George Soros is in the news these days because, in 2004, he bankrolled a considerable part of the effort to contain the horrendous, near-cataclysmic Bush Republican agenda of free-lance war and devastation and American money markets run amok. And because he has continued to financially support other causes regarding freedom of speech and truth in media.
Today we are faced with the huge aftermath of the Great Bush Recession, the 15% unemployment and underemployment numbers that Bush left behind. Bush dropped the near-Depression and the $13 trillion debt on America’s doorstep in late 2008 and early 2009. The Republicans decided that instead of running away to hide from their joint responsibility for the disaster, they would stonewall and obstruct.
They decided to use every minute of every hour on the 5,000 radio stations that carry their messages and to spend every hour and the full resources of their wholly owned Fox News network and the Fox Television Network and the Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Daily and CNBC and the Fox Business Network and the Premiere radio programming group and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck and the vast array of Right Wing talkers–who comprise 90% of the talk radio airwaves–to lie about what happened between 2001-2008. Then they spent the rest of the time rearranging the facts about what is being done to correct the situation
With hundreds of millions of dollars going into this effort from the Right, George Soros realized that it would be futile to try to turn back this enormous tide of Right Wing propaganda. He decided not to involve himself in this election, one that has been gerrymandered by the Right Wing of the Republican Party under the guise of the term “Tea Party.” Perhaps he felt that the American people, if they vote for Corporate-Fascists, should learn the hard way, as he did in Nazi-occupied Hungary, about what will happen to them.
The fact is that the Tea Party would have been a blip on the radar screen of history had it not been for the hugely wealthy oil corporations and the health insurance firms and the Wall Street hedge fund managers and investment brokers. The Koch family and several other billionaires and the Chamber of Commerce, using undisclosed but quite probably Arab and Chinese investor funds have worked hard to confuse the American people. In the case of the Tea Party members, they have succeeded.
Soros is an interesting guy. He’s worth knowing a little about. He is an altruist, the real deal, spending vast sums of money in really positive ways around the world, perhaps much more outside the United States than in it. He is of course an internationalist by virtue of birth, education and business interests.
Soros is a Hungarian-born Jew whose family split up during the Second World War to avoid extermination by the Nazis when they occupied Hungary. Soros was sent to live with a gentile family and the family reunited at the end of the war only to find itself now under the yoke of the Communists. Soros was sent to England to live with an Uncle and eventually graduated from the London School of Economics. In 1956, he emigrated to the United States from England and began a career on Wall Street, starting his own firm in 1970.
In 1992, he made approximately $1 billion dollars betting on the British pound. His overall wealth is not exactly clear, but is substantial enough for him to have given away approximately $7 billion since 1984, primarily to the development of free democratic societies but in a list of charitable or humanitarian enterprises that seem almost endless.
In the United States, Soros has drawn fire from Right Wing, Corporatist-Fascist organizations for his work with anti-reactionary political forces and with free-press advocates. He has given hundreds of millions to organizations that point out lies in news reports and television, newspaper and Internet commentary.
He has made numerous comments and speeches on the inadvisability of the Iraq war and the problems of American Imperialists, like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and other in their group. His primary focus is on an open society, where ideas are discussed and debated, seeking the best solutions for the greatest number of citizens.
Naturally, as an altruistic seeker of better and more democratic societies, Soros has been attacked and vilified by every Corporate-Fascist organization in the country, of which there are now quite a large number.
We now have one media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, an immigrant himself who was not welcome elsewhere in the world because of his extraordinarily disgusting media properties. Given the bad taste of most Americans his version of supermarket-tabloid slime has found a home here while not tainting him with the perverse odor of a sleazebag.
He became half-respectable through the purchase of the Republican Party whose every member bows down to the propaganda-spewing Australian-American. He sloughs Right Wing propaganda from peroxided blondes in short skirts and nondescript second-tier news anchors to the unlettered and highly racist.
These commentators, who think, like Murdoch, that money buys respectability, seem also to think that telling lies that cause serious repercussions, like instigating the murder of doctors, have no real punishable outcome in the Christian after life. Apparently Hitler was right. How many divisions does the Pope have? Nothing to answer for in the after-life that these commentators simple-mindedly want us to believe that they believe.
Christianity is merely a series of slogans to them and to their leader, Murdoch. And good taste? The more disgusting the better for those in the Murdoch empire. Murdoch finds his respect among the cretins in the Republican Party who work to send jobs overseas while complaining that Obama does nothing here…while their Senators block anything that he tries to do. Ain’t Republican politics grand?
The most recent attacks on Soros are for not spending enough during this Mid-term campaign. Soros has given money to Democrats but in smaller numbers this year because the mood whipped up by the Right Wing reactionary force, begun as early as mid-Summer 2009 has worked. Tea Party candidates, including those who want to do away with Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, educational benefits, clean air and water and food regulations, add more tax cuts for the top 1%…all this has made the mid-term elections a free-for-all.
Billionaires, like the Koch family quietly spent hundreds of millions of dollars to influence less-educated members of society and to inflame racist sentiments.
In many cases in many electoral districts of the country, irrationality is the predominant mood.
Media Matters, a wonderful resource to those who want to know the truth and the facts about what is being said on television, was largely a Soros backed group. They spend a great deal of time simply pointing out the hundreds of lies told daily by the Fox News Channel about Democrats and Independents. Fox News Channel spends most of its time trying to support legislators who are toeing the mark for their corporate friends.
It shows up most clearly in the Glenn Beck program, which has ignored the requests from advertisers for a saner, more rational approach to its commentary. Since the Right Wing Rupert Murdoch has decided to pay the bill and more Right Wing nuts and Tea Party racists are listening, the program has refused to tell the truth about anything.
The obstinate attitude of Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch has cost them over 290 national advertisers, but they still will not listen, thinking perhaps that they will break the resolve of national advertisers. The idea perhaps is that they can continue to spew propaganda for the Republican Party and get the vast number of unsuspecting consumers to pay for it at the supermarket checkout counter. It doesn’t seem to be working.
They attack George Soros with impunity. A man who has given away ten-fold more money to causes that nurture freedom and free enterprise and democratic principles than the crackpot Glenn Beck will ever earn for himself or for Murdoch.
Does Murdoch donate? Yes…$1 million to the Republican Party, and zero to the Democratic Party. And another $1 million to the Republican Governors campaign committee. The bought-and-paid-for media mogul, the Sultan of Sleaze outdoes himself in scum-baggery. He takes with one hand and gives back with the other. And always, always works against the interests of the Middle Class.
These Fox people are so completely up for sale to the BP Oil and Exxon/Mobil and United Healthcare and Koch Industries and Home Depots of the country…the corporations with the most radical Right Wing extremists…that they simply cannot say a single honest word about a man whose efforts have surpassed all but a handful in his compassion for humanity.
For example, this September Soros announced a $100 million grant to Human Rights Watch, an organization that Fox New Channel hates with a passion…as do all other Murdoch enterprises. Why? Because Human Rights Watch is an organization that shines a very public light on human rights abuses in places like Uzbekistan and Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia. Murdoch doesn’t want that. These are his friends. Murdoch doesn’t kill or maim people. He helps others do it. Soros is trying to stop it. That is precisely the difference between those two billionaires.
Soros is no saint. He doesn’t pretend to be or even seek recognition for what he does. He has explained many times why he does what he does. He lived through one terrorist regime only to be followed by another. He understands oppression and how mortally dangerous the denial of human rights can be.
He only understands money and greed. And the value of nothing.
