Cheering on Chaos

(available as PDF here:  OT0312)

George Soros, the Left’s Daddy Warbucks, is praying for chaos on American streets.  The radical philanthropist is hoping that civil unrest will grow because he believes a large enough crisis could help to force America even farther to port.  Soros has hinted he may even open the financial floodgates to help Democrats keep the White House and take back Congress.

George Soros seems delighted that chaos may be coming to his adopted homeland. “In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible,” the anti-American financier told Newsweek in a recent interview, restating the Saul Alinsky adage that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros says. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Soros loves to spew the usual socialist drivel about so-called market fundamentalism running amok as if he were living during the Cleveland administration: “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.”

To people like Soros, the mortgage bubble was caused by the Snidely Whiplashes of the financial world, not by venal real-life politicians like Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and the monstrous financial blunderers known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Free markets are to blame even though they have never been tried.

As the U.S. economy continues to deteriorate, anger will grow and rioting in the streets is sure to follow. “It’s already started,” he says. “Yes, yes, yes,” Soros adds; “almost gleefully,” Newsweek writer John Arlidge editorializes.

For years Soros has longed for an opportunity to transform America into a socialist state. Will he finally get his chance in 2012? “The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” he said in 2009 as he created the Institute for New Economic Thinking with a $50 million endowment.

The purpose of INET, in his own words, is to develop “a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order.”

This Marxist sympathizer co-founded the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that funds leftist political infrastructure. He has said that European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now” and favors American decline. Soros praises Red China effusively, saying the totalitarian nation has “a better-functioning government than the United States.” (National Post, Nov. 16, 2010)

In one sense, he’s right. If he pulled one of his economy-collapsing stunts in China, the authorities would waste no time putting him in front of a firing squad. But in America Soros’s economic troublemaking earns him invitations to the Obama White House.

Soros now counts on the armies of street thugs that comprise the “Occupy” movement to ramp up the anarchy. He praises Occupy Wall Street as “an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” disingenuously distancing himself from the supposedly spontaneous uprising.

The movement will spread. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century,” he says.

In fact the anti-American activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement announced they plan to violently disrupt the G8/NATO summit in Chicago on May 19. Adbusters, the Noam Chomsky-friendly magazine that spearheaded the Occupy movement, claims the movement will conduct a massive occupation of Chicago “in the tradition of the Chicago 8.”

Of course the radicals of the Chicago 8 organized riots at the Democratic Party’s national convention in that city in 1968. Hundreds of police officers were injured. Adbusters vows that this time the rioters won’t give an inch to the police. A massive occupation of Chicago involving “50,000 people from all over the world” will begin on May 1:

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide. [ellipses in original]

When the nations of the G8 and NATO begin meeting May 19, the movement plans to press its demands. Occupiers want an economy-killing “Robin Hood Tax” to be imposed on financial transactions, an international agreement to curb carbon emissions, and “a nuclear-free Middle East” (translation: the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Israel), according to Adbusters.

And woe to the powers that be if they don’t give in to the radicals’ demands.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear. [ellipses in original]

Spring Protests

The Occupiers are also preparing a spring offensive against The System.

Media reports indicate that Occupiers are working with other groups in a campaign against Monsanto, the agricultural biotechnology company. In Oklahoma, Occupiers intend to protest Wal-Mart. In Chicago, Occupiers are forming coalitions with transit unions and teachers. In Cincinnati, Occupiers are reaching out to the Green Party and local civic organizations.

Although Occupiers appear to overwhelmingly support President Obama, the movement has yet to officially align itself with the president’s reelection campaign. “We need candidates who are about the people,” according to Nancy Bohannon of IndyOWS, an Occupy group in Indianapolis. “We don’t have any right now. To change that we have to start with each and every one of us.”

Occupy leaders in more than a dozen states told Reuters in February that they are receiving training for upcoming confrontations. They intend to lead rallies at state capitols nationwide. “We have had to get back to more conventional grassroots organizing methods to get more people involved and engaged,” said Chris Schwartz, who belongs to Occupy Cedar Valley in Iowa. “What we’re doing is building out infrastructure for the spring.”

In the spring some Occupiers intend to reestablish the tent cities that have characterized the movement so far. This would include New York City, Washington, D.C., and Oakland, California. “Some people feel that re-encamping would serve as a symbol and that it’s something we need to do,” according to John Zarebski of Occupy Lansing in Michigan. “Others feel we should devote our resources elsewhere.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement grew out of an event last Sept. 17 in lower Manhattan called the US Day of Rage that was organized by Adbusters. Organizers vowed that the mass protest would be nonviolent in nature. This raised the question of why they named their event after the original “Days of Rage” that took place in Chicago in 1969. That tumultuous year, members of what was later to become known as the Weather Underground provoked four days of riots and demonstrations against The System.

Occupy Wall Street, and the satellite protests it spawned in cities across the U.S. and around the world have been spectacularly violent. Radical activists are responsible for literally hundreds of crimes, including assault, gang rape, arson, rioting, robbery, and a host of others.

Adbusters Media Foundation of Vancouver, Canada, the nonprofit behind the so-called anti-consumerist magazine, has received funding from organizations associated with radical philanthropist George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a donor collaborative that wants to push America even farther left. The foundation has received $176,500 since 2001 from the Glaser Progress Foundation, which was created by Alliance member Rob Glaser. Glaser heads the online multimedia company RealNetworks. (For more on Adbusters, see Foundation Watch, January 2012)

The Adbusters Media Foundation has also taken in $317,773 from the Tides Foundation since 2001. Tides was created by Drummond Pike, a close friend of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. Rathke was a longtime member of the Tides board of directors. When it was revealed in 2008 that Rathke’s brother Dale had embezzled nearly a million dollars from ACORN, Pike tried to squelch the scandal by writing a six-figure check to cover the perpetrator’s remaining restitution payments.

In anticipation of the May protests Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has increased fines for resisting a police officer. Longtime Chicago activist Don Rose was undeterred. “The more pugnacious the city gets, the more provocative it becomes.”

The Occupiers have helped to reframe the political debate. It’s impossible to turn on the radio or the TV without hearing today’s issues framed in Marxist terms, as matters of so-called economic equality pitting the “1 percent” against the “99 percent.”

Soros Backs the Occupiers
Soros is a major backer of a left-wing group that is funneling money to the Occupy Wall Street movement. The nonprofit organization at the receiving end of Soros’s largesse, Alliance for Global Justice, is managing donations benefiting the communists, socialists, anarchists and hippies who were occupying Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan.

It should surprise no one that Soros (net worth: $22 billion), the ultimate Wall Street insider and preeminent funder of the activist Left today, embraces Occupy Wall Street.
As I note in my book Subversion Inc., this radical sympathizer co-founded the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that wants to radically transform America. He has said that European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now” and favors American decline. Soros, a currency manipulator with an insider-trading conviction, praises Red China effusively, saying the totalitarian nation has “a better-functioning government than the United States.”

The Alliance for Global Justice has received grants from George Soros’s philanthropy, the Open Society Institute ($100,000 since 2004), and from the far-left Tides Foundation ($60,000 since 2004) that allows high-profile donors to give secretly to radical causes.

Much of the money received by the Tides network of philanthropies has come from Soros’s charity, according to philanthropy databases. The Open Society Institute has given $24,599,553 to the Tides network of philanthropies since 1999. Of that total, $18,154,270 went to the Tides Foundation and the remaining $6,445,283 went to the Tides Center, which like the Alliance for Global Justice, serves as a fiscal sponsor for small or new activist groups.

A hotbed of anti-American activity, the Alliance takes money from the most extreme left-wing philanthropies operating in America today. The Alliance has accepted grants from the (pro-Fidel Castro) Arca Foundation ($185,000 since 2001), General Service Foundation ($165,000 since 2001), and Foundation for Deep Ecology ($30,000 since 2000), an anti-science environmentalist group that regards human beings as a cancer on the earth.

Alliance for Global Justice is a “fiscal sponsor,” which means that it serves as a financial clearinghouse for radical causes that haven’t filed papers to incorporate themselves as nonprofit organizations. Donors give money to the Alliance and are then able to deduct the donations from their income tax even though the cause they are funding isn’t recognized as tax-exempt by the IRS. Fiscal sponsors take a percentage of donations as management fees, and then pass on the rest to the cause favored by the donor.

Founded in 1998, the Alliance, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C., has a long history of anti-American activism. The Alliance and its president, Katherine Hoyt, are longtime supporters of the Sandinista (Communist) movement in Nicaragua and the Zapatistas, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement in Mexico.

When a credit card-processing glitch caused the Alliance’s website to reject $144,000 in donations for Occupy Wall Street, Hoyt claimed that an evil capitalist conspiracy was afoot. “I can’t help but believe that politics must be involved somewhere,” Hoyt said in a statement on the Alliance’s website.

It turns out the donations were rejected because of the Alliance’s own technological blundering, so Hoyt’s comment was scrubbed from the website. Alliance leader Chuck Kaufman blamed technology for the banking error. “Our group normally processes a dozen donations a week, so all of a sudden Occupy Wall Street took off and it was 400 per day,” Kaufman said. “We just didn’t understand the banking architecture.”

Other causes supported by the Alliance include the antiwar group World Can’t Wait (a spinoff of the Revolutionary Communist Party), and Courage to Resist, which encourages U.S. soldiers to desert and supports accused traitor Bradley Manning of WikiLeaks infamy. Its leaders also have an abiding hatred of Israel. The Alliance has funded anti-Israel groups including Israeli Anarchists Against the War and Bil’in Center for Joint Struggle.

The Alliance for Global Justice’s antipathy toward things that Americans revere makes it a perfect business partner for George Soros.

Blameless?
In an impressive feat of cognitive dissonance Soros holds himself blameless for the state of the economy. “Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret,” said the convicted inside-trader whose speculative adventures have harmed perhaps hundreds of millions of people worldwide. “The tragedy of our current situation is the unintended consequence of imperfect understanding. A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.”

When asked if the financial wizards who played a role in the economic meltdown were not just wrong but evil Soros replies, “That’s correct.” In other words, this man who has described himself as “some kind of god” blames everyone else on Wall Street for the current economic mess.

Meanwhile, Soros has virtually admitted he plans to flood this year’s campaign with money to help Democratic candidates. At an invitation-only conference of major left-wing donors in November, Soros told attendees via video that he was considering opening the funding floodgates this election cycle. Soros suggested he might get back into the game, telling the conference that he intended to be at their next conference in May “because there is a lot of work to do.” (Politico newspaper, January 18, 2012)

In October 2011 left-wing groups funded by George Soros held a conference on election law and the approaching 2012 election. It was a planning session by activists who believe voter fraud is a myth on how to undermine electoral integrity in the upcoming election. The meeting was organized by the Fair Elections Legal Network, a group that has received $122,500 in grants since 2008 from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation.

According to former Department of Justice lawyer J. Christian Adams, the speakers at the conference were Deven Andersen of “Black Youth Vote!”; Robert “Biko” Baker of the League of Young Voters Education Fund; and Eric Marshall of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Andersen received a fellowship from the Soros-funded radical community organizing group, the Center for Community Change. Megan Donavan of the Fair Elections Legal Network served as moderator.
As Adams, author of the October 2011 Organization Trends, observes,

These types of groups exist primarily to attack any effort to combat voter fraud or ensure the integrity of elections. As I write in my book Injustice, there is “an enormous and well-funded industry of voter fraud deniers that provides an intellectual smokescreen for this lawlessness.”

Andersen smears all Tea Party supporters and electoral integrity backers as racists: “The Tea Party is a reincarnation of the White Southern Democrats. They want to turn the clock back to 1866 and make blacks second rate citizens again,” he said. “Conservatives don’t like people of color. They are stuck in 1866.” At the conference Robert Baker alleged that there is a “conservative war on voting” and that “young blacks are being taken out of the electoral process.”

Ducking Regulations
It wasn’t that long ago that George Soros was traveling the globe urging a regulatory crackdown on the same financial sector that has allowed him to become a billionaire 14 times over. In late 2008 the preachy political radical who has given more than $8 billion to charities and left-wing causes lectured a congressional committee. “The entire regulatory framework needs to be reconsidered and hedge funds need to be regulated within that framework,” he said.

Soros got his wish, and the lawmakers his money helped install in Congress approved the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Public Law 111-203). Soros talks a good game when it comes to openness and transparency. With an obedient media in tow, he postures as a defender of business ethics and good government but the lofty ideals he espouses apply only to other people. In the end, when his personal interests are at stake, his professed ideals get discarded like yesterday’s racing form.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this man who has described himself as “some kind of god” now doesn’t want to comply with new disclosure rules that accompany the Dodd-Frank law. To avoid complying, last year he closed his $25 billion Quantum funds to investors outside his family.

What new regulation does Soros consider to be so burdensome? A mere requirement that hedge funds such as his with more than $150 million under management register with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by March 2012. A loophole allows a fund to skip registering if it manages only a family’s funds.

Why would Soros, benefactor of the aggressively leftist Open Society Institute, not want to register like all the other big players on Wall Street? In the scheme of things registration isn’t a big deal. Its major drawback is that it would open up Soros’s dealings to public scrutiny.

In a case of typically British understatement, the Financial Times of London observed that Soros’s “decision contrasts with his own reputation as an advocate for both government and corporate transparency.” There’s more than a mere contrast here. Soros’s refusal to register with the SEC is a deliberate betrayal of the principles to which he pays lip service.

Remember that Soros profits from economic destruction. He was convicted of insider trading in France in 2006. He has caused havoc worldwide with his currency bets. For example, he “broke” the Bank of England in 1992 by shorting the pound. Although he earned more than $1 billion in the process, his sneaky maneuver cost British taxpayers £3.3 billion.

It’s all part of a pattern. Soros has long believed the rules don’t apply to him. Soros would never allow regulators to examine his exotic investment schemes or his unorthodox financial strategies. Such oversight might give the government early warnings of his upcoming shenanigans.

Matthew Vadum is Senior Editor at Capital Research Center and author of Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off Taxpayers, (WND Books, 2011).