Open Soros Who is this billionaire self described "brit," and why is he throwing millions of dollars at the Democrats?
Macomber, Shawn
o oros Who is this billionaire and self-described "nut" and why is he throwing his millions at Democrats and the overthrow of American capitalism? BY SHAWN MACOMBER _ ROWING UP IN...
...dollar against the euro, the Canadian dollar, the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and gold...
...The family split up and George survived the war under the assumed identity of a gentile boy, Sandor Kiss...
...Since his arrival on Wall Street in 1956 at age 26, Soros has remained consistently ahead of the curve...
...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...
...The foundation shies away from the term euthanasia, but Soros makes clear he believes that "the use of technology to extend life when life has no meaning doesn't make sense...
...In 1969 he started the Quantum Fund to trade securities at higher volumes with around $5 million...
...When Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze was recently ousted, he proclaimed that Soros had overthrown him...
...His 1995 book Soros on Soros contains a clue as to what he may be thinking: "I do not accept the rules imposedby others....I am a law-abiding citizen, but I recognize that there are regimes that need to be opposed rather than accepted...
...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...
...Clearly Soros sees himself as someone who is able to determine when the "normal rules" should and shouldn't apply...
...And how long is it likely to last...
...American Conservative Union Chairman David Keene calls Soros the "Daddy Warbucks of the radical Left" who "opposes everything President Bush stands for...
...In other areas: Soros has funded legal defense for illegal immigrants...
...He has made a big gamble for political influence, but, should Bush win, he will be more marginalized than ever...
...Explaining his self-proclaimed role as a "stateless statesman," Soros told Kaufman, "Yes, I do have a foreign policy...
...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...
...He is always trying to rationalize what are basically his emotions...
...It's a harrowing tale, both poignant and terrible, and filled with many close calls...
...This is what happens to a Jew who hides," read a sign attached to one of the bodies...
...Let's suppose speculation went on to push the franc," he said...
...I was and always am very critical of capitalism," he told Forbes magazine in 1997...
...Yet dying is even more widespread than sex...
...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...
...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...
...In practice, then, anything Soros endorses becomes a boon for the "open society," while anything he disagrees with—Bush, immigration policy, the war on drugs, even the United States itself—becomes its greatest enemy...
...and Narco-terrorism (1990), and director of the American Center for Democracy, believes the billionaire's threat should not be taken lightly...
...He has declared himself "at odds with the latter-day apostles of laissez faire" and, further, doubts the markets' ability to allocate goods properly...
...On that day British citizens saw their currency lose 20 percent of its value...
...His father is driven more by "temperament" than anything else, Robert said...
...In an interview with CNBC last May 20, Soros explained, "I now have a short position against the dollar....We continue to sell the U.S...
...The war in Kosovo was a justified defense of the "open society," while the war in Iraq is a tyrannical plot devised by George W. Bush...
...Soros's 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...
...Trying to stave off the challenge to its currency by foreign speculators, the British government had borrowed heavily before finally accepting defeat and allowing the devaluation of the pound...
...He opposed the war in Iraq and he bankrolls every wacko liberal cause from population and gun control schemes, to drug legalization, radical feminism, and one-world globalism...
...to former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta's new think-tank, the Center for American Progress...
...I have not even a shadow of remorse for making a profit out of the devaluation of the pound...
...I have had these illusions, or perhaps delusions, of grandeur and they have driven me," Soros toldbiographer Michael Kaufman...
...Perhaps what is most interesting about the episode, considering Soros's recent professions of moral outrage at the Bush economic plan, is his blasé attitude toward social mores in business...
...Others have caught the scent of something other than philosophy in the air around Soros...
...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...
...Soros's heroes have always been philosophers and intellectuals, not businessmen...
...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...
...While Vasarhelyi fell out of love with hardline communism many years before, he remained, until his death in 2001, strikingly unfriendly towards liberal ideals...
...The more successful he became the more cash he had on hand...
...A real patriot, hellbent on making cash off yet another market crash—ours...
...Cash aside, what does it mean to have the George Soros "Seal of Approval...
...This is a heavy load that I could shed only when I recognized my success...
...Last summer Soros spread cash around to the campaigns of Bob Graham, John Kerry, and Howard Dean...
...Soros makes Ted Turner look conservative by comparison," Keene said...
...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...
...I am a kind of nut who wants to have an impact...
...The president should be worried," Ehrenfeld said...
...Soros has dropped more than $15 million so far to defeat George W. Bush next November, and he has made it clear he is willing to spend more—much more...
...Pushed further, Despite, or perhaps because of, his bizarre proclamations, Soros has become the go-to guy for the Democratic Party...
...often they appraise themselves by the amount of money they can make on the side...
...Remember the fury that befell Dean when he said we needed to be "evenhanded" in the Mideast peace process...
...and in 1999 he predicted the imminent total collapse of the global capitalist system...
...In his native Hungary, Soros handpicked Miklos Vasarhelyi, a former member of the Communist government of Imre Nagy and one-time Italian fascist, to head his foundation in that country...
...seem more than bizarre...
...Zaza Gachechiladze, editor-in-chief of the Georgian Messenger, concurred...
...One can almost hear the ghost of Karl Popper lamenting: "What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king...
...Indeed, he says quite forthrightly in his latest book that he intends to replace the Bush Doctrine with the "Soros Doctrine...
...seem more than bizarre...
...Soros's main concern is that someone be elected who is indebted enough to him that he will pick up the phone when he calls...
...Soros is willing to forgive these misconceptions...
...Governments and individuals alike took heed of his financial moves...
...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...
...Around the world, Soros has become something of a bogeyman...
...Or perhaps he believes in his own mythology as well...
...Maintaining his intellectualism has also required Soros to immerse himself in a strange cycle of Jewish self-loathing...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 SHAWN MACOMBER not possible," Soros explains...
...We appraise politicians by the amount of money they can raise...
...Soros's vast wealth and his own personal story have allowed him to say things people like Howard Dean or Pat Buchanan couldn't get away with...
...So that's what I'm all about," Soros told Kaufman...
...When I hear President Bush say that, 'either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,' I hear alarm bells," Soros writes...
...In his post-drug war world, a "strictly controlled distribution network" would dispense drugs and tax them to fund treatment centers...
...during the Contract with America-era, Soros opposed welfare reform, warning that "the poor and the infirm are going to get kicked around, literally...
...We have been told all about sex, but very little about dying...
...By the 1990s it was worth nearly $6 billion...
...He makes no bones about this, consistently mocking world leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan who refused to meet with him...
...This romantic vision of himself, not as a world-class financier, but as a first-rate intellectual, is a major part of George Soros's myth of himself...
...Soros has supported Democrats in the past, but he has never decided to get as publicly, or financially, involved as now, when—or because?— the odds for Democrats are so poor...
...Republicans, predictably, see Soros's activities in a different light...
...That fear alone will likely encourage Soros to spend millions of dollars more, desperate cash for desperate causes way outside the mainstream of American politics...
...Popper's best-known concept was that of an "open society"—a society that would "maximize FEBRUARY 2004 AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25 OPEN SOROS the freedom of individuals to live as they wish...
...Does that sound like the kind of man who is planning to help defeat Bush and then step back and let a new Democratic president do as he wishes...
...Soros has adopted strange and hyperbolic language in describing today's America as a fascist Fourth Reich with September 11 serving as our Reichstag fire...
...During that time, the fight was against a monolithic ideology, which Soros had determined was flawed...
...Photo: Reuters NewMedia between "market fundamentalists" and "religious fundamentalists...
...BUT THIS IS ABOUT MORE THAN MONEY...
...In September, Soros was invited to speak at one of the State Department's Open Forums...
...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 Soros on Soros...
...The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat...
...This fit well with his newfound distaste for the "threat" of global capitalism...
...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...
...A drug free America is simply Soros's vast wealth and his own personal story have allowed him to say things people like Howard Dean or Pat Buchanan couldn't get away with...
...But such is Soros's growing reputation...
...And he isn't joking...
...George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party...
...Which is all the more reason why reading Soros's latest book, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, is more than a bit disconcerting...
...Evil Money: Encounters Along the Money Trail (1992...
...Soros's memory of those days spent under Nazi occupation is, however, different from what one might expect...
...For an adolescent to be in real danger, having a feeling he is inviolate, having a father whom he adoredacting as a hero and having an evil confronting you and getting the better of it, I mean, being in command of the situation, even though you're in danger, but basically maneuvering successfully, what more can you ask for...
...Far from making light of these delusions, Soros goes on to embrace them...
...In Albania, for example, Soros supported a paper that encouraged a coup by a group of ex-Communists, helping to take down a moderate liberal government...
...In a 1995 speech, Soros hinted at his ultimate hope of philosophical vindication: There is more to my existence than money...
...MUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN ABOUT SOROS'S vast fortune...
...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...
...While Soros did help fund the many public demonstrations and paid full-time activists, Shevardnadze was brought down mostly by economic collapse and his own political corruption...
...2 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 SHAWN MACOMBER Soros gave an example...
...Can the Democrats still possibly believe Soros's millions come without strings attached...
...FEBRUARY 2004 AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27 OPEN SOROS regretted that his own success had helped further the notion that "Jews rule the world...
...Today's America is "a threat to the world," run by a Republican Party which is the arbiter of an unholy alliance 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2004 SHAWN MACOMBER George Soros and Hillary Clinton at Economic Forum...
...BY SHAWN MACOMBER _ ROWING UP IN NAZI-OCCUPIED HUNGARY, a 14-year-old George Soros saw two dead bodies hanging from lampposts...
...Therefore, anyone fighting communism was fighting for an "open society...
...Malcolm, belying her feminist slant, confided to the Washington Post that the Soros donation was like "getting his Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval...
...The international philanthropist routinely ties the causes he christens as worthwhile into the struggle of his early life in Hungary, and his crusade against Bush is no exception...
...But Democrats looking to Soros as a moral compass may want to check to see which direction that needle is pointing...
...Shawn Macomber is a reporter for The American Spectator...
...My goal is to become the conscience of the world...
...Some of this may seem strange in light of the fact that a mere two years ago Soros described the influence of large cash donations in politics as "a fundamental crisis in democratic self-government...
...For me, this was the most exciting time of my life," Soros has said...
...and to Americans Coming Together (ACT), a get-out-the-Democratic vote operation headed by former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal and Ellen Malcolm, president of the pro-abortion EMILY'S List...
...Can the Democrats still believe Soros's millions come without strings attached...
...Many Americans might take issue with Soros's implication that al Qaeda is right and we are wrong...
...Despite, or perhaps because of, his bizarre proclamations, Soros has become the go-to guy for the Democratic Party...
...Thus defeating Bush has become the professed "central focus" of Soros's life...
...At one point in The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros laments that "international income redistribution is practically nonexistent...
...Soros also explained that he But now that Soros is a billionaire, his sudden pangs of...
...HEN SOROS FINALLY BEGAN to turn his eye towards his adopted country in recent years, his domestic agenda turned out to be schizophrenically varied, and more than a little odd...
...On September 16, 1992, Soros made a billion dollars for funds he managed in a single day by betting against the British sterling, helping to usher in what the Brits refer to as Black Wednesday...
...That would be wrong and bad...
...It's incredibly ironic that George Soros is trying to create a more open society by using an unregulated, under-the-radar-screen, shadowy, soft-money group to do it," Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said...
...The question of what constitutes a life with "meaning" is one Soros, the philosopher, surprisingly refuses to delve into...
...Some conservatives are looking at Soros's words and cash and recommending a more cautious approach...
...And perhaps Soros would have met the same fate if his father had not obtained fake identities for himself, his wife, and his two sons...
...He has donated millions to MoveOn.org, a group originally formed to denounce what it termed the excessive public focus on President Clinton's personal life...
...We are now, Soros writes, a nation of "victims turning perpetrators," likening our reaction to the terrorist attacks to the crimes committed by the Germans because of their nation's mistreatment at Versailles...
...Soros on several occasions has likened Jewish support for Israel to a "tribal loyalty" he wants 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...
...At a recent speech before the Jewish Funders Network, Soros implied 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...
...We appraise artists by how much their creations fetch...
...Indeed, the man is a visionary in the world of business...
...During his speech he made several jokey references to his plans for George W. Bush's defeat come next November before turning on the hyper-internationalist rhetoric, including his proposed "modification of the concept of sovereignty, because sovereignty is basically somewhat anachronistic...
...And he is living in a constant state of not exactly denial, but rationalization of his emotional state...
...Now it is rumored he is planning on pushing for Wesley Clark...
...Soros will be very much a fixture of the 2004 race...
...In books and speeches Soros speaks endlessly of how much better the world would be if only those in power had listened to him...
...Until well into middle age, he vowed he would avoid the "ego trip" of philanthropy...
...More recently Soros has been very publicly betting against the dollar...
...The other body carried the warning, "This is what happens to a Christian who hides Jews...
...His massive philanthropic endeavors operate under the umbrella of the Open Society Institute...
...But now that Soros is a billionaire, his sudden pangs of conscience over the role of capitalism in the U.S...
...A cursory glance at Federal Election Commission records shows Soros has no interest in who wins, so long as it is not George W. Bush...
...It was his sponsorship that helped unify the movement to 'legitimize' illegal drugs—not only in the U.S., but around the world...
...What I've learned watching Soros over the years is that he has this very interesting ability, andall the resources, to change landscapes to his liking...
...He's been known to pay graduate students in philosophy just to walk with him and discuss ideas...
...Soros became known as the Man Who Broke the Bank of England...
...Soros is the person who planned Shevardnadze's overthrow," he said...
...His opposition to President Bush's re-election makes perfect sense when viewed through this prism...
...Another factor that sheds light on Soros's 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 of the twentieth century and a man he had nominal contact with while studying at the London School of Economics...
...But I remember seeing it as a kid and thinking, Jesus Christ, at least half of this is bullshit...
...America has become a "supremacist" nation, he continues, led by a man who "has a simplistic view of what is right and what is wrong" and is at odds with the very "principles of open society, which recognize that we may be wrong...
...At 17 he slipped out of a Russian-occupied section of Austria and headed for London, just as the Iron Curtain was descending...
...Soros saw opportunity in post-war Europe, and became involved in the embryonic stages of the globalization of markets trading international securities...
...It's generally accepted public opinion here that Mr...
...But it wouldn't stop me...
...From a purely cold-hearted perspective, this all might be kosher...
...The Bush administration has apparently yet to take Soros's promises seriously...
...He claims he is no "neo-Marxist," but his writings throughout the 1990s have certainly had that flavor...
...And in periods of regime change, the normal rules don't apply...
...FEBRUARY 2004 AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29...
...R ACHEL EHRENFELD, author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed—and How to Stop It 2003...
...he intends to replace the "Bush Doctrine with the "Soros Doctrine...
...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...
...Yet Soros writes that we invaded Iraq to some degree on behalf of Israel, and Democrats remain silent...
...conscience over the role of capitalism in the U.S...
...Soros also finances a multiple front effort to decriminalize drugs...
...He is able, with the power of his money, to make things once unthinkable, normal...
Vol. 37 • February 2004 • No. 1
