The Shared Agendas of George Soros and Barack Obama

If you want to gain a better understanding of The Great Debate or The Titanic Struggle for the soul of America, read this very long article in its entirety. Sarah Palin represented the anti-thesis to these views without equivocation. She was good at drawing the battle lines. It is for this reason the MSM, influenced to a large extent by Soros, did their utmost to destroy her. Rather than debate her policies or position, which would have given her credibility, they just smeared her. Ted Belman

By Discover The Networks

While George Soros was busy bankrolling his battalion of established activist groups and launching a few new ones of his own, he quite naturally looked toward the upcoming presidential election of 2008 with great anticipation, eagerly awaiting the day when George W. Bush would finally leave office. The question was, who would replace him? In recent years, all indications had been that Soros favored Hillary Clinton above most, if not all, other potential Democratic candidates for President. But now there was a new face on the scene¯a young, charismatic U.S. senator from Illinois named Barack Obama¯who seemed not only to share virtually all of Soros’s values and agendas, but also appeared to be a highly skilled politician who stood a good chance of getting elected to the nation’s highest office.

In December of 2006, Soros, who had previously hosted a fundraiser for Obama during the latter’s 2004 Senate campaign, met with Obama in Soros’s New York office. Just a few weeks later¯on January 16, 2007¯Obama announced that he would form a presidential exploratory committee and was contemplating a run for the White House. Within hours, Soros sent the senator a contribution of $2,100, the maximum amount allowable under campaign-finance laws. Later that week, the New York Daily News reported that Soros would support Obama rather than Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, though Soros pledged to back the New York senator were she to emerge as the nominee.1 But it was clear that Soros considered Obama to be the more electable candidate of the two. Most importantly, Obama’s economic and political prescriptions for America were wholly accordant with those of Soros.

Anti-Capitalism

Obama’s anti-capitalist background and views are well documented: His father was a communist; his mother was a communist sympathizer;2 in his youth he was mentored by the communist Frank Marshall Davis; he sought out Marxist friends and professors at Occidental College; he attended Socialist Scholars Conferences in New York; he was trained in the community-organizing methods of Saul Alinsky, a communist fellow traveler; he developed close ties to the pro-socialist community organization ACORN; he developed close personal and political ties to the infamous Marxists (and former domestic terrorists) Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn; he was hand-picked for his first political office by Alice Palmer, a pro-Soviet figure in Illinois; in the 1990s he became a member of the New Party, a socialist political coalition; he had close connections to the Midwest Academy, a radical training ground which author Stanley Kurtz has described as a “crypto-socialist organization”;3 and he spent twenty years attending the church of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who preaches the Marxist doctrines of liberation theology.

As President, Obama appointed Carol Browner, a former “commissioner” of the Socialist International as his “environment czar”;4 he employed a White House communications director (Anita Dunn) who cited Mao Zedong as one of her “favorite political philosophers”;5 he appointed a “science czar,” John Holdren, who views capitalism as a system that is inherently destructive of the environment;6 he appointed Van Jones, a longtime revolutionary communist, as his “green jobs czar”;7 and he strongly favors the redistribution of wealth, both within the U.S. and across international borders. The list, of course, could go on and on.

George Soros, too, harbors many negative views about capitalism and free markets. “The entire edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that markets can be left to their own devices,” says Soros. “We must find a new paradigm and rebuild from the ground up.”8 According to Soros, the capitalist “belief that everybody pursuing his self-interest will maximize the common interest Š is a false idea.”9 Calling the global capitalist system “deeply flawed,” Soros maintains that “as long as capitalism remains triumphant, the pursuit of money overrides all other social considerations.”10

As Soros sees things, capitalism “is today a greater threat than any totalitarian ideology.”11 Lamenting that “the richest 1 percent of the world’s population receive as much as the poorest 57 percent,”12 Soros suggests that only by reining in “global capitalism” can that gap be narrowed. He further complains that global capitalism, by encouraging the free flow of money across international borders, reduces the vital “ability of the state to provide Social Security to its citizens.”13 “The globalization of financial markets has rendered the welfare state that came into existence after World War II obsolete,” Soros explains, “because the people who require a social safety net cannot leave the country, but the capital the welfare state used to tax can.”14

Soros’s proposed remedy for this problem is a worldwide war on poverty that would transform the entire planet into a global welfare state, a sort of open-society alliance where “a kind of international central bank” could redistribute wealth from rich populations to poor ones.15 Toward this end, Soros announced in September 2006 that he would donate $50 million to the United Nations Millennium Project, a massive redistributive scheme calling for the governments of wealthy countries to commit 0.7% of their GNP to promoting “the economic development and welfare of developing countries.”16 Heading this Project (from 2002-2006) was Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who had worked with Soros in Russia during the Bill Clinton administration. As evidenced by his participation in the Millennium Project,17 Sachs has radically altered his former pro-capitalist positions. Indeed, in recent times he has praised socialists as “both the heirs and the leaders of the world’s most important and most successful political path”; he has lauded their “strong commitment to universalist ethical principles and fiscal re-distribution”; and he has voiced regret that America’s lack of “commitment to re-distribution” has “enabled a massive underclass to develop.”18

Similarly, George Soros sees “the global capitalist system in its present form” as “a distortion of what ought to be a global open society.”19 He suggests that if the “market fundamentalism in America” were “eliminated,” then “the public interest would be better served” by way of “a more equal distribution of wealth.”20

In a November 2008 interview, Soros was asked whether he supported programs falling under the rubric of “big-government” or “European-style ‘socialism.'” He replied, “That is exactly what we need now. I am against market fundamentalism. I think this propaganda that government involvement is always bad has been very successful-but also very harmful to our society.”21

In October 2009, Soros told a Central European University audience that “there is a deep-seated conflict between capitalism and open society.” He observed, moreover, that “Karl Marx[‘s] proposition” of communist redistributionism “was a very attractive idea” that might well have succeeded if not for the unfortunate fact that “the communist rulers put their own interests ahead of the interests of the people.”22 “The failure of the central planning model did not prove the validity of the free enterprise model,” says Soros. “… There is a better way of looking at the world. It is based on the postulate of radical fallibility, according to which all our constructs are flawed in one way or another. Specifically, both models-Communism and free enterprise, or market fundamentalism, as I have rechristened it-are deficient; the deficiency in each one can be cured only by taking some elements from the other.”23

The Call for Global Government

Soros’s desire for a worldwide welfare structure is consistent with his general preference for some form of global government. In 1998 he wrote that “insofar as there are collective interests that transcend state boundaries, the sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions.” “The greatest opposition to this idea,” he added somberly, “is coming from the United States.”24

Soros has continued to espouse this perspective ever since. At a 2003 event, a questioner asked Soros whether he and his foundations could “help to bring more foreign influence into the United States instead of relying on what is essentially a balance between Democrats and conservative Republicans, which hasn’t worked and is not about to start working.” Soros replied:

“I think you put your finger on a very important flaw in the current world order. And that is that only Americans have a vote in Congress. And yet it is the United States that basically determines policy for the world. That is a flaw in the current setup. I don’t think you can correct it by giving the Chinese government a vote in Congress. But it is a flaw, and I think this is where American leadership is needed, to take into account and respect the interests of others as well, in order to retain the dominant position we currently enjoy.”25

This call for increased “foreign influence” in American political life is congruent with President Obama’s position on the matter. In March 2009, for instance, Obama appointed Harold Koh, the dean of Yale Law School, as legal advisor to the U.S. State Department. Koh is an advocate of transnationalism, a concept arguing in favor of “global governance” as opposed to the constitutional sovereignty of independent nation-states. This perspective holds that the world’s most challenging problems are too complex and deep-rooted for any single country to address effectively on its own. The solution, says Koh, is for all members of the international community to recognize a set of supranational laws and institutions whose authority overrides those of any particular government.26

In March 2007, Koh chastised the U.S. for having “unwisely disengaged from various institutions that promote fundamental human rights, chief among them the International Criminal Court [which would subordinate American criminal-justice procedures in certain cases to those of an international tribunal] and the newly established Human Rights Council” of the United Nations¯a Council whose membership includes a number of nations known for their unrestrained anti-Semitism and human-rights abuses.27 President Obama ultimately announced, in 2009, that the U.S. would join the Council for the first time.28 In November 2010, this Council made headlines when it harshly berated America for its alleged discrimination against Muslims, its barbaric police practices, its use of torture against enemies abroad, and its religious intolerance.29

Another Obama official¯Eric P. Schwartz, the administration’s assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration¯formerly served as director of the U.S. Connect Fund, a Soros-financed organization that promotes global governance.30

Fiscal Policy

Just a few days after Barack Obama was elected President, George Soros stated: “I think we need a large stimulus package which will provide funds for state and local government to maintain their budgets¯because they are not allowed by the constitution to run a deficit. For such a program to be successful, the federal government would need to provide hundreds of billions of dollars. In addition, another infrastructure program is necessary. In total, the cost would be in the 300 to 600 billion-dollar range….”31

Soon thereafter, as one of the first priorities of his presidency, Obama pressured Congress to pass a monumental $787 billion economic-stimulus bill whose text was 1,071 pages long-¯and which few, if any, legislators read before voting on it. Obama stressed the urgency of passing this bill at the earliest possible moment, so as to forestall any further harm to the U.S. economy. Notably, the legislation repealed numerous essentials of the 1996 welfare-reform bill against which George Soros had so strongly rebelled.32 According to a Heritage Foundation report, 32 percent of the new stimulus bill-or an average of $6,700 in “new means-tested welfare spending” for every poor person in the U.S.-was earmarked for social-welfare programs.33 Such unprecedented levels of spending did not at all trouble Soros, who said: “At times of recession, running a budget deficit is highly desirable.”34 In December 2009, Obama concurred again-outlining a set of new multibillion-dollar stimulus and jobs proposals while explaining that America must continue to “spend our way out of this recession.”35

Taxes

CONTINUE