by John Perazzo
Another key beneficiary of the Secretary of State Project's support in 2006 was Democrat Mark Ritchie, who defeated a two-term incumbent Republican in Minnesota. Ritchie acknowledged his debt to the SoSP when he said, "I want to thank the Secretary of State Project and its thousands of grass-roots donors for helping to push my campaign over the top."77 A former community organizer with close ties to ACORN and to the nowdefunct radical New Party,78 Ritchie, like Jennifer Brunner, played a lead role in 2008.
75 www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/28/politics/main4483617.shtml?source=RSSattr=U.S._4483617
76 www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/09/12/payday13.html
77www.startribune.com/politics/34306799html?elr=KArks:DCiUHc3E7_V_nDaycUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiU
78 http://spectator.org/archives/2008/11/07/sos-in-minnesota; http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2010/11/mark-ritchie-file-2-minnesota-sos.html
When Republican incumbent U.S. Senator Norm Coleman finished 725 votes ahead of Democratic challenger Al Franken, the thin margin of victory triggered an automatic recount. With Ritchie presiding, Coleman's lead gradually dwindled in the ensuing weeks as a result of what journalist Matthew Vadum describes as a long series of "appalling irregularities" that invariably benefited Franken. For example, during the recount process a number of ballots were suddenly "discovered" in an election judge's car; one Minnesota county similarly "discovered" 100 new votes for Franken and claimed that a clerical error was responsible for the fact that they hadn't been counted before; another county tallied 177 more votes than it had recorded on Election Day; yet another county reported 133 fewer votes than its voting machines had originally tabulated. "Almost every time new ballots materialized, or tallies were updated or corrected, Franken benefitted," writes Vadum.79 In addition, at least 393 convicted felons voted illegally in two particular Minnesota counties.80 By the time the recount (and a court challenge by Coleman) ended in April 2009, Franken held a 312-vote lead and in June was officially declared the victor.81
79 http://spectator.org/archives/2009/04/14/fighting-frankenstein/print
80www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2010/07/20/Al-Franken-May-Have-Won-His-Senate-Seat-Through-Voter-Fraud
81http://tinyurl.com/6zelz9m
Soros and Obama
With organizations such as the Democracy Alliance and electoral innovations such as the Sec- retary of State Project in place, the Shadow Party approached the 2008 Presidential election with an integrated organization and singleness of purpose unprecedented in the annals of American politics. It was able to use the Internet to put people in the street; it had think tanks, media organizations, and fundraising arms built to function smoothly in the new reality created by campaign finance reform; it had the most sophisticated voter registration (and, for the other side, vote suppression) program yet seen.
It had been widely assumed that Soros would throw the elaborate machinery he had created for seizing power behind the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. The two of them had a relationship going back some 15 years, after all, involving a shared vision about the importance of socializing medicine as a way of expanding government power and regularizing social life. Hillary began the primary season, moreover, as the prohibitive favorite in the fight for the Democrat nomination. But in December 2006, Soros summoned Barack Obama, elected to the U.S. Senate only two years earlier, to a meeting in his New York office. Just a few weeks later — on January 16, 2007 when Obama announced that he would form a presidential exploratory committee — Soros immediately sent the senator a contribution of $2,100, the maximum amount allowable under the new campaign-finance laws he had played so large a role in creating. Soon thereafter, Soros announced that he would support Obama rather than Clinton for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.82
82 www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_43/b4055047.htm
Some in the establishment were surprised that he should turn his back on an old friend. But Soros' agenda had always been ideological, not personal. Obama not only shared virtually all of Soros' values, including his antagonism to the Iraq War, but had also risen to prominence in the universe of leftwing networking organizations the Shadow Party had created. Compared to Hillary Clinton, he was a sure thing, a politician who spoke Soros' language and could be counted on to promote the radical causes close to his heart. The Obama campaign was soon staffed, funded and promoted by personnel from the forces Soros had welded into the Shadow Party juggernaut: the leftwing public employees unions, the progressive billionaires, and the ACORN radicals.
Some of the people who sold Obama to America moved in the parochial world of leftwing activism and "community organizing," coming out of organizations such as the Midwest Academy,83 a major training center for radicals founded by Sixties diehards Heather and Paul Booth,84 formerly hardcore members of Students for a Democratic Society, who had continued the fight above ground when their comrades Billy Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, went underground to launch the Weatherman terror campaign.85 The Booths chose a more gradual form of revolution — whose guidelines were laid down in the radical theories of Saul Alinsky.86 The Midwest Academy, recipient of a grant from Soros' Open Society Institute, was one of the organizations in which Obama became involved when returning home to Chicago after graduating from Harvard Law.87
83www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6725
84www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1641; www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2501
85 www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2169;
86 www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2314
87www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6725
The future president had also cycled through some of the better known organizations sheltering under the Shadow Party's political umbrella. The most famous — to become the most notorious in the first year of the Obama presidency — was ACORN,88 supported for years by Soros' Open Society Institute and other Shadow Party groups.89 Its agenda in the words of one critic was "anti-capitalist redistributionism," and one of Obama's first jobs was doing voter registration for the ACORN affiliate Project Vote.90
88 www.nationalreview.com/corner/171642/obama-acorn-cover/stanley-kurtz
89www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1225222922.pdf
90 www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/249390
Then-SEIU President Andrew Stern, the Center for American Progress' John Podesta, and other key figures in the Soros network sat on ACORN's Advisory Council.91 For his part, Obama, adroitly riding the updrafts of Chicago's leftwing political universe, was the attorney for ACORN's lead election-law cases before joining the Illinois legislature.92 In 1995, acting as ACORN's attorney, Obama sued to ensure the implementation of an Illinois motor-voter law.93 When ACORN officially endorsed Obama's presidential candidacy in February 2008, the candidate's campaign gave one of ACORN's front groups $800,000 to fund a voterregistration drive on the senator's behalf.94 By October, ACORN would be under investigation for voter-registration fraud in 13 states.95 In the 2008 campaign, pursuing the Shadow Party's strategy for parlaying the power of institutions within its network, Obama's presidential campaign furnished Project Vote with a list of donors who had already given the campaign the maximum sum of money permitted by law. In turn, Project Vote representatives contacted those donors and urged them to give contributions to Project Vote, which it could then use to support Obama's can- didacy while technically complying with electionlaw limits on campaign donations.96 That same year, the Open Society Institute gave Project Vote $400,000.97
91 http://newsbusters.org/blogs/tom-blumer/2009/09/21/acorn-independentadvisory-council-member-stern-lets-loose-acorns-critic
92 www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/us/politics/11acorn.html
93 www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/224610
94 http://tinyurl.com/4knn5r6
95www.nationalreview.com/articles/225978/identification-requiredderoy-murdock
96 http://tinyurl.com/6ymmba4
97http://dynamodata.fdncenter.org//990pf_pdf_archive/137/137029285/137029285_200812_990PF.pdf
Another boost for Obama came from MoveOn. This powerful Soros-affiliated organization dispatched approximately a million volunteers to work on Obama's campaign nationwide — 600,000 in battleground states and 400,000 in non-battleground states. In addition, MoveOn registered more than half a million young Obama supporters to vote in the battleground states, while adding a million young people to its membership rolls during the summer of 2008. All told, MoveOn and its members contributed more than $58 million directly to the Obama campaign, while raising and spending at least an additional $30 million in independent election efforts on behalf of other Democrats across the United States.98
98 http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2008/11/obama-benefits-frommoveons-88.php
99www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2406
The Shadow Party in the White House
The Shadow Party succeeded in realizing Soros' dream of putting his man in the White House. With Obama's inauguration, members of the Soros coalition began showing up in high level jobs in the new administration. One who soon attracted unwanted attention was a self-defined "communist" named Van Jones who spent six months as the new president's "green jobs czar" in 2009 before revelations about his background forced him to resign and return to his position as a fellow at Podesta's Center for American Progress.99
Before joining Obama, Jones had headed the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which had received more than $1 million from the Open Society Institute to pursue its claim that the American criminal-justice system was racist and therefore to promote "alternatives to violence and incarceration."100 Over the years, Jones had been a board member of numerous nonprofits funded by the Shadow Party, including the radical environmental group Apollo Alliance, which was launched by the Soros-connected Tides Foundation, as well as Podesta's Center for American Progress.101 Jones definitely had gotten the Shadow Party message, often urging his fellow leftists "to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends."102
100 www.ellabakercenter.org/page php?pageid=19&contentid=151
101 www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2406
102 www.nationalreview.com/articles/228741/alinsky-does-afghanistan/andrew-c-mccarthy
A key figure in the Shadow Party entering the Obama White House by the front door was the ubiquitous Andrew Stern, a veteran New Leftist who headed the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the second-largest labor organization in America. Trained in the tactics of radical activism at the Midwest Academy, Stern had worked with Soros to form America Votes to run the ground war for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards ticket. In 2008, Stern's SEIU contributed $60.7 million to help elect Barack Obama to the White House — deploying 100,000 volunteers during the campaign.103 As of October 30, 2009, scarcely eight months into the Obama presidency, the union boss had visited the White House 22 times — more than any other individual.104
103 http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/28/nation/na-stern28 103 http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/28/nation/na-stern28
104www.capitalresearch.org/pubs/pdf/v1259611404.pdf
Almost everywhere one looked in the new ad- ministration, members of the Soros inner circle proliferated. Key presidential strategist and advisor David Axelrod, who as much as anyone was responsible for Obama's elections, first to the Senate and then to the Presidency, had received over $200,000 for his political consulting firm during the 2004 elections from the Shadow Party's Media Fund.105 Carol Browner, named by Obama as his "environment czar," was a board member of the Alliance for Climate Protection, the Center for American Progress, and the League of Conservation Voters — all funded by Soros.106 The SEIU's Anna Burger, called "the most powerful women in the labor movement" by Fortune magazine and vice chair of the Democracy Alliance, was appointed to the Obama Economic Recovery Advisory Board.107 Kevin Jennings, who had established the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), a Boston-area organization funded by the Open Society Institute, was named "education czar."108
105 www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/09/the_sorosaxelrod_axis_of_astro.html; www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0910/Axelrod_and_the_outside_groups.html
106www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2364
107 www.seiu.org/a/ourunion/anna-burger.php; www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2445
108 www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-jennings; www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2426
With members of the Shadow Party playing central roles, the Obama White House began to roll out an ideological agenda immediately after the inauguration that involved many of George Soros' signature concerns.
Stimulus
Just a few days after Obama was elected, 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 ... ."109
109www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,592268,00.html
Soon afterwards, as one of the first acts of his presidency, Obama pressured Congress to pass a monumental $787 billion economic-stimulus bill with a text of 1,071 pages which few, if any, legislators read before voting on. It was based on the radical precept of using social crisis to create radical change, which the Alinskyite groups in Obama's background had made into a theorem and which chief of staff Rahm Emanuel made into an aphorism: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."110
110www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yeA_kHHLow
It was first of all a payoff to key Shadow Party elements, in particular public sector unions, to allow them to remain strong for future elections through the financial crisis. It was also loaded with spending projects Democrats had been unable to fund for years. The stimulus was an opening bid to radically transform American capitalism by channeling populist anger at Wall Street toward support for an expansionist vision of the welfare state based on "social justice" — leftist code for a socialist redistribution of wealth.
Obama stressed that it was urgent to pass the stimulus bill at the earliest possible moment, even without full deliberation, so as to forestall any further harm to the U.S. economy. Because of the near hysterical atmosphere surrounding the flailing economy, it went largely unnoticed that the bill also repealed numerous essentials of the 1996 welfarereform bill which George Soros had so strongly opposed.111 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.112 Such unprecedented levels of spending did not at all trouble Soros, who justified it with discredited Keynesian doctrine: "At times of recession, running a budget deficit is highly desirable."113
111http://articles.mcall.com/1996-10-01/news/3126013_1_legal-immi-grants-welfare-reform-law-rosalind-gold
112http://tinyurl.com/4tno77e
113www.spiegel.de/internationalbusiness/0,1518,592268,00.html
Environment and Energy
Cap-and-trade, Obama's tax-based policy proposal to reduce Americans' consumption of fossil fuels, was a strategy that had been discussed and perfected in the nonprofits associated with the Shadow Party. Under cap-and-trade regulations, companies would be subject to taxes or fees if they exceeded their government-imposed limit for CO2 emissions.114 Some economists predicted that such legislation, if enacted, would impose colossal costs on businesses — costs that would be passed on to consumers, who in turn would pay anywhere from several hundred to several thousand extra dollars each year in energy costs.115 But to Soros, the taxpayers' money woul
d be well spent on such a policy. "Dealing with global warming will require a lot of investment," he emphasized, and thus "will be painful" but "at least" it will enable humankind to "survive and not cook."116When asked in 2008 whether he was proposing energy policies that would "create a whole new paradigm for the economic model of the country, of the world," Soros replied, "Yes."117
114 www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=826
115 www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2007/12/Beware-of-Capand-Trade-Climate-Bills
116 http://keywiki.org/index.php/George_Soros_-_Political/Financial_Stances
117 Ibid
During his 2008 presidential campaign, Obama had a comparable moment of candor: "[U]nder my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations."118
The principal motive underlying the capand-trade policies that Obama and Soros support was articulated by Obama's "regulation czar," Cass Sunstein,119 a leftist law professor and longtime proponent of "distributive justice," whereby America would transfer much of its own wealth to poorer nations as compensation for the alleged harm that U.S. environmental transgressions have allegedly caused in those countries. In language echoing Soros' own pronouncements, Sunstein speculates that "desirable redistribution" can be "accomplished more effectively through climate policy than through direct foreign aid."120