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).
(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.
