Posted on 01/31/2011 8:31:58 AM PST by Qbert
Palm Springs, California -At the front gates of the Rancho Las Palmas resort, a few hundred liberals rallied Sunday against "corporate greed" and polluters. They chanted for the arrest of billionaires Charles and David Koch, and their ire was also directed at the other free market-oriented businessmen invited here by the Koch brothers to discuss free markets and electoral strategies. Billionaires poisoning our politics was the central theme of the protests. But nothing is quite as it seems in modern politics: The protest's organizer, the nonprofit Common Cause, is funded by billionaire George Soros.
Common Cause has received $2 million from Soros's Open Society Institute in the past eight years, according to grant data provided by Capital Research Center. Two panelists at Common Cause's rival conference nearby -- President Obama's former green jobs czar, Van Jones, and blogger Lee Fang -- work at the Center for American Progress, which was started and funded by Soros but, as a 501(c)4 nonprofit "think tank," legally conceals the names of its donors.
In other words, money from billionaire George Soros and anonymous, well-heeled liberals was funding a protest against rich people's influence on politics.
When Politico reporter Ken Vogel pointed out that Soros hosts similar "secret" confabs, CAP's Fang responded on Twitter: "don't you think there's a very serious difference between donors who help the poor vs. donors who fund people to kill government, taxes on rich?"
In less than 140 characters, Fang had epitomized the myopic liberal view of money in politics: Conservative money is bad, and linked to greed, while liberal money is self-evidently philanthropic.
Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker magazine, for instance, that the Kochs' anti-regulation, anti-bailout, low-tax agenda "dovetail[s] with the brothers' corporate interest." Of Soros, Mayer asserted flatly "none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests."
This is the Obama campaign's tune, too. While decrying Republican campaign contributions in an Obama fundraising e-mail, someone at Organizing for America apparently got self-conscious about the irony and tagged the e-mail with a subject line saying: "Our Donations Are Different."
So, is Soros' money really different from the Kochs' money?
On one level, they're equivalent: They are rich people using their wealth to advance their favored policies.
But the core CAP claim -- that the Soroses and Peter Lewises of the world are trying to help the poor, while the Kochs are not -- is ungrounded.
The Kochs argue, with plenty of evidence, that economic freedom and the prosperity it yields are the best things a government can offer to the poor.
And the accompanying liberal claim -- that pro-free market donations boost the donors' profits while pro-big government donations don't -- is also false.
First off -- and this was the point of a talk I gave Sunday at the Koch conference -- many of the industrialists in the audience could profit more through regulations and subsidies than they could through the free market. Some oil executives, for example, have supported California's strict refinery regulations because they kept out competitors. Natural gas companies like Enron have backed cap and trade because it hurt oil and coal. As for bankers -- the Wall Street bailouts made it clear that big government is their mother's milk.
Second, until Soros discloses all the investments and short positions of all his funds and all his personal wealth, it's not possible to conclude whether his advocacy is motivated by public interest or personal gain. Is he short coal? Has he invested in GE's Greenhouse Gas Services, which, dealing in greenhouse gas credits, depends on a cap-and-trade law in order to be profitable?
We know that other liberal philanthropists use their wealth to advance big-government positions that enrich them. Take Warren Buffett, that relentless champion of the estate tax. His support for a high inheritance tax could be civic-mindedness, but it could also be related to his life insurance holdings and his tendency to buy up successful family businesses forced to sell out by the death tax -- that's how he got the Buffalo News.
Finally, while Soros money and Koch money are superficially equivalent, there's a crucial distinction. If we take both sides at their word, Soros and other liberal donors spend in order to impose their preferences on others while the Kochs and other free-market donors spend in an effort to be left alone to buy and sell with willing parties.
The moral difference is this: Only one side is trying to compel others to conform to its preferences.
Consider how each side profits from its favored policies: The Kochs benefit if government takes less of their profit. To be sure, they could pocket the difference and not make charitable contributions to the poor. In moral terms, that would be selfish or just plain greedy.
Soros and his wealthy supporters profit from the government taxing or threatening to tax the children of a business owner. That's the moral equivalent of mugging.
--- DISCLOSURE: I was not paid for my Palm Springs talk, but in the past, for editing, mentoring, speaking, and the like, Koch-affiliated non-profits have paid me -- approximately $3,000 over the course of my decade in Washington.
Give me the Koch brothers any day over that shmendrick George Soros
The left acts like the brothers are paying us to support their pet causes.
Soros on the other hand actually does pay for media and protests.
Soros is proving...once a Nazi, always a Nazi.
Were the Koch’s indicted for collapsing a country’s currency?! /s
“Soros indicted by France had to flea the country for collapsing their currency”
“He robs from rich western countries, and uses his profits to rob even more savagely from the East, under the cloak of “philanthropy.” His goal is to loot wherever and however he can. Soros has been called the master manipulator of “hit-and-run capitalism.”
“what Soros means by “open,” is a society that allows him and his financial predator friends to loot the resources and precious assets of former Warsaw Pact economies.”
“Soros is the visible side of a vast and nasty secret network of private financial interests, controlled by the leading aristocratic and royal families of Europe, centered in the British House of Windsor. This network, called by its members the Club of Isles, was built upon the wreckage of the British Empire after World War II.”
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/engdahl-soros.html
Soros is wanted for economic terrorism in at least one southeast asian nation.
According to knowledgeable U.S. and European investigators, Soros’s circle includes indicted metals and commodity speculator and fugitive Marc Rich of Zug, Switzerland and Tel Aviv; secretive Israeli arms and commodity dealer Shaul Eisenberg, and “Dirty Rafi” Eytan, both linked to the financial side of the Israeli Mossad; and, the family of Jacob Lord Rothschild.
Soros’s relation to the Rothschild finance circle represents no ordinary or casual banking connection. It goes a long way to explain the extraordinary success of a mere private speculator, and Soros’s uncanny ability to “gamble right” so many times in such high-risk markets. Soros has access to the “insider track” in some of the most important government and private channels in the world.
“indicted by France had to flea the country”
Might be a good idea to stay out of cheap French motels, anyway;)
“Breathtaking hypocrisy”
Yep. If he supposedly cares so much about the poor...why isn’t he out redistributing his own wealth to show the rest of us “ignorant” folks how it’s supposed to be done?...
The first shots in the Obama Revolution, the highly unlikely campaign that elevated an inexperienced former Chicago community organizer born in Hawaii and raised in Indonesia into the Oval Office, were fired at the Long Island Southampton beach house of billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros.
It was at a highly secretive meeting in the summer of 2002 that Soros, Morton Halperin, (the director of Soros’ Open Society Institute), John Podesta (the former Clinton White House chief of staff), Jeremy Rosner (a former speech writer for Bill Clinton), Robert Boorstin (a Democrat strategist and also a former speech writer for Clinton) and Carl Pope (a Democrat strategist and environmentalist) met to draft a plan to defeat President George W. Bush in the presidential election of 2004.
Ultimately, Soros would spend approximately $26 million of his own money in a failed mission to rid America of President Bush. It was through this effort, however, that Soros gave birth to a much more ominous cause, the “Shadow Party.” And the Shadow Party would eventually become the Obama Administration. And George Soros would become the master puppeteer for the President of the United States and the leader of the free world.
Without Soros and the Shadow Party, Barack Obama would be, at best, a senator from Illinois attending social gatherings with domestic terrorists Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and sitting in the pews of black liberation theologist Reverend Jeremiah Wright. At worse, he’d be an unremarkable and unheard of state senator. Instead, Barack Obama is the President of the United States.
Only July 7, 2003, Soros, Halperin, Podesta and Harold Ickes, (deputy chief of staff for the Clinton White House, money man, and dirty trickster) founded the American Majority Institute just three blocks from the White House to be the cornerstone organization of the Shadow Party. A few months later, they changed the name to the Center for American Progress under which it is known today. The organization describes itself as “a nonpartisan research and educational institute” aimed at “developing a long-term vision of a progressive America” and “providing a forum to generate new progressive ideas and policy proposals.”
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38917
Capitalists, GOING GALT?
Might be a good idea to stay out of cheap French motels, anyway;)
No, that's bedbugs!
It was the same in Germany and Italy. Before the fascists took complete political power, they had to destroy the conservative investment class. The historical paralleles to what is happening in the USA are astounding.The European fascists concentrated on taking over energy and arms industries. Many of the conservative investment class had to leave their homes and move abroad. Those who did not were disenfranchised, the same way that the Soros fascists are trying to do to the Koch family. he coservative class jews were evetually put in ovens, those who did not escape abroad.The ultimate solution. And it will now be sought in the USA using DHS, TSA, FEMA, and the ACORN crowd, as well as bamas shadow militar forces which are being set up within our military infrastructire now. The first purge of the State Department is about to tae place, with Obama calling allthe ambasadors home for a "conference." Many will be asked to step down and be replaced with American Muslims.
And all we see is the tip of the iceberg.The left is emboldened by its successes which have not even been reported,so emboldened they are going public.
The unions will be used to accomplish the disenfrachisement of the conservative investment class.Its already happened at GM and Chrysler.
If these idiot liberal fascists were lined up and shot, I could care less.It will come to war with them eventually.Why not hit them while they are weak?
The capitalist system has been so successful, it has raised the living standards across the whole world, and we still have a ways to go. Even the Chinese use the approach for their own ends. The economic problems in Egypt occur because Capitalism has not been allowed to work there. SOROS wants exclusive power for his fascist friends and World Wide Caliphate fascists. He should not be breathing Gods good air. He will cause the death of millions and bring an era of untold suffering around the world.
When the Republicas take back oour nation, SOROS should be declared personna non grata in the USA, along with his money. He served the Nazis during WWII.
Look on and weep, or get uncivil and do something.
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