Loosing Support From on High

Via-

All the News That Fits Soros' Agenda

Via-American Thinker

By Ed Lasky


Are three liberal billionaires trying to control what we think of as news in America?

Hedge fund billionaire George Soros, the sugar daddy of the Democratic Party, has given NPR an initial grant of $1.8 million dollars to begin a project called Impact of Government that will allow NPR to hire 100 journalists at NPR member stations in all 50 states. The focus will be covering state governments and how their actions affect people. The New York Times reports the response of Vivian Schiller, NPR's president and chief executive:

Ms. Schiller said the journalists would not be part of typical statehouse coverage, but instead would work on enterprise journalism that looks at how state government decisions play out over years, and extend beyond a single state's borders

Ann Beeson, executive director of Soros's Open Society, stated that ""We're looking for opportunities to support new models to fill the gap in coverage."

Of course, Soros has other goals in mind, and this is merely seed money for future donations from himself and his liberal allies. Can anyone doubt that coverage will be tilted even more liberal than it already is and will be used to favor Democrats?

George Soros Talks Obama’s Book in Threat to Euro

Via-Bloomberg

Amity Shlaes

George Soros has been making what he calls a “grave accusation” against Germany. The financier- philanthropist said last week that Germany is endangering the European Union by keeping wages down and pursuing a balanced national budget too aggressively. Germany’s parsimonious attitude, Soros suggests, may bring down the euro.

You get the feeling that Soros is speaking directly to Angela Merkel, trying to give the German chancellor a kindly tutorial. In a speech at Humboldt University, Soros said that Germany had understandable reasons for pursuing thrift. But, he added, the country should spend more and advocate aggressive spending and looser money by the European Investment Bank and the European Central Bank, respectively.

Soros implied that Germany should look to the U.S., where President Barack Obama has spent vigorously and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has created money for the greater good. Soros, the tutor again, underscored that Germany clearly “does not know what it is doing.”

It is time to turn the question around, and make a grave accusation against Soros. It is Soros who is endangering the euro by advocating these spending and loosening policies. They are policies that may give Europe budget problems that render its currency vulnerable to attack by Soros-like traders. Perhaps, like Merkel, Soros is doing his endangering for understandable reasons. Nonetheless, the danger is there, and worth laying out.

Currency Strains

Start with the euro’s creation, as Soros has. Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries’ abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency.

Soros labels this construct “patently flawed.” Clever is another way to describe it. The enormous carrot of access to the euro-land market incentivizes nations to apply the stick of fiscal discipline to themselves. Under that plan, countries that fail to apply the stick with alacrity face the unpleasant choice of initiating extraordinary tax increases and budget cuts to curtail debt or being forced out of the monetary union.

That happened to the U.K. back in the early 1990s, when Soros cost the country $3 billion while he made $1 billion by forcing Britain out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the euro precursor.

What Merkel Knows

As a former East German, Merkel has visceral knowledge of the enormous waste of human capital that takes place in countries lacking good currencies. Because the East German mark of her young adulthood was a political fantasy rather than a genuine currency, scientists such as Merkel couldn’t purchase the equipment they needed to compete with Western scientists.

Germans like Merkel recall better than Americans what happened when Soros’s raiders hit the U.K., so they know how brutally any non-dollar currency, even the currency of a regional leader, can be brought down.

Beyond Merkel’s personal memory there is the German national memory of the 1920s hyperinflation. That resulted from the decision of a desperate Weimar Republic to inflate its way out of war debts. That hyperinflation so punished middle-class savings and so weakened the 1920s economy that the average German became more susceptible to maniacs like Adolf Hitler and the communists.

Pressure on Germany from Soros, and for that matter, from the Obama administration, makes it harder for Merkel or other European leaders to heed their own sound instincts. Soros’s pressure also obscures a desirable policy path for Germany, one in which it practices fiscal discipline and growth creation so well that other euro nations emulate it.

False Choice

The Keynesian argument that the choice is binary, between spending and pain, is untrue. For one thing, deflation isn’t always painful -- in the 1920s, even as Germany agonized, the U.S. thrived during an American deflation. Budget tightening, especially in combination with competitive tax codes, may put all Europe on a growth path that renders its currency a true competitor for the role of global leader over the long run.

The best defense of Soros is that Soros-recommended stimuli by Germany and in euro-land will indeed yield strong growth, and prevent one recession, just as he says. But what happens after that recovery? Europe, like the U.S., isn’t growing fast enough to continue spending its way out of every recession. It is likely that German-tolerated euro-spending on a big scale in 2010 or 2011 would render Europe’s nations the very sort that vulnerable currency traders specialize in annihilating.

The Obama administration for its part is being disingenuous when it makes spending recommendations. As my colleague Sebastian Mallaby at the Council on Foreign Relations notes, the dollar’s status as the currency of reserve amounts to a sort of Kevlar vest against the bullets of currency raiders. The euro possesses no vest.

Soros wants to help the Obama administration and the Keynesian spending that Democrats favor. If Europe spends, that makes the U.S. look less isolated. A big spending Europe also makes the euro less of a threat to the dollar. In any case, it is hard to imagine that what Soros alleges about Germany is true for Soros: that he just doesn’t understand what he is doing.

The Obama White House Calls in the Cavalry

The progressive groups that helped elect Obama president are now being asked to campaign for his agenda.





Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency was trailblazing in its ability to tap into a network of activists around the nation to help propel him to victory. His campaign does not seem to have ended. He is again reactivating this network, but this time it is not to help him get elected. Instead, he is rounding up the usual suspects to help him advance his legislative program. The never-ending campaign has already begun.

Greg Sargent reports that a private White House cocktail reception was recently hosted by Barack and Michelle Obama for leaders of major progressive groups:


The Obamas] signaled that their groups would play a key role in driving the big progressive changes at the heart of the White House’s legislative agenda, an attendee tells me.
The message was that these groups would be valuable as a kind of progressive outside “echo chamber,” as the attendee puts it. The party — which was organized by top Obama aide Valerie Jarrett — signals that the White House is moving forward with efforts to build coordination with outside progressive groups in order to drive the White House’s message and beat back its foes. As I reported recently, Jarrett is at the center of those efforts.

Included on the guest list were: Labor leaders Jimmy Hoffa and Andy Stern, MoveOn.org’s Eli Pariser, Sierra Club’s Carl Pope, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richardson, and Joe Solomonese of the Human Rights Campaign.

This should not come as a surprise.

Barack Obama began his career as a community organizer. Though he expressed frustration at what he was able to accomplish in this role and soon departed for Harvard Law School, he took with him an appreciation for what well-organized and motivated groups can do when they work together. This was revealed many times during the campaign. He was able to bring out volunteers en masse to work the neighborhoods for him. He certainly has brought community organizing into the modern age.

One of the key players on his team was Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook. He was able to use the internet as never before on behalf of the campaign. Of course, it was a masterstroke to announce his vice-presidential selection via email only to those who submitted their email addresses. He now has a vast database of “troops” that he can call into action when conditions warrant, whether it be to make calls to congressmen, stage protests, or circulate leaflets. That kind of free labor is priceless. We will see much more of it in the days to come.
Of course, such labor is never entirely free. Posters, air time, ads, leaflets — all these come with a sticker price. We are not communists, after all. This is where another — higher — layer of activists comes into play.

Andy Stern is head of the Service Employees International Union, which is clearly one of the most astute, politically active, and well-funded of all unions. Stern has operated on the local, state, and federal levels when it comes to helping the campaigns of favored politicians. His union occasionally has mishaps: there is a corruption issue with the Los Angeles chapter and there were discussions involving the selling of Obama’s Senate seat in Illinois between a representative of his union and disgraced former Governor Rod Blagojevich. But he knows the ropes, which levers to pull, and he (along with fellow labor leader Jimmy Hoffa) is sitting on a treasure chests of funds. These chests will be replenished by virtue of the “stimulus bill.”

Stern has a close associate who receives very little attention. Anna Burger may be the most influential woman in the labor movement as hailed by Gannet. But her influence extends far beyond labor. She is a sharp political operator in charge of Change To Win, a group formed by a bevy of unions to use the political system to enrich laborers. She is also, along with Stern, one of the labor leaders involved in a very influential, if furtive, group known as the Democracy Alliance. This is an activist group on steroids with liberal-minded billionaires and mere centimillionaires behind them. The group brings together donors and political activists to fulfill a range of liberal goals. We may not see them — they don’t leave many fingerprints behind — but we will see what it is they will accomplish in the days ahead. They have a track record of success.

George Soros, hedge fund billionaire, is one of the main powers that be in the Democracy Alliance. He is also the most generous funder of 527 groups in the nation. These groups include MoveOn.org, whose leader Eli Pariser was one of the people who joined the Obamas at the White House. Moveon.org was the group responsible for the General BetrayUs ads that ran during the campaign which sought to impugn the reputation of the general behind the surge in Iraq

Groups such as ACORN (which held classes in activism with Barack Obama as a teacher) might also have a place at the table. Fortunately, a provision that might have been used to enrich their coffers did not make it into the final stimulus bill. I am more inclined to believe that President Obama will not look towards ACORN to work his magic. He may not throw them under the bus, but now that he is president he may choose not to tarnish his reputation by working with a group that has a tarnished reputation of their own
There are cleverer ways to bring about Change. The president knows them and he will use them
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