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 impugnsmany 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 contendsthat 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 “dedicatedto finding the [progressive] stars of tomorrow and preparing them to lead.”
- The Gamaliel Foundation teachessocial-change “techniques and methodologies.”
- The Ruckus Society promotes“nonviolent direct action against unjust institutions and policies.”
- The American Institute for Social Justiceaims to “transform poor communities” by agitating for increased government spending on social-welfare programs.
- The Institute for America’s Future “regularly convenes and educatesprogressive 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 academythat 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 assertsthat “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 programsas Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps, and low-income housing initiatives.
- The Economic Policy Institutebelieves 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 Democraticpolitical candidates than for Republicans.
- The Progressive States Network seeksto “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 triesto “counteract the growing influence of conservative media.”
- Free Press is a “media reform” organization co-founded by Robert McChesney, who callsfor “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 playerin 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 announcedthat 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 Studieshas 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 Foundationtries 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 belongsto the sanctuary movement that tries to shield illegal aliens from the law.
- The Migration Policy Instituteadvocates 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 “protectsopportunities for all Latinos … especially the most vulnerable―new immigrants and the poor.”
- The Immigration Policy Centerstates 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 Forumopposes 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 condemnedthe “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 Fundcollects 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 invasivegenerally, 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 chargedthat 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 lamentsthat 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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Looks like a left-wing, wannabe murderer and convicted domestic terrorist has decided to start threatening several conservative bloggers over their posts about his violent past. The scumbag in question, one Brett Kimberlin, even found the home phone number of one of these bloggers and left a veiled threat to the man’s wife and family.
