George Soros, the Open Society Foundations, and the $18.0 Billion for Left-Wing Activism
Billionaires are still rare. But there are more of them, and they are using their financial power to change the mechanisms of society in ways beyond people’s and governments’ controls. The old-fashioned predatorial investor George Soros has painted himself as a stalwart of left-wing activism. In fact, he seems more of an activist for himself than for any worthwhile cause. Soros has also taken on the role of chief Donald Trump detractor. He’s famous for having put a big chunk of his money behind this cause.
That chunk has just gotten bigger. Soros has just transferred a huge fortune to his Open Society Foundations.
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From Moscow, to Skopje (Macedonia), to Washington, billionaire Soros, aged 87, has become a rather feared and disliked figure. He is a target of nationalists. He is accused of having supported a coup in Macedonia and demonstrations in Hungary. But that’s just when he’s not being linked to fueling the migration crisis in Europe. Soros has become the scourge of a growing number of leaders and governments, and not just those accused of having authoritarian leanings.
Soros began his career of influencing politics and social life in 1993. That’s when he formed the Open Society Institute, now known as the Open Society Foundation. The institute served to spread and defend the progressive causes for which Soros acts as promoter and financier. By some calculations, the tycoon has invested billions of dollars in groups, foundations, and associations affiliated with the Open Society to achieve the goals he set.
The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported that Soros moved as much as $18.0 billion to his non-governmental organization (NGO). Now, that does not represent a one-time lump sum. The transfer has occurred step by step over the past several years, but its scope and size have only been revealed now.
This means that Soros’s Open Society Foundations has become the second-largest foundation in the United States, behind Microsoft Corporation founder Bill Gates’s Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Soros’s foundation is committed to projects with goals related to democracy and human rights all over the world; in the Americas, for example, against police violence. It’s no wonder the Soros-Antifa connection rumors have taken off.
Soros Made No Secret of Efforts to Sabotage Trump—and Others
The Hungarian-born Soros has made no secret of the fact that he opposed President Donald Trump. During the 2016 election campaign, he backed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Soros is also considered a keen critic of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. This has tainted the Soros-Hungary relationship.
Hungary’s government wanted to shut down a university founded by Soros a few months ago by a law change. Orbán,who received a Soros scholarship when he was an anti-communist student, turned on his former benefactor. He accused Soros of using NGOs to flood Europe with Muslim refugees and create a “transnational empire.” Hungary has taken such a negative view of Soros that the government has run ad campaigns against the billionaire.
The anti-Soros campaign has become even more frontal. It features a government poster campaign featuring the financier in the form of a puppeteer pulling the strings of an opposition politician. The charge is that Soros wants to force Hungary to accept Muslim migrants. (Source: “The “Totally Successful” Anti-Soros Campaign Comes to A Sudden End, Hungarian Spectrum,” July 12, 2017.)
Many governments and citizens alike fear the Soros open borders ideal. Through the Open Society Foundations, Soros has become the sponsor of a vast group of NGOs and organizations pursuing “globalist” or anti-national interests. In France, for example, many believe that the—illegal—migrants waiting for a chance to board ferries to the United Kingdom are part of the “Soros open borders” plan. In Calais, the “no-borders” migrants are supported by Soros.
The impression is that cities like Calais, and others in Europe near major land and water ports of entry, will face increasing chaos. Critics of the famous billionaire charge that Soros’s influence is generating social chaos. They say that Calais has been falling increasingly into a state of confusion, and that it is in the throes of a migrant invasion. Meanwhile, rather than opposition, the “Soros open borders” militants are breaking the laws to come to the aid of the clandestine or illegal migrants.
The no-borders activists have inherited the mantle from the confused social activism of the 1960s and early 1970s in Europe. Over the past few years, the activists have found a common cause. They rally around the notion of a collective of activists founded in 1999—and found today throughout Europe—fighting for the disappearance of borders. In Calais, these activists are grouped around the collective Calais Migrant Solidarity. It is these extremists who, on January 23, helped the migrants enter the port of Calais illegally and take possession of a ferry.
Soros has complained of national borders because they pose an impediment to world-ruling bodies. He is said to finance several groups in the United States that promote open borders and mass immigration, according to the book The Shadow Party, by conservative writers David Horowitz and Richard Poe.
Soros Has Attracted Many Legends and Rumors
There are so many rumors surrounding Soros that it has become increasingly difficult to separate fact from fiction. The controversial tycoon portrays himself as a philanthropic investor. He wants, as noted above, open borders, democracy, and less national sovereignty. He promotes so-called liberal causes. It’s no wonder that many suspect a deep Soros-Antifa connection.
The problem is that George Soros is inconsistent. He promotes causes that many like to label as being leftist. Yet, personally, he has behaved as the most rapacious kind of capitalist. He would make even the Carnegies and Rockefellers of robber-baron history blush. That’s the source of the controversy. The image is of a sociopath who fuels social chaos, triggers political and financial crises, and then makes a killing on the corpse of what’s left.
Compare, if you will, Soros’s open borders goals of Soros’s Open Society Foundations with how Soros made his grand entrance onto the world scene in 1992. Soros pelted the Italian lira and the British pound in 1992. He became known as “the man who broke the Bank of England” because he had launched a massive speculative attack against the British currency. Ten years later, he was convicted and sentenced in France for insider trading. The technical details of how Soros achieved his successful shorting of the pound and the lira are beyond the scope of this article. Nonetheless, it’s Soros’s financial greed that makes his apparently humanitarian pursuits so suspicious.
Examples of the Chaos that $18.0 Billion Can Buy
Through Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the billionaire and speculator supports a network of hundreds of NGOs. These operate by covering a huge spectrum of activities. Often with openly political goals in the U.S. and around the world, the NGOs exploit media connections as well. This is why the Soros social activist empire is a maze even harder to navigate and understand than the Labyrinthian financial operations he exploits to feed his coffers.
Soros admitted to CNN that he had funded Ukraine’s “colored revolution” in Maidan Square to facilitate the path for a U.S.-friendly junta to take over. Of course, in the process, he also wrecked U.S.-Russia relations. (Source: “Soros Admits Responsibility for Coup And Mass Murder In Ukraine,” Infowars, May 27, 2014.)
He clearly stated that he had previously funded, among other things, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the Saffron Revolution in Myanmar, and the Green Revolution in Iran.
Soros, it might be fair to assume, has made far more enemies than friends. Perhaps he likes it that way. In Macedonia, nationalist former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski accused Soros of destabilizing the country. (Source: “Macedonian Party Turns Screws on Soros-Funded NGOs,” Balkan Insight, January 26, 2017.)
In Poland, where the leader of the right, Jarosław Kaczyński, accused Soros of wanting to create “societies without identity” in Romania, where the Social Democrat majority claimed that the tycoon remotely controlled hundreds of thousands of protesters against a reduction of anti-corruption legislation.
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Moscow banned the Open Society Foundations in Russia in 2015 as part of its policy of repression of NGOs. Meanwhile, Soros supported the “color revolutions” in Central and Eastern Europe, as in Ukraine. There were suggestions that the many anti-Trump protests—though not all—that sprung up in Washington and elsewhere in the United States on the day of Trump’s presidential inauguration represented another color revolution, financed by Soros. (Source: “Color Revolution” against Donald Trump,” Centre for Research on Globalization, January 18, 2017.)
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Breitbart news site, whose co-founder, Steve Bannon, is close to U.S. President Donald Trump, publishes almost daily accusations directed at George Soros. One of the latest focuses on Soros’s $18.0-billion donation to the Open Society Foundations. (Source: “Death Star: George Soros Transfers $18 Billion to Open Society Foundations,” Breitbart, October 17, 2017.)
Ultimately, what this means is that Americans should expect anything to happen. Soros has proven his ability and desire to shake up the world, whether economically or politically, however he sees fit. Now, the NGO monster he has created has the financial bite to reach further than ever.
