By Rachel Marsden
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
PARIS -- Billionaire Hungarian-American oligarch George
Soros is an extremely concerned humanitarian who can be counted on to put his
considerable bank balance where his concerns are. Lately, those concerns have
included Ukraine and other former Soviet satellite states; Syria; immigration
rights in America; the U.S. banking system; and the Great Lakes region of
Africa, where all the mining opportunities just happen to be. Perhaps he could
lay off the generosity long enough for us to recover from it all.
Humanitarianism and charity can't always be taken at face
value, if only because there is no better front for less-than-altruistic
endeavors. Islamic charities, for example, have been exposed as fronts for
terrorist funding. Most people simply assume that charity automatically equates
to goodwill.
Set up a non-governmental organization (NGO) or
"think-tank" with a dreamy humanitarian name to ultimately funnel
cash into various forms of political subversion and disruption, and you've just
created the perfect instrument for the perpetual incitement of low-intensity
political conflict.
Low-intensity operations are insidious because they occur
at a level just below the threshold that triggers acute opposition. Much like
the ignored second hand of an analog clock, these low-intensity operations
subtly effect change. Russian President Vladimir Putin knows this, which is why
he rammed through a law in 2012 requiring NGOs that receive foreign funding and
are engaged in "political activity" to register as foreign agents.
Predictably, people complained that it wasn't a very nice thing to do to all
the well-meaning humanitarians.
Soros' Open Society Foundations have funded millions of
dollars of operations in Georgia, Ukraine and Russia. The only one of those
countries that hasn't experienced total anti-Russian upheaval followed by a
return to a more balanced geopolitical reality is Russia itself -- which the
foundations are constantly complaining about. In May, Soros wrote in The
Guardian that Europe should offer "free political risk insurance" to
companies that invest or do business in Ukraine, and "guarantee the losses
in the same way as they underwrite the World Bank." This was his great
offering to humanity in the wake of that crisis.
Yeah, nice try. Fourteen percent of Soros' stock
portfolio, according to the investment website GuruFocus.com, consists of
energy investments -- the likes of which would benefit from entry into
Ukraine's underexploited domestic market. To put that into plain-speak for
those of us who aren't among the richest people on the planet, it's like saying
that the government should offer me "hunger risk insurance" and
guarantee me a lifetime of free dining at taxpayer expense.
Why on earth would we taxpayers want to subsidize Soros'
stock portfolio? According to Soros, it's necessary "to counteract
Russia's efforts to destabilize Ukraine." Tu quoque. Russia was satisfied
with its monopoly in Ukraine and not much interested in doing anything to
disrupt it.
So, where else is Soros sticking his fingers? He gave $1
million in humanitarian aid to Syria through the International Rescue
Committee, which, according to Eric Thomas Chester's book "Covert Network:
Progressives, the International Rescue Committee and the CIA," has worked
closely with the Central Intelligence Agency in various parts of the world over
the past several decades.
On the domestic front, Obama-appointed regulatory
decision-makers ranging from Daniel Tarullo (the Federal Reserve's informally
designated lead governor for banking regulations) to Amias Gerety (who chairs
the Financial Stability Oversight Council committee responsible for designating
the entities to undergo the "too big to fail" regulatory
straitjacketing process) are products of the Soros-funded Center for American
Progress. Soros told the Wall Street Journal in 2010 that he was unhappy with
President Obama's bailouts and instead wanted to see U.S. banks nationalized
and taken over by the government. Many argue that strict new Dodd-Frank
regulations effectively achieve this.
The Center for American Progress is also churning out
pro-amnesty pieces about America's current undocumented-immigrant crisis.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Open Society Foundations
website has been advertising grants available for organizations interested in
fighting against "Islamophobia" and "anti-Gypsyism" -- the
sort of issues that only totally open borders in Europe could possibly fix, of
course.
Not to speculate on possible motives behind supporting a
flood of undocumented workers, but it would certainly serve to depress working
wages to the benefit of oligarchs such as Soros -- a concern noted in a recent
report from the Congressional Budget Office.
In Africa, the slippery slope from humanitarianism to
profit has been much steeper and more obvious, with the Open Society
Foundations moving from helping prostitutes in the resource-rich Great Lakes
Region -- comprising Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda,
Tanzania and Uganda -- to commissioning reports with titles such as "Energy
Policy and the Petroleum Industry Bill."
Hmmm. You won't convince the good-hearted naifs of the
world to join forces with a multibillionaire to enrich his bottom line through
low-intensity disruption operations -- er, I mean, to "save the
world" -- with profiteering titles like that.
Russian oligarchs are effectively accountable to Putin as
the elected leader of the country. To whom are our oligarchs accountable?
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