by Beck, Glenn
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Alliance or Empire?
Working for Us published the names of what it called the “Top Offenders” among congressional Democrats who failed to support such leftist priorities as “living wage” legislation—a socialist program to raise the minimum wage to potentially unlimited levels—the proliferation of government labor unions, and a single-payer government-owned health-care system.
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One of the project’s first successes came in Minnesota where Mark Ritchie, an activist supported by ACORN, was elected secretary of state with the Alliance’s help. Two years later, when Norm Coleman, the incumbent Republican senator, finished 725 votes ahead of Democratic challenger Al Franken, the thin margin of victory triggered an automatic recount. With Ritchie presiding, and ignoring what John Fund from the Wall Street Journal described as a series of “appalling irregularities” (in one case, at least 393 convicted felons voted illegally in two particular Minnesota counties), Coleman’s lead gradually dwindled. “Almost every time new ballots materialized or tallies were updated or corrected, Franken benefited,” wrote Matthew Vadum. When the recount was over, Franken had eked out a 312-vote lead and was officially declared the victor.
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Lessons in Esperanto
Stelo—(adj) The action or crime of stealing. Theft.
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The Democracy Alliance had bought itself a United States senator.
HOPE AND CHANGE
Later that week, Soros announced that he would support Obama for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. The Obama campaign was soon staffed, funded, and promoted by personnel from the forces Soros had welded into the Shadow Party juggernaut: the left-leaning public employees unions, the progressive billionaires, and the ACORN radicals from Project Vote.
When Obama was elected, members of the Soros coalition immediately began showing up in high-level jobs in the new administration:
Van Jones, who headed the Soros-funded Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, spent six months as the new president’s “green jobs czar” before revelations about his background forced him to resign and take up a position at the Soros-funded Center for American Progress.
Carol Browner was named by Obama as his “environment czar.” Browner 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.
David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign manager, and recipient of over $200,000 from the Shadow Party’s Media Fund, was appointed as the president’s political adviser. He was later named the media and communications director of Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.
Anna Burger, vice chair of the Soros Democracy Alliance, and top SEIU executive, was appointed to the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a Boston-area organization that Soros helped fund, was named “safe school czar.”
Andy Stern, who headed the SEIU, the second-largest labor organization in America, and a key figure in the Shadow Party through America Votes, was among the most frequent visitors to the White House in Obama’s first term.
Almost everywhere you looked in the new administration you would find members of the Soros inner circle, beneficiaries of the Soros “charities,” and operatives from the Shadow Party. And, not coincidentally, as soon as the Obama administration took over, the White House began to roll out policies that had George Soros’s fingerprints all over them.
Just a few days after the election, Soros said:
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.
Shortly thereafter, in one of the first acts of his presidency, Obama announced, and the Democratic Congress passed, a monumental 1,071-page, $787 billion economic stimulus bill.
Energy is another area where Soros has taken a key interest. Obama’s tax-based policy proposal to reduce Americans’ consumption of fossil fuels through “cap-and-trade” was a strategy that, after being proposed and perfected by the nonprofits that Soros funded, was incorporated into the Shadow Party campaigns. Under cap-and-trade regulations, companies are subject to taxes or fees if they use more “dirty” energy than the government wants them to. Some economists have predicted that such legislation, if enacted, would impose colossal costs on businesses—costs that would be passed on to consumers, who would pay anywhere from several hundred to several thousand more dollars each year in energy costs. But to Soros, the taxpayers’ money would be well spent. “[D]ealing with global warming will require a lot of investment,” he said, emphasizing that it “could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come,” while admitting that it “will be painful.”
When Soros was 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,” he replied simply, “Yes.”
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,” he conceded. “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.”
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Lessons in Esperanto
Kiel i tiu Guy ganjo post diranta i tiu?—(question) How did this guy win after saying this?
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The cap-and-trade policies being pushed by Obama and Soros were also a favorite of Obama’s “regulatory czar,” Cass Sunstein, a leftist law professor and longtime proponent of “distributive justice.” Under Sunstein’s idea of justice, which sounds eerily similar to Soros’s post-9/11 “affirmative action on a global scale” comment, America would transfer much of its own wealth to poorer nations as compensation for the alleged harm that U.S. environmental transgressions have caused. In language echoing Soros’s own pronouncements, Sunstein wrote:
It is even possible that desirable redistribution is more likely to occur through climate change policy than otherwise, or to be accomplished more effectively through climate policy than through direct foreign aid.
Translation: climate change regulation might be the best way to accomplish the redistribution of wealth that we want anyway. It might even be better than just handing the money to foreign countries for nothing. Yet conservatives are crazy for being skeptical of the left’s intentions with environmental policy.
SOROS-CARE
The biggest Obama agenda item of all—Obamacare—was also a Soros crusade.
Soros had devised his own ideas for reform, many of which found their way into Hillarycare through what he called “the Project on Death.” The Project’s boilerplate mission was compassionate—to embed hospices and “palliative” care in U.S. health policy—but its practical objective was to ration care. Those who are very sick and won’t see much improvement in their condition are, after all, very expensive to take care of. Some might even call them a burden on the system.
Following the defeat of Hillarycare and the failure of the Project on Death to gain traction, Soros created a new coalition, a vast network of organizations to promote socialized medicine. The new umbrella group was called “Health Care for America Now” (HCAN) and it became the primary lobby for the plan that would seek to lock up a sixth of the American economy into a government-controlled operation.
HCAN’s strategy, to impose a system of government health insurance that would eventually culminate in a single-payer plan, became the strategy of the Obama White House. The path to this goal would be paved by a public option—a government insurance agency to compete with existing insurers.
An agency like this would have a couple of nice things going for
it: It wouldn’t have to turn a profit; and it could do whatever it liked to its private competitors. Increase its competitors’ taxes? Sure, why not. Add thousands of pages of new regulations to make it almost impossible for them to operate? Naturally! The truth—which HCAN and the others understood very well from the start—is that a “public option” would inevitably force private insurers out of the industry and leave the government as the only alternative.
This strategy was outlined by Professor Jacob Hacker, speaking at the Soros-funded Tides Foundation: “Someone once said to me this is a Trojan Horse for single-payer, and I said, well it’s not a Trojan Horse, right? It’s just right there. I’m telling you.”
Hacker lauded the HCAN approach: “One of the virtues of it, though, is that you can at least make the claim that there is a competitive system between the public and private sectors.” He added that while it would lead to a single-payer government health-care system eventually, it wouldn’t “frighten people into thinking they are going to lose their private insurance.”
ISRAEL: “VICTIMS TURNING PERSECUTORS”
If Obamacare was the crown jewel of the president’s domestic agenda, his unprecedented hard line toward Israel and appeasement of Palestinian radicals was a signature statement of his foreign policy. It was also, not coincidentally, another initiative in which Soros played a heavy hand.
Soros’s antipathy for Israel had now seemingly developed into a full-blown hostility. Just as he perceived American policies to have provoked the anti-American attacks by Islamic jihadists on 9/11, so too did he regard the Jews and the state of Israel as the primary cause of anti-Semitism. He has referred to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as a case of the “victims turning persecutors,” even though the source of the conflict is the sixty-year Arab war of aggression to erase the Jewish state. While Hamas, the terrorist party in control of Gaza, calls for the extermination of the Jews, Soros argues that the key to a Mideast peace is “bringing Hamas into the peace process.”
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Lessons in Esperanto
Frenezeco—(n) Extreme foolishness or irrationality. Insanity.
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To promote his anti-Israel views, Soros helped fund a left-wing lobby called “J Street” at the outset of the Obama administration. Like other Soros groups, J Street positions itself as a counter to what Soros considers to be a malignant “conservative” organization, in this case the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—an organization, by the way, overwhelmingly made up of Democrats.
J Street has called for “a new direction for American policy in the Middle East” and has cautioned Israel not to be too combative against Hamas—despite that group’s avowed hatred for Jews, their refusal to recognize the Jewish state, and their eight thousand unprovoked rocket attacks on civilian targets in Israel.
According to J Street, the Mideast conflict is perpetuated chiefly by Israel: “Israel’s settlements in the occupied territories have, for over forty years, been an obstacle to peace.” While this is an enormously complex issue, the reality is that these settlements are an obstacle only to those who do not want a Jewish presence in a Muslim state.
The Soros/J Street positions mark a break with sixty years of American policy toward Israel, but they are largely indistinguishable from those of the Obama White House. Obama signaled his comfort with J Street’s agendas when he sent his then-national security adviser James Jones to deliver the keynote address at the organization’s annual conference in October 2009, and when he objected to Jewish settlements in Jerusalem, which is the capital of the Jewish state.
Soros, knowing that his comments on Israel made him controversial in the Jewish community, initially tried to conceal his support of J Street from the public for fear that it might alienate other potential backers of the organization. But, in September 2010, the Washington Times penetrated the veil, revealing that from 2008 to 2010, Soros and his two children had given a total of $750,000 to J Street and that the organization’s Advisory Council includes a number of individuals with close ties to Soros operations.
When the streets of Cairo erupted in February 2011, and Obama hesitated as Mubarak tried to hold on to power, Soros wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post urging Obama to embrace regime change and welcome the entrance of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic cult that has spawned twelve terrorist organizations including al-Qaeda and Hamas. “President Obama personally and the United States as a country have much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy . . .,” he wrote. “[D]oing so would open the way to peaceful progress in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood’s cooperation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president, is a hopeful sign that it intends to play a constructive role in a democratic political system. . . .
“The main stumbling block is Israel. . . . Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. . . .”
In other words, according to Soros, America—which considered the reigning Mubarak regime to be an ally for forty years despite its faults—and Israel, a nation under siege from Muslim extremists, are the real obstacles to peace in the Middle East. On the other hand, the Muslim Brotherhood—the fountainhead of Islamic terrorism—is the key to peace.
That logic must cost billions of dollars, because I don’t get it.
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The Key to Peace?
Just so we’re all on the same page about the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s most important cleric (who is often portrayed as a moderate in the Western media), once said: “Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers [i.e., Muslims].”
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AN INCESTUOUS AFFAIR
In Soros’s anti-Israel, pro–Muslim Brotherhood Washington Post op-ed, he inadvertently outlined the way he does business to anyone with the curiosity to notice: “The American Israel Public Affairs Committee,” he wrote, “is no longer monolithic or the sole representative of the Jewish community.”
This, of course, was correct—since the creation of J Street. In essence, George Soros is citing an organization funded by George Soros as evidence that there are voices out there that support the opinions of George Soros.
Some will call this successful political activism. Some will call it a conspiracy. I call it incestuous. When Israel is the question, Soros has J Street as the answer. When government health care is the question, Soros has HCAN as the answer. When the Obama administration’s attempt to force Catholic organizations to provide contraception was the question, Soros had Media Matters to answer, claiming “Faith leaders . . . agree with the regulation.” Their backup for that claim? A statement from the group Faith in Public Life, cofounded by Jim Wallis, and funded, you guessed it, by George Soros.
Almost everybody wants to play puppet master. Some people are just a lot better at it than others.
“[Al-Qaeda’s supporters] are aware of the cracks in the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their own hands.”
—Osama bin Laden, 2001
BY EARLY 2009 the global economy had lost close to $50 trillion from its peak. Of that decline, $13 trillion came from America. Blue-chip financial institutions that had survived the worst of the worst collapsed before our eyes. The world had nearly been plunged into a second Great Depression.
It was in this environment that a financial analyst named Kevin D. Freeman was commissioned by the Pentagon to analyze the economic crisis in light of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. He was asked to answer several questions: Could terrorist organizations or enemy nations
execute a significant attack on our financial markets? Could these groups really succeed in crashing our stock market? Could they debase our currency?
The answers, as you will see, are all yes. Yet, despite the compelling evidence of outside manipulation that Freeman published in his Pentagon report, Economic Warfare, his findings were generally ignored. “Nobody wants to go there” was the response from one anonymous government official to the Washington Times when asked why the threat wasn’t being taken seriously.
Freeman has told me personally that government officials threatened to classify his report and punish him with jail time if he dared to publicly discuss his research on how our enemies might harm our economy.
They are cowards.
It’s time to shine a light on Freeman’s findings—and the threat of financial terrorism in general. This isn’t some conspiracy theory or academic research: this is very real. Remember, terrorists didn’t have bombs or guns on 9/11—just better imaginations. The same applies here. The size of our economy is both our greatest strength and greatest vulnerability. Our enemies don’t need bombs or guns to target it—just better imaginations.