After this week’s announcement that Soros has donated $5 million to MoveOne, I’m doing some research on George Soros:
From George Soros: Open Society Crusader in Retreat? (via Wikipedia):
Of course, the real lesson from Soros’s experience may be that civil society building efforts in countries with few strong civil society institutions requires a much larger and longer term commitment of resources than that which the West made to the former communist world. Soros never claimed to be able to do this job by himself, and he often criticized Western governments for not duplicating his efforts on much a greater scale. Through his own heroic efforts, Soros sought to shame the overly cautious policymakers of the United States and Western Europe. As time passes and major transition problems persist in parts of Eastern Europe and in many of the New Independent States, most notably Russia, Soros the philanthropist stands as an ever larger figure of late 20th century history while the leaders of the West look ever more ineffectual.
Bill Seitz’s Open Societies Node (also includes Seizt’s ” priorities for making the NYC/USA society more open”)
An anti-Soros article on Indymedia (haven’t read this yet… via Wikipedia).
November 13, 2003 at 1:47 am
Soros is a personal hero of mine, although he is like most humans flawed.
The Indymedia critique is pretty distorted, although most of the facts are close to accurate. But the framing is deceptive. For instance here is a quote: “It was Soros who saved George W. Bush’s bacon when his management of an oil exploration company was ending in failure. Soros was the owner of Harken Energy Corporation”. Now this isn’t an outright lie, but it his a Dubya level distortion of the truth. It makes it like Soros personally stepped up and bailed Bush. In fact he was a part owner of the firm, not “the owner” and while aware of the political importance of having a Bush on the payroll, its not like he personally went out and bailed the man cause. In fact it seems be barely knew Bush and the idea was pushed by some other owner.
There is a hell of a lot of misleading stuff like that in the article. Still it makes a couple somewhat valid points. He is a capitalist and he has made a load of cash. But he’s also a far bolder philanthropist the almost any other rich cat. He has stated he would like to give away every single penny of his billions by the time he dies. He singlehandly financed the first medical marijuana initiatives in Cali and Arizona. He is proactive, he wants his money to have an effect, not sit in a foundation collecting interest.
To tired to go on. But yeah investigate the man, its damn interesting.
November 21, 2003 at 2:54 pm
I’m not really sure what he is up to, but I do not think that he can be trusted.
I do know that Soros is not interested in human freedom. He got rich, but wants noone else to be able to become rich. He has railed against capitalism in the mainstream media, such as a 1997 article in Atlantic Monthly.