SOROS:The Man Behind Kerry

[Guest guest]

The Man Who Would Be Kingmaker, Part II

By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Shawn Macomber

FrontPageMagazine.com | October 29, 2004

 

"Soros knows a better way - armed with a few billion dollars, a

handful of NGOs and a nod and a wink from the US State Department,

it is perfectly possible to topple foreign governments that are bad

for business, seize a country's assets, and even to get thanked for

your benevolence afterwards. Soros has done it."

"If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies

with me from childhood, which I felt I had to control, otherwise

they might get me in trouble," Soros once wrote. When asked to

elaborate on that passage by The Independent, Soros said, "It is a

sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of God, the

creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I

began to live it out."

 

(To read Part I,

http://www.frontpagemag.com/articles/readarticle.asp?ID=15710&p=1)

 

THE AMORAL ANTI-CAPITALIST CAPITALIST

 

Democrats looking to George Soros as a moral compass may want to

check to see which direction the needle is pointing. The billionaire

might actually be able to help them out on that count: In the mid-

1990s he posited that there was "something both phony and pompous

about a financial speculator inveighing against the moral crisis of

our age."

 

Much has been written about Soros' vast fortune. Indeed, the man is

a visionary in the world of business. Since his arrival on Wall

Street in 1956 at age 26, Soros has remained consistently ahead of

the curve. A shrewd observer of gaps in the international financial

scene, he saw opportunities in postwar Europe that others completely

missed. He became involved in the embryonic stages of the

globalization of markets trading international securities. The more

successful he became the more cash he had on hand. The more cash he

had on hand the more influence he had over events.

 

At a certain point, Soros stopped reacting to situations and began

instigating them. His consolidated financial power has always been

used to benefit himself, of course, even when that meant crashing

the markets of entire countries, indeed, sometimes entire

hemispheres. In 1969 Soros started the Quantum Fund to trade

securities at higher volumes, with around $5 million. By the 1990s

the fund was worth nearly $6 billion. Governments and powerful

individuals alike began taking heed of his every move. Institutional

Investor magazine called Soros "The world's greatest money manager."

 

On September 16, 1992, Soros made his fund a cool billion dollars in

a single day betting against the British sterling, helping to usher

in what the Brits refer to as Black Wednesday. On that day, British

citizens saw their currency lose 20 percent of its value. Trying to

stave off the challenge to its currency, the British government had

borrowed heavily before finally accepting defeat and allowing the

devaluation of the pound. Soros was dubbed the Man Who Broke the

Bank of England, a designation in which he seemed to take perverse

pride.

 

Perhaps what is most interesting about the episode, considering

Soros' recent professions of moral outrage at the Bush economic

plan, is his blasé attitude toward social mores in business. "If I

abstain from certain actions because of moral scruples then I cease

to be an effective speculator," Soros told the London Guardian

shortly after the incident. "I have not even a shadow of remorse for

making a profit out of the devaluation of the pound." Pushed

further, Soros gave an example. "Let's suppose speculation went on

to push the franc," he said. "That would be wrong and bad. But it

wouldn't stop me."

 

Later on 60 Minutes, when asked whether he felt any complicity in

the financial collapses in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan or

Russia, Soros was similarly blunt. "I think I have been blamed for

everything," he said. "I am basically there to make money. I cannot

and do not look at the social consequences of what I do." A few

minutes later, he reiterated the point in even stronger language. "I

don't feel guilty because I am engaged in an amoral activity which

is not meant to have anything to do with guilt," he said. Worse was

Soros' contention that, despite the fact that a single letter from

him to the Financial Times recommending a 25 percent devaluation of

the country's currency sent Russia into an economic tailspin, "I am

actually trying to do the right thing."

 

Well, try harder, George. You've plunged half the world into

depression to line your own pocket.

 

Soros weeks later remained unrepentant about the havoc he'd wreaked,

going so far as to explain how the "instability" he'd caused worked

to his advantage:

 

"The net effect is a breakdown of the system, instability, and a

negative effect on the economy, the size of which we don't know, but

it could be very, very serious. I mean, Europe is going to go into a

very serve recession. Business is practically collapsing in Germany,

also very bad in France. … Instability is always bad. It may be bad –

it may be good for a few people like me who are instability

analysts, but it's really bad for the economy." And when the economy

suffers, society suffers too. How, then, does this sit with his

claim of working to better the situation of each individual and the

greater, "open" society.

 

More recently Soros has been very publicly betting against the

dollar. In an interview with CNBC last May, Soros explained, "I now

have a short position against the dollar … we continue to sell the

U.S. dollar against the euro, the Canadian dollar, the New Zealand

dollar and gold." A real patriot, hell-bent on making cash off yet

another market crash – ours. Could this be a part of the Democrats'

2004 strategy? Journalist Richard Poe believes it could be:

 

"In view of the catastrophes Mr. Soros has inflicted on so many

foreign lands, his sudden rise to prominence in U.S. politics

deserves closer inspection," Poe writes. "Bellicose charges of vote-

rigging and calls for UN intervention such as we have heard lately

from high-ranking Democrats fall strangely on American ears. Yet,

for George Soros, such overheated rhetoric constitutes business as

usual. The Democrat strategy taking shape in America this year

strongly resembles a `velvet revolution' in the making. Every piece

of the puzzle has fallen into place. Only the exact time and nature

of the final provocation – the signal for action – remains unknown."

 

>From a purely cold-hearted perspective, this all might be kosher.

But now that Soros is a billionaire, his sudden pangs of conscience

over the role of capitalism in the U.S. seem a bit too convenient

and contrived to help foster the hero image he is so obviously

attempting to create for himself. "I am not so optimistic about

capitalism," he told Charlie Rose. "It is built on false

foundations." Then where, one wonders, did all of Soros' cash come

from? He claims he is no "neo-Marxist," but his writings throughout

the 1990s have certainly had that flavor. He has declared himself,

for example, "at odds with the latter-day apostles of laissez faire"

and, further, doubts the markets' ability to allocate goods properly.

 

"I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire

capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is

endangering our open and democratic society," Soros, the thirty-

eighth-richest man in the world, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in

1997. "The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer

the communist but the capitalist threat." Later in the same article

Soros writes, "Laissez-faire ideology … is just as much a perversion

of supposedly scientific verities as Marxism-Leninism is." In his

more recent book The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros asserts

that the Communist doctrine failed "only because the free enterprise

model has been pursued in a less dogmatic, extremist way than the

Communist one."

 

At one point in The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros laments

that "international income distribution is practically nonexistent."

Haughty words from a man with a bank account larger than the GNP of

some Third World countries. If the rich getting richer pains Soros

so, why not go ahead and stop accumulating massive amounts of money

by raiding the treasuries of entire nations and making them poor?

 

"It is exactly because I have been successful in the marketplace

that I can afford to advocate these values," Soros said candidly in

Soros on Soros. "I am the classic limousine liberal."

 

Nevertheless, Soros blames capitalism for the coarsening of American

culture. He apparently is the only one able to handle wealth

properly. The rest of us savages couldn't be trusted with his

fortune:

 

"Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as

the criterion of value," Soros writes in The Capitalist

Threat. "What is more expensive is considered better. The value of a

work of art can be judged by the price it fetches. People deserve

respect and admiration because they are rich. [Why does Soros think

people respect him???] What used to be a medium of exchange has

usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationship

postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have

turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in

principles. Society has lost its anchor."

 

Tough talk for the man who also has boasted, "I cannot and do not

look at the social consequences of what I do." The word hypocrite

doesn't even begin to describe what Soros is involved in here.

Schizophrenia may come closer.

 

Although widely credited as the penultimate example of an anti-

communist, Soros has chafed at the term in the past. In fact, Soros

told the New York Times in 1990, "I feel more comfortable with

Soviet intellectuals than I do with American businessmen." Soros

also complained to The New Yorker in 1995 about a newspaper that had

had the gall to call him an anti-communist in the late 1980s. "It

was highly embarrassing and damaging to me, because I had a

foundation in China, where I said I was a supporter of the Open Door

Policy," Soros said. "`I'm not an anti-communist,' I said to them.

So you would have to say different things in different countries."

 

Soros was also no fan of the Reagan administration's hard-line

stance against communism. "Anti-communism as it is professed and

practiced by the Reagan administration runs a great risk," Soros

wrote in the Financial Times in 1984. "If we interfere in the

internal politics of countries within our orbit in order to prevent

them from falling into the Communist orbit, we must deny them the

privilege of choosing their own form of government."

 

This is interesting in hindsight, what with Soros proudly taking

credit for overthrowing regimes and – in his own words –

proudly "meddling in the affairs" of other nations. Soros goes on in

the same article to try and foment fear and mistrust in the economy,

writing that the only way to find an "alternative to economic and

political calamity in 1985" required "a thorough revision of U.S.

economic and foreign policy." Soros went so far as to repeat the age-

old mantra of the far left that communist nations failed

economically not because of ideology, but because of U.S. hegemonic

ambitions, accusing the Reagan administration of developing "a new

form of economic imperialism" to the detriment of the rest of the

world: "Under the present arrangements we are … denying them

[communist countries] economic prosperity," Soros wrote.

 

His statement is eerily similar to what Osama bin Laden and the rest

of the Islamist, anti-American lobby is claiming today. For example,

in bin Laden's so-called "Open Letter to America" he wrote: "You

steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your

international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed

the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the

world." These two men who use vast wealth to influence world events

are not so far apart in thought.

 

Thank God George Soros didn't get his way in the 1980s; otherwise we

might still be waiting for communism to collapse. We now know that

strength brought us peace, and tax cuts and deregulation brought us

hitherto unknown prosperity before the dawn of the 1990s.

 

"Insofar as there is a dominant belief in our society today, it is

the belief in the magic of the marketplace," Soros wrote in The

Capitalist Threat.

 

Not so fast, wrote Robert Samuelson in a retort published in

Newsweek magazine. "If that were so, governments everywhere would be

shrinking radically," he wrote. "They aren't." In fact, Samuelson

said, in most rich democracies, "the central problem of the

political economy is the reverse of what Soros says. It is not how

to curb rampaging markets. It is how to maintain a large welfare

state without suffocating a productive economy."

 

With millions of people's fates riding on his every whim, here is

one of Soros' secrets of finance: "You know the reason he changes

his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts

killing him," his son told biographer Michael Kaufman. "It has

nothing to do with reason. He literally goes into a spasm, and it's

this early warning sign."

 

UNDER WRAPS

 

Of course, we'll have to take Soros' word for whatever he's doing,

since, for most of their existence, his hedge funds operated

overseas outside the purview of the Securities and Exchange

Commission. "We are not registered with the Securities and Exchange

Commission," Soros acknowledged on 60 Minutes in 1998. "We find it

more convenient to operate without it."

 

"So in some ways, it's to escape regulation?" reporter Steve Kroft

asked. To which Soros brazenly replied, "Yeah, that's right."

 

Soros could not even join the board of his own Quantum Fund because

he was an American citizen. If the fund were actually run by him it

would be subject to U.S. laws on insider trading and taxes. As an

offshore fund, Quantum avoids the Investment Company Act, which,

according to economics writer Andrew Tobias, "severely restricts the

ability of funds to sell short or to make big undiversified bets –

betting half the fund's assets on the collapse of some foreign

currency, say. Offshore fund shareholders are not subject to U.S.

taxation, though their American fund managers are. Some Americans do

invest in offshore funds, but they must perjure themselves to do so.

Many use foreign trusts, with non-U.S. in-laws or non-U.S.

institutions as administrators."

 

Doesn't quite sound aboveboard, does it? Investment lore says Soros

started offshore because in the beginning only people outside the

United States would invest in his fund, but that doesn't quite jibe

with the reality of today. It is clear Soros is strictly attempting

to avoid American investment law with his funds these days. Take

Quantum Realty, his one attempt at a U.S.-based investment house,

for which Soros was given assurances "at high levels" that non-U.S.

investors would be exempt from U.S. taxes. "Politics then demanded

this decision be reversed after the fund had been operating for over

a year," Tobias writes. "It had to be disbanded to protect the non-

U.S. investors."

 

The offshore fund faced little serious regulation, leading one of

Soros' colleagues to explain to The New Yorker that "George has his

own rules – they're different, larger. He is unencumbered." The same

article went on to describe Soros as "a consummate games man, adept

at finding every tax loophole and operating in gray areas where

there is no oversight and maneuverability is wide. … Indeed the sums

of money that he manages not to pay the I.R.S. in taxes put his

present gift giving in a different light."

 

The irony of that insight is that Soros would probably make no bones

about it. Deception and smoke and mirrors are all an acknowledged

part of his personality and business plan. "I am sort of a deus ex

machina," Soros told the New York Times in 1994. "I am something

unnatural. I'm very comfortable with my public persona because it is

one I have created for myself. It represents what I like to be as

distinct from what I really am. You know, in my personal capacity

I'm not actually a selfless philanthropic person. I've very much

self-centered."

 

Even Soros' semi-authorized biographer couldn't get a grip on

exactly what was going on over at the Quantum Fund: All Gary

Gladstein, the managing director of Soros Fund Management, could say

was that the total number of investors in Quantum and the other five

funds Soros established "probably" never exceeded 1,000. "They are

all very rich individuals, and many have interests in several or

even all of Soros funds," Kaufman writes. "Under the laws of

Curacao, where the fund is legally chartered, it is illegal for any

of its directors or representatives to identify any shareholder by

name, even to the people at Soros Fund Management, the New York part

of the operation that determines and carries out investment

decisions as the fund's adviser." Many of these investors are known

only by "coded Swiss bank accounts or by financial advisers serving

as their nominees." Kaufman notes, "It is quite likely that Soros

does not know or, for that matter, care to know all of his

shareholders."

 

The general idea is that he doesn't have to care, because he is the

primary investor. But for Americans this setup poses an interesting

quandary. Since Soros is dumping so much money into social causes

and political campaigns in the U.S., is it to prevent us from

knowing who so we do not know who the nameless, faceless investors

in America's future are? And do their agendas tie in with Soros'

agendas? Is there a particular wealthy investor who has a specific

interest in drug legalization or euthanasia, for example? Could a

certain Russian investor have a vested monetary interest in seeing

the ruble crash – a crash, it is worth noting, Soros was able to

precipitate in the late `90s with a single letter to a newspaper?

Soros, who spends so much time talking about the need

for "transparency" and "openness," runs one of the most secretive

and powerful investing firms in the world. And it affects us all.

 

Occasionally, even with all his deceptions, hidden agendas and

personas, Soros has still gotten nailed. In 1979 he was charged with

stock manipulation for buying a large amount of a computer company's

stock, selling it off quickly to drive down prices, then buying a

greater amount at an "artificially low price." Soros signed a

consent decree in which he neither admitted nor denied complicity in

the act. Then in 1986, he was fined $75,000 by the Commodity Futures

Trading Commission for using several private accounts to hold

positions well above speculative limits.

 

Soros' most infamous brush with the law was in France, where a court

convicted him; Jean-Charles Naouri, former aide to France's then-

Finance Minister Pierre Beregovoy; and Lebanese businessman Samir

Traboulsi of insider trading. (Perhaps now that Soros is an enemy of

the hated Bush, the French government will find it in its heart to

pardon him?) Soros met the decision with predictable bluster. "I

have been in business all my life, and I think I know what is

insider trading and what isn't," he said.

 

Nevertheless, there is little political will to put Soros in his

place stateside. When pulled in front of the House Banking Committee

ostensibly to testify on hedge funds and the fatal danger

international currency speculators like himself posed to the

economy, House Democrats were all too willing to let any serious

questions fall by the wayside.

 

"The members of the Banking Committee led by their chairman, Henry

Gonzales, were indeed ready to blame the hedge funds for kicking the

markets downhill and risking the banks with their heavy borrowing,"

business writer Irv Chapman said on Lou Dobbs' Moneyline after the

hearing. "But they wound up treating George Soros as an expert

witness on world markets and currencies instead of a man whose heavy

high-risk trading keeps them awake at night."

 

Why? Because right off the bat Soros was willing to tell them what

they wanted to hear. After Soros' opening statement, which was but a

cruder, shorter rehashing of his Atlantic Monthly article, Minnesota

Democrat Bruce Vento praised Soros for the "heresy you may have

committed here by admitting that Adam Smith's invisible hand has

some fingerprints."

 

Typical anti-capitalist, pseudo-populist rethoric was all it took to

throw Congress off his scent. Committee members inexplicably took

Soros at his word, even in the face of all the evidence, when he

assured them that his unregulated Quantum Fund was not

a "destabilizing" force. "I see no imminent danger of a market

meltdown or crash," Soros breezily told the committee. "Frankly, I

don't think hedge funds are a matter of concern to you or the

regulators. There is really nothing to regulate on hedge funds."

 

Soros is smooth enough to know, however, that there has to be some

red meat too, so he sent the committee off in another, more vague

direction: derivatives traders. "There are so many of them, and some

of them are so esoteric that the risk involved may not be properly

understood even by the most sophisticated investor, and I'm supposed

to be one," Soros said. "Some of those instruments appear to be

specifically designed to enable institutional investors to take

gambles which they would not otherwise be permitted to take."

 

No one seemed to pick up the irony of that last bit: Soros was

essentially describing what he did every day. But because he was

willing to say capitalism was bad, the Dems let him slide. Perhaps

his newfound distaste for laissez-faire is more thought-out and self-

interested than most suppose.

 

Somewhere in the love fest, everyone forgot the part where they were

supposed to fact-check what the billionaire was telling them. For

example, Soros told the committee that "The only thing [hedge funds]

have in common is that managers are compensated on the basis of

performance and not as a fixed percentage of assets under

management." This, as it turns out, was a ludicrously false

statement.

 

As Forbes writer Dyan Machan later pointed out:

 

"Soros forgot to add that whether they perform or not, most hedge

funds also get paid a fee based on assets under management. In

Soros' case, we are talking about $90 million last year on the $11

billion he managed – nearly a cool quarter-million a day, counting

Saturdays and Sundays. Maybe Soros forgot about that $90 million

because it was dwarfed by the half-billion or so he collected in

fees from his 15 percent share of the trading profits."

 

In a story for the Ripon Forum, writer Jeffrey Kuhner suggested

Soros' anti-capitalism went hand in hand with his "ideological

kookiness."

 

"The 20th century is littered with examples of messianic

visionaries – Lenin, Hitler and Castro – whose megalomania and

absolute desire for power have wreaked unimaginable havoc," he

writes. "Mr. Soros' brand of neo-Marxism is no different. His one-

world globalism and hostility to capitalism are part of the radical

left's long-term ambitions to alter human reality through social

engineering. … If implemented, Mr. Soros' utopianism would

eventually lead to a form of one-world authoritarianism and economic

collectivism."

 

THE PHILOSOPHER KING

 

Another factor that sheds light on Soros' behavior is that he

believes he is continuing and furthering the ideas of his hero, Sir

Karl Popper, generally considered one of the greatest philosophers

of science in the whole of the 20th century and a man he had nominal

contact with while studying at the London School of Economics.

Popper's best-known concept was that of "open society" – that is, a

society that would "maximize the freedom of individuals to live as

they wish." Soros has borrowed the term in the titles of two of his

books, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism and The Crisis of

Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. His massive

philanthropic endeavors operate under the umbrella of the Open

Society Institute.

 

In practice, then, anything Soros endorses becomes a boon for "open

society," while anything he disagrees with – Bush, immigration

policy, the war on drugs, even the United States itself – becomes

its greatest enemy. Hence, the war in Kosovo was a justified defense

of "open society," while the war in Iraq is a tyrannical plot

devised by George W. Bush, destined to bring about the apocalypse

and destroy freedom for everyone.

 

Soros has been jabbering on about "open societies" for decades now,

but he is still unable to give a reasonable explanation of what one

is. When he tries to define it, it comes out as the sort of pseudo-

sociology one would expect from a starry-eyed college freshman.

An "open society," to George Soros, is "a different conception of

how society ought to be organized" and it is "really more

sophisticated than the democracy or Communistic systems."

The "little people" would be hard pressed to understand Soros'

genius, his tone suggests. Apparently we should just collectively

hand the keys over to the Soros Godhead and let him drive us where

he will.

 

But this is about more than money. Soros' heroes have always been

philosophers and intellectuals, not businessmen. He's been known to

pay graduate students in philosophy to just walk aimlessly around

with him discussing "ideas." He puts on elaborate weekends at his

home, inviting prominent intellectuals and philosophers to debate

the philosophical tracts he has toiled on, writing and rewriting

them throughout his life.

 

Biographer Michael Kaufman spoke to Jonathan Wolff, from University

College, London, who had attended one of Soros' philosophy

discussion parties. "He had apparently read no philosophy since the

fifties and had made clear that he did not think that much of

significance has occurred in the field since then," Wolff told

Kaufman, adding that Soros, "did not think any of us really

understood his ideas. He had some of the typical features of an

autodidact – an impatience with anyone who mentioned a text he had

not read, and a tendency to change the track of discussion when

things got hard."

 

Soros himself noticed this tendency in his own work, writing in his

unpublished essay, The Burden of Consciousness, that, "I have tried

to be concise but occasionally I have slipped into verbosity –

especially when I did not have anything original to say."

 

At points, The Burden of Consciousness, could get downright weird:

 

"I have very definite ideas about the relationship between my mind

and the outside world," Soros writes. "I realize that there is a

world of which I am a part. That world has existed before I became a

part of it and will continue to exist after I have ceased to exist.

I can influence the outside world through my actions and of course

the outside world impinges on my existence in an infinity of ways."

 

Huh? Is this a newsflash for Soros? Yet this was the drivel he felt

important enough to take a leave of absence from the business world

to pursue.

 

This romantic vision of himself, not as a world-class financier, but

as a first-rate intellectual, is a major part of George Soros' myth

of himself.

 

"I have had these illusions, or perhaps delusions, of grandeur and

they have driven me," Soros told biographer Michael Kaufman. Far

from making light of these delusions, Soros embraces them.

Explaining his self-proclaimed role as a "stateless statesman,"

Soros told Kaufman, "Yes, I do have a foreign policy…my goal is to

become the conscience of the world." The man who couldn't be

bothered with morality in business, is convinced that he can steer

the entire world on the correct moral course. And he isn't joking.

In a 1995 speech, Soros hinted at his ultimate hope of philosophical

vindication:

 

"There is more to my existence than money. I focused on it in my

career mainly because I recognized that there is a tendency in our

society to exaggerate the importance of money, to define values in

terms of money. We appraise artists by how much their creations

fetch. We appraise politicians by the amount of money they can

raise; often they appraise themselves by the amount of money they

can make on the side. Having recognized the importance of making

money, I may yet come to be recognized as a great philosopher, which

would give me more satisfaction than the fortune I have made."

 

Others have caught the scent of something other than philosophy in

the air around Soros. His son Robert, in an interview with Kaufman,

said, "My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why

he does this or that. But I remember seeing it as a kid and

thinking, Jesus Christ, at least half of this is bullshit." His

father is driven more by "temperament" than anything else, Robert

said. "He is always trying to rationalize what are basically his

emotions. And he is living in a constant state of not exactly

denial, but rationalization of his emotional state."

 

Soros, despite his wealth, never passes up an opportunity to

downplay its influence in his life as if to say, I am not one of

THEM. Really, I am not. "I used to collect but actually I don't have

great material needs," Soros once said. "I like my comfort. But,

really, I am a very abstract person." Soros defines modesty a bit

differently than most Americans. In addition to his mansion in Sun

Valley, Idaho, he owns many homes across America and the world,

including, according to USA Today, "an apartment, a beach house and

a country house in the New York area." Soros' repeatedly has pointed

to the fact that he doesn't collect art as proof of his lack

of "material needs," meanwhile the billionaire is collecting houses.

That's some Average Joe, alright. Not to mention modesty is

something other people are supposed to point out about a person, not

something one points out about themselves. Such is the Soros charm,

however. Like Arafat, who accumulated billions he stole from the

Palestinian people, which enables him to be in power while wearing

apparently the same uniform for decades, Soros, too claims that his

lack of "materialism" is the driving force behind his success. "I

did not really want to identify myself with moneymaking to the

extent that was necessary in order to be successful. I had to deny

my own success in order to maintain the discipline that was

responsible for that success."

 

No matter how many times Soros brazenly boasts about his success in

Business Week or Forbes, he never seems to tire of warning against

it in his "philosophical" writings.

 

"Our sense of right and wrong is endangered by our preoccupation

with success as measured by money," Soros wrote in the Atlantic

Monthly. "Anything goes as long as you can get away with it." And

yet, this sort of amoral pursuit of success is what Soros practices

and encourages in his "other" life.

 

In the end, Soros' philosophy is really a kind of non-philosophy

gibberish. He wants the world to follow him on the basis of his

discovery that he is probably wrong about everything.

 

"We have now had 200 years of experience with the Age of Reason, and

as reasonable people we ought to recognize that reason has its

limitations," Soros writes in his article, The Capitalist

Threat. "The time is ripe for developing a conceptual framework

based on our fallibility. Where reason has failed, fallibility may

yet succeed."

 

Yeah, right. Failure is not only an option, it's our only option

according to this madman.

 

One thing is sure: Do not expect any apologies, ever, from George

Soros.

 

"When it comes to protecting your own life or saving the system, I

know which one I would do first," Soros told The Guardian. "It's

much better to be a successful speculator and then apply your moral

priorities elsewhere."

 

But at what cost? And what would is Sir. Karl Popper's view think of

that?

 

"One of the main arguments of The Open Society is directed against

moral relativism," Popper wrote in his philosophical autobiography,

The Unended Quest. "The fact that moral values of principles may

clash does not invalidate them. Moral values or principles may be

discovered, and even invented. They may be relevant to a certain

situation, and irrelevant to other situations. They may be

accessible to some people and inaccessible to others. But all this

is quite distinct from relativism; that is, from the doctrine that

any set of values can be defended."

 

Soros' incessant utopianism, his lack of respect for any opinion

other than his own, and the way he drowns out other voices with a

flood of cash, would likely not have sat very well with his hero

either. Once again, from The Unended Quest:

 

"There can be no human society without conflict: such a society

would be a society not of friends but of ants. Even if it were

attainable, there are human values of the greatest importance which

would be destroyed by its attainment, and which therefore should

prevent us from attempting to bring it about. On the other hand, we

certainly ought to bring about a reduction of conflict."

 

The message is clear, we can and should work to alleviate conflict,

but it cannot be eliminated and utopian schemes usually destroy the

human spirit rather than set it free. This is why Popper referred to

The Open Society as his "war effort." It was openly influenced by

his fears that, "freedom might become a central problem again,

especially under the renewed influence of Marxism and the idea of

large-scale `planning.'"

 

If "large-scale planning" without the consent of the general

population isn't Soros' shtick, what is?

 

Although Popper met with Soros once or twice while Soros was a

student at the London School of Economics, and sent a note with

short comments on The Burden of Consciousness, Soros failed to make

much of an impression on the old philosopher. According to Kaufman's

biography, when Soros contacted Popper in 1982 to let him know about

how he'd been naming funds, foundations, and various other entities

after the concepts enshrined in The Open Society, Popper wrote

back: "Let me first thank you for not having forgotten me. I am

afraid I forgot you completely; even your name created at first only

the most minute resonance. But I made some effort, and now, I think,

I just remember you, though I do not think I should recognize you."

 

By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Shawn Macomber

FrontPageMagazine.com | October 29, 2004

 

A QUESTION OF HERITAGE

 

"I grew up in a Jewish anti-Semitic home," Soros told acquaintances,

according to Robert Slater's unauthorized biography, which also

reports the blue-eyed, blond-haired Soros would "beam" when other

children would tell him, "You don't look Jewish."

 

Later in London, Soros would continue to shun his Jewish heritage,

only bringing it up when he felt he could exploit it one way or

another. When Soros broke his leg working on the railroad in

England, he applied for benefits to the Jewish Board of Guardians.

He was already getting some form of workman's comp benefits from the

British government for his on the job injury, but he decided to lie

to the Jewish Board anyway, in an attempt to double his money. To

some degree this is understandable, if a bit uncouth: A young man

low on cash, trying to play the system.

 

Nevertheless, instead of cutting his losses and walking away when

the Board turned him down for payments, he lashed out in a letter,

telling the Board he was disappointed to "see how one Jew deals with

another in need." Deceitfully shamed, the Board began weekly

payments to Soros, which Soros labels "a great success." Biographer

Michael Kaufman writes, "Only after his leg had completely healed

and he had spent the spring break hitchhiking in France did he write

his benefactor at the board to tell him he could stop sending the

money. For sometime afterward, though, he would receive generous

gifts from the board on all the major Jewish holidays,." and he, no

doubt, perceived it as his entitlement. And when his fortunes turned

and he made millions, according to former Jewish Board officials, he

never returned the favor by contributing to the organization.

 

Maintaining his intellectualism has also required Soros to immerse

himself in a strange cycle of Jewish self-loathing. At a recent

speech before the Jewish Funders Network, Soros implied, like Jaques

Chiraq, that the recent rise of anti-Semitism in Europe was a result

of the policies of George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon – remove them

from office and the world will go back to not hating Jews, Soros

assured. In fact, in The Bubble of American Supremacy Soros veers

into the same conspiracy-theory ramblings that get other public

figures into hot water.

 

One of the "important considerations" in our decision to invade

Iraq, Soros contends, much like the rest of the Arab world, was

Israel. "A large number of religious fanatics in the United States

believe that the rebirth of Israel presages the apocalypse and the

second coming of the messiah," he writes. "Since the apocalypse

involves the destruction of Israel, Israel might be better off

without friends like this. [but] President Bush…felt obliged to pay

attention to his constituency. Establishing a strong military

presence in Iraq would help to transform the political complexion of

the entire region. This would reassure Israel and weaken the

Palestinian extremists."

 

Does Soros have an editor? Did anyone bother to tell him that last

paragraph follows no logical path whatsoever? First of all, it's

arguable whether evangelicals are a asset or liability in American

politics today. But aside from that, if President Bush were

attempting to please these folks by hastening the apocalypse,

wouldn't a weaker Israel ripe for "destruction" serve that better

than a strong Israel emboldened against her enemies? If we went to

Iraq to secure Israel, by Soros' own logic, we would be pushing the

apocalypse back considerably.

 

He also explained that he regretted his own success had helped

further the notion that "Jews rule the world." This is not a new

regret for Soros, who lamented to his interviewer in Soros on Soros

that, "If there was ever a man who fit the stereotype of Judo-

plutocratic Bolshevik Zionist world conspirator, it is me." Sadly,

this may also tie in with his early life in Nazi occupied

Hungary: "I have suffered from the low self-esteem that is the bane

of the assimilationist Jew," he said in the same book. "This is a

heavy load that I could shed only when I recognized my success,."

and apparently also by making anti-Semitic remarks.

 

Soros on several occasions has likened Jewish support for Israel to

a "tribal loyalty" he wanted no part of. "I took pride in being in

the minority, an outsider who was capable of seeing other points of

view," he wrote in his 1990 book Opening the Soviet System. "Only

the ability to think critically, and to rise above a particular

point of view could make up for the dangers and indignities that

being a Hungarian Jew had inflicted on me."

 

These sentiments, of course, tie in with an earlier point. Soros

needs, for his own self-validation, to believe he is one of the few

people with the answers, a sole hero saving an intellectually

stunted world from itself. Can Soros, the brilliant speculator think

rationally? As anyone who has perused one of his meandering,

unfocused books can tell you, the truth is, his clarity of thought

is questionable at best. But does he believe he is on a higher

intellectual plane than most people? Absolutely. The only person

Soros would probably ever admit had a leg up on him intellectually

would probably be the dead Karl Popper. And even that's not a sure

bet.

 

Soros has now rewritten Middle Eastern history to better jive with

his idea of the "poignant and difficult case" of Israel, another

nation, like the U.S., of "victims turning perpetrators. Soros, much

like the virulent anti-Semitic graphic daily propaganda in the Arab

newspapers, is comparing Israel's self defense against repeated

attempts of annihilation by the Islamist/Arab terrorists to Nazi

atrocities. The successful defense against terrorism, especially

preemptive actions, are is never appropriate in Soros' book.

 

His history of how Israel fought for its independence could have

been written by Noam Chomsky or Yasser Arafat. "After the war [World

War II], Jews resorted to terrorism against the British in Palestine

in order to secure a homeland in Israel," Soros writes in The Bubble

of American Supremacy. "Subsequently, after being attacked by Arab

nations, Israel occupied additional territory and expelled many of

the inhabitants. Eventually, the Arab victims also turned

perpetrators, and Israel started suffering terrorist attacks."

 

This Soros' interpretation seriously downplays denies the number of

Arab invasions and the brutal tactics used that led Israel to occupy

the lands these attacks were launched from in the first place. And

as for the "expulsions," many of those people left of their own

accord because of the surrounding Arab nations ordered them to

leave, Muslim edicts demanding no interaction with the Jews. The

Arab plan was to kill all the Jews as soon as possible and move

back. on the land. For this, Jews are apparently getting what they

deserve in Soros' mind. By surviving Arab/Muslim violence all these

years, and by defending themselves, the Israeli Jews have brought

all these troubles upon themselves.

 

Soros' comments did not sit well with quite a few Other public

figures: were less than impressed with Soros' comments as well.

 

"It's a warped view of the Holocaust and its aftermath, of Israel,

and America," the national director of the Anti-Defamation League,

Abraham Foxman, fumed to The New York Sun. "It's outrageous. To call

it obscenity is not strong enough a word. It is so perverted and so

perverse." The New York Daily News ran an editorial describing Soros

as a "man who lacks even a remotely balanced view of history and the

nature of evil. He has demeaned the Holocaust and placed moral

responsibility for anti-Semitism on its victims rather than its

perpetrators." Even Democratic Representative Eliot Engle Engle also

called Soros statements "morally reprehensible" and advised

his "hear no evil/see no evil" Democratic brethren that he didn't

think that, "People shouldn't kiss up to" Soros simply because "he

wants to give money." away.

 

But at least Soros has in his grace, said he will allow the state of

Israel to exist. He told The New Yorker, "I don't deny the Jews

their right to a national existence – but I don't want to be a part

of it." This bleeds over into the way he runs his foundations. When

looking for people for the board of his Moscow foundation, he took a

trip with the most promising of them, only to find that, "they were

all too old and too Jewish." Not acceptable, he said. "I mean, you

can't be that Jewish in Russia. So I told them, `You can't have more

than one-third Jews on the board.'"

 

Soros' vast wealth and the personal stories he tells his own

personal story have allowed him to say things people like Pat

Buchanan or Howard Dean could never get away with. Remember the fury

that befell Dean when he said we needed to be "evenhanded" in the

Mideast peace process? Yet Soros writes that we invaded Iraq to some

degree on behalf of Israel, and Democrats remain silent. Maybe they

didn't hear he him say said it. Maybe they were in line at the bank

waiting to deposit another one of Soros' massive donations when he

went public with that gem.

 

THE FIRST EGO TRIP

 

Cash aside, what does it mean to have George Soros' "Seal of

Approval"? And how long is it likely to last? Until well into middle

age, Soros vowed he would avoid the "ego trip" of philanthropy, only

changing his mind when he came to consider (in his own words), "the

pursuit of self-interest as too narrow a base for my rather inflated

self."

 

Then, suddenly, he reversed course in the 1980s and began funneling

support to Charta 77 in Czechoslovakia, and Solidarity in Poland,

helping to pave the way for the downfall of communism. This was

apparently was an epiphany for Soros, who wrote in Underwriting

Democracy that while he had spent the post-World War II era as

a "partisan of open society," he had never been able to "take its

superiority for granted because communism had conquered half the

world and democracies were hard pressed to resist its

encroachments." Once again, Soros has trouble making a determination

of whether something is right or wrong. An evil can become a

possible good if it is a victor. Nazism once held a large portion of

Europe. Would With this logic Soros may grant that ideology the

possibility of superiority over ours simply by virtue of the fact

that it had spread so far.? No wonder he can't stand George W. Bush.

 

At any rate, during the late 80s and early 90s the fight was against

a monolithic ideology, which Soros had determined was flawed. So had

most people living inside these countries, and even a good deal of

people outside of them, with the notable exception of liberal high

society, large parts of the media, and college campuses. Soros had

come to the conclusion that anyone fighting communism was fighting

for an "open society." This was good for anti-communists and rebels,

who came into a financial windfall.

 

When asked point blank in Soros on Soros, the financier admitted to

becoming cozy with elements in the communist regimes where his

foundation was active. "Of course we collaborated: The communists

wanted to use me and I wanted to use them," Soros said. "That was

the basis of our collaboration. The big question was who would get

the better of the other." Once again winning was all. A matter of

ego was at stake.

 

But in the aftermath of the Iron Curtain's collapse, Soros took an

ideological turn, and his support since then has gone primarily to

left-wing groups. "The people Soros hires are noted for their anti-

Thatcherite views," Oxford University professor Mark Almond told

Forbes. "You'd be hard pressed to find a religious dissident or

staunch anti-communist in his foundations." To which Jonathan Sunley

of the Windsor Group added in the same article, "Soros is engaged in

a one-dimensional ideological laundering of the old

Communist/nomenklatura." Soros himself seemed disinclined to give

the free market much of a running start in the recently liberated

countries of Eastern Europe. "We thought free enterprise, laissez-

faire," he told the Wall Street Journal in 1994. "The failures in

Eastern Europe prove that laissez-faire is a false doctrine." No.

The failures in Eastern Europe proved that communism was a false

doctrine. Nobody ever promised the former communist states could be

fixed in under five years.

 

This obvious turn to old leftist elements in Eastern Europe and

Russia, not coincidentally, corresponded to his newfound distaste

for the "threat" of global capitalism. In Albania, for example,

Soros supported a paper that encouraged a coup by a group of ex-

Communists, helping to take down a moderately (for the region and

time) liberal government. In his native Hungary, Soros handpicked

Miklos Vasarhelyi, a former member of the Communist government of

Imre Nagy and a one-time Italian fascist, to head the Soros

foundation in that country. He was tried by the Soviets after the

1956 uprising alongside his old boss, ending up with the lightest

sentence of them all. Although Vasarhelyi repeatedly denied any

collaboration with the communists after his stint in jail, Hungarian

Communist Party memos make reference to the party's "influence" over

him, going so far as to suggest that if certain dissident speeches

were to "get into Vasarhelyi's hands we would be able to get a hold

of them." While Vasarhelyi fell out of love with hard-line communism

many years before, he remained, until his death in 2001, strikingly

unfriendly towards liberal ideals. "I was and always am very

critical of capitalism," he told Forbes magazine in 1997.

 

And what was Soros' comment on all of this information? "They [as ex-

communists] know better what democracy is than perhaps those who

were always opposed to the regime," he told Forbes. It does indeed

sound like a reconstitution of the communist nomenklatura when put

so bluntly as that. Those who agitate for democracy are at a

disadvantage when dealing with George Soros.

 

When the Forbes piece turned out not to Soros' liking, he lashed out

in Time magazine, calling the piece "nonsense" and fuming, "You had

a capitalist fool [steve Forbes, the magazine's owner] combining

with the nationalist right – a stupid combination." Yet, Soros'

refused to answer the basic question before him: To what extent was

he collaborating with communist elements in these vulnerable

societies? And, conversely, to what extent was he shafting the

actual pro-democratic elements in those same societies?

 

Perhaps these attitudes go back further than most suspect. In the

Kaufman biography, Soros reminisces about a conversation he had with

his father after deciding to leave Hungary. His father was pushing

London, but George told him, "I'd like to go to Moscow, to find out

about Communism. I mean that's where the power is." Soros' father

prevailed in that exchange, but Soros' interest in going to Moscow

seems curious since he was living under Soviet rule in Hungary at

the time. These days he uses that experience as a way to beef up his

anti-authoritarian bona fides. But apparently, communism the Soviets

seemed all right to Soros at the time.

 

Soros revels in the fact that his cash in unstable countries can buy

him much more respect and influence in unstable countries than would

normally be the case. For example, Soros said the following of

Ukraine in an interview with The New Yorker: "It was a vacuum"

with "a great willingness to accept this kind of support, which

would in normal times be rather intrusive.," Soros said. "I mean, I

can't try and do that in America. They would tell me where to get

off!" When pressed on the point, Soros exclaimed, "If this isn't

meddling in the affairs of a foreign nation, then I don't know what

is!" Of course, as we shall see, Soros did indeed turn to America

shortly thereafter, and has as of yet unfortunately not been

told "where to get off."

 

In 1997, Soros funded a newspaper in Albania, Koha Jone, which

issued clarion call after clarion call to rise up against the

elected liberal government. When the coup had been successful, a top

official in Soros' Albanian foundation actually came out and

announced that, "[President] Berisha's going. We got him." Soros'

definition of "open society," it became clear, did not always mean

the rule of law should be obeyed or that democratic regimes should

be left in place. No time for revolution at the ballot box when

Uncle George wants something done. Berisha was replaced by a

Socialist Party that had "only dropped Marx as the center of its

platform" a few months before, according to The Washington Times.

 

"Now in Albania a few thousand rebels, many of whom had been members

of the communist secret police and military officials sacked by Mr.

Berisha in the early days of the democratic transition, have taken

control of the country with the backing of the Socialist Party in

Tirana," Daniel McAdams wrote in The Washington Times. "The rest of

the country lurches toward chaos, as the unarmed and the unaligned

now seek weapons to defend themselves against the bands of roving

rebels."

 

Perhaps Soros is just funding the little guy, promoting that element

of dissent all so important to a democracy. The proof escapes this

pudding, however. When Soros' friends are in power, Soros does all

he can to make sure they stay in power. An investigation by Forbes

magazine, for example, found that once Soros' Hungary foundation

head Vasarhelyi's old communist cronies were in power, dissent held

little value to Soros. "The ADF (Alliance of Free Democrats)-

controlled culture ministry and the Soros foundation both subsidize

periodicals," Richard Morais writes. "We matched the most recently

published lists of the subsidies and found 77 percent of the

periodicals that got major government handouts also received

subsidies from the Soros foundation. It seems to us [that] a

foundation dedicated to an Open Society would go out of its way to

assist periodicals not supported by the government of the day."

 

Around the world, Soros has become something of a bogeyman. When

Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze was recently ousted, he

claimed Soros had overthrown him. Zaza Gachechiladze, editor-in-

chief of the Georgian Messenger, concurred. "It's generally accepted

public opinion here that Mr. Soros is the person who planned

Shevardnadze's overthrow," he said. While Soros did help fund the

many public demonstrations and paid full-time activists to agitate,

Shevardnadze was brought down mostly by economic collapse and his

own political corruption. Soros major role in the event was

supporting exit polling that gave victory to the opposition party,

even as official results showed Shevardnadze the true victor.

Resulting protests led to Shevardnadze's capitulation.

 

Such is Soros' growing reputation. Feared and, powerful, some are

coming to the natural conclusion that he is unstoppable. He goads on

the idea, naturally. "I'm delighted by what happened in Georgia,"

Soros told the L.A. Times, "and I take great pride in having

contributed to it." Indeed. When the Georgian cabinet was announced

earlier this year, the now-defunct Russian daily Novye Izvestiya

called it the "Soros cabinet," because of the several million

dollars Soros was putting up to raise the salaries of new government

officials. None dare call this a payoff, but can we really believe

there will be no desire in the new Georgian government to satisfy

Soros' every whim while they are all essentially on his payroll?

 

Certainly the other countries in the area fail to see how

overthrowing an elected government is compatible with democracy.

They see a double standard. "No European standards of democracy

presume the violent overthrow of presidents which is precisely what

happened in Georgia," Vladimir Zharikhin, the deputy director of the

CIS Institute, said, as reported by the Central Asia Report. "Soros'

practices show that he doesn't increase the amount of democracy in a

country; he merely exchanges one set of authoritarian rulers for

others who are more obedient to him." Russian writer Ivan Tregubov

was even more blunt: "George Soros demonstrates a heightened concern

for democracy, glasnost and `openness' in those countries where he

has business interests." Tregubov scathingly added that Soros, "like

Trotsky, promotes permanent revolution across the globe, if under a

different flag and with his own money."

 

How could Soros deny this? He openly admits that when it comes to

making money for his investors he has no morals, no boundaries, and

no regrets. Honestly, why should his "philanthropy" be any different

at all?

 

Oxford University professor Mark Almond argued in a British

newspaper that these fears, even if they occasionally turn out to be

bunk, are indeed justified.

 

"Given the non-transparent nature of Soros' Quantum Fund, fears in

small states that he could develop an economic monopoly, as well as

a quasi-monopoly position in their media and academic life, are not

unreasonable, though perhaps unfounded," Almond wrote. "To allay

those suspicions, Soros must do more than talk of the `open

society.'"

 

Other countries notice this meddling. Shortly after the Georgian

incident, Soros' foundation was kicked out of Uzbekistan fearing the

same sort of Soros power play. The executive director of Soros'

foundation in Kyrgyzstan admitted to the L.A. Times that there

was "some kind of apprehension, some suspicion, some caution toward"

the foundation in that country with the leadership expressing

concerns over "whether we do not have some Trojan horse that is

leading to that situation."

 

Early into his "philantropic" efforts, Soros told ABC that his fund

had become "so enormous" that it didn't "make sense" to do anything

but give the money away. Soros then acknowledged having a problem

the vast majority of Americans don't: "It seems to be easier [to

make money than to spend it]. I seem to have a greater facility in

making it than in making the right decisions in giving it away."

 

Does giving money away erase the amoral nature of how it was earned?

Not for everyone.

 

As the Malaysian Business Times editorialized, "Mr. George Soros

thinks he is promoting freedom with his crusade for democracy, but

what he is doing is dispensing sorrow to those who are on the

receiving end of his non-democratic attacks on currencies."

 

And why shouldn't these countries be afraid of Soros? He is a man

who openly believes creating chaos is central to his success in

business and elsewhere. He feeds off chaos. In 1990 he complained to

the New York Times that his work in Eastern Europe became much

more "boring" after the liberation from the communists. "Building is

always more effort than destroying," he said.

 

Soros also loves homegrown communists, though. In 2000, Soros gave

$50,000 to the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), which was founded as a

Communist Party defense agency. "The keynote speaker at NLG's 2003

national convention, Lynne Stewart," FrontPage Magazine's Ben

Johnson reports, "praised Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, Fidel Castro

and Che Guevara."

 

One of the NGL's most recent reports was an effort to whitewash

North Korea, going so far as to actually play the police state off

as more just than American society. "We noted that this was not the

Orwellian society George Bush and much of the media is [sic.] trying

to portray," the report states. "The contrast between North Korea

and its lack of policeman and North America in which armed police in

bulletproof vests are commonplace was more than striking – it was

startling. If the presence or absence of armed policemen is a

criterion for a free society then it speaks volumes about the nature

of the two societies."

 

This is no joke: At one point the NLG delegation stops for a picnic,

and joyfully breaks out into a rendition of "We Shall Overcome" and

other "old anti-war and protest songs" for a group of undoubtedly

confused North Koreans. "We know that if the contest between the

lawyers of each nation were singing that this would have ended with

our defeat quite swiftly," they write. The reader need not worry for

the NLG delegation's self-esteem, though. Every step of the way, the

North Koreans willingly stroke the egos of these useful idiots. At

one point, a North Korean military official tells the nearly giddy

NLG lawyers he is excited to meet them, "because lawyers bare truth

and justice in their hearts."

 

These are Soros' kind of people. And isn't he is the ultimate anti-

communist? The very thought would seem a cruel joke to those poor

souls languishing in North Korean gulags today. If this "Worker's

Paradise" was so wonderful, why did the NGL delegation come back to

cold, cruel America?

 

And it's not just the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy that's got problems

with the way Soros' has handled himself abroad. Some on the left

have questioned whether his "philanthropy" is anything but a cover

for his own business interests. For example, Neil Clark writing in

the New Statesman, comes to the "sad conclusion" that for all "his

liberal quoting of Popper, Soros deems a society `open' not if it

respects human rights and basic freedoms, but if it is `open' for

him and his associates to make money. And, indeed, Soros has made

money in every country he has helped to prise `open.'" Clark charges

that Soros follows a very strict pattern in his philanthropic

endeavors, "of advocating `shock therapy' and `economic reform,'"

only to swoop in "to buy valuable state assets at knock-down prices."

 

Clark also has a theory why Soros is so adamant that Bush has got to

go:

 

"Why is he so upset with Bush? The answer is simple. Soros is angry

not with Bush's aims - of extending Pax Americana and making the

world safe for global capitalists like himself - but with the crass

and blundering way Bush is going about it. By making US ambitions so

clear, the Bush gang has committed the cardinal sin of giving the

game away. For years, Soros and his NGOs have gone about their work

extending the boundaries of the `free world' so skillfully that

hardly anyone noticed. Now a Texan redneck and a gang of overzealous

neo-cons have blown it…

 

"Soros knows a better way - armed with a few billion dollars, a

handful of NGOs and a nod and a wink from the US State Department,

it is perfectly possible to topple foreign governments that are bad

for business, seize a country's assets, and even to get thanked for

your benevolence afterwards. Soros has done it."

 

NEW WORLD ORDER

 

The constant theme in Soros' writing is the need for an end to

America as the world's preeminent power. During a September 2003

State Department Open Forum speech, Soros proposed a "modification

of the concept of sovereignty" which was necessary

because "sovereignty is basically somewhat anachronistic." His

attacks on capitalism similarly lead to the same conclusion. A one-

world government is the only thing to bring balance to the economies

of the world.

 

He stresses this in his article, The Capitalist Threat,

writing, "Laissez-faire ideology does not prepare us to cope with

this challenge. It does not recognize the need for a world order. An

order is supposed to emerge from states' pursuit of their self-

interest. But, guided by the principle of survival of the fittest,

states are increasingly preoccupied with their competitiveness and

unwilling to make any sacrifices for the common good."

 

Soros' proof of this was the supposed failure of Western nations to

lend a hand in Russia after the fall of communism.

 

"The combination of lassiez-faire ideas, social Darwinism, and

geopolitical realism that prevailed in the United States and the

United Kingdom stood in the way of any hope for an open society in

Russia," Soros wrote. "If the leaders of these countries had had a

different view of the world, they could have established firm

foundations for a global open society." Faster than you can say New

World Order, there it is.

 

Of course, as usual, Soros' eccentricities become more nefarious

when combined with his vast fortune. Bringing about a global order

and smashing sovereignty based on national borders has become a

major focus of the Open Society Institute in recent years, primarily

through the so-called Justice Initiative, which seeks to

give, "local meaning to global norms."

 

What exactly does that mean? Who knows. The rhetoric coming out of

the Justice Initiative makes it sound as if there is an egalitarian

global order out there already, and it is only being held up by

selfish, "stable" countries like the United States. A major goal of

the Justice Initiative is to give the International Criminal Court –

-an attack on our sovereignty so heinous even John F. Kerry voted

against it – jurisdiction over every nation in the world.

 

"The Justice Initiative contributes to the application, enforcement,

and dissemination of international legal principles at the local

level—whether helping judges to apply international due process

rules to pretrial detention decisions, building community capacity

to secure police accountability consistent with international

standards, or collaborating with lawyers to secure local court

enforcement of regional nondiscrimination norms," the OSI website

informs us. "The financial and jurisdictional limits of the ICC, as

well as the frequent unwillingness or inability to prosecute on the

part of the states most concerned, makes necessary investigation and

prosecution by other states, notably through the exercise of

universal jurisdiction. Thus, legislation, institutional reform, and

the preparation and promotion of cases will all be needed to ensure

that national systems fulfill their role in ending impunity."

 

Two of the nations resisting this "universal jurisdiction" are the

United States and Israel, and with good reason. In the current

political climate, where even allies of the United States such as

France and Germany are throwing ludicrous claims of war crimes at

her, signing onto the ICC would be an open invitation by the United

States to the world for endless persecution of Americans. Israel,

the only country more despised by the world than America, would do

virtually nothing but defend itself from such claims. Israeli

leaders (and many of their American counterparts) would become

virtual prisoners in their home countries, lest they step outside

their borders and be arrested by blue helmeted world police.

 

There is no element of fairness built into the ICC and other bodies

of world law. One needs no better proof of the injustice than the

recent World Court ruling attempting to end the construction of a

barrier between Israel and the West Bank, literally the only thing

that has been able to end diminish the suicide bombers three- year

reign of terror. When Jews must be made to die to satisfy the

Arab/Muslim agenda, joined by the anti-Semitism of Europeans who

have romanticized the bunch of thug terrorists running the

Palestinian Authority, it is exceedingly clear that the world cannot

be trusted. Do we in America want to see a day when we cannot defend

ourselves? When we cannot set our own border policy? The great

majority of Americans say no. George Soros says yes. The only

question left is who will prevail?.

 

Think Soros is destined to lose that battle? Don't be so

sure. "Although I remain a champion of losing causes, how much

closer I have come to realizing them than when I first started!" he

wrote a few short years ago. He has no interest in American society

as such. "Of course what I do could be called meddling because I

want to promote an open society," he told Hemispheres magazine. "An

open society transcends national sovereignty." That's no American

patriot talking. That's a liberal elitist determined to lay the

foundation for a One World Government, and it is nothing new.

 

The end of American sovereignty has long been a part of the "Soros

Doctrine," as he likes to call it. He is constantly praying for the

day when a weakened United States can be at the mercy of

international institutions. "Our attachment to superpower status is

understandable," Soros writes in Underwriting Democracy, "but it is

nonetheless regrettable, because it prevents the resolution of a

simmering crisis."

 

And who would pay for this One World Government? Even Soros doesn't

have that kind of cash, but lately he's begun plugging the so-

called "Tobin Tax," an international currency transactions tax. In

other words, a globally run Marxist system for worldwide income

redistribution. For those who can't read between the lines, let's

make this as blunt as possible: They want the U.N. to be able to

take what they openly admit will be hundreds of billions of dollars

from the American economy and send it off into the world wherever

they please. One of the leaders of the initiative, Robin Round,

recently declared at an NGO conference in Montreal that "one of the

major obstacles" to the tax was the U.S. and activists praise the

tax as a way to lower American living standards as a prelude to some

murky, undefined "sustainable development" for the rest of the

world.

 

The aims of the project are quite clear. Just as the ICC seeks to

restrain American military power, the Tobin Tax, almost like bin

Laden's doctrine, seeks to restrain and destroy American economic

power. These are all baby steps on the way forcing the end of

American nationhood, which is a considerable hurdle to global

dominion. Hilary French of the Worldwatch Institute, another

proponent of the tax, went so far as to advise Americans to get

over "the sovereignty thing," and recommended that Europe and other

proponents "shame the United States" into accepting the tax.

 

Another interesting aspect of this is Soros' lifelong interest in

Esperanto, the so-called universal language. In a 1986 article in

the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows describes the atmosphere of a

meeting of the International Esperanto Congress in China: "Their

dream of world brotherhood through a planned international language

is so touchingly unrealistic; the proportion of oddball among them

so high." Friendless in London at 17, Soros took to the soapbox at

Hyde Park to argue publicly, according to Kaufman's book, as

to, "the utility of an international language in Esperanto."

 

This odd language ended up as the basis for the name Soros,

according to an article by Joshua Muravchik in Commentary. "At some

point during the boys' childhood, the parents decided to change the

family name and chose the Hungarian sounding but in fact obscure

Soros," Muravchik writes. "It means `soar' (in the future tense) in

Esperanto, the made-up, trans-European language promoted by those

who dreamed of a world free of nationality. [soros' father] Tivadar

was among its leading proponents." Tividar would later write his

memoir in Esperanto.

 

"Created over a hundred years ago, Esperanto was not just a

language, but a movement for international understanding and peace,"

web columnist and Esperanto proponent C. Keith Ray wrote last year,

scoffing that in "McCarthy era" America, "Esperanto was associated

with Communism," but nevertheless allowing that, "perhaps some

American Communists were using it as a `secret language.'"

 

One more strange piece of the Soros puzzle.

 

Soros has been preparing these utopian schemes for some time. In

grade school, Soros once wrote a story about a donkey named Peaceful

that ended a barnyard war. It's a very touching story, really. And

who knows, if a jackass with $7 billion can take over vast swaths of

the world, who are we to doubt the potential of a donkey?

 

INVASION U.S.A.: SOROS TAKES ON THE HOMEFRONT

 

When Soros finally began to turn an eye towards the United States in

recent years, his domestic agenda turned out to be schizophrenically

varied, and more than a bit outside the mainstream. "I have started

to pay more attention to my adopted country," Soros wrote in the

Washington Post in 1997, "because I feel the relatively open society

we enjoy here is in danger."

 

Gara LaMarche, president of Soros' U.S. operation the Open Society

Institute (OSI), promises in the organization's 2004 report to

continue to establish a "systematic response sufficient to the

challenge of radical right-wing dominance" and to "educate the

public about the impact of federal budget and tax cuts on state and

local services." So what are some of the challenges posed by this

supposed "right-wing dominance"? "Some were unforeseeable, such as

the assault on civil liberties after the terrorist attacks of

September 11, 2001," LaMarche writes. What was September 11 again?

Oh right, that was that attack George Soros didn't want us to

respond to in any way. "Others are the product of a long-term, multi-

faceted, right-wing strategy to discredit public institutions and

services (such as health and education), human rights, legal

protections against discrimination, and other aspects of an open

society."

 

Wow, conservatives are really, really evil. But the conspiracy only

grows corroding according to this Soros funded organization: "The

state of justice in America is but one part of a political and

policy landscape formed by 25 years of steady investments made by

right-wing forces in a network of think tanks, scholars, advocates,

litigation and media. Tax cuts that starve the government of

revenue, reducing the amount of spending for education, health and

other human needs, are another example of right-wing influence."

 

(OSI) gave out more than $130 million to various causes throughout

the United States. It gives a nice little window into what Soros

would like to shape the whole of America into: A secular, post-

modern, culturally relativist society. In other words, not at

anything at all like the America we know, and many of us love, today.

 

Long term, if Soros has his way, the United States won't even remain

territorially intact. He funds both the National Council of La Raza

and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, two

groups that want to essentially eliminate America's borders. In a

much hailed 1997 speech to the National Council of La Raza, former

Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said that he "proudly affirmed

that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory" enclosed by

its borders and that Mexican migrants are an important a very

important part of this. OSI has likewise contributed $65,000 to the

Malcolm X Grassroots movement, which wants to establish an all-black

homeland in the Southeastern United States, from South Carolina to

Louisiana. It would be communist, of course.

 

"Most disturbing, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement's website

lionizes a group of `political prisoners,' all of whom were

convicted of killing policemen," writes FrontPage Magazine editor

Ben Johnson. "Sundiata Acoli, Robert Seth Hayes, Jalil Muntaquin,

Herman Bell and Russell Maroon Shoats were all radical black

revolutionaries, serving with the Black Panthers and/or Black

Liberation Army."

 

These murders, according to the group's website, were perfectly

acceptable: "In 1970, along with 5 others, Maroon was accused of

attacking a police station, which resulted in an officer being

killed. This attack was said to have been carried out in response to

the rampant police brutality in the Black community."

 

With his involvement in the Project on Death in America, Soros said

he hoped to promote discussion of an American taboo. "There's a

widespread denial of death in America," he explained. "We have been

told all about sex, but very little about dying. Yet dying is even

more widespread than sex." This is yet another in a long line of

failures Soros sees in American society. During a speech at the

Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, Soros expanded on his rather

odd perception: "In America, the land of the perpetually young,

growing older is an embarrassment, and dying is a failure," he

said. "Death has replaced sex as the taboo subject of our times.

People compete to appear on talk shows to discuss the most intimate

details of their sex lives, but they have nothing to say about

dying, which in its immensity dwarves the momentary pleasures of

sex." Who would watch day time talk shows if all they talked about

was death? Can Soros find it in his own humanity to understand why

people prefer talk about sex instead of death? One encompasses joy,

or at the very least life, and the other is the ultimate sorrow.

Since most people strive for happiness, there is unlikely to be a

time when we find joy either in dying or discussing the

inevitability of death. Perhaps Soros expects too much from us.

Perhaps he expected too much from his own father, who Soros "wrote

off" because after receiving a diagnosis of terminal cancer

he "unfortunately wanted to live."

 

"I was kind of disappointed in him," Soros said, belying his

humanity yet again.

 

The foundation shies away from the term euthanasia, but Soros makes

it clear he believes that the "use of technology to extend life when

life when life has no meaning doesn't make sense." The question of

what constitutes a life with "meaning" is one Soros, the philosopher

king, surprisingly refuses to delve into. Nevertheless, when later

speaking about a physician-assisted suicide law that had passed in

Oregon, Soros said in a speech, "As the son of a mother who was a

member of the Hemlock Society (a pro-suicide group), and as a reader

of Plato's `Phaedra,' I cannot but approve."

 

Though now defunct, Project On Death in America director Kathleen

Foley said much had been accomplished in changing the social mores

of America vis-à-vis death. "PDIA invested heavily in the academic

faculty and clinician leader who would spearhead change," she

wrote. "These individuals are changing both attitudes and practice

in their academic medical centers, hospices, hospitals, and schools

of medicine, nursing, and social work."

 

Soros, always up for an opportunity to display his personal

eccentricities before an audience, once explained to a crowd how

he "came to terms with my own death" – which unsurprisingly is

deeply steeped in the same pseudo-philosophical babble everything

else he says is:

 

"Building on my own insight that there is always a divergence

between ideas and fact, I came to the conclusion that it is the idea

of my death which I cannot accept because it is a total denial of my

consciousness. The fact of dying, when it comes, may be much more

acceptable, especially if it comes at the end of a long life. The

insight that the idea is not the same as the fact made the idea more

bearable…"

 

"As people come to terms with death, recognizing it as a fact of

life, then the demand for physician-assisted suicide, as well as for

unnecessary medical interventions, will drop."

 

In his long worked on, but never released, philosophical treatise,

The Burden of Consciousness, Soros proudly held up his willingness

to face death as one of the many things that separated him from mere

mortals. He complained about those who choose to ignore death, which

was exactly what the, "large faceless masses of society, who are not

very much aware of their own individual existence, are doing."

 

Feel more comfortable yet? Is this really the kind of jumbled mind

that we want to be helping to set end of life policy in America?

 

In a ploy to get at this whole "death" issue without having to

bother with the "life" issue, Soros also has routed millions of

dollars to the Planned Parenthood Federation, the Center for

Reproductive Rights, and the American Civil Liberties Union to

help, "incorporate emergency contraception and early abortion

services into the services of comprehensive neighborhood health

centers" and "public hospitals catering to low-income and immigrant

patients." Equal opportunity for abortion is yet another benefit of

an open society, apparently.

 

The wedge issue of abortion is politically useful, Ellen Chesler,

director of OSI's Program on Reproductive Health and Rights,

admits: "It has become important for its symbolic value as well as

its actual value," she writes on the OSI website.

 

Soros also finances a multiple front effort to decriminalize

drugs. "A drug free America is simply not possible," Soros explains.

In his post-drug war world, a "strictly controlled distribution

network" would dispense drugs and tax them to fund treatment

centers. But, in effect, that's not really where most of the Soros'

money went. One of his programs, "Shoot Smart, Shoot Straight"

constituted a user kit for crack cocaine smokers, for example. What

exactly does one put in a crack smoking kit? Wonderful question.

According to a 1999 piece in Insight Magazine, "The user kit

includes two condoms, antiseptic towelettes, triple antibiotic

ointment, two alcohol swabs, five vitamin C tablets, copper wool, a

few rubber bands, a rubber mouthpiece and a pamphlet with the

following instructions: `Use a glass or metal stem with mouthpiece.

Don't get cut lips. Let pipe or stem cool down before taking next

hit to prevent burning or cut lips.'"

 

Another brochure includes pictures of how to "cook" drugs and

detailed injection instructions. None of this seems to be

pursuing "the treatment option" OSI insists it is interested in.

Adding insult to injury, tens of thousands of these kits were handed

out at U.S. taxpayer funded clinics. And now Soros admits that he

would be for "clinical dosing of addicts" with heroin, as it has

been used and - what Soros doesn't tell you - failed in Swiss

treatment centers.

 

Soros has funded legal defense for illegal immigrants, helping them

to stay in the country and…stay on welfare, too. His Emma Lazarus

Fund (named after the poet whose words grace the Statue of Liberty)

was initiated after Soros became infuriated with a new federal law

restricting food stamps and Supplemental Security Income Benefits to

non-citizens. Soros called this modest roadblock in the way of the

expansion of the bloated welfare state as "a clear-cut case of

injustice."

 

In retrospect, of course, it is far from clear-cut that any

injustice was done. Welfare reform has been a huge success. More

people are working. States are saving millions of dollars, and

spending elsewhere, solving new problems. All of this despite the

doomsday proclamations of Soros. So while we can say Soros was on

the wrong side of an American policy decision that went right, we

have yet to see any hard facts showing Soros' policies have changed

America for the better.

 

Perhaps Soros is right. Perhaps he could be wrong about things after

all.

 

THE END BEGINS

 

Soros' vocal personal involvement in the effort to defeat Bush this

November has irrevocably tied him, his foundations, and the many

people he works with into that cause. He has made a big gamble to

regain the political influence he enjoyed with the Clinton

Administration. Should Bush win, however, Soros would be

marginalized even further. His profile has become too high to just

write off a Democratic loss as a minor bump in Soros' yellow brick

road. That fear alone will likely encourage Soros to spend million

of dollars more, desperate cash for desperate causes way outside the

mainstream of American politics.

 

Soros has a preoccupation with the idea of acceptance. He talks

openly about various humiliations and rejections all the time in

interviews. Take this excerpt from an interview with Michael Kaufman

about life in 1950s London, for example:

 

"I had thought everybody would be terribly interested in this

brilliant, clever young man who had lived through so much and in

reality nobody gave a damn…I was a virgin but very interested and so

I tried to pick up girls on the street without success. The lack of

sexual contact was painful, because sex was my main interest and all

that gave me complexes that it took me a long time to shed."

 

There is no reason not to believe that Soros acquired similar

complexes from Reagan, Thatcher, Bush I, and all the others who

failed to take him seriously. And just as he got himself a young

trophy wife once he could afford one, then dumped her for a younger

girlfriend,, Soros is now looking for a trophy president.

 

His lack of influence with George W. Bush is killing him. This is

the true reason he has put himself so on the line this election

cycle. The myth of his greatness comforts him when the going gets

rough.

 

"The more I am attacked, the more I am ready to stand up for what I

believe in," Soros told uber-liberal pundit Eric Alterman. "But I am

frustrated by the reach and influence of the RNC propaganda machine.

They are presenting a totally distorted picture of who I am and what

I stand for."

 

But it is his own words that have gotten him into hot water, and it

is his own actions he does not want to answer for. There is an

inherent contradiction in his behavior: His ego desperately wants to

take credit for being the puppet master, but he wants everyone to

ignore which way he is pulling the strings. He cannot have it both

ways.

 

Is Soros God? Well, recently, even he has determined it unlikely. On

60 Minutes, Soros explained earnestly, "if you think you're God and

you go into financial markets, you're bound to come out broke. So

the fact that I'm not broke shows that I don't believe I'm God."

 

At least we got that cleared up. Nevertheless, isn't it a bit

frightening to think that the next election could be decided by a

megalomaniac who has seriously considered the possibility that he is

God?

 

Soros went on to explain that he is a person who at times, "engages

in amoral activities and the rest of the time tries to be moral."

Frankly, we hope we can all agree to expect more from those who

control our destiny. We can also hope that if George W. Bush wins

another term, Soros keeps his promise to "go into some kind of

monastery."

 

Soros, like it or not, is a fixture of the 2004 political landscape.

One can almost hear the ghost of Karl Popper lamenting: "What a

monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king."

 

*Rachel Ehrenfeld is author of Funding Evil; How Terrorism is

Financed–and How to Stop It (Bonus Books, 2004); Shawn Macomber is a

staff writer at The American Spectator and runs the website,

www.ReturnofthePrimitive.com.