NEWSMAX: George Soros’ Coup

by Richard Poe Thursday, August 10, 2006 2:44 pm Eastern Time

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GEORGE SOROS’ COUP

Soros Vows to “Puncture” American Supremacy

by Richard Poe

NewsMax Magazine

May 2004

ONE OF THE WORLD’S RICHEST MEN is attempting to influence the U.S. presidential election this year.

His net worth is at least $7 billion.

He reportedly controls an additional $11 billion in assets through his investment funds.

His foundations give away up to $400 million a year.

He wants to buy the 2004 presidential election for the Democrats.

He talks openly of driving President Bush from office and of forcing “regime change” in the United States.

He says he might even spend his whole fortune to make this happen.

He has likened himself to the Messiah.

His name is George Soros, and he means business.

* * *

It must have been a surreal moment last year when Soros first unveiled his anti-Bush obsession to the Washington Post.

“America under Bush is a danger to the world,” said the multibillionaire. Ousting this sitting U.S. president, Soros admitted, “is the central focus of my life … a matter of life and death.”

With those words Soros declared war on George W. Bush. And for Soros, war is total. “I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is,” he said.

How much money, the Post asked? Would Soros spend his whole fortune to oust Bush? “If someone guaranteed it,” he replied.

Soros’ words should not be taken lightly. Already, the 73-year-old speculator in global currency has gone belly to belly against some of the world’s mightiest nations, risking billions in daredevil, do-or-die contests of financial power.

He has won such battles before. He stands a good chance of winning this one.

He has reportedly pumped at least $35 million into the Democrats’ campaign and vows to raise a total of $95 million through a network of “Section 527” front groups designed to circumvent the McCain-Feingold ban on “soft money” contributions to political parties.

The Federal Election Commission places no limits on donations to the shadowy 527s and requires no disclosure of the donors and the amounts they have given. Consequently, no one really knows how much money Soros has lavished — or will — on the Democrats this year.

What is clear is that the Democrats and their 527s have already begun waging a major media campaign against Bush. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates the pro-John Kerry 527s have already raised $287 million.

Radical Agenda

Meanwhile, Soros’ private philanthropy, totaling nearly $5 billion, continues undermining America’s traditional Western values. His giving has provided funding of abortion rights, atheism, drug legalization, sex education, euthanasia, feminism, gun control, globalization, mass immigration, gay marriage and other radical experiments in social engineering.

What drives George Soros? What about George W. Bush offends him so deeply that he would empty his multibillion-dollar piggybank to topple the president?

And what about our country offends Soros so deeply that he would tell a British newspaper, during a time of war, that he wants to “puncture the bubble of American supremacy”?

Soros’ public pronouncements offer scant clues to his motivation. His jeremiads against Bush ring false, rattling with the tinny clamor of shopworn Democrat boilerplate. Most could have been plucked at random from any stump speech by Kerry.

“The government of the most powerful country on earth has fallen into the hands of extremists,” Soros intones in his December 2003 book, “The Bubble of American Supremacy.”

In condemning Bush’s War on Terrorism, Soros parrots familiar talking points. “We find ourselves in a quagmire [in Iraq] that is in some ways reminiscent of Vietnam,” he writes. “[T]he reckless pursuit of American supremacy has put us and the rest of the world in danger.”

Soros has reportedly donated $2.5 million to the Democrat activist group MoveOn.org. The group aroused controversy in December by displaying on its Web site streaming video of two TV ads likening President Bush to Adolf Hitler.

One ad juxtaposed text from a Bush speech with shots of Hitler speaking. “Sound familiar?” asked the text. Another showed footage of Bush and the Nazi dictator while a voice said, “What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003.”

Soros’ 34-year-old son, Jonathan, a partner at Soros Private Equity Partners, turned up at the heart of the scandal. The younger Soros had collaborated with techno-rocker Moby to organize an online contest for 30-second anti-Bush TV ads, under the auspices of MoveOn.org. The now-infamous Hitler ads were among the 1,500-odd submissions that came in over the transom.

In the face of withering protests from Jewish groups and Republicans, MoveOn.org yanked the Hitler ads and apologized for displaying them.

In truth, however, the ads merely reflected what passes nowadays for mainstream Democrat rhetoric. “You don’t need Hitler when you already got Bush,” quipped leftist funnyman Michael Moore at MoveOn.org’s Jan. 13 awards ceremony for the ad contest.

Soros is quicker than most to evoke the specter of Nazi terror when speaking of President Bush.

A Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Hungary, Soros told the Washington Post in November: “When I hear Bush say, “You’re either with us or against us,” it reminds me of the Germans. … My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me.”

Sensitized him? Perhaps.

Experienced Soros watchers, however, do not count “sensitivity” among his noteworthy traits. Ruthlessness, yes. Greed, yes. Machiavellian cunning, certainly. Megalomania, without a doubt. But sensitivity? Those who know and study Soros are inclined to seek more cynical explanations for his vendetta.

Clinton Connection

“It’s not life or death for Soros, it’s the money — and the consequent power, which brings him more money,” journalist Anne Williamson told NewsMax. “He has much less traction with the Bush administration” than he did with the Clintons, she opines.

In fact, Soros reached the apogee of his power, fame and influence during the Clinton years.

“With the Clinton Administration, Soros, a newly turned Democrat, has made the kind of inroads that he was unable to make before,” noted Connie Bruck in a Jan. 23, 1995, profile of Soros for The New Yorker. “[H]e has cultivated excellent relationships with high-ranking officials in the State Department and at Treasury. He has opened a Washington office. …”

What exactly Soros gained from his association with the Clintons and what he gave in return remains murky to this day. But some things are clear.

When the Clintons took office, they inherited the awesome and historic task of rebuilding and redefining America’s relationship with the fallen Soviet empire. Whether through sloth, incompetence or lack of vision, the Clintons did not rise to this challenge.

Instead, they delegated the task to others. According to a September 2000 report of the House Speaker’s Advisory Group on Russia, headed by Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., the Clintons turned over Russia policy to a “troika” of underlings, which included Vice President Al Gore, Strobe Talbott at the State Department and Lawrence Summers at Treasury.

This troika, in turn, relied heavily on the help and guidance of George Soros.

Regarding Soros’ freelance statesmanship, Strobe Talbott told The New Yorker in 1995: “I would say that [Soros’ policy] is not identical to the foreign policy of the U.S. government — but it’s compatible with it. It’s like working with a friendly, allied, independent entity, if not a government. We try to synchronize our approach to the former communist countries with Germany, France, Great Britain — and with George Soros.”

Journalist Anne Williamson lived and worked in Russia on and off for a decade, during the peak years of Soros’ power. She is a leading expert on the post-Soviet states and on George Soros. Williamson’s forthcoming book, “Contagion: The Betrayal of Liberty: Russia and the United States in the 1990s,” reveals for the first time many of Soros’ lucrative Russian operations during the Clinton years.

“The Clintons welcomed Soros with open arms,” Williamson told NewsMax. “Soros performed services for the Clintons, and in return received wide latitude for his business ventures in the former Soviet bloc. Soros not only expanded his fortune under Bill and Hillary, but he also fit in with their counter-cultural zeitgeist. Through them, Soros found a public platform to espouse his wacky politics. With Bush in power, Soros no longer has that kind of influence. That’s a big part of what’s driving him crazy.”

During the Clinton years, Soros’ massive clout in the former Soviet bloc marked a high point in his career, giving the flamboyant billionaire wealth and power reminiscent of the Mongol Khans.

This was the heyday of “Russiagate,” a term coined in 1999 by David Ignatius of the Washington Post to describe what he called “the lawlessness of modern Russia and the acquiescence of the Clinton administration in the process of decline and decay there.”

It was fun while it lasted. But that’s all over now.

Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin is cleaning house. He is cracking down on the “oligarchs,” the seven multibillionaires who have been calling the shots in Russia since 1993. As their power wanes, Soros’ empire appears to be waning with them.

Oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Soros ally with a net worth in excess of $15 billion, was arrested in October 2003 on charges ranging from tax evasion to fraud.

Soros accused Putin of political “persecution,” declaring: “I believe [Khodorkovsky] acted within the constraints of the law in supporting political parties. I am doing the same in the United States.”

The Kremlin might not have appreciated Soros’ remarks. The following month, a paramilitary team of at least 50 men in camouflage fatigues, some armed with stun guns, evicted his Open Society Institute from its Moscow offices, confiscating computers and documents. Police refused to intervene.

In view of these indignities, Soros cannot help but resent Bush’s courtship of Vladimir Putin.

Humiliation in Ukraine

With his Russian operations temporarily crippled, Soros has been focusing more attention on Ukraine lately. But when he arrived at Simferopol airport on March 29, Soros described his reception from Ukrainian officials as “not very warm.”

Things got even chillier on March 31, when a pair of student activists burst into a political conference in Kiev and threw condoms filled with mayonnaise at Soros. The Ukrainian nationalist party Bratstvo (Brotherhood) took credit for the attack, accusing Soros of plotting to subvert Ukraine’s elections.

Some Russian journalists raised similar charges. They view Soros as a hidden force behind many of the so-called “velvet revolutions” or bloodless coups that have swept the post-communist states in recent years.

“Soros Preparing Revolution in Ukraine,” announced a March 31 headline in Pravda. Referring to the recent coup in the Republic of Georgia, which Soros is widely accused of orchestrating, Pravda’s Yaroslav Rodin wrote: “A week ago the generous philanthropist said that he was ready to pay salaries to the entire Georgian government under the excuse of eradicating corruption in that country. … By visiting Ukraine … Soros and the politicians close to him demonstrated their intention to conduct one more ‘velvet revolution.’ … If Russia keeps silent, ‘velvet revolution’ in Ukraine is inevitable. We can have one more ‘velvet state’ on our border, and its government will get their salaries from Soros.”

Times have changed. In 1994, Soros bragged to The New Republic that “the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.” But those days are gone.

For Soros, the golden era of Russiagate has passed.

And so have the Clintons, at least for now.

The Culture War

Money and power mean a great deal to Soros.

But the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson sees a deeper motivation driving Soros’ rage. As president and founder of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny (BOND) and author of the bestseller “Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America,” Peterson decries the leftward march of the Democratic Party, which Soros, as a major Democrat donor, is helping to push.

“This battle that we are fighting in America is not a physical battle, it’s a spiritual battle. It is good versus evil,” Peterson told NewsMax.

“George Soros is an evil man. He’s anti-God, anti-family, anti-American and anti-good. President Bush is a good man, a simple man. He has his flaws. But, from the reports I’ve heard, whenever President Bush is getting ready to make a move, he prays first and asks for God’s guidance. When you believe in God, you have a great power in you,” Peterson said.

“It’s because of President Bush’s faith in God, his commitment to prayer, his desire to do right that George Soros and the Congressional Black Caucus and the liberals hate him. They can’t stand the good in him.”

The press heaps praise on Soros as one of the most generous philanthropists since John D. Rockefeller. But a great deal of Soros’ money appears to go to organizations that are diametrically opposed to traditional Western, Judeo-Christian culture.

He has spent millions promoting a left-wing agenda that includes abortion, feminism, gun control, abolition of capital punishment, voting rights for felons, legalization of drugs, euthanasia and gay marriage.

An atheist, he seems baffled, disdainful and, at times, fearful of Bush’s faith.

“Bush feels that on September 11th he was anointed by God,” Soros told the Washington Post. In his 2003 book “The Bubble of American Supremacy,” Soros says: “Once September 11 provided President Bush with the enemy he was looking for, he became a man with an ordained mission. It suited his personality. Being a reformed substance abuser and born-again Christian, he had personal acquaintance with the devil. The devil took the form of suicide bombers. …”

Soros and the Jews

Soros might do better to turn his psychoanalytic skills on himself. He has plenty of his own inner demons to fight.

On Nov. 5, 2003, he created a stir by showing up for a meeting of the Jewish Funders Network. His disdain for Jewish charities is well known.

“Associates said Soros’ appearance … was the first they could ever recall in which the billionaire … had spoken in front of a Jewish group or attended a Jewish function,” noted Uriel Heilman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“Soros’ first known funding of a Jewish group came in 1997, when his Open Society Institute’s Emma Lazarus Fund gave $1.3 million to the Council of Jewish Federations, and when Soros gave another $1.3 million to the Jewish Fund for Justice, an anti-poverty group.”

So what was Soros doing addressing a meeting of the Jewish Funders Network? It turned out that he was trying to gain support for his anti-Bush campaign. But he approached the subject in a peculiar way.

At the meeting, he called on fellow Jews to acknowledge what he called their own role in provoking anti-Semitism around the world.

“There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe,” he said. “The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. … If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish.”

He cited an Oct. 16, 2003, speech in which Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, since retired, had charged that “Jews rule this world by proxy.”

“I’m also very concerned about my own role,” Soros said, “because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world.”

In calling attention to his “own role” in fostering anti-Semitism, Soros seemed to imply that some of his financial activities might have helped fuel anti-Jewish feeling, particularly in Malaysia.

Soros’ remarks scandalized many Jews.

“Let’s understand things clearly: Anti-Semitism is not caused by Jews; it’s caused by anti-Semites,” said Elan Steinberg, senior adviser at the World Jewish Congress.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, commented: “If [Soros] sees that his position of being who he is may contribute to the perception of anti-Semitism, what’s his solution to himself — that he give up his money? That he close his mouth?”

Soros is unlikely to close his mouth on this subject. It appears to be one of his favorites.

In 1995, he told The New Yorker: “I don’t think that you can ever overcome anti-Semitism if you behave as a tribe. … The only way you can overcome it is if you give up the tribalness.”

His uneasy relationship with the Jewish community, and with his own Judaism, goes back many years. He recalls that, when he was working as a successful New York hedge fund manager around 1980, he found himself yearning to make a difference in the world.

But his estrangement from his own people left him groping for a purpose. In his 1990 book, “Opening the Soviet System,” he confesses: “As I looked around me for a worthy cause, I ran into difficulties. I did not belong to any community. As a Hungarian Jew I had never quite become an American. I had left Hungary behind and my Jewishness did not express itself in a sense of tribal loyalty that would have led me to support Israel.”

In short, Soros viewed himself as a man without faith, tribe, or country. And as he imagined himself to be, so he became.

Messianic Visions

Born in Budapest on Aug. 12, 1930, Soros originally bore the name Gyõrgy Schwartz. His parents were non-practicing Jews.

Soros’ father, Tivadar, was a lawyer. But his marriage into a prosperous merchant family gave him leisure to indulge his true passion: the promotion of Esperanto, an artificial language created during the 1880s. Esperantists hoped to wipe out nationalism by persuading everyone in the world to drop their native tongues and speak Esperanto instead.

Swept up in this globalist fantasy, Tivadar mastered Esperanto and in 1936 changed his family name to Soros — an Esperanto verb, in the future tense, meaning “will soar.”

When the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944, Tivadar and his family went into hiding. Taking on false identities as Christians, they survived the Holocaust.

Soros writes that life under Nazi and communist rule shaped his character in unexpected ways. One effect was to darken his attitude toward fellow Jews.

He never forgot how Hungary’s Judenrat, the Jewish Council set up by the Nazis, betrayed Jews in exchange for special privileges.

At one point, the Judenrat recruited him and other Jewish youngsters to hand out leaflets deceptively persuading unwitting Jews to turn themselves in for deportation to the death camps.

When the communists occupied Hungary, they brought a whole new set of lessons for Soros. He insists to this day that communism repelled him. Yet Soros admits that he told his father in 1946: “I’d like to go to Moscow to find out about communism. I mean that’s where the power is. I’d like to know more about it.”

Tivadar persuaded his son to go to England instead. His advice came none too soon. In January 1947, Stalin installed the communist dictator Matyas Rákosi in Hungary. Born Matthias Rosenberg, he was a Hungarian Jew who had lived many years in the U.S.S.R. Returning with the Red Army, Rákosi plunged his native Hungary into a bloodbath of purges, show trials, mass deportations and executions.

Soros has never revealed what effect the Jewish dictator Rákosi might have had on his already shaky sense of “tribal loyalty.” But, after seven months of Rákosi’s terror, Soros left his homeland in August 1947. The young man had just turned 17.

The Godless Society

Soros made his way to England, where he gained admission to the London School of Economics in 1948. One of his professors, Karl Raimund Popper, made a lifelong impression on Soros.

Popper foretold the fall of “closed,” or totalitarian, societies in his 1945 book, “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” Soros later would mold his network of foundations around Popper’s vision.

But what exactly is an open society, in Popper’s view? It differs from George Washington’s in one crucial respect.

America’s Founding Fathers believed that liberty was “unalienable” and God-given, the natural birthright of every man. To deny the people liberty was to flout divine will, to break the “natural law” of the universe. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

Karl Popper, on the other hand, held nothing to be self-evident. He was an atheist. He taught that men were doomed to grope blindly for truth, by trial and error. And no matter how hard we searched, we would never find it.

Following Popper’s lead, Soros argues in his book “The Bubble of American Supremacy” that “the Declaration of Independence is … open to different interpretations.” Its principles, he says, “are not self-evident truths but arrangements necessitated by our inherently imperfect understanding.”

Because America’s founding documents have no special sanctity, in Soros’ view, they are disposable. They can be changed at will, to fit the changing times.

As we will see, such teachings offer an irresistible temptation to boundlessly ambitious men such as George Soros.

Wall Street Wunderkind

Deeply impressed with Popper, Soros flirted with the idea of becoming a philosopher. But he soon realized that finance better fit his talents. After graduating in 1952, he joined the London brokerage firm Singer & Friedlander, where he mastered the obscure art of international arbitrage.

He moved to New York in 1956, ultimately landing a job as a portfolio manager at Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder Inc., an investment bank catering to old money, with roots going back to 1803 Berlin. The firm’s blue-chip clientele had once included Germany’s “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck.

Soros’ career blossomed in New York, due partly to his drive and intellect and partly to the help and guidance of top-level global investors whose favor he courted.

In 1969, he and an associate, Jim Rogers, struck out on their own, starting what would later become known as the Quantum Fund, the cash cow of Soros’ empire.

He quickly acquired guru status among fellow hedge fund managers. He bucked all the trends. His eerily prescient investments marked him as the man to watch on Wall Street.

The Quantum Fund quadrupled in value, from $100 million to $400 million, between 1979 and 1981, at which point Institutional Investor named Soros “the world’s greatest money manager.”

But he was just getting warmed up. In 1992, he shorted the British pound, betting $10 billion that it would sink in value. The Bank of England tried desperately to buy pounds as fast as Soros — and a growing number of nervous British investors — could dump them. In the end, Soros won, and the pound was devalued.

Soros personally cleared nearly $2 billion on the ensuing chain reaction of financial chaos that spread from Rome and Stockholm to Tokyo. Forever after he bore the title “the man who broke the Bank of England.”

Soros had become a global force, a man who could single-handedly undermine the monetary value of a great nation and profit from it.

The Problem With Conscience

Even his admirers struggle to reconcile Soros’ predatory currency speculation with his carefully cultivated public image as a philanthropist and humanitarian.

Soros claims that he can compartmentalize the two functions. Conscience clouds an investor’s judgment, he says. Therefore, he sets aside conscience when playing the markets.

“When I sold sterling short in 1992 … I was in effect taking money out of the pockets of British taxpayers,” he admits in “The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered.”

“But if I had tried to take social consequences into account, it would have thrown off my risk-reward calculation, and my profits would have been reduced.”

But once the business is done, Soros argues, he can use his profits for the betterment of man. Soros once told The Guardian: “I realized [as a young man] that it’s money that makes the world go round, so I might as well make money. … But having made it, I could then indulge my social concerns.”

It sounds so easy. But life has a way of puncturing our self-delusions.

Marxist organizer Saul Alinsky used to advise radical young priests, “Decide early whether you want to be a bishop or a pastor — everything follows from that.”

Alinsky explained his point further in his 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals.” He wrote: “[T]he priest who wants to be a bishop … bootlicks and politicks his way to the top, justifying it with the rationale, ‘After I get to be bishop, I’ll use my office for Christian Reformation.’ … [U]nfortunately, one changes in many ways on the road to the bishopric … and then one says, ‘˜I’ll wait until I’m a cardinal and then I can be more effective’ … and so it goes.”

Perhaps, deep down, Soros tells himself he will use his great hoard of money someday to right the wrongs and level once and for all the inequities he says are inherent in the capitalist system — a system from which he has so fabulously profited.

So far, however, he has kept most of his capitalist-generated wealth to himself. His ventures into philanthropy tend to be structured in such a way as to leave his investment portfolio undisturbed.

Soros presents himself as the Johnny Appleseed of democracy. He claims that he is building “open societies” around the world through his foundation network. However, as Taki Theodoracopoulos observed in a 1995 article in the London Sunday Times:

“[Soros’] investment fund did not pay taxes in the United States between 1969 and 1986, enjoying a `free ride’ that netted him and his investors billions of dollars. Until the American Tax Reform Act [of] 1986 was passed, [Soros’] Quantum Fund legally avoided paying a cent. … Then there’s the fact that all his philanthropy began in 1987, the first year he and his fund had to pay taxes. Charitable matters are tax deductible and Soros says his aim is to give away half his yearly income, the maximum he can deduct.”

In fairness to Soros, he actually began dabbling in philanthropy as early as 1979. In 1984, he launched his first Open Society Foundation in Hungary. But his giving remained modest until 1987. That year, he opened his Moscow office, and his philanthropy quickly swelled to its now-legendary proportions. “My spending rose from $3 million in 1987 to more than $300 million a year by 1992,” he writes.

Clinton’s Russia Scandal

From a moral standpoint, the moment of truth for Soros came when he set up shop on Soviet soil. As a selfstyled crusader for liberty, he found himself in a unique position to slay the Bolshevik dragon in its lair. But greed overcame him. Squeezing profit from Mother Russia proved more seductive to Soros than liberating her.

Critics of Soros have long charged that his philanthropy is “merely a smoke screen for empire building,” as Connie Bruck stated in The New Yorker. He admitted to Bruck that his philanthropy did indeed open doors to political influence.

For instance, when he first began spreading money around Central Europe, said Soros, “People like the dictator in Romania, Iliescu, suddenly became very interested in seeing me. … [M]y influence increased.” Transmuting such influence into profit has long been a Soros specialty.

The entanglement of his goals as philanthropist, politician and profiteer became particularly acute in the chaos of post-Communist Russia. Bruck describes Soros as “a consummate gamesman, adept at … operating in gray areas where oversight is scant and maneuverability wide.”

During the Clinton years, no “game” offered wider maneuverability, scanter oversight and greater potential profits than Russian privatization.

The party ground to a halt in 1999, when federal investigators began scrutinizing billions of dollars in illegal transfers out of Russia through the Bank of New York and other banks. Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, who headed the House Banking Committee, announced on Sept. 1, 1999 that the Russia scandal could prove to be “one of the greatest social robberies in human history.”

Based on preliminary inquiries, Leach declared that he was “very confident” that at least $100 billion had been laundered out of Russia, an unknown portion of which may have been diverted from the International Monetary Fund and other foreign aid loans.

Journalist Anne Williamson, appearing before Leach’s House Banking Committee on Sept. 22, 1999, explained to a panel of stunned congressmen how so many U.S. taxpayer dollars had managed to go missing in Russia.

She told the committee that the Clintons had set up an “international patronage machine.” Clintonistas in the guise of “consultants” to the Russian government requested and received loans, virtually at will, through such international lending agencies as the IMF, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Overseas Private Investment Corp. and the Export-Import Bank.

“Crony Stuff”

Soros insists that his own investments in Russia were squeaky clean. However, his privileged access to Kremlin bigwigs and “oligarchs” helped lubricate some deals. In her book, Anne Williamson notes, for instance, that Soros invested in the Russian oil firm Sidanko and in Russia’s second-largest steel mill, Novolipetsk, in a 1995 auction restricted to insiders.

To Soros’ evident discomfort, the topic of Sidanko and Novolipetsk came up during his testimony in a Congressional hearing. On Sept. 15, 1998, a full year before Russiagate exploded, Soros appeared before Leach’s House Banking Committee as a friendly witness. Most of the queries put to him were deferential to the point of fawning. But at one point, Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., asked a more searching question.

“Mr. Soros, you have agreed with Chairman Leach’s statement that crony capitalism was one of the main problems in Russia. … But could not someone consider you as maybe one of the insiders in Russia, as maybe one of the cronies …?”

Soros denied it. He said that he avoided any deals in Russia that smacked of cronyism or special favors.

But Rep. Bachus reminded Soros that he had acquired shares in “a large oil company which … has more reserves than Mobil Oil.” The congressman was referring to the privatization of Sidanko Oil in 1995, in a state auction that was closed to foreign investors.

Though a foreigner, Soros managed to acquire shares of Sidanko anyway, because he belonged to an investment group with close ties to the powerful Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin. “I would say that that was part of the crony stuff that was going on,” Soros finally conceded.

According to Williamson, the Leach Committee never got to the bottom of Russiagate. The matter was hushed up more quickly and forcefully than any other Clinton scandal.

New-Age Messiah

Through the years, Soros has raised eyebrows with his seemingly limitless capacity for self-glorification. Joshua Muravchik comments in the Wall Street Journal, “He told one interviewer that he had ‘godlike, messianic ideas,’ and another that he sometimes thought of himself as ‘superhuman.’ To still a third he explained that his ‘goal is to become the conscience of the world.'”

In his 1990 book, “Opening the Soviet System,” Soros confesses:

“If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood which I felt I had to control, otherwise I might end up in the loony bin. But when I had made my way in the world I wanted to indulge myself in my fantasies to the extent that I could afford.”

Patriotic Russians winced when Soros bragged to The New Republic in 1994 that “the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.” And just about everyone winced when Soros confessed to The New Yorker in 1995 that he saw in himself many of the attributes of the God of the Old Testament.

What sort of messiah does Soros imagine himself to be? What message does he bring for mankind, and for America?

“Soros uses his philanthropy to change — or, more accurately, deconstruct — the moral values and attitudes of the Western world, and particularly of the American people,” says Rachel Ehrenfeld, author of “Funding Evil.”

A foretaste of Soros’ brave new America can be gleaned from the work of Open Society outposts in other parts of the world.

Hostility to the family looms large in Soros’ agenda. Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, an editor of Chronicles and director of the Center for International Affairs at the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Ill., writes, “Over the past five years, the Soros network has given a successful start to previously nonexistent ‘gay’ activism in almost all of its areas of operation.” Trifkovic alleges that the Soros network’s zeal for providing abortion services vastly exceeds its commitment to funding more positive women’s health programs, such as breast-cancer detection, prenatal and postnatal care, and the like.

Soros is also revolutionizing the schools.

Because no one has a monopoly on truth, in Soros’ view, his Open Society network seeks to abolish traditional, “authoritarian” education. Instead, as Serbia’s education minister, Gaso Knezevic, gushes, the Soros network will train teachers to become “partners” of their pupils, transforming every classroom into an “exercise ground” for the “unhindered expression of students’ personalities.”

The Soros Cult

“Anybody who spent time in any of the targeted countries … must react with bitter laughter at the suggestion that … Soros is in any position to positively influence the American political system,” writes Stephen Schwartz, a former Open Society Institute (OSI) contractor who worked on Soros-funded projects in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. “In general, Soros activities… have a ‘politically correct,’ dogooder quality,” says Schwartz, a superficial approach which fails to address society’s fundamental ills.

Schwartz attributes the OSI network’s failures mainly to naíveté.

But Trifkovic perceives a more sinister character in the Soros cult taking root in his native Serbia. He likens Soros’ recruits to the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire: young Christian boys stolen from their families in the Turkish-occupied Balkans, converted to Islam and trained to fight against their own people.

“In all post-communist countries, Soros relies on the sons and daughters of the old communist establishment, who are less likely to be tainted by any atavistic attachments to their native soil, culture and traditions,” Trifkovic charges.

Trifkovic told NewsMax that, among his old high school acquaintances, those who became prominent in the Soros network tended almost exclusively to be people he knew as communist drones in high school, members of the Titoist youth group.

Many readers will recognize in Soros’ agenda the same secular and seemingly anti-American obsessions that drive today’s Democratic Party.

Soros did not invent this philosophy. He is merely one of its loudest promoters. The Soros cult preaches secularism, the godless faith of a new world order.

The Secret Plan

In a brief epilogue to his book “Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism,” published in November 2000, Soros announced that he had conceived a master plan for saving the world.

However, the plan was secret. To reveal it, he implied, would be like advertising his intentions on the eve of a major stock market play, where showing his hand might quash the deal.

Nevertheless, he could not resist tantalizing readers by dropping a small hint.

“I have a clear sense of mission for my foundation network,” he wrote. “I shall not spell it out here because it would interfere with my flexibility in carrying it out — there is a parallel here with the problem of making public pronouncements when I was actively engaged in making money — but I can state it in general terms: to foster the civil society component of the Open Society Alliance.” [emphasis added]

What sort of hint was that? How did Soros intend to save the world by fostering the “civil society component” of his foundation network?

Soros was using insider jargon. To ordinary people, his words were gibberish. But those trained in the rites and rituals of Soros’ Open Society network understood that “civil society” was a code phrase.

Soros spokesman Michael Vachon tells NewsMax that the term “civil society” simply refers to “organizations that are not the government.” Maybe so. But, in nearly every case in Soros’ writings, when he uses the term ‘mobilizing civil society,’ he seems to refer to vigorous, anti-government activism.

To “mobilize civil society,” in Soros-speak, apparently means to force “regime change.”

From the earliest years of his anti-establishment work, when he famously imported 200 unauthorized Xerox copiers into Hungary in 1984, he has never shrunk from defying host governments in the cause of “open society.” “Working with the government may be more productive, but working in countries whose government is hostile may be even more rewarding,” he writes in “The Bubble of American Supremacy.”

“In such countries, it is important to support civil society to keep the flame of freedom alive. By resisting government interference, the foundation may be able to alert the population that the government is abusing its authority.”

Of course, “civil society” can at times be “mobilized” in the wrong direction, Soros admits. “[C]ivil society is capable of great achievements …,” he writes, “but with the help of the Internet it could become too much of a good thing. We have all seen what happened at the WTO meeting in Seattle.”

Soros decries the violent protests at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. But Soros also did not like the target of the protests. Soros supports the WTO.

Michael Vachon insists that, “George Soros rejects violence.” Vachon does admit, however, that Soros funds groups “that may or may not organize demonstrations.”

When “open society” is at stake, Soros has never hesitated to fund activist groups that take to the streets to challenge the government. Whether Soros will dare to do in America what he has done so many times in other countries remains to be seen.

“Regime Change” in the U.S.

We can only speculate about whether Soros’ anger at President Bush amounts to a mere temper tantrum over the diminishment of his Russian influence or whether it represents a deeper contest between good and evil, god and godlessness, as the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson suggests.

Either way, Soros is obsessed with driving Bush from the White House. In a Sept. 30, 2003, BBC interview, Soros called for nothing less than “regime change in the United States.”

Coming from him, this is no idle threat. He has the power, the money, the network and the experience to pull it off. “My foundations contributed to democratic regime change in Slovakia in 1998, Croatia in 1999, and Yugoslavia in 2000, mobilizing civil society to get rid of Vladimir Meciar, Franjo Tudjman, and Slobodan Milosevic, respectively,” he writes in “The Bubble of American Supremacy.”

“[H]e gets in there and does it, and he has no patience with government,” said Morton Abramowitz, former ambassador to Turkey and then president of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in 1995. “As I frequently say about George, he’s the only man in the U.S. who has his own foreign policy — and can implement it.”

Soros’ power arises partly from his $7 billion personal fortune, which makes him the 28th richest man in the world, according to Forbes. It also comes from the $11 billion in assets he controls through his New York-based investment firm, Soros Fund Management LLC.

His reputation for accurate forecasting of market trends amplifies his power still further. His ability to change markets on a whim makes his power terrifying.

A word from Soros uttered on some mass-media venue such as CNN’s “Moneyline” can make or break markets, persuading thousands of smaller investors to buy or sell in accordance with his analysis. “When Soros speaks, world markets listen,” notes the New York Times.

And finally, a large part of his power comes from what Trifkovic calls his Janissaries, the army of loyal disciples he has recruited around the world.

Through his global web of Open Society Institutes and Open Society Foundations, Soros has spent 25 years recruiting, training, indoctrinating and installing a network of loyal operatives in 50 countries, placing them in positions of influence and power in media, government, finance and academia.

These are the foot soldiers in Soros’ “velvet revolutions,” the Brutuses who stand ready in the shadows, awaiting the command to metaphorically skewer their respective Caesars.

Shadow Government

Croatian president Franjo Tudjman described this infiltration process in a Dec. 7, 1996 speech reported by the Croatian news service Hina. Tudjman said:

“[Soros and his allies] have spread their tentacles throughout the whole of our society. Soros… had approval to… gather and distribute humanitarian aid. …However, we… allowed them to do almost whatever they wanted. …They have involved in their network… people of all ages and classes — from secondary school pupils and students to journalists, university lecturers and academics — trying to win them over by financial aid. These are people from all walks of life, from the cultural, economic, scientific, medical, legal and journalistic sphere… [Their aim is to] control of all spheres of life… setting up a state within a state…”

Tudjman vowed to root out Soros’ Janissaries, but died of stomach cancer before he could finish the purge. A Soros-approved “velvet government” under President Stipe Mesic took power in January 2000.

Soros’ definition of “democratic regime change” can be somewhat less “democratic” than the term implies.

In the case of Slobodan Milosevic, for instance, Soros’ protesters filled the streets of Belgrade to halt an election that was still in progress. The vote was close enough that Yugoslav law required a runoff election. But “Otpor” activists did not wait for the second vote.

Soros and his operatives freely admit that they helped fund and organize the anti-Milosevic activists, including the radical Otpor organization whose role proved decisive in the coup. “We were here to support the civil sector — the people who were fighting against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic … Most of our work was undercover,” said Soros network operative Velimir Curgus to the Los Angeles Times.

It is not clear to what extent Soros and his people personally controlled every Otpor operation. For instance, the armed units of Otpor rebels, reportedly deployed in Cacak and other towns during the uprising, may well have been rogue elements answering to other masters than Soros. Still, it is worth noting that their presence, ignored by the mass media, has been confirmed by the respected British publication Jane’s Intelligence Digest.

“The Cacak group, some 4,000 strong, had 2,500 AK-47 rifles and over 600 anti-tank shoulder-launched weapons,” reports Jane’s. “[T]renches were dug out on the southern approaches to Belgrade and several hundred mortars and recoilless rifles deployed. In several towns armed teams, coordinated by Otpor, were on stand-by. …”

If Jane’s is correct, it would appear that Otpor presented Milosevic with an offer he could hardly refuse: Concede the election or face civil war.

The Georgian Coup

Soros’ most recent exercise in “democratic regime change” occurred in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

When Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze rebuked Soros in mid-2002 for meddling in local politics, Soros warned him bluntly, at a Moscow press conference, that his presidency hung by a thread.

At the conference, Soros floated the idea that Shevardnadze might try to rig Georgia’s 2003 elections. Soros vowed that he would “mobilize civil society” to thwart any vote tampering.

“It is necessary to mobilize civil society in order to assure free and fair elections,” Soros said. “This is what we did in Slovakia at the time of Meciar, in Croatia at the time of Tudjman and in Yugoslavia at the time of Milosevic.”

It appears that Soros made good on his threat.

“It was back in February that billionaire financier George Soros began laying the brickwork for the toppling of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze,” writes Mark MacKinnon in the Nov. 26, 2003 edition of the British newspaper Globe and Mail.

“That month, funds from his Open Society Institute sent a 31-yearold Tbilisi activist named Giga Bokeria to Serbia to meet with members of the Otpor (Resistance) movement and learn how they used street demonstrations to topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic.”

In the summer, MacKinnon says, Soros brought Otpor activists to Georgia to train 1,000 student activists.

By the time the elections rolled around in Georgia, the plotters were ready. No sooner had Shevardnadze announced his victory than the Soros-controlled television station Rustavi-2 began broadcasting exit polls that contradicted the official vote tally.

Soros filled the streets with protesters led by Serbian-trained activists. Buses brought reinforcements from the countryside, and demonstrators laid siege to the Parliament building, charging vote fraud.

Shevardnadze had little choice. Rather than plunge his country into civil war, he stepped down on Nov. 23.

Man Without a Country

Some foreign critics view Soros as an American agent, pure and simple. They assume that he takes his marching orders directly from the U.S. State Department and the CIA.

It is true that his machinations in the former Soviet bloc have tended to strengthen U.S. influence in that region while diminishing Russia’s.

From the Solidarity uprising in Poland to Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution,” Soros’ hidden hand has been at work in virtually every major rollback of Soviet and Russian influence for the last 25 years. Even so, his relationship to Washington’s Cold Warriors seems to have been more that of a convenient ally than an agent, as Strobe Talbott noted in 1995.

Now that the Cold War has ended, Soros must find new dragons to slay. In feudal Japan, samurai who lost their warlords became ronin, wandering the countryside and fighting other men’s wars for pay.

Through the 1990s, as the Cold War faded slowly from memory, Soros more and more began to resemble a political mercenary, challenging central banks, impoverishing nations with currency devaluations and toppling governments for reasons that became increasingly difficult to discern.

He seems to operate today as something of a lone wolf, answering to no particular master and loyal to no one — but still willing to lend a hand in geopolitical intrigues by this or that government, provided there is money to be made.

In his 1991 book, “Underwriting Democracy,” Soros calls himself a “stateless statesman” — a curious moniker for a man who has held U.S. citizenship since 1961.

Soros evinces an odd lack of gratitude, love or even respect for the land that gave him refuge, freedom and fabulous wealth. He tends to speak of America as just one more project, one more unstable banana republic in need of Soros-style “democratization.”

“I believe deeply in the values of an open society,” Soros told the Washington Post on Aug. 8, 2003. “For the past 15 years I have focused my energies on fighting for these values abroad. Now I am doing it in the United States.”

Project on Death

The America he envisions bears little resemblance to the constitutional republic our Founding Fathers fought and bled to create.

Among the truths they held “self-evident” were life, liberty and property. Judging from the direction of his philanthropy since the mid-1990s, it is not entirely clear that Soros considers even “life” to be a self-evident right.

Soros is one of the world’s leading promoters of the “right-to-die” movement, which seeks to legalize euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide.

When it comes to “right-to-die” issues, Soros practices what he preaches. His father died painfully of abdominal cancer in 1968. In Soros’ view, he died a coward.

“When my father was dying, he tried to cling to life, and it seemed he had lost what it was that made me admire him,” Soros told his biographer Michael Kaufman. “In a sad way, I had written him off even before he died.”

His mother’s death was far more to Soros’ liking. Erzebet Soros had long been a member of the Hemlock Society, an organization that urges members to choose their time of death by committing suicide.

Kaufman writes that Soros’ mother “had … obtained medication to bring on death if pain became unbearable.

“Soros said he knew about [the poison], adding, ‘I would have been willing to help her take it if she had asked me to do it, but she didn’t and I was relieved.'” According to Soros, his mother never did take the poison. But he implies that her readiness to do so lent a dignity to her passing that his father’s death lacked.

Kaufman writes that Erzebet died holding her son George’s hand. “Her way of dying was very positive for the family,” Soros commented.

Five years later, on Nov. 30, 1994, Soros founded Project on Death in America. Its goal was to encourage people to overcome their fear of death and to embrace the inevitable.

Project on Death promoted suicide and euthanasia. It urged doctors to warehouse terminally ill patients in hospices and give “palliative” care to the gravely ill — care designed to help patients feel better while they are dying — rather than wasting time, energy and money actually trying to cure them.

For the next 10 years, Soros and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation poured $200 million into Project on Death in America. It became one of Soros’ top priorities. And no wonder. The market was screaming for his new product. His timing could not have been better.

In a Nov. 30, 1994 speech, justifying Project on Death, Soros asked:

“Can we afford to care for the dying properly? The number of people dying in the United States currently stands at 2.2 million annually. Increases in cancer and AIDS deaths and the aging of the baby boomers will cause this figure to climb faster than the population… The fear is that the dying of the elderly will drain the national treasury. … [But] [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.”

And what did Soros mean by “proper” care for the dying? He wasted no time in addressing that point. “This brings me to that hotly debated subject, physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia,” he continued in the next sentence.

The Final Showdown

“George Soros’ animus against George Bush has much to do with [Bush’s] pro-life tendencies and the defunding of various population-control groups like the UNPFA [United Nations Population Fund],” notes the pro-life Web site FamilyandLife.org. This is undoubtedly true.

But the Soros camp has far more fundamental bones to pick with Bush than right-to-life issues.

Peter Singer, the Princeton “bioethicist” and the man who advocates killing infants born with disabilities, has lambasted Bush in a book titled “The President of Good and Evil.”

Singer’s point is simple. Noting that Bush makes frequent use of the words “good” and “evil” in his speeches, Singer opines that Bush is a self-righteous and possibly dangerous religious fanatic.

Soros has criticized Bush on similar grounds. In “The Bubble of American Supremacy,” he declares, “[T]he Bush administration is in contradiction with the principles of an open society, because it claims possession of an ultimate truth.”

“Ultimate truth” has no place in Soros’ “open society.” Neither do good and evil. “President Bush … has a simplistic view of what is right and what is wrong,” Soros fumes in his book.

Soros and Singer proudly proclaim themselves free of such moral clarity. Their ideology recognizes no objective truth, no ultimate standard, no right and wrong, no natural or unalienable rights, and no God. Thus have the battle lines been drawn for election 2004.

That’s the “bottom line,” as financier George Soros himself might put it. The 2004 election is not about Iraq, nor about any other specific policy of President Bush.

In November, Americans will choose sides in a mighty culture war, a contest pitting globalist elites against heartland Americans who love their country and traditions.

The 527s are a means to an end, a convenient tool for Soros and company to advance their agenda. Today the agenda is to defeat President Bush. If another Republican were in the White House, the agenda would be the same.

Despite press reports to the contrary, Soros spokesman Michael Vachon tells NewsMax that Soros has contributed no more than $12.8 million to “Section 527” Democrat activist groups to date, and that donations to these groups are fully transparent. “The RNC [Republican National Committee] has in fact been putting forth this notion that 527s are somehow shady, unregulated, illegitimate groups. The fact is they’re not,” Vachon protests. He adds that no Soros-funded 527s are “coordinating their activities with the Kerry campaign.”

Maybe not. But the political machine Soros is building reaches far beyond the ordinary realm of America’s two-party system and has the clear intention of advancing Soros’ agenda.

Soros is a long-term planner. Years before President Bush took office; Soros was already hard at work laying the groundwork for “regime change” in the U.S.

On Nov. 30, 1994, three weeks after Republicans swept Congress in the midterm elections, he announced that he wished to “do something about … the distortion of our electoral process by the excessive use of TV advertising.” What he apparently meant by this was that he wished to gain personal control over political advertising in the U.S., a strategy he has used many times to topple regimes in other countries.

How ironic that today Soros seeks to distort the electoral process through “the excessive use of TV advertising” by means of the 527s.

Interestingly, he poured millions into the campaign finance “reform” movement. His efforts resulted in the McCain-Feingold act of 2002, which, among other things, bars political parties from raising “soft money” — that is, unlimited donations from organizations and interest groups — to fund federal campaigns.

The ink was hardly dry on McCain-Feingold before Soros began exploiting its biggest loophole.

The law might prevent the Democratic Party from funding TV and radio ads with “soft money,” but Soros was not the Democratic Party. He has become the most significant donor to what Business Week called a “shadow party” — a network of “Section 527” front groups that immediately began cranking out attack ads against President Bush.

Soros’ brazen defiance of the spirit of McCain-Feingold has evoked awe and admiration from cash-hungry Democrats. He has emerged as de facto leader of America’s elites.

George W. Bush will champion the heartland.

Already this election is shaping up to be like none we have seen before. Nov. 2 this year may just be the final showdown.

– Richard Poe

Research assistance by Marie Poe

Cross-posted from NewsMax Magazine, May 2004