|
New party financied by soros Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1070061305119&call_pageid=968350072197&col=969048863851http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1070061305119&call_pageid=968350072197&col=969048863851
Nov. 29, 2003. 09:32 AM
Billionaire Soros aims fortune at Bush
DAVID OLIVE
He is the billionaire tycoon that American conservatives love to hate.
George Bush, the U.S. president, "is a danger to the world," says George Soros, one of the greatest currency speculators in history. And removing Bush from power is "the central focus of my life," says the 74-year-old refugee from both fascism and communism in his native Hungary.
Soros has already pledged $15.5 million (U.S.) toward Bush's defeat at the polls next year. Accusing Bush of leading the world into a period of escalating violence, Soros describes his quest to dispatch the president as "a matter of life and death."
Fresh from victory in the former Soviet republic of Georgia last weekend, Soros is a force to be reckoned with. The independent TV station that satirized the ousted Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, the street protesters in Tbilisi carefully trained in peaceful agitation, and the leading opposition party now poised to replace the fallen regime were all, in some degree, financed by Soros.
Soros is still best known in financial circles as the Man Who Broke the Bank of England with a 1992 bet on sterling by which he reaped a one-day profit of $1 billion. But Soros is better-known — and practically worshipped — by thousands of pro-democracy advocates who draw sustenance from the dozens of Open Society Foundations promoting democracy in about 50 countries around the world. The foundations are financed out of Soros's lifetime donations of some $4 billion.
Soros has long been credited with doing more than any other individual to promote democracy in Eastern Europe, before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Apart from a $300 million university he financed in Budapest, Soros has spurned typical bricks-and-mortar vanity projects in favour of low-key, grassroots campaigns to subvert ruling oligarchies.
Legendary Soros ploys include his distribution of 1,100 photocopiers in pre-Internet Hungary to foster an underground media and impromptu grants of $500 to each of 35,000 Russian scientists and academics after the country's economic collapse.
And the rudimentary fresh-water system Soros helped build in war-torn Sarajevo to keep residents from succumbing to sniper fire when they visited the city's few public wells.
Yet Soros is an easy target for his many critics.
There is, most obviously, his apparent hypocrisy in decrying the cruel vicissitudes of a world currency system from which he amassed his own fortune. Soros was famously accused by Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad of triggering the Asian currency crisis of 1997.
Soros's mastery of a profession that exploits chaos and legal shades of gray has twice found him accused of impropriety. He settled a case of alleged stock manipulation brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the late 1970s. And he is appealing a conviction last year of insider trading in the shares of a French bank.
Soros is also fallible as a seer. It was his first misreading of the markets in the early 1980s, in fact, that drove Soros to seek more fulfillment from his idiosyncratic brand of philanthropy.
And an effort to assist with the early 1990s comeback bid of Paul Reichmann, son of fellow Hungarian émigrés, backfired when clients complained about the subpar returns of the Soros fund that Reichmann managed.
But it's Soros the iconoclast who draws the most ire.
Observing that oil and mineral riches in the developing world seldom benefit local populations, Soros has angered the fraternity of multinational petroleum and mining giants by demanding they publicly report the royalties they pay to the regimes in those countries — as they are obliged to do in First World nations.
And Soros is unsparing of Bush, all the more remarkable given the financier's shy demeanour. "When I hear Bush say, `You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans," Soros told the Washington Post in a controversial interview earlier this month, recalling the Nazi persecution that prompted the Jewish Soros family to adopt false identities to escape the Holocaust.
Soros's grassroots campaign to unseat Bush consists, for now, of recent donations of $10 million to a Democratic voter mobilization group called America Coming Together (ACT); as much as $3 million in funding for a new Democratic think tank, the Centre for American Progress; and a pledge of $2.5 million to Moveon.org, a liberal group that opposed the Iraqi invasion.
The New York-based financier is now widely accused of subverting the U.S. political process.
The Republican National Committee declared that "Soros has purchased the Democratic party." Amotz Asa-El, a columnist in Conrad Black's Jerusalem Post, warned last week that Soros undermines world Jewry by "unwittingly parad(ing) the shadow of the Court Jew, the Wandering Jew, and the medieval money lender who for centuries fed anti-Semitism's sick imagination."
A more restrained Washington Post editorialized last week that "no one wants one deep-pocketed person picking the next president.
For Democrats thrilled with the Soros millions, imagine conservative financier Richard Mellon Scaife opening his bank account on behalf of Mr. Bush."
The grateful recipients of Soros's support doubt his $15.5 million grubstake will skew the outcome of a presidential contest in which some $4 billion will be spent.
They argue, too, that high-ranking Jewish war hawks — Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Doug Feith at the Pentagon, for instance — are no less a lightning rod for anti-Semitism than Soros.
As for Scaife, who demonized the Clintonites and stands ready to aid the GOP again, many Dems argue that a counterweight to the hard-right publications, think tanks and attack groups funded by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and the Olin and Coors foundations is long overdue.
Soros himself is struggling to hover above the partisan fray. His problem is with Bush, not his party.
Soros savages the Bush foreign policy in his forthcoming book, The Bubble of American Supremacy, to be published in January, and excerpted in the current Atlantic Monthly.
The financier sees a parallel between the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive military action with the dot-com boom and bust, in which investors sabotaged the undoubted commercial potential of the Internet by allowing themselves to get carried away with speculative excess.
Bush, Soros argues, has similarly extrapolated the undeniable security challenge of post-Sept. 11 America into a self-defeating agenda of U.S. power projection that is turning the world against America.
Calling for old-fashioned police work to deal with Al Qaeda, and citing his own network of grassroots activities in promoting democracy, Soros makes a pitch for "increased foreign aid or better and fairer trade rules" that no longer shut developing-world imports out of First World markets.
"The framework within which to think about security is collective security," Soros says, invoking the multilateralism that won the Cold War.
"Neither nuclear proliferation nor international terrorism can be successfully addressed without international co-operation."
This mainstream sentiment, widely shared in that portion of the U.S. foreign policy establishment not captured by the neo-cons, derives in part from Soros's personal contempt for Bush as a fellow capitalist.
Bush established his political bona fides by pointing to his business success in pocketing a handsome sum from the 1986 sale of his Texas oil exploration outfit, Spectrum 7, to a firm called Harken Energy. But the attraction to Harken of Spectrum 7, an inch away from insolvency at the time, was that it was run by a son of the then U.S. vice-president.
Harken, as it happens, was owned in part by George Soros. No stranger to crony capitalism, Soros recalled for U.S. investigative reporter David Corn last year the genesis of the Harken-Spectrum 7 transaction.
"Bush," Soros recalled, "was supposed to bring in the (Persian) Gulf connection. But it didn't come to anything. We were buying political influence. That was it. (Bush) was not much of a businessman."
At least from Soros's perspective, formed by that long ago deal, if you couldn't count on an obscure hustler for a little influence peddling, what were his prospects for success as a leader of the free world?
|
|
