[A-List] Soros

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[the dirt on Soros]

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New Statesman Profile - George Soros

 Neil Clark Monday 2nd June 2003


The billionaire trader has become eastern Europe's uncrowned king and
the prophet of ''the open society''. But open to what? George Soros
profiled by Neil Clark

George Soros is angry. In common with 90 per cent of the world's
population, the Man Who Broke the Bank of England has had enough of
President Bush and his foreign policy. In a recent article in the
Financial Times, Soros condemned the Bush administration's policies on
Iraq as" fundamentally wrong" - based as they were on a "false
ideology that US might gave it the right to impose its will on the
world".

Wow! Has one of the world's richest men - the archetypal amoral
capitalist who made billions out of the Far Eastern currency crash of
1997 and who last year was fined $2m for insider trading by a court in
France - seen the light in his old age? (He is 72.) Should we pop the
champagne corks and toast his conversion?

Not before asking what really motivates him. Soros likes to portray
himself as an outsider, an independent-minded Hungarian emigre and
philosopher-pundit who stands detached from the US military-industrial
complex. But take a look at the board members of the NGOs he organises
and finances. At Human Rights Watch, for example, there is Morton
Abramowitz, US assistant secretary of state for intelligence and
research from 1985-89, and now a fellow at the interventionist Council
on Foreign Relations; ex-ambassador Warren Zimmerman (whose spell in
Yugoslavia coincided with the break-up of that country); and Paul
Goble, director of communications at the CIA-created Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty (which Soros also funds). Soros's International
Crisis Group boasts such "independent" luminaries as the former
national security advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Richard Allen, as
well as General Wesley Clark, once Nato supreme allied commander for
Europe. The group's vice-chairman is the former congressman Stephen
Solarz, once described as "the Israel lobby's chief legislative
tactician on Capitol Hill" and a signatory, along with the likes of
Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, to a notorious letter to President
Clinton in 1998 calling for a "comprehensive political and military
strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime".

Take a look also at Soros's business partners. At the Carlyle Group,
where he has invested more than $100m, they include the former
secretary of state James Baker and the erstwhile defence secretary
Frank Carlucci, George Bush Sr and, until recently, the estranged
relatives of Osama Bin Laden. Carlyle, one of the world's largest
private equity funds, makes most of its money from its work as a
defence contractor.

Soros may not, as some have suggested, be a fully paid-up CIA agent.
But that his companies and NGOs are closely wrapped up in US
expansionism cannot seriously be doubted.

So why is he so upset with Bush? The answer is simple. Soros is angry
not with Bush's aims - of extending Pax Americana and making the world
safe for global capitalists like himself - but with the crass and
blundering way Bush is going about it. By making US ambitions so
clear, the Bush gang has committed the cardinal sin of giving the game
away. For years, Soros and his NGOs have gone about their work
extending the boundaries of the "free world" so skilfully that hardly
anyone noticed. Now a Texan redneck and a gang of overzealous neo-cons
have blown it.

As a cultivated and educated man (a degree in philosophy from the
London School of Economics, honorary degrees from the Universities of
Oxford, Yale, Bologna and Budapest), Soros knows too well that empires
perish when they overstep the mark and provoke the formation of
counter-alliances. He understands that the Clintonian approach of
multilateralism - whereby the US cajoles or bribes but never does
anything so crude as to threaten - is the only one that will allow the
empire to endure. Bush's policies have led to a divided Europe, Nato
in disarray, the genesis of a new Franco-German-Russian alliance and
the first meaningful steps towards Arab unity since Nasser.

Soros knows a better way - armed with a few billion dollars, a handful
of NGOs and a nod and a wink from the US State Department, it is
perfectly possible to topple foreign governments that are bad for
business, seize a country's assets, and even to get thanked for your
benevolence afterwards. Soros has done it.

The conventional view, shared by many on the left, is that socialism
collapsed in eastern Europe because of its systemic weaknesses and the
political elite's failure to build popular support. That may be partly
true, but Soros's role was crucial. From 1979, he distributed $3m a
year to dissidents including Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter 77
in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he
founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and pumped
millions of dollars into opposition movements and independent media.
Ostensibly aimed at building up a "civil society", these initiatives
were designed to weaken the existing political structures and pave the
way for eastern Europe's eventual colonisation by global capital.
Soros now claims, with characteristic immodesty, that he was
responsible for the "Americanisation" of eastern Europe.

The Yugoslavs remained stubbornly resistant and repeatedly returned
Slobodan Milosevic's unreformed Socialist Party to government. Soros
was equal to the challenge. From 1991, his Open Society Institute
channelled more than $100m to the coffers of the anti-Milosevic
opposition, funding political parties, publishing houses and
"independent" media such as Radio B92, the plucky little student radio
station of western mythology which was in reality bankrolled by one of
the world's richest men on behalf of the world's most powerful nation.
With Slobo finally toppled in 2000 in a coup d'etat financed, planned
and executed in Washington, all that was left was to cart the ex-
Yugoslav leader to the Hague tribunal, co-financed by Soros along with
those other custodians of human rights Time Warner Corporation and
Disney. He faced charges of crimes against humanity, war crimes and
genocide, based in the main on the largely anecdotal evidence of
(you've guessed it) Human Rights Watch.

Soros stresses his belief in the "open society" propounded by the
philosopher Karl Popper, who taught him at the LSE in the early 1950s.
Soros's definition of an "open society" - "an imperfect society that
holds itself open to improvement" - sounds reasonable enough; few
lovers of genuine liberty would take issue with its central tenet that
"the open society is a more sophisticated form of social organisation
than a totalitarian one". But Soros's "open societies" don't tend to
be all that open in practice.

Since the fall of Milosevic, Serbia, under the auspices of
Soros-backed "reformers", has become less, not more, free. The
recently lifted state of emergency saw more than 4,000 people
arrested, many of them without charge, political parties threatened
with bans, and critical newspapers closed down. It was condemned by
the UN Commission on Human Rights and the British Helsinki Group. But
there was not a murmur from the Open Society Institute or from Soros
himself. In fairness, Soros has been far more critical of his former
protege Leonid Kuchma, president of the Ukraine, a country described
by the former intelligence officer Mykola Melnychenko as "one big
protection racket", and now possibly the most repressive police state
in Europe.

But generally the sad conclusion is that for all his liberal quoting
of Popper, Soros deems a society "open" not if it respects human
rights and basic freedoms, but if it is "open" for him and his
associates to make money. And, indeed, Soros has made money in every
country he has helped to prise "open". In Kosovo, for example, he has
invested $50m in an attempt to gain control of the Trepca mine
complex, where there are vast reserves of gold, silver, lead and other
minerals estimated to be worth in the region of $5bn. He thus copied a
pattern he has deployed to great effect over the whole of eastern
Europe: of advocating "shock therapy" and "economic reform", then
swooping in with his associates to buy valuable state assets at
knock-down prices.

More than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soros is the
uncrowned king of eastern Europe. His Central European University,
with campuses in Budapest, Warsaw and Prague and exchange programmes
in the US, unashamedly propagates the ethos of neoliberal capitalism
and clones the next pro-American generation of political leaders in
the region. With his financial stranglehold over political parties,
business, educational institutions and the arts, criticism of Soros in
mainstream eastern European media is hard to find. Hagiography is not.
The Budapest Sun reported in February how he had been made an honorary
citizen of Budapest by the mayor, Gabor Demszky. "Few people have done
to Budapest what George Soros has," gushed Demszky, saying that the
billionaire had contributed to "structural and mental changes in the
capital city and Hungary itself". The mayor failed to add that Soros
is also a benefactor of Demszky's own party, the Free Democrats,
which, governing with "reform" communists, has pursued the classic
Soros agenda of privatisation and economic liberalisation - leading to
a widening gap between rich and poor.

The Soros strategy for extending Pax Americana differs from the Bush
model, particularly in its subtlety. But it is just as ambitious and
just as deadly. Left- liberals, admiring his support for some of their
favourite issues such as gay rights and the legalisation of soft
drugs, let him off lightly.

Asked about the havoc his currency speculation caused to Far Eastern
economies in the crash of 1997, Soros replied: "As a market
participant, I don't need to be concerned with the consequences of my
actions." Strange words from a man who likes to be regarded as the
saviour of civil society and who rails in print against "market
fundamentalism". This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For
the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New
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