocaine trade.

1992: In this year, Soros's speculation made big news, as he pulled off major attacks on the currencies of Great Britain and Italy, after which he bragged about earning more than $1 billion by hurting the currencies of these nations.

1993: U.S. Congressman Henry Gonzalez (D-Texas) called for an investigation of Soros's manipulation of foreign exchange markets, including the possibility that the same measures used against Great Britain would be used against the United States.

1995: The manager of Soros's Management Fund, through which he controls the Quantum Fund, took out an ad in the U.S. press, which urged the Congress (then controlled by Newt Gingrich), to proceed with its budget cuts, despite the possibility of a budget impasse (train wreck), because such austerity was absolutely required for the financial markets.

1995: The Italian courts, in response to a legal brief by associates of LaRouche in Italy, launched an investigation of Soros's role in the speculative attack on the lira in 1992. The suit was dismissed in 1999.

1997: Soros's hedge funds launch a speculative attack against the Thai baht, in a move widely credited with triggering the great Asian financial crisis of 1997, which destroyed the economies of Indonesia, and many other nations.

SOROS THE DRUG PUSHER
1992-1994: Soros creates the Open Society Institute, and through that, both the Drug Policy Foundation and the Lindesmith Center, funneling more than $15 million for their activities, which focus heavily on changing drug laws, toward legalization.

1996: Ballot initiatives in favor of "medical marijuana" in California and Arizona, funded lavishly by Soros's front groups, are passed. These were the front end of a campaign that encompassed up to 25 states.

1997: Soros's Drug Policy Foundation pours money into a campaign to legalize euthanasia in Australia.
Meanwhile, in Ibero-America, Soros becomes a leading finacier of the drive to legalize cocaine. He bankrolls a meeting on Oct. 8-9, 1997 in the Colombian city of Medellin, for the purpose of pushing drug legalization, at the same time that Human Rights Watch/Americas, another major beneficiary of his funds, attacked the national forces deployed against the drug cartels as "human rights violators." It should be noted that the pro-drug guerrillas in Colombia are known to be bloody-thirsty kidnappers, and murderers, who terrorize the nation.
In the United States, Soros worked with the pro-drug Mayor of Baltimore Kurt Schmoke, to promote "progressive" drug policies, including needle-exchange programs. Soros "donated" $25 million to spreading illegal drugs in the city.

1998: Another Soros-related group, the Andean Council of Coca Leaf Producers, begins to carry out an armed revolt in Bolivia, under the banner "Coca or Death." The Council was established by a European group called Coca 95, whose chief financier was Soros, and whose directors call for free trade in every narcotic on the face of the earth: cocaine, heroin, marijuana and synthetics.
Soros's Lindesmith Center in June of this year, issues an Open Letter to Kofi Annan calling for a "truly open" dialogue on illegal drugs -- claiming that clamping down on them is worse than drug abuse itself, and demanding that legalization be put on the table.

2000: Soros moves both through Human Rights Watch, and direct funding of the Toledo Presidential campaign, to topple the successful anti-drug government of Alberto Fujimori in Peru. EIR forecasts that the new Soros-backed government will move to put anti-drug fighters in prison, and bring back the murderous Sendero Luminoso -- which it has done.

2001: In June, the Wall Street Journal gives major coverage to the decision by Soros, along with billionaires Peter Lewis and John Sperling, to kick in at least $10 million for the 2002 elections, where they will target Florida, Ohio, and Michigan for decriminalization referenda.
Soros also funds a drive for decriminalization of marijuana in Canada.

2002: Soros funded a referendum on the Nevada ballot, which called for the legalization of marijuana use, and would {mandate} that the state begin growing and retail distribution of the drug to anyone over 21 years of age. The effort was run by a Washington, D.C.-based group, the Marijuana Policy Project, which receives direct funding from Soros, through the Drug Policy Foundation, which has received more than $15 million from Soros in recent years. The Drug Policy Foundation recently merged with the Lindesmith Center, a project of Soros's Open Society Institute tax-exempt foundation. The new, unified entity, the Drug Policy Alliance, is run by Soros employee Dr. Ethan Nadelman. Soros has poured at least $25 million into various dope legalization schemes over the past five years, and has vowed to substantially increase his bankrolling of the dope lobby efforts.
The Marijuana Policy Project was launched by a former official of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Legislation (NORML), the oldest of the drug legalization fronts now under the Soros umbrella.

* - For documentation on Soros's drug and money operations, and much more, see EIR's Special Report "The true story of Soros the Golem," from April 1997, and the website www.larouchepub.com.

-30-

$oreA$$ and his $uper Rich Lunatic Lib buddy, Peter Lewis, the founder/owner of Progressive insurance have been pushing for turning drug laws for decades. Here is a petition drive during the Clinton administration about this>

http://www.ourdrugfreekids.com/article03.htm

Drug Free Kids' PETITION TO STOP DRUG LEGALIZATION

We, the undersigned, herein petition Mr. George Soros to stop funding and/or promoting projects that undermine the efforts of parents and others to prevent drug use by America's youth. The various projects of pro-legalization groups funded by Mr. Soros and others have captured the fascination of the media and are sending a "Drugs are OK" message to all children. This has resulted in a burgeoning epidemic of drug use by youth which now includes high school heroin use and overdose deaths.

Parents have been funding the anti-drug fight out of their own meager budgets for many years. Mr. Soros has outfunded us by millions of dollars and the pro-drug groups he is backing are now able to mislead the public in slick campaigns that have already resulted in drug legalization in two states. (See Reader's Digest, April, 1998, "High On A Lie" FOLLOWING THIS PETITION.) Minds or societies that are enslaved by drugs are neither free nor open. We ask that Soros redirect his money to prevention and treatment.

Mail your signed petitions to Drug Free Kids, P.O. Box 60865, Washington, D.C. 20011. We will deliver them to President Clinton to take to Mr. Soros. Children are invited to sign!

February 2003

George Soros: A Bridge to Radicalism

Soros Funds a Leftwing Network Addressing Media, Legal and Social Issues

By Neil Hrab

Capital Research Center

capitalresearch.org

George Soros, the international financier, is at present caught up in an insider-trading scandal in France. There’s no clear proof that Soros is culpable for the stock shenanigans being investigated by Paris authorities. But the news represents one of the few times when his name has received unfavorable press mention. Soros is much better known for his philanthropy.

In 2000 his private grantmaking foundation, the Open Society Institute (OSI), distributed over $103 million to American nonprofits. OSI is only one component of the Soros foundations network. This network, covering 50 nations, includes several other foundations, network programs supporting them, and various international initiatives. Including OSI, the Soros foundations network spent $453 million in 2001.

Some believe Soros’ giving marks him as a billionaire with a conscience. “Mr. Democracy” is how he is described in the American Bar Association Journal. Soros, a currency speculator whose net worth is estimated to be more than $1 billion, is called the man who could “bring more change to [America’s] justice system and the [American] legal profession than anyone since Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and other Founding Fathers got together to write the Constitution.”

The effusive ABA statement reflects Soros’ philanthropic ambition to underwrite radical social and legal changes in America. Like the Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur and Turner foundations, Soros’ Open Society Institute lavishes donations on liberal political advocacy groups and activists of the radical Left.

Soros’ support for left-wing causes is curious. Born in Hungary in 1930, his education and early life experiences surely made him aware of the perils of government control and collectivist ideology. Soros survived World War II and briefly studied in London, where he became acquainted with Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994), the man he now regards as his intellectual mentor. Popper, a philosopher who wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), a treatise famous for its rebuttal of the political philosophies of Plato, Hegel and Marx, was eager to contrast the secrecy and brutality of totalitarianism to an “open society” based on freedom and human flourishing. Soros is now a naturalized American citizen.

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Read this month's Foundation Watch.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:eUFUl0CLCD8J:www.capitalresearch.org/news/news.asp%3FID%3D83

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