From Shadow Party to Shadow Government: George Soros and the Effort to Radically Change America

by John Perazzo

  The Shadow Party and the Shadow Government

  George Soros and the Effort to Radically Change America

  By David Horowitz and John Perazzo

  Copyright 2010

  David Horowitz Freedom Center

  PO Box 55089

  Sherman Oaks, CA 91423

  Elizabeth@horowitzfreedomcenter.org

  www.frontpagemag.com

  "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." — Barack Obama (October 30, 2008)1

  1 www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2008/10/30/obama-speakscrowd-40000/

  A watershed moment in George Soros' long and stealthy effort to capture control of the Democratic Party and change the course of American politics came in August 2008 at the Party's presidential nominating convention in Denver, Colorado. One of a series of panel discussions staged for the media VIPs and moneymen, all of them euphoric at the growing prospect of Barack Obama's victory in the upcoming elections, featured a man named Rob Stein.2 An aide to Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown during the Clinton administration, Stein was not well known to the public but was locally famous among "progressive" Democrats as a key operative in the network of institutions designed by Soros in an effort to create what they only half jokingly referred to as a "vast leftwing conspiracy."

  2www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2388

  The subject of the panel discussion Stein staged for Party movers and shakers in 2008 was "The Colorado Miracle."3 Everyone in the room knew that the phrase referred to a stunning political development generated virtually overnight by a chain of Soros-funded state organizations. The lineup of state office holders told the tale. In October 2004, Republicans held two U.S. Senate seats, five of seven congressional seats, the governorship, the secretary of state's office and both houses of the legislature. When the 2008 election scarcely two months away ended, the exact opposite would be true, and Colorado would have been changed from a red state to a blue one in one brief election cycle.4

  3http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ODJmYWRlMDkxMzYxMzM1NTY3YmMwZDc1MzZmMmYzMGU=

  4http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=ODJmYWRlMDkxMzYxMzM1NTY3YmMwZDc1MzZmMmYzMGU=

  Some political commentators would see this transformation as an expression of Western independence and contrarianism or of changing demographics, which had given the state a growing Hispanic population. These and other factors had played a role. But as Stein pointed out in his discussion of the Miracle then just nearing its apotheosis, Colorado had been given a political makeover primarily as a result of a relentless political ground war waged by the Colorado Democracy Alliance, an organization created out of his vision and Soros' money.5 The Colorado Democracy Alliance had created, in record time, a progressive political infrastructure with one purpose: taking over Colorado politics from the precinct to the statehouse. It had accomplished this by putting together a relent- less political blitzkrieg.6 And best of all, Stein assured his audience, what had happened in Colorado was an exportable model that could be replicated in dozens of other states across the country. The election of Barack Obama might be the immediate goal before them, Stein concluded, but the longterm objective was to take control of the American political system. "The reason we're doing what we're doing ... " he said, "and the way we get progressive change is to control government."7

  5 www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7151

  6www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1228145204.pdf

  7www.capitalresearch.org/news/news.html?id=677

  Rob Stein was speaking for his patron as well as for himself. Over a twenty year period, George Soros has been able to exercise unparalleled influ- ence through the network of leftwing political organizations he built — a network so successful that it is a power unto itself and has earned itself a title: the Shadow Party.8 It is a network that exists in a political penumbra, although it calls for transparency; that works at the edges of the electoral system, although affecting electoral outcomes is its raison d'etre.

  8www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=842

  Soros' agenda is hidden and his goals are not made public because they are based on a radical vision of social change that most Americans not only reject but fear. But this agenda involving a radical change of American institutions has subverted and taken over the Democratic Party. The Soros agenda, in fact, has become the Obama agenda.

  The Billionaire Philanthropist

  Born in Hungary in 1930 into a deracinated Jewish family, George Soros survived World War II by working as an assistant to an official in the fascist government whose job was to confiscate the property of Jews headed to the gas chambers.9 After the war, Soros relocated to England,10 where he attended the London School of Economics and was influenced by one-worldism and the prospect of perfecting humanity through social engineering. But at this point in his life his ideas were subordinate to the desire to make money. After graduating in 1952, Soros joined a London brokerage firm, Singer and Friedlander.11 Four years later, he relocated to New York and eventually found work as a portfolio manager at an investment bank. He brought continental anti-bourgeois and anti-American attitudes with him and later admitted that he only wanted to stay in the U.S. long enough to make his fortune.12 But business was too good and he became a citizen.

  9 Peter Schweizer, Do As I Say (2005), p. 157; http://tinyurl.com/4kcy5ek

  10www.georgesoros.com/faqs/entry/georgesorosofficialbiography

  11www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2773265/Billionaire-who-broke-theBank-of-England.html

  12Michael T. Kaufman, Soros: The Life And Times Of A Messianic Billionaire (2002), p. 83

  In 1973 Soros set up a private partnership called the Soros Fund,13 renamed The Quantum Fund in 1979.14 Its value grew to $381 million by 1980,15 and more than $1 billion by 1985.16 As he later said, "Having made it, I could then indulge my social concerns."17 The $3 million he invested in these concerns in 1987 grew to $300 million a year by 1992.18 During this period, Soros established a series of foundations in Central Asia and Eastern Europe,19 where projects he funded hastened the fall of communist regimes and also, as he freely admitted, opened new money-making opportunities for him with the state industries and properties up for grabs.

  13 www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/85/Soros-Fund-Management-Llc.html

  14www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Soros-Fund-Management-LLC-Company-History.html

  15www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/85/Soros-Fund-Management-Llc.html

  16 Peter Schweizer, Do As I Say (2005), p. 157.

  17www.guardian.co.uk/business/2002/mar/10/theobserver.observer-business10

  18 George Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy (2004), p. 136

  19www.soros.org/about/timeline

  In 1993 Soros established the flagship of his foundation network — the New York City-based Open Society Institute (OSI) — which would support a variety of radical American groups and causes over the next decade — ranging from the legalization of drugs and the promotion of open borders to the creation of a leftwing judiciary — that bore his eccentric stamp but also resonated with a growing segment of the Democratic Party.20

  20 www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=589

  Campaign Finance Reform and the Creation of the Shadow Party

  By the early 1990s, Soros had become close to Bill and Hillary Clinton. ("I do now have great access in [the Clinton] administration," he boasted in 1995. "There i
s no question about this. We actually work together as a team.")21 One point of close collaboration between the Clintons and Soros was health care. Soros had his own reform, promoted by the Open Society Institute, that he saw as compatible with the initiatives that became known as HillaryCare. He called it, with characteristic bluntness, The Project on Death in America.22 Its rationale was compassionate: to embed hospices and "palliative" care in U.S. health policy. But its basic objective was more pragmatic: rationing care to terminal and seriously ill patients for whom medical attention offered little payoff and who were thus a burden on the system. It was the direct forerunner of the "death panels" of ObamaCare that drew fire from the political right in the next decade.

  21Interview with George Soros, The Charlie Rose Show, PBS (November 30, 1995)

  22 www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/x3770435801.pdf

  Over a ten-year period, the Open Society Institute would sink $45 million into The Project on Death in America.23 But Soros was less concerned by the fact that his initiative didn't immediately pay off than he was by the way such socially progressive reforms were defeated in America by unruly free speech. The fate of HillaryCare provided him with an epiphany of how the political system had to be changed if progressive ideas were to triumph.24

  23 www.soros.org/resources/articles_publications/publications/report_20041122/a_complete.pdf

  24David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party (2006), pp. 131-136

  The Clintons' proposal to nationalize the health care system had been undone in large part by a television ad campaign featuring "Harry and Louise," actors playing a typical American couple voicing their concerns in a series of television spots about the implications of a government takeover of medicine. The campaign had cost $14 million, a small sum given what it achieved — undoing the most important initiative of the new administration.25 The lesson Soros took away from the experience was that he had been putting the cart before the horse. Before pumping money into reforms, he had to clear the field of the unregulated political speech that would always stand in the way of the kinds of progressive (i.e., socialist) solutions to social problems he regarded as critical for the future of America and the world.

  25www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/business/media/17adco.html

  There was an answer at hand: campaign finance reform. It had been wafting through American politics with decreasing urgency since Watergate, but was still, many years later, a reform without a constituency. Working with others interested in this issue, Soros would use the institutional network he was beginning to build to create the illusion of a mass movement so that members of Congress would feel that everywhere they looked — academic institutions, the business community, religious groups — there was a clamor for campaign finance reform.26

  26 www.richardpoe.com/2005/03/25/pewgate-the-battle-of-theblogosphere/

  Over the next few years, Soros would give $12.6 million to the cause of campaign finance reform through the Open Society Institute and push other interested philanthropies, the Pew Charitable Trusts chief among them, to accelerate their commitment to this crusade.27 The juggernaut he helped form would give large grants to media outlets such as National Public Radio to publicize the cause,28 and to institutions such as New York University's Brennan Center to do the legal research, bogus as it later proved to be, that sought to justify the regulation of political speech.29

  27Ryan Sager, "Buying 'Reform': Media Missed Millionaires' Scam," New York Post (March 17, 2005).>

  28Ryan Sager, "Buying 'Reform': Media Missed Millionaires' Scam," New York Post (March 17, 2005).

  29 David Tell, "An Appearance of Corruption: The Bogus Research Undergirding Campaign Finance Reform," The Weekly Standard (May 26, 2003).

  All this paid off in 2002 with the McCain-Feingold Act (Soros contributed to McCain as well), which proposed to clean up politics by regulating the kinds and amounts of donations candidates could accept. The legislation banned "soft" money (unregulated individual contributions) and allowed only limited "hard" money (contributions to political action committees).30 Soros saw immediately that the main effect of the new law would be two-fold — to curb the use of the kind of TV advertising that had killed HillaryCare; and ultimately to limit the influence of the two political parties, which depended on soft money as their basic source of fuel. This would provide the opening for him to step in with his well-funded network and take control of the Democrats' political campaigns. This would be accomplished by funneling money into politics through so-called "527 organizations," named for the section of the IRS code allowing them to register with the Federal Election Commission. Soros could use these organizations to perform the roles — political advertising, get-out-the-vote operations — previously under the control of the Democratic Party, which now lacked the cash to fuel them.31

  30www.fec.gov/press/bkgnd/bcra_overview.shtml

  31 www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=813

  The McCain-Feingold law effectively defunded the Democratic Party (and the Republican Party as well), and allowed Soros to step into the breach creating a Shadow Party composed of 527 funding entities, radical get-out-the-vote organizations like ACORN and the public sector unions to pursue Soros' own political agenda.32

  32 www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/theshadowpartypoe2004.html

  The national reaction to the events of September 11, 2001 convinced Soros that he needed to put his plan into effect immediately. He viewed the terrorist attacks as confirmation that what he called "American Supremacy" was the number one problem facing the world.33 Soros detested what he viewed as the arrogance the President displayed when he publicly branded U.S. enemies as "evil"; when the President unapologetically expressed his faith in American exceptionalism; and when he refused to consider the possibility that the terrorists had real grievances and that American imperialism was ultimately responsible for the attacks.

  33 Soros (2004), p. 74; www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/19648

  Soros maintained that the proper long-term response to 9/11 would be for America to launch a global war on poverty by sending massive amounts of aid to impoverished regions around the world where terrorism flourished. Terrorism, Soros maintained, was the result of a "growing inequality between rich and poor, both within countries and among countries."34

  34 Soros (2004), p. 94

  Before 9/11 Soros saw his philanthropy as a way of incrementally changing health care, criminal sentencing, drug laws and other social issues he regarded as important. The direction in which he wanted to steer the United States was clear in the radical agendas of the groups that he had been funding for nearly a decade through his Open Society Institute. Those agendas could essentially be distilled down to three overriding themes: the diminution of American power, the subjugation of American sovereignty in favor of one world government, and the implementation of a socialist redistribution of wealth — both within the U.S. and across national borders.

  But now Soros decided that the world was endangered by American dominance and it was essential to change the country fundamentally, overnight as it were rather than over time. He believed that the 2004 elections offered the best opportunity to "deflate the bubble of American supremacy."35 But to accomplish this would require a political apparatus whose like had never been seen in the United States before; a network that could not only acquire profound and lasting influence but would do so in such a stealthy manner that Americans would not know what was happening.

  35 Soros (2004), p. 74

  The First Election: 2004

  There was no official birth announcement when the Shadow Party was launched on July 17, 2003 at El Mirador, George Soros' Southampton estate on Long Island. But it was the most significant development in American politics in decades. At this meeting of political strategists, wealthy donors, left-wing labor leaders and progressive activists, Soros laid out his plan to defeat George Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Present were figures from the Clinton years such as former Secretary of
State Madeline Albright and former White House chief of staff John Podesta; alongside them were "progressive" activists such as Ellen Malcolm, founder and president of EMILY's List, Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, along with large donors such as Taco Bell heir Rob McKay, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser and Progressive Insurance mogul Peter B. Lewis.36

  36 www.richardpoe.com/2005/10/06/part-1-the-shadow-party/

  The political operatives Soros had hired to staff the effort believed that Bush could be beaten in 2004 if there was a massive turnout of Democrat voters in swing states.37 Soros pledged the $10 million required to fund an organization that would be called America Coming Together. A grassroots activist group designed to coordinate the Shadow Party's massive get-out-the-vote drive, America Coming Together would raise the money that would allow it to dispatch tens of thousands of volunteers to knock on doors and work phone banks, parlaying the work of leftwing unions, environmentalists, and abortion rights activists into an unprecedented political offensive. When Soros made his commitment, according to reports that later filtered out of the Southampton meeting, Peter Lewis matched his $10 million, Rob Glaser anteed up $2 million, and Rob McKay put in $1 million.38

  Soon after this summit meeting, Soros also put up $3 million for John Podesta's new think tank,39 the Center for American Progress, which would function as the brain trust of the network of institutions that would comprise the Shadow Party.40 And finally Soros summoned California software developer Wes Boyd for a meeting at his New York office. In addition to having made a fortune in Silicon Valley, Boyd was also creator of the radical website MoveOn.org,41 which he founded during the Clinton impeachment trial to get the nation to "move on" to "more important issues" and since then had made an Internet cash cow for leftwing Democrat candidates. Soros offered Boyd a deal. He and Peter Lewis would match up to $5 million for any new money Boyd raised to expand MoveOn's reach for 2004.42

  37 ibid

  38 www.richardpoe.com/2005/10/06/part-1-the-shadow-party/