George Soros is one of the most powerful men on earth. A New York
hedge fund manager, he has amassed a personal fortune estimated at
about $13
billion (as of 2009). His company, Soros
Fund Management, controls at
least another $25
billion
in investor assets. Since 1979, Soros's foundation network -- whose
flagship is the Open
Society Institute (OSI) -- has dispensed more than $5 billion to
a multitude of organizations whose objectives are consistent
with those of Soros. With assets of $1.93 billion as of 2008, OSI
alone donates scores of millions of dollars annually to these
various groups. Following
is a sampling of the major agendas advanced by groups that Soros and
OSI support financially. Listed under each category heading are a few
OSI donees fitting that description.
Organizations
that accuse America of violating the civil rights and liberties of
many of its residents:
- The
Arab American Institute impugns
many of the “sweeping”
and “unreasonable” post-9/11 counterterrorism measures that have
unfairly “targeted Arab Americans.”
- The
Bill of Rights Defense Committee has
persuaded
the political leadership in more than 400 American cities and
counties to pledge noncompliance with the anti-terrorism measure
known as the Patriot Act, on grounds that the legislation tramples
on people's civil liberties.
Organizations
that depict America as a nation whose enduring racism must be
counterbalanced by racial
and ethnic preferences in favor of nonwhites:
Organizations
that specifically portray the American criminal-justice system as
racist and inequitable:
- The
Sentencing
Project asserts
that prison-sentencing patterns discriminate
against nonwhites, and seeks
“to
reduce the reliance on incarceration.”
- Critical
Resistance contends
that crime stems from “inequality and powerlessness,” which can
be rectified through wholesale redistribution of wealth.
- The
Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights charges
that criminal laws “are
enforced in a manner that is massively and pervasively biased.”
Organizations
that call for massive social change, and for the recruitment and
training of activist leaders to help foment that change:
- The Center
for Community Change
is “dedicated
to finding the [progressive] stars of tomorrow and preparing them to
lead.”
- The Gamaliel
Foundation
teaches
social-change
“techniques and methodologies.”
- The Ruckus
Society promotes
“nonviolent
direct action against unjust institutions and policies.”
- The American
Institute for Social Justice
aims to “transform poor communities” by agitating for increased
government spending on social-welfare programs.
- The Institute
for America's Future
“regularly
convenes and educates
progressive leaders, organizations, candidates, opinion makers, and
activists.”
- People
for the American Way,
founded by
television producer Norman Lear to
oppose
the allegedly growing influence of the “religious right,” seeks
“to
cultivate new generations of leaders and activists” who will
promote “progressive values.”
- Democracy
For America operates an academy
that has
taught more than 10,000 recruits nationwide how to “focus,
network, and train
grassroots activists in the skills and strategies to take back our
country.”
- The Midwest
Academy
trains radical activists in the tactics of direct action,
confrontation, and intimidation. Author Stanley Kurtz has described
this academy as a “crypto-socialist organization” that was
“arguably the most influential force in community organizing from
the seventies through the nineties.”
Organizations
that disparage capitalism while promoting a dramatic expansion of
social-welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes:
- The Center
for Economic and Policy Research
asserts
that “the welfare state has softened the impact” of “the worst
excesses and irrationalities of a market system” and its
“injustices.”
- The Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities
advocates greater tax expenditures on such assistance
programs
as Medicaid,
the Children’s Health Insurance Program, food
stamps, and low-income housing initiatives.
- The Economic Policy Institute believes that “government must play an active role in protecting the economically vulnerable, ensuring equal opportunity, and improving the well-being of all Americans.”
- The Ella
Baker Center for Human Rights
was founded by the revolutionary communist Van Jones. This
anti-poverty organization claims that “decades of disinvestment in
our cities,” coupled with America's allegedly imperishable racism,
have “led to despair and homelessness.”
- The Emma
Lazarus Fund: In
1996 George Soros said he was “appalled”
by
the recently signed welfare-reform law that empowered states to
limit legal immigrants' access to public assistance. In response to
this “mean-spirited attack on immigrants,” he launched an Open
Society Institute project known as the Emma
Lazarus Fund
and
endowed it with $50 million.
Organizations
that support socialized medicine in the United States:
- Health Care for America Now
(HCAN)
is a vast network of organizations supporting,
ideally, a “single-payer” model where the federal government
would be in charge of financing and administering the entire U.S.
healthcare system.
During the political debate over “Obamacare” in 2009 and 2010,
HCAN’s
strategy was to try to achieve such a system incrementally, first by
implementing a “public option”—i.e., a government insurance
agency to “compete” with private insurers, so that Americans
would be “no
longer at the mercy of the private insurance industry.”
Because such an agency would not need to show a profit in order to
remain in business, and because it could tax and regulate its
private competitors in whatever fashion it pleased, this “public
option”
would inevitably force private insurers out of the industry. In
August 2009, Soros pledged
to give HCAN $5
million
to promote its campaign for reform.
Organizations
that strive to move American politics to the left by promoting
the election of progressive political candidates:
- Project
Vote is the voter-mobilization arm of the notoriously corrupt ACORN,
whose voter-registration drives and get-out-the-vote initiatives
have been marred by massive levels of fraud
and corruption.
- Catalist
seeks
“to help progressive organizations realize … electoral success
by building and operating a robust national voter database.”
- The
Brennan
Center for Justice
aims
to “fully restore voting rights following criminal
conviction”―significant
because research
shows that ex-felons are far likelier
to vote for Democratic
political candidates than for Republicans.
- The
Progressive
States Network
seeks
to “pass progressive legislation in all fifty states by providing
coordinated research and strategic advocacy tools to
forward-thinking state legislators.”
- The
Progressive
Change Campaign Committee,
to which George
Soros personally donated
$8,000
in 2010, works
“to elect bold progressive candidates to federal office … more
often.”
Organizations
that promote leftist ideals and worldviews in the media and the
arts:
- The American
Prospect, Inc.
is the owner and publisher of The
American Prospect
magazine, which tries
to “counteract
the growing influence of conservative media.”
- Free
Press
is a “media reform” organization
co-founded by Robert McChesney,
who
calls
for “a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system”
and to “rebuil[d] the entire society on socialist principles.”
- The
Independent
Media Institute
aims to “change
the world”
via projects like AlterNet, an
online news magazine calling
itself “a
key player
in the echo chamber of progressive ideas and vision.”
- The
Nation Institute
operates
synergistically with the far-left Nation
magazine, which works
“to
extend the reach of progressive ideas” into the American
mainstream.
- The
Pacifica
Foundation
owns and operates Pacifica
Radio,
awash from its birth with the socialist-Marxist rhetoric of class
warfare and anti-capitalism.
-
Media
Matters For America: For
a number of years,
the Open Society Institute gave indirect funding―filtering
its grants first through other Soros-backed operations―to
this
“progressive
research and information center” which “monitor[s]”
and “correct[s] conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.”
In
October 2010, Soros announced
that he would soon donate $1 million directly to Media Matters.
- Sundance
Institute: In 1996, Soros
launched
his Soros Documentary Fund to produce “social justice” films
that would “spur awareness, action and social change.” In 2001,
this Fund became part of actor-director Robert Redford’s Sundance
Institute. Between 1996 and 2008, OSI earmarked at least $5.2
million for the production of several hundred documentaries, many of
which were highly critical of capitalism, American society, or
Western culture generally.
In 2009, Soros pledged
another $5 million to the Sundance Institute.
Organizations
that seek to inject the American judicial system with leftist values:
- The
Alliance
for Justice
consistently
depicts Republican judicial nominees as “radical
right-wing[ers]”
and “extremists”
whose
views range far outside the boundaries of mainstream public
opinion.
-
The
American
Constitution Society for Law and Policy
seeks to indoctrinate young law students to view the Constitution as
an evolving or “living”
document,
and to reject
“conservative buzzwords such as 'originalism'
and 'strict construction.'”
- Justice
at Stake
promotes legislation that would replace judicial elections with a
“merit-selection” system where a small committee of legal
elites, unaccountable to the public, would pick those most
“qualified” to serve as judges. OSI has spent
at least $45.4 million on efforts to change the way judges are
chosen in many American states.
Organizations
that advance leftist agendas by infiltrating churches and religious
congregations:
Think
tanks that promote leftist policies:
- The Institute
for Policy Studies
has long supported Communist and anti-American causes around the
world. It seeks to provide a corrective to the “unrestrained
greed” of “markets and individualism.”
- The New
America Foundation
tries to influence public opinion on such topics as healthcare,
environmentalism, energy policy, and global governance.
- The Urban
Institute
favors socialized medicine, expansion of the federal welfare
bureaucracy, and tax hikes for higher income-earners.
Organizations
that promote open borders, mass immigration, a watering down of
current immigration laws, increased rights and benefits for illegal
aliens, and ultimately amnesty:
- The American
Immigration Council―formerly
known as the the
American Immigration Law Foundation―supports
“birthright citizenship” for children born to illegal immigrants
in the U.S.
-
Casa
de Maryland periodically sponsors “know
your rights”
training sessions to teach illegals how to evade punishment in the
event that they are apprehended in an immigration raid.
- The Immigrant
Legal Resource Center
belongs
to the
sanctuary
movement
that tries to shield illegal aliens from the law.
- The Migration
Policy Institute
advocates a
more permissive U.S. refugee admissions and resettlement policy, as
well as more social-welfare benefits for illegals residing in the
U.S.
- LatinoJustice
PRLDF
is
a legal advocacy group
that
“protects
opportunities for all Latinos … especially the most vulnerable―new
immigrants and the poor.”
- The Immigration
Policy Center states that “[r]equiring
the 10-11 million unauthorized immigrants residing in the U.S. to
register with the government and meet eligibility criteria in order
to gain legal status is a key element of comprehensive immigration
reform.”
- The National
Immigration Forum opposes the enhancement of
the U.S. Border Patrol and the construction of a border fence to
prevent illegal immigration.
- The National
Immigration Law Center
works
to help low-income
immigrants gain access to government-funded welfare programs on the
same basis as legal American citizens.
Organizations
that oppose virtually all post-9/11 national-security measures
enacted by the U.S. government:
- The Center
for Constitutional Rights,
founded
by four longtime supporters of communist causes,
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.”
- The National
Security Archive Fund
collects and publishes declassified documents (obtained through the
Freedom
of Information Act) to a degree that compromises American national
security and the safety of intelligence agents.
- The American Civil Liberties Union has depicted the U.S. government's post-9/11 national-security
measures as excessively harsh and invasive
generally, and also as discriminatory against Muslims in particular. Moreover, the organization
has filed numerous lawsuits seeking to limit the government's ability
to locate, monitor, and apprehend terrorist operatives.
- Human
Rights Watch
has derided the U.S. war on terror as a foolhardy endeavor rooted in
blindness to the realization that terrorism stems, in large measure,
from America's failure “to promote fundamental rights around the
world.”
Organizations
that defend suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters:
- The
Constitution
Project
has supported such notorious figures as
Salim Ahmed
Hamdan
(Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and chauffeur) and Jose Padilla (an
American Islamic convert
and terrorist plotter). Moreover, the Project contends that it is
illegal for the U.S. government to detain terror suspects if the
evidence against them was obtained through “torture.”
-
The Lynne
Stewart Defense
Committee was established to support Lynne Stewart, who is a
criminal-defense attorney and an America-hating Maoist. Stewart was
convicted of illegally helping her incarcerated client, the “blind
sheik” Omar
Abdel Rahman,
pass messages to an Egypt-based Islamic terrorist organization. In
September 2002, the Open Society Institute gave
$20,000
to this committee; OSI vice president Gara LaMarche characterized
Ms. Stewart as a “human rights defender.”
Organizations
that depict virtually all American military actions as unwarranted
and immoral:
- Amnesty
International: In
2005, this group's then-executive
director William
Schulz
alleged
that the United States had become “a leading purveyor and
practitioner” of torture. Irene
Khan, who
charged
that the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where the U.S. was housing
several hundred captured terror suspects, “has become the gulag of
our time.”
Schulz’s remarks were echoed by Amnesty's then-secretary
general
- Global
Exchange was founded by Medea
Benjamin, a pro-Castro radical who helped establish a project
known as Iraq Occupation Watch for the purpose of encouraging
widespread
desertion by “conscientious objectors” in the U.S. military.
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.
Organizations
that advocate America’s unilateral disarmament and/or a steep
reduction in its military spending:
- The American
Friends Service Committee,
which views
America as the world's chief source of international strife, has
long had a friendly
relationship
with the Communist Party USA.
Lamenting
that “the
United States spends 59% of the discretionary federal budget on
military-related expenses,”
the Committee seeks to “realig[n]
national spending priorities and to increase the portion of the
budget that is spent on housing, quality education for all, medical
care, and fair wages.” In
2000, George Soros himself was a signatory to a letter titled “Appeal
for Responsible Security” that appeared in The
New York Times.
The letter called
upon the U.S. government “to commit itself unequivocally to
negotiate the worldwide reduction and elimination of nuclear
weapons,” and to participate in “the global de-alerting of
nuclear weapons and deep reduction of nuclear stockpiles.”
Organizations
that promote radical environmentalism:
Groups
in this category typically oppose mining and logging initiatives,
commercial fishing enterprises, development and construction in
wilderness areas, the use of coal, the use of pesticides, and oil and
gas exploration in “environmentally sensitive” locations.
Moreover, they claim that human industrial activity leads to
excessive carbon-dioxide emissions which, in turn, cause a
potentially cataclysmic phenomenon called “global warming.”
Examples of such Soros donees include Earthjustice, Green For All,
the Natural Resources Defense Council,
the Alliance
for Climate Protection, Friends of the Earth, and the Earth Island
Institute.
Another major recipient of Soros money is the
Tides
Foundation, which receives cash from all manner of
donors―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 a heavy backer of environmental organizations, though its
philanthropy extends also into many other areas.
Organizations
that oppose the death penalty in all circumstances:
In
2000, George Soros co-signed
a letter
to President Bill Clinton asking for a moratorium on the death penalty, on
grounds that it tended to be implemented disproportionately against
black and Hispanic offenders.
Consistent with the billionaire's opposition to capital punishment,
his Open Society Institute has given millions of dollars to
anti-death penalty organizations such as New
Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, Witness to Innocence, Equal
Justice USA, the Death Penalty Information Center, People of Faith
against the Death Penalty, and the Fair Trial Initiative.
Organizations
that promote modern-day feminism's core tenet―that
America is fundamentally a sexist society where discrimination and
violence against women have reached epidemic proportions:
- The Feminist
Majority Foundation “focus[es] on advancing
the legal, social and political equality of women with men,
countering the backlash to women's advancement, and recruiting and
training young feminists...”
- The Ms.
Foundation for Women
laments
that although “women
are more than half the [U.S.] population … they don’t have equal
opportunity, voice or power.”
- The National
Partnership for Women and Families
asserts
that “women
today are still paid only $0.77 to a man’s dollar”―an
assertion that is grossly misleading and substantively untrue.
Organizations
that promote not only women's right to taxpayer-funded
abortion on demand,
but
also political candidates who take that same position:
Organizations
that favor global government which would bring American foreign
policy under the control of the United Nations or other international
bodies:
According
to George Soros, “[W]e need some global system of political
decision-making. In short, we need a global society to support our
global economy.”
Consistent with this perspective, the Open Society Institute in 2008
gave $150,000 to the United Nations Foundation, which “works
to broaden support for the UN through advocacy and public outreach.”
Moreover, OSI
is considered a “major”
funder of the Coalition for an
International Criminal Court,
which aims
to subordinate American criminal-justice procedures in certain cases
to an international prosecutor who could initiate capricious or
politically motivated prosecutions of U.S. officials and military
officers.
Organizations
that support drug legalization:
Dismissing
the notion of “a
drug-free America” as nothing more than “a utopian dream,”
George Soros says that “the war on drugs” is “insane” and,
“like the Vietnam War,” simply “cannot be won.”
“I'll tell you what I would do if it were up to me,” says Soros.
“I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network
through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous
ones like crack, legally available.”
In 1998 Soros was a signatory
to a public letter addressed to United
Nations Secretary
General Kofi
Annan,
declaring that "the global war on drugs is now causing more harm
than drug abuse itself." The
letter blamed the war on drugs for impeding such public-health
efforts as stemming the spread of HIV, hepatitis, and other
infectious diseases, as well as human-rights violations and the
perpetration of environmental assaults. Other notable signers
included Peter
Lewis,
Tammy
Baldwin,
Rev.
William Sloan Coffin, Jr.,
Walter
Cronkite,
Morton
H. Halperin,
Kweisi
Mfume,
and Cornel
West.
Soros
and his
Open Society Institute have given many millions of dollars to groups
supporting drug-legalization and
needle-exchange programs. In 1996, former
Carter
administration
official Joseph Califano called Soros “the Daddy Warbucks of drug
legalization.” According to a Capital Research Center publication,
“It’s
no exaggeration to say that without Soros there would be no serious
lobby against the drug war.”
A leading recipient of Soros funding is the
Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), which
seeks
to loosen
narcotics laws, promotes “treatment-not-incarceration” policies
for non-violent drug offenders, and advocates syringe-access programs
“to
help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.”
Soros
himself formerly
sat on the DPA
board of directors. As recently as 2010, Soros
contributed
$1 million to support a California ballot measure known as
Proposition 19, which would have legalized personal marijuana use in
the state; the measure, however, was rejected by voters on election
day.
Peter Schweizer,
author of Do
As I Say (Not As I Do),
speculates on the possible reasons underlying Soros's support for
drug legalization:
“One
very possible answer is that he hopes to profit from them [drugs]
once they become legal. He has been particularly active in South
America, buying up large tracts of land and forging alliances with
those in a position to mass-produce narcotics should they become
legalized in the United States. He has also helped fund the Andean
Council of Coca Leaf producers. Needless to say, this organization
would stand to benefit enormously from the legalization of cocaine.
He has also taken a 9 percent stake in Banco de Colombia, located in
the Colombian drug capital of Cali. The Drug Enforcement
Administration has speculated that the bank is being used to launder
money and that Soros's fellow shareholders may be members of a major
drug cartel.”
Organizations
that support euthanasia for the terminally ill:
Soros
has long promoted the cause of physician-assisted
suicide in an effort to
change public attitudes about death.
Toward that end, in 1994 he began giving money to the
(now defunct) Project
on Death in America (PDA),
whose purpose
was to provide “end-of-life” assistance for ailing people and to
enact public policy that will “transform the culture and experience
of dying and bereavement.”
In
2000, the Open Society Institute pledged $15 million to PDA over
a three-year period.
Notably,
PDA's mission was congruent with the goals of those who support
government-run health care, which invariably features bureaucracies
tasked with allocating scarce resources and thus determining who
will, and who will not, be eligible for particular medications and
treatments. Such bureaucracies generally make their calculations
based upon cost-benefit analyses of a variety of possible treatments.
Ultimately these decisions tend to disfavor the very old and the very
sick, because whatever benefits they might gain from expensive
interventions are likely to be of short duration, and thus are not
judged to be worth the costs. Soros himself has suggested that
“[a]ggressive, life-prolonging interventions, which may at times go
against the patient's wishes, are much more expensive than proper
care for the dying.”
Additional pro-euthanasia groups funded by Soros and OSI are the
following:
- The
Death with Dignity National Center seeks to allow “terminally ill
individuals meeting stringent safeguards to hasten their own deaths”
by way of lethal drug prescriptions.
-
The
Compassion in Dying Federation of America advocates “aid-in-dying
for terminally ill, mentally competent adults.”
Organizations
that have pressured mortgage lenders to make loans to
undercapitalized borrowers, a practice that helped spark the subprime
mortgage crisis and housing-market collapse of 2008:
- The Greenlining
Institute―by
threatening to publicly accuse banks of racially discriminatory
lending practices―has
successfully
negotiated loan commitments of more than $2.4
trillion from
America's financial institutions.
-
The Center
for Responsible Lending,
according
to
Americans for Prosperity vice president Phil Kerpen, has “shak[en]
down and harass[ed] banks into making bad loans to unqualified
borrowers.”
The Open Society Institute is not the only vehicle by which George
Soros works to reshape America's political landscape. Indeed, Soros
was the prime mover in the creation of the so-called "Shadow
Democratic Party," or "Shadow
Party," in 2003. This term refers to a nationwide network of
labor unions, non-profit activist groups, and think
tanks whose agendas are ideologically to the left, and which are
engaged in campaigning for the Democrats. This network's activities
include fundraising, get-out-the-vote drives, political advertising,
opposition research, and media manipulation.
The Shadow Party
was conceived
and organized principally by George
Soros, Hillary
Clinton and Harold
McEwan Ickes -- all identified with the Democratic
Party left. Other key players included:
To develop the Shadow Party as a cohesive entity, Harold Ickes
undertook the task of building a 21st-century version of the Left's
traditional alliance of the "oppressed" and
"disenfranchised." By the time Ickes was done, he had
created or helped to create six new groups, and had co-opted a
seventh called MoveOn.org.
Together, these seven groups constituted the administrative core of
the newly formed Shadow Party:
These organizations, along with the many leftist groups with which
they collaborate, have played a major role in helping Soros
advance his political and social agendas.
According
to Richard Poe, co-author (with David Horowitz) of the 2006 book
The Shadow Party:
"The Shadow Party is the real power driving the
Democrat machine. It is a network of radicals dedicated to
transforming our constitutional republic into a socialist hive. The
leader of these radicals is ... George Soros. He has essentially
privatized the Democratic Party, bringing it under his personal
control. The Shadow Party is the instrument through which he
exerts that control.... It works by siphoning off hundreds of
millions of dollars in campaign contributions that would have gone to
the Democratic Party in normal times, and putting those contributions
at the personal disposal of Mr. Soros. He then uses that money
to buy influence and loyalty where he sees fit. In 2003, Soros
set up a network of privately-owned groups which acts as a shadow or
mirror image of the Party. It performs all the functions we
would normally expect the real Democratic Party to perform, such as
shaping the Party platform, fielding candidates, running campaigns,
and so forth. However, it performs these functions under the
private supervision of Mr. Soros and his associates. The Shadow Party
derives its power from its ability to raise huge sums of money.
By controlling the Democrat purse strings, the Shadow Party can make
or break any Democrat candidate by deciding whether or not to fund
him. During the 2004 election cycle, the Shadow Party raised more
than $300 million for Democrat candidates, prompting one of its
operatives, MoveOn PAC director Eli
Pariser, to declare, 'Now it’s our party. We bought it,
we own it…'"
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