GUIDE TO THE GEORGE SOROS NETWORK

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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, former Director of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy.) 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 abetters
• 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, MoveOn 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.