Soros appointed Aryeh Neier as director of both the Open Society Institute and the entire global network of Soros foundations. Neier, a former sixties radical, spent fifteen years as an operative of the ACLU, including eight years as its national executive director. Neier was also the founder and executive director of Human Rights Watch, a group famous for absurdly making the United States and Israel the chief targets of its “human rights” protests.
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Franchise Opportunities Available
Today, the Open Society Foundations funded by Soros and run by Neier are active in more than seventy countries around the world and his Open Society Institute is a $1.9 billion operation.
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Soros claims that he has donated over $7 billion to his Open Society organizations and he has successfully organized other billionaires to follow his example. Among those that have received his money:
Organizations that oppose America’s post-9/11 national security measures, such as the ACLU and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, which has persuaded the governments of more than four hundred American cities to pledge noncompliance with the Patriot Act;
The Center for Constitutional Rights, founded by four longtime supporters of communist causes, which has condemned the “immigration sweeps, ghost detentions, extraordinary rendition, and every other illegal program the government has devised” in response to “the so-called War on Terror”;
Organizations that promote “open borders” and full citizenship rights for illegal aliens such as the American Immigration Council and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which tries to shield illegal aliens from the law;
Organizations such as the Sentencing Project, which attacks the American prison system as racist;
The Gamaliel Foundation and the Midwest Academy, whose radical instructors train political organizers, Barack Obama among them, to fight for “social, economic and racial justice”;
The pseudo-anarchist Ruckus Society (“actions speak louder than words”);
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an organization founded by self-declared (former, if you listen to him) communist Van Jones.
Because his overall goal is the transformation of American society, Soros has also made donations—really investments—in an astonishing number of media organizations and activist groups:
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Lessons in Esperanto
Iluzio—(n) A deceptive appearance or impression. Illusion.
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NBC, ABC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post;
The Columbia Journalism Review and ProPublica;
The Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Lens, the Columbia School of Journalism, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Organization of News Ombudsmen, National Public Radio, the socialist American Prospect Inc.;
The far-left media organizations the Nation Institute, Pacifica Foundation, Independent Media Center, Media Fund, Independent Media Institute, and Media Matters For America;
Left-wing religious organizations such as Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good; Sojourners, whose founder, Jim Wallis, merits a chapter of his own; People Improving Communities through Organizing; and Catholics for Choice, a nominally Catholic organization that “believes in a world where everyone has equal access to . . . safe and legal abortion services”;
Global Exchange, whose founder, Medea Benjamin, is a pro-Castro radical who created Iraq Occupation Watch for the purpose of encouraging American troops to desert. In December 2004, Benjamin announced that Global Exchange would be sending aid to the families of terrorist insurgents who were fighting American troops in Iraq.
The Tides Foundation, which receives cash from individuals, groups, and other foundations and then funnels it to designated left-wing recipients. Having given more than $400 million to “progressive nonprofit organizations” since 2000, Tides is the chosen vehicle for many progressives to donate cash to questionable organizations without leaving their fingerprints on it.
Various groups supporting drug-legalization and needle-exchange programs. In 1996, former Carter administration official Joseph Califano called Soros “the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization.”
Groups promoting physician-assisted suicide such as the Project on Death in America (PDA), whose purpose was to provide “end-of-life” assistance and to enact public policy that would “transform the culture and experience of dying and bereavement.” Over a nine-year period, the Open Society Institute gave $45 million to PDA.
Leftist organizations whose perspectives are “internationalist” and who see American sovereignty as an obstacle to their goals, such as the United Nations Foundation and the Coalition for an International Criminal Court, which sought to subordinate American criminal justice to an international prosecutor. Soros once wrote: “In short, we need a global society to support our global economy.” “The sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.”
MAN OF ACTION
George Soros is not a man who simply thinks big; he puts his ideas, and his money, into action. Soros showed just how serious he was about global regime change by deploying his Open Society Institutes, and the cluster of socially involved organizations he had built around them, in efforts to overthrow the governments of several countries, while also banking loads of cash on the side.
Right around the turn of this century, Soros began to target Central Asian countries that were former members of the Soviet bloc. These nations were generally in a state of disintegration under the pressures of American military and economic power. Among the regimes in Europe that Soros himself took credit for overthrowing were those in Serbia, Croatia, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where, according to the Los Angeles Times, he played an “important role” in preparing the country for a revolt against their president. “I’m delighted by what happened in Georgia,” Soros said, “and I take great pride in having contributed to it.”
Soros’s preferred method in these countries was to set up Open Society Institutes, which had a broad mandate to influence and infiltrate social institutions and media outlets, and to fund activist organizations that could organize street protests charging the existing regimes with corruption and other crimes. Franjo Tudjman, the late president of Croatia who fought a long (and, ultimately, losing) battle with Soros, described his opponents this way:
[Soros and his allies] have spread their tentacles throughout the whole of our society. . . . [Their aim is to] control of all spheres of life . . . setting up a state within a state. . . .
Soros not only admitted to this subversion, he in fact became addicted to the experimentation:
When you try to improve society you affect different people and different interests differently and they are not actually commensurate, you very often have all kinds of unintended adverse consequences. So I had to experiment. And it was a learning process. The first part was this subversive activity, disrupting repressive regimes. That was a lot of fun and that’s actually what got me hooked on this whole enterprise. Seeing what worked in one country, trying it in the other country.
That image in your mind of an evil billionaire dictating world events while maniacally laughing from his midtown penthouse apartment with a furry white cat on his lap may not be that far off. These methods were effective in small, poor countries, but America presented much larger problems. So he went right to the top.
Around the time that George Soros launched the Open Society Institute, he also forged a close relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton, the new president and first lady. “We actually work together as a team,” he boasted. When the Clintons took office in early 1993, they faced the daunting task of cultivating a productive relationship with the collapsed Soviet empire, which was attempting to rise from its ruins. Soros was chosen to serve as a key adviser on the project.
; Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard professor whose work Soros had previously funded through one of his foundations, was tapped to head the economic team to oversee Russia’s transformation to a market economy. Soros worked closely with Sachs, and the pair held such enormous sway over Russian president Boris Yeltsin that Soros once quipped “the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.”
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Lessons in Esperanto
Egoista—(adj) Lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure. Selfish.
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That new empire turned out to be massively corrupt. An enormous money-laundering scheme, which came to be known as “Russiagate,” led to the diversion of $100 billion out of the country and the transfer of valuable public properties into private hands for a fraction of their value.
The mess was eventually investigated by the U.S. House Banking Committee and Soros was called to testify. He denied any responsibility but did admit that he had used insider access in a deal to acquire a large portion of Sidanko Oil. Soros further acknowledged that some of the missing Russian assets had made their way into his personal investment portfolio and conceded that the Sidanko deal “was part of the crony stuff that was going on.” House Banking Committee chairman Jim Leach later characterized the entire sordid affair as “one of the greatest social robberies in human history.”
Think about the significance of this for a moment. The Soviet Union’s opportunity for transition to a free-market economy could have been the knockout blow in a century-long battle between capitalism and communism. If capitalism were to have worked in the former Soviet Union, capitalism could work anywhere. There would be no more plausible arguments to be made for socialism and communism. With all of that on the line, the man with his fingers deep in the cookie jar was none other than George Soros. It’s no wonder that the Soviet transition was so messy, corrupt, and for a select few, very, very profitable.
SHADOW PARTY
Another area of close collaboration between the Clintons and Soros was the campaign to socialize the American health-care system. The defeat of Hillarycare convinced Soros that he would have to change the political process if progressive ideas were to triumph. The key would be to create the illusion of a mass movement so that members of Congress would feel that everywhere they looked—academic institutions, the business community, religious groups, the media—there was a clamor for reform.
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Lessons in Esperanto
Propagando—(n) Information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a particular political cause. Propaganda.
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Soros poured millions into the illusory mandate effort, mobilizing the institutions he had funded and recruiting other philanthropies, such as the Pew Charitable Trust, to get behind his crusade. He also contributed money to Senator John McCain, the politician leading the reform efforts—which paid off in 2002 with the passage of the McCain-Feingold Act.
The new campaign finance law banned “soft” money, stripping the two major political parties of their financial base. This funding vacuum provided Soros with the perfect opportunity to create a “Shadow Party,” which would funnel massive amounts of capital into organizations that would assume the role that political parties traditionally played in electoral campaigns. These organizations (which are used by both parties) are called 527s and they would be tasked with conducting the political “air war” through media buys and the “ground war” through get-out-the-vote efforts.
An equally important impetus behind Soros’s creation of the Shadow Party was the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks upon the United States. Soros did not see these attacks as indications that religiously motivated enemies had declared war on the West. Instead he complained about “American supremacy” and “growing inequality between rich and poor, both within countries and among countries.” His solution was, naturally, to subordinate American sovereignty to the will of the rest of the world. He wrote that “[a] global open society requires affirmative action on a global scale.”
Soros took advantage of that perceived opportunity in a big way. There was no official press release when the Shadow Party was born on July 17, 2003, at Soros’s estate in Southampton, Long Island. But it was a momentous event, creating the largest and most powerful political juggernaut in American history. Among those present at its founding were former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, former White House chief of staff John Podesta, Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and Andy Stern, former head of the SEIU public employees union, along with billionaires like Progressive Insurance mogul Peter B. Lewis.
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September 11: An “Unusual Opportunity”
Like other progressives, Soros believed that you should never let a serious crisis go to waste. In his mind, 9/11 provided an opportunity to move his agenda forward much faster than might otherwise be possible. He wrote:
September 11 has shocked the people of the United States into realizing that others may regard them very differently from the way they see themselves. They are more ready to reassess the world and the role that the United States plays in it more than in normal times. This provides an unusual opportunity to rethink and reshape the world more profoundly than would have been possible prior to September 11.
Soros regarded the “war on terror” that President Bush had declared as the heart of the problem and promised to devote every penny he had to defeat Bush in the 2004 elections. “America under Bush is a danger to the world,” he declared in 2003. “And I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.” Based on the election results, I guess Soros bezonas pli monon. (In case you’re still not fluent in Esperanto, that means: “needed more money.”)
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The Shadow Party, which would spend hundreds of millions of unofficial dollars on the 2004 presidential campaign, consisted of a network of seven 527 organizations. The ground war was orchestrated by a variety of people and groups, including leaders of the left-wing government unions and the Center for American Progress, headed by Podesta. The air war was run by the Media Fund, headed by Clinton operative Harold Ickes, and MoveOn.org, the Internet fund-raising and agitation group created by West Coast billionaire Wes Boyd.
Another component, “America Votes,” referred to by one of its staffers as a “monster coalition,” was designed to coordinate the efforts of all the left-wing groups working at the grassroots level to defeat Bush—from ACORN to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, from the Sierra Club to the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union.
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Lessons in Esperanto
Malnobla—(adj) Deserving contempt. Despicable.
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True to his word, Soros contributed $23,700,000 of his personal funds to the campaign effort during the 2004 election cycle. The Campaign Finance Reform Act, which Soros had engineered, and which was marketed to the public as legislation that would take money out of the political system, had instead resulted in an avalanche of money coming into politics—and the lion’s share of that money was directed by Soros himself.
When the ballots were counted in the 2004 elections, the Shadow Party came within a few thousand votes in Ohio of pulling off a victory. But, even in defeat, its alteration of the American political landscape was profound.
By pushing campaign finance reform, Soros had cut off the Democrats’ soft money supply; by forming the Shadow Party, he had provided the Democrats with an alternative source of funding—one that he, and the institutions he created, controlled; and by controlling the money, George Soros was finally in a position to define the agenda of the party.
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Lessons in Esperanto
Malprospero—(adj) Lack of success. Failure.
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But most important of all, by controlling campaign resources, Soros was able to begin purging those campaigns of the small minority of moderates who remained. The polariz
ation of the political parties, and of America as a whole, was about to be fully unleashed.
AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE
In April 2005, Soros called another summit of the wealthy and powerful to prepare for the next presidential campaign. Seventy well-heeled progressive activists met in Phoenix to form the Democracy Alliance.
The Alliance would become the most exclusive of all the Shadow Party institutions. Members were obligated to pay an initial $25,000 fee, plus $30,000 in yearly dues, and were also required to donate at least $200,000 annually to groups endorsed by the Alliance. This was a gathering of the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. Donors were to “pour” these requisite donations into four different categories: leadership, civic engagement, ideas, and media.
Over the next three years, the Democracy Alliance established subchapters in all fifty states. Just two months after the Democratic Party won control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 midterm elections, Soros and then-SEIU president Andrew Stern created a PAC called “Working for Us,” whose goal was to eliminate Democratic Party moderates and to “collaborate with those who worked so hard to elect a progressive Congress, including state and local activists, the netroots and progressive organizations.”