Soros's New Hostile Takeover:
The Democratic Party
by Jeffrey Steinberg
On Dec. 20, 1998, in the midst of his murderous speculative rampage against the currencies of Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, and other targeted Asian nations, George Soros appeared on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes," to explain and defend his behavior. Confronted by interviewer Steve Kroft about his experiences as a youth in Hungary, under the Nazi occupation, Soros freely admitted that he posed as the "adopted godson" of an official of the Nazi-occupation government, and helped in the confiscation of Jewish properties.
"Kroft: And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.
"Soros: Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that's when my character was made.
"Kroft: In what way?
"Soros: That one should think ahead. One should understand and anticipate events and when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a very personal experience of evil.
"Kroft: My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted godson.
"Soros: Yes. Yes.
"Kroft: Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.
"Soros: Yes. That's right. Yes.
"Kroft: I mean that's—that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
"Soros: Not—not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don't—you don't see the connection. But it was—it created no—no problem at all.
"Kroft: No feeling of guilt?
"Soros: No.
"Kroft: For example that, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that?
"Soros: Well, of course I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was—well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets—that if I weren't there—of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would—would—would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the—whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. I had no role in taking away the property. So I had no sense of guilt."
In an earlier television interview on the same subject, Soros was even more blunt about his role as a Nazi collaborator in the Holocaust. On April 15, 1993, Soros appeared on WNET-TV and declared, "When the Germans came in," his father explained to him that, "This is a lawless occupation. The normal rules don't apply. You have to forget how you behave in a normal society. This is an abnormal situation. And he [Soros's father] arranged for all of us to have false papers, everybody had a different arrangement. I was adopted by an official of the ministry of agriculture, whose job was to take over Jewish properties, so I actually went with him and we took possession of these large estates. That was my identity. So it's a strange, very strange life. I was 14 at the time."
In point of fact, Soros's adopted "godfather" served under Nazi Waffen SS Gen. Kurt Becher, who ran what was euphemistically called the Economic Department of the SS Command, which oversaw the extermination of 500,000 Hungarian Jews. In his famous book Perfidy, an indictment of the Jews who colluded with the Nazis in order to survive, Ben Hecht described Becher's Economic Department, in more graphic terms than did Soros. The Department was in charge of looting the properties of Hungarian Jews, in "removing the gold fillings from the millions of teeth of the dead Jews; in cutting off the hair of millions of Jewesses before killing them, and shipping bales of hair to Germany's mattress factories; in converting the fat of dead Jews into bath soap, and in figuring out effective methods of torture to induce the Jews awaiting death to reveal where they had hidden their last possessions."
A psychiatrist might diagnose someone who went through such an experience, yet felt no remorse, no guilt, and actually boasted that it shaped his strategies as a ruthless, and very successful speculator, as a sociopath. Such clinical diagnosis aside, the simple fact is: Soros has devoted his entire adult life to the looting of the powerless, on behalf of the British financier oligarchy that sponsored his post-war career as one of the first of their offshore hedge-fund speculators. He asserts that morality has no place in the market, and that, if he had a conscience, he could never have succeeded in amassing his billions.
The 'Hostile Takeover' of America
As a matter of policy, Soros's Quantum Fund has never accepted money from any American investors—in order to stay outside the reach of U.S. government investigation. He operates in such locales as the Dutch Antilles and Switzerland, yet much of his ill-gotten gains have been devoted to what some of his colleagues jokingly refer to as the "hostile takeover" of America.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Soros poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaign to legalize drugs—marijuana, heroin, and even crack cocaine. Soros refers to this as the "open society," a lawless domain in which the only dictum is "harm reduction." Soros's dope legalization policies follow the model of the British East India Company, which waged two Opium Wars against China, during the 19th Century, to impose drug addiction on the population—for British profit and social control.
Soros's latest hostile takeover target is the Democratic Party, and over the past eight years, Soros and a gang of fellow billionaires have come pretty close to achieving their goal.
Starting soon after George W. Bush's inauguration as President in early 2001, Soros poured a reported $18 million into passage of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law (Soros has continued to be a major donor to McCain's Reform Institute), which placed a cap on "soft money" donations to the political parties, but left open a loophole, allowing nominally independent groups, referred to as "527s," to take unlimited donations. Soros began buying up the first generation of 527s, including outfits like MoveOn, ACT (America Coming Together), and Media Matters. Soros also played a pivotal role in the 2004 candidacy of Howard Dean, who bombed as a Presidential candidate, but was rewarded for his access to Soros loot with the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, after John Kerry's loss to George Bush in November 2004.
From that perch, Howard Dean waged a ruthless campaign against candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 primary elections—in tandem with Soros's Democracy Alliance, a secretive billionaires club, that pooled its money to take over and run a "vast leftwing conspiracy" of 527s, PACs, and think tanks, that has replaced any Democratic Party constituency organization.
In the meantime, Soros found his legion of honest Bush-haters, in groups like MoveOn and ACT, to be useful tools in his further grimy speculative binges. Following the Kerry defeat, MoveOn, the Center for American Progress, and other progressive groups on the Soros dole, targeted Vice President Dick Cheney and Halliburton, the giant oil and defense contractor that was profitting mightily off of Bush and Cheney's Iraq imperial misadventure.
The barrage of attacks on Halliburton drove the company stock down, from a peak of $40 down to $26—at which point Soros began buying up Halliburton shares. Between the third quarter of 2005, and the fourth quarter of 2006, Soros bought 2 million shares of Halliburton, at an average price of just over $31.
As the media attacks on Halliburton—in part, driven by Soros's anti-Bush/Cheney and anti-war zeal—died down by late 2006, Halliburton shares quickly rebounded. By early 2008, with Halliburton shares nearing $50, Soros had made an estimated $40 million in clear profit, making him one of the larger Bush-Cheney war profiteers.
