Posted by
shadowlover65-68 on Monday, September 01, 2008 7:22:39 PM
AMERICANS; VETERANS; PAST AND PRESENT and their families; who also served
To those who remember and to those that have lost their belief in America. I submit to you that we are a brotherhood to be counted to keep America strong. Let no one take your individual freedom from you, no matter the rhetoric. Disagree if you will and exercise your dissent as your right to be identified as an American. Think of Liberalism, Socialism, of Progressivism, of Communism and Islamism. Think of a left wing ideology that insidiously takes control of a political party through subterfuge and deceit. Think of the billions of dollar pumped into our country by those advocates within and abroad whose stated intention to overthrow our system of life from within. There are many in our country that has not served in our brotherhood that understands what being an American is. There are many that will never understand. They will attempt to deceive you that your patriotism was wrong; that your sacrifice was for nothing, that the pain in remembering those who gave all for this country we call America had and has no meaning. I, for one, will never forget, and now I will defend our country once again by reminding those brothers of mine what may be lost if they fail to educate themselves about a new type of enemy, new, but an enemy never the less.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero [ancient Roman scholar, lawyer, statesman and orator 106BC - 43BC]
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
-- Winston Churchill
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”.... Albert Einstein
“If a man has nothing he would die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
--Martin Luther King; a great American (and a Republican)
GEORGE SOROS
- Multi-billionaire funder of leftwing causes and groups
- Founder of the Open Society Institute
- Stated that defeating President Bush in the 2004 election “is the central focus of my life”
George Soros is a Hungarian immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1956, at age 26, and made his fortune as an international financier. His father, who was born into an Orthodox Jewish family, changed the family name from Schwartz to Soros in 1936 – a move that enabled the Soros family to conceal its Jewish identity and thus survive the Nazi Holocaust. In 1947 the family emigrated from Hungary to England, where an event occurred that greatly influenced the development of George’s personality and worldview. He broke his leg and was cared for by England’s National Health Service, free of charge, while the Jewish relief agencies of that era did not offer him the help he believed they owed him. In that convergence of events was born Soros’ favorable opinion of Democratic Socialism, and his negative view of many Jewish groups.
In 1956 Soros started life in America with very little money but a well-developed knowledge of investing, thanks to his education at the London School of Economics and his experience working for a London stockbroker. He transformed his meager seed money into a huge fortune by becoming one of the world’s leading hedge fund investors and currency traders. In 1969 he started his enormously successful Quantum Fund, which, over the ensuing three decades, yielded its long-term investors a four thousand-fold increase on their initial 1969 investments. During his career, Soros has orchestrated some extremely risky, ethically questionable deals. For instance, in a $10 billion 1992 deal whose success was contingent upon the devaluation of the British Pound, he earned himself a $1 billion profit and the title, “the man who broke the Bank of England.” Over the years, he has amassed a personal fortune of some $7 billion.
In 1979 Soros founded the Open Society Fund, and since then has created a large network of foundations that give away hundreds of millions of dollars each year, much of it to individuals and organizations that share and promote his leftist philosophy. He believes that in order to prevent right-wing fascism from overrunning the world, a strong leftist counterbalance is essential. Asserting that America needed “a regime change” to oust President Bush, Soros maintained that he would gladly have traded his entire fortune in exchange for a Bush defeat in the 2004 election. In a November 2003 interview with the Washington Post’s Laura Blumenfeld, he stated that defeating President Bush in 2004 “is the central focus of my life". . . "a matter of life and death." "America under Bush,” he said, “is a danger to the world, and I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is." Claiming that “the Republican party has been captured by a bunch of extremists,” Soros accuses the Bush administration of following a "supremacist ideology" in whose rhetoric he claims to hear echoes from his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,’ “ he explains, “it reminds me of the Germans. It conjures up memories of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit (The enemy is listening). My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me."
Soros pledged to raise $75 million to defeat President Bush in the 2004 Presidential election, and personally donated nearly a third of that amount to anti-Bush groups (see The Shadow Party). He gave $5 million to MoveOn.org, the group that produced political ads likening Bush to Adolf Hitler. He also contributed $10 million to a Democratic Party 2004 get-out-the-vote initiative called America Coming Together, whose directors include representatives from the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, the Service Employees International Union, and EMILY's List. He further pledged $3 million to the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think-tank headed by former Clinton chief-of-staff John Podesta.
PBS broadcaster and Schumann Center for Media and Democracy President Bill Moyers is a trustee of the Open Society Institute’s Board of Directors. The network of Soros foundations – the most prominent of which is the Open Society Institute – supports a wide array of leftist groups and causes.
In August 2006 Soros wrote a Wall Street Journal piece titled "A Self-Defeating War." The article's premise is that "the war on terror is a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies." "Five years after 9/11," Soros elaborates, "a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -- Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia -- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world. Yet al Qaeda has not been subdued."
According to Soros, "Terrorism is an abstraction. It lumps together all political movements that use terrorist tactics. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sunni insurrection and the Mahdi army in Iraq are very different forces, but President Bush's global war on terror prevents us from differentiating between them and dealing with them accordingly. It inhibits much-needed negotiations with Iran and Syria because they are states that support terrorist groups." "The war on terror," adds Soros "emphasizes military action while most territorial conflicts require political solutions. ... [It] drives a wedge between 'us' and 'them.' We are innocent victims. They are perpetrators. But we fail to notice that we also become perpetrators in the process; the rest of the world, however, does notice. That is how such a wide gap has arisen between America and much of the world. Taken together, these ... factors ensure that the war on terror cannot be won. An endless war waged against an unseen enemy is doing great damage to our power and prestige abroad and to our open society at home."
In December of 2006, Soros met with Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama in his New York office. Soros had previously hosted a fund-raiser for Obama during the latter's 2004 campaign for the Senate. On January 16, 2007, Obama announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee, and within hours Soros sent the senator a contribution of $2,100, the maximum amount allowable under campaign finance laws. Later that week the New York Daily News reported that Soros would back Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, whom he had also supported in the past. Soros's announcement was seen as a repudiation of Clinton's presidential aspirations; though Soros said he would support the New York senator were she to win the Democratic nomination.
In early January 2007, Soros was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer of CNN. Blitzer began the interview by asking Soros about the following quote that appears in Soros's newly published book, The Age of Fallibility: "The Bush administration and the Nazi and communist regimes all engaged in the politics of fear. Indeed, the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and Communist propaganda machines by drawing on the innovations of the advertising and marketing industries." When Blitzer asked him to defend that assertion, Soros replied:
"You actually picked out the most incendiary part of the book, and I am very careful to draw a clear distinction between the Nazi regime and our open society, because we are a democracy. But there are some similarities in the propaganda methods, which I pointed out. ... I think there are some serious arguments about our open society being endangered by the policies followed by the Bush administration. The war on terror, which does not have an end, changes, it leads to an undue extension of executive powers. It has stifled debate. Criticizing the president is considered unpatriotic, and as a result, we have been following policies which endanger our traditional [unintelligible]."
"A lot of people will agree with you on that," said Blitzer. "But where they will starkly disagree is to then bring in the whole Nazi and Communist comparison." Soros replied: "Actually, it's a valid point, and maybe I did go over the line, but I think that on the whole my assessment is a balanced one. And frankly, when President Bush said, 'you are either with us or you are with the terrorists,' that's when I was reminded. But I should have probably kept it to myself."
While criticizing the Iraq War for the benefit of reporters at the January 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Soros unburdened himself of the view that Nazis were now running the United States government. “America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany,” Soros explained. “We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process.” Lest there be doubts that Soros was actually likening his adoptive country to the Third Reich and the Bush administration to the Nazi nomenklatura, a Soros spokesman, Michael Vachon, moved quickly to dispel them. “There is nothing unpatriotic about demanding accountability from the president,” he said of Soros’s appeal for de-Nazification. “Those responsible for taking America into this needless war should do us all a favor and retire from public office.”
In the April 12, 2007 issue of the New York Review of Books, Soros penned an article titled “On Israel, America and AIPAC,” wherein he derided the Bush administration for “committing a major policy blunder in the Middle East” by “supporting the Israeli government in its refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, which the U.S. State Department considers a terrorist organization.” In Soros’ calculus, “This precludes any progress toward a peace settlement at a time when progress on the Palestinian problem could help avert a conflagration in the greater Middle East.” “Israel,” said Soros, “with the strong backing of the United States, refused to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government and withheld payment of the millions in taxes collected by the Israelis on its behalf. This caused great economic hardship and undermined the ability of the government to function. But it did not reduce popular support for Hamas among Palestinians, and it reinforced the position of Islamic and other extremists who oppose negotiations with Israel. … [Hamas] was not willing to go so far as to recognize the existence of Israel but it was prepared to enter into a government of national unity which would have abided by the existing agreements with Israel. … But both Israel and the United States seem to be frozen in their unwillingness to negotiate with a Palestinian Authority that includes Hamas. The sticking point is Hamas's unwillingness to recognize the existence of Israel; but that [recognition] could be made a condition for an eventual settlement rather than a precondition for negotiations. … The current policy of not seeking a political solution but pursuing military escalation—not just an eye for an eye but roughly speaking ten Palestinian lives for every Israeli one—has reached a particularly dangerous point."
Soros and his foundations have had a hand in funding a host of leftist organizations, including the Tides Foundation; the Tides Center; the National Organization for Women; Feminist Majority; the American Civil Liberties Union; People for the American Way; Alliance for Justice; NARAL Pro-Choice America; America Coming Together; the Center for American Progress; Campaign for America's Future; Amnesty International; the Sentencing Project; the Center for Community Change; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense and Educational Fund; Human Rights Watch; the Prison Moratorium Project; the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement; the National Lawyers Guild; the Center for Constitutional Rights; the Coalition for an International Criminal Court; The American Prospect; MoveOn.org; Planned Parenthood; the Nation Institute; the Brennan Center for Justice; the Ms. Foundation for Women; the National Security Archive Fund; the Pacifica Foundation; Physicians for Human Rights; the Proteus Fund; the Public Citizen Foundation; the Urban Institute; the American Friends Service Committee; Catholics for a Free Choice; Human Rights First; the Independent Media Institute; MADRE; the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; the Immigrant Legal Resource Center; the National Immigration Law Center; the National Immigration Forum; the National Council of La Raza; the American Immigration Law Foundation; the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee; and the Peace and Security Funders Group.
GUIDE TO THE GEORGE SOROS NETWORK
George Soros is one of the most powerful men on earth. A New York hedge fund manager, he has amassed a personal fortune estimated at about $7.2 billion. His management company controls billions more in investor assets. Since 1979, his foundation network -- whose flagship is the Open Society Institute (OSI) -- has dispensed an estimated $5 billion to a multitude of organizations whose objectives are consistent with those of Soros. (The President of OSI and the Soros Foundation Network is Aryeh Neier, who, as Director of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, personally created the radical group Students for a Democratic Society in 1959.) With assets of $859 million as of 2005, OSI alone donates scores of millions of dollars annually to these various groups, whose major agendas can be summarized as follows:
promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
defending suspected anti-American terrorists and their abettors
financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
advocating America’s unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending
opposing the death penalty in all circumstances
promoting socialized medicine in the United States
promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is “not clean air and clean water, [but] rather ... the demolition of technological/industrial civilization”
bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
To view a list of many of the more important organizations that support these agendas and have received direct funding from Soros and his Open Society Institute in recent years, click here. (Comprehensive profiles of each are available in the "Groups" category of DiscoverTheNetworks.org.)
There are also numerous “secondary” or “indirect” affiliates of the Soros network. These include organizations which do not receive direct funding from Soros and OSI, but which are funded by one or more organizations that do. These secondary affiliates also include organizations that work collaboratively or synergistically with Soros-funded groups. To view a list of some of these organizations, click here. (Comprehensive profiles of each are available in the "Groups" category of DiscoverTheNetworks.org.)
In one of his most significant and effective efforts to shape the American political landscape, Soros was the prime mover in the creation of the so-called "Shadow Democratic Party," or "Shadow Party," in 2003. This term refers to a nationwide network of more than five-dozen unions, non-profit activist groups, and think tanks whose agendas are ideologically to the left, and which are engaged in campaigning for the Democrats. This network's activities include fundraising, get-out-the-vote drives, political advertising, opposition research, and media manipulation.
The Shadow Party was conceived and organized principally by George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Harold McEwan Ickes -- all identified with the Democratic Party left. Other key players included:
Morton H. Halperin: Director of Soros' Open Society Institute
John Podesta: Democrat strategist and former chief of staff for Bill Clinton
Jeremy Rosner: Democrat strategist and pollster, ex-foreign policy speechwriter for Bill Clinton
Robert Boorstin: Democrat strategist and pollster, ex-national security speechwriter for Bill Clinton
Carl Pope: Co-founder of America Coming Together, Democrat strategist, and Sierra Club Executive Director
Steve Rosenthal: Labor leader, CEO of America Coming Together, and former chief advisor on union matters to Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich
Peter Lewis: Major Democrat donor and insurance entrepreneur
Rob Glaser: Major Democrat donor and Silicon Valley pioneer
Ellen Malcolm: Co-founder and President of America Coming Together, and founder of Emily’s List
Rob McKay: Major Democrat donor, Taco Bell heir, and McKay Family Foundation President
Lewis and Dorothy Cullman: Major Democrat donors
To develop the Shadow Party as a cohesive entity, Harold Ickes undertook the task of building a 21st-century version of the Left's traditional alliance of the "oppressed" and "disenfranchised." By the time Ickes was done, he had created or helped to create six new groups, and had co-opted a seventh called MoveOn.org. Together, these seven groups constituted the administrative core of the newly formed Shadow Party:
America Coming Together
America Votes
Center for American Progress
Joint Victory Campaign 2004
Media Fund
MoveOn.org
Thunder Road Group
These organizations, along with the many leftist groups with which they collaborate, have played a major role in helping Soros advance his political and social agendas.
According to Richard Poe, co-author (with David Horowitz) of the 2006 book The Shadow Party:
"The Shadow Party is the real power driving the Democrat machine. It is a network of radicals dedicated to transforming our constitutional republic into a socialist hive. The leader of these radicals is ... George Soros. He has essentially privatized the Democratic Party, bringing it under his personal control. The Shadow Party is the instrument through which he exerts that control. ... It works by siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions that would have gone to the Democratic Party in normal times, and putting those contributions at the personal disposal of Mr. Soros. He then uses that money to buy influence and loyalty where he sees fit. In 2003, Soros set up a network of privately-owned groups which acts as a shadow or mirror image of the Party. It performs all the functions we would normally expect the real Democratic Party to perform, such as shaping the Party platform, fielding candidates, running campaigns, and so forth. However, it performs these functions under the private supervision of Mr. Soros and his associates. The Shadow Party derives its power from its ability to raise huge sums of money. By controlling the Democrat purse strings, the Shadow Party can make or break any Democrat candidate by deciding whether or not to fund him. During the 2004 election cycle, the Shadow Party raised more than $300 million for Democrat candidates, prompting one of its operatives, Move On PAC director Eli Pariser, to declare, 'Now it’s our party. We bought it, we own it…'"
Soros in 2004 spent some $26 million trying, unsuccessfully, to defeat President Bush’s reelection bid, a task Soros called “the central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death.” He has likened Republicans generally, and the Bush administration in particular, to “the Nazi and communist regimes” in the sense that they are “all engaged in the politics of fear.” “Indeed,” he wrote in 2006, “the Bush administration has been able to improve on the techniques used by the Nazi and Communist propaganda machines by drawing on the innovations of the advertising and marketing industries.” Soros elaborated on this theme at the January 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he told reporters: “America needs to . . . go through a certain de-Nazification process.”
Soros has been a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton, who, in turn, has long admired Soros and shares many of his agendas. At a 2004 "Take Back America" conference in Washington, DC, Mrs. Clinton introduced Soros with these words:
“Now, among the many people who have stood up and said, ‘I cannot sit by and let this happen to the country I love,’ is George Soros, and I have known George Soros for a long time now, and I first came across his work in the former Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, when I was privileged to travel there, both on my own and with my husband on behalf of our country. ... [W]e need people like George Soros, who is fearless, and willing to step up when it counts.” (Cited in David Horowitz and Richard Poe, The Shadow Party, p. 53)
In December of 2006, Soros met with Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama in his (Soros') New York office. Soros had previously hosted a fund-raiser for Obama during the latter's 2004 campaign for the Senate. On January 16, 2007, Obama announced the creation of a presidential exploratory committee, and within hours Soros sent the senator a contribution of $2,100, the maximum amount allowable under campaign finance laws. Later that week the New York Daily News reported that Soros would back Obama over Senator Hillary Clinton, whom he had supported in the past. Soros' announcement was seen as a repudiation of Clinton's presidential aspirations; though Soros said he would support the New York senator were she to win the Democratic nomination.
"Secondary" or "Indirect" Affiliates of the George Soros Network
By Discover The Networks
July 2007
In addition to those organizations ("primary" or "direct" affiliates) that are funded directly by George Soros and his Open Society Institute (OSI), there are also numerous "secondary" or "indirect" affiliates of the Soros network. These include organizations which do not receive direct funding from Soros and OSI, but which are funded by one or more organizations that do. These secondary affiliates also include organizations that work collaboratively or synergistically with Soros-funded groups. Among these secondary affiliates are the following:
Air America Radio: Funded by Democracy Alliance, which is heavily bankrolled by Soros, this radio station was created to advance the cause of the Democratic Party and the political Left.
Catalyst: Headed by Soros ally Harold Ickes, this political consultancy seeks "to help progressive organizations realize measurable increases in civic participation and electoral success by building and operating a robust national voter database of every voting-age American." Toward this end, it helps leftist organizations conduct more effective get-out-the-vote drives and targeted political advertising.
Center for Progressive Leadership: Funded by the Soros-bankrolled Democracy Alliance, this anti-capitalist organization is dedicated to training future leftist political leaders.
Media Matters for America: Seeking to "systematically monitor [the media] for conservative misinformation" and to discredit anything that "forwards the conservative agenda," this group, which has intimate ties to Hillary Clinton, works very closely with the Soros-backed Center for American Progress. It is heavily funded by Democracy Alliance, of which Soros is a major financier.
Moving Ideas Network: This coalition of more than 250 leftwing activist groups is a partner organization of the Soros-backed Center for American Progress. Promoting the candidacy of leftwing politicians, the Moving Ideas Network was originally a project of the Soros-backed American Prospect and, as such, received indirect funding from the Open Society Institute. In early 2006, The American Prospect relinquished control of the Moving Ideas Network
New Organizing Institute: Created by the Soros-funded MoveOn.org, this group "trains young, technology-enabled political organizers to work for progressive campaigns and organizations."
Schumann Center for Media and Democracy: PBS broadcaster and Schumann Center President Bill Moyers is a trustee of the Open Society Institute's Board of Directors. The Schumann Center shares many of OSI's agendas.
Service Employees International Union: The current President of SEIU is the former New Leftist Andrew Stern, who sat on the Executive Committee of the Soros-created America Coming Together.
Sierra Club: This organization's Executive Director, Carl Pope, co founded America Coming Together, in whose creation Soros played a major role.
Think Progress: This "project" of the American Progress Action Fund, which is a "sister advocacy organization" of the Soros-funded Center for American Progress and Campus Progress, seeks to transform "progressive ideas into policy through rapid response communications, legislative action, grassroots organizing and advocacy, and partnerships with other progressive leaders throughout the country and the world." Think Progress promotes an agenda identical to that of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Vote for Change: Coordinated by the political action committee of the Soros-funded MoveOn.org, Vote for Change was a group of 41 musicians and bands that performed concerts in several key election "battleground" states during October 2004, to raise money in support of Democrat John Kerry's presidential bid.
Working Families Party: Created in 1998 to help push the Democratic Party toward the left, this front group for the Soros-funded ACORN functions as a political party that promotes ACORN-friendly candidates.