George Soros

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George Soros (born August 12, 1930) is a Hungarian-born American businessman. He is famous as a currency speculator and a philanthropist. He is also the son of the Esperanto writer Tivadar Soros. He has been inspired by Karl Popper.

Table of contents

1 Early Life 2 "The Man Who Broke the Bank of England" 3 Critics 4 Quotes 5 Philanthropy 6 Soros vs. Bush 7 Books 8 External links and references

Early Life

Soros was born in Hungary and lived there until 1946, when he escaped the Soviet occupation by participating in an Esperanto youth congress in the West. (Soros was taught to speak the language from birth.) As a young man, Soros traded currencies in the black market during the Nazi occupation of Hungary.

Soros emigrated to England in 1947 and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1952. In 1956, he moved to the United States. He has stated that his intent was to earn enough money on Wall Street to support himself as an author and philosopher. He is currently the chairman of Soros Fund Management and of the Open Society Institute.

"The Man Who Broke the Bank of England"

On September 22, 1992, Soros became instantly famous when, believing the Pound Sterling was overvalued, he speculated aggressively against it. The Bank of England was forced to withdraw the currency out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and Soros earned an estimated US$1.1 billion in the process. He was dubbed "the man who broke the Bank of England." In 1997, under similar circumstances during the Asian financial crisis, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad accused Soros of bringing down the Malaysian currency, the ringgit.

Despite his carefully groomed media image, Soros is a controversial figure. Although he has become extremely wealthy as an international investor and currency speculator (his fortune in 2000 was estimated at US$ five billion), he freely acknowledges that the current system of financial speculation undermines healthy economic development in many underdeveloped countries.

Critics

Critics point out that Soros plays the currency markets through Quantum Fund, his privately-owned investment fund registered in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles, a Caribbean tax haven which has repeatedly been cited by the International Task Force on Money Laundering of the OECD as one of the world's most important centers for laundering the illegal proceeds of the Latin American drug trade. By operating from Curaçao, Soros not only avoids paying taxes but also hides the nature of his investors and what he does with their money.

Soros has critics from all over the political spectrum: American conservatives dislike his dump-Bush campaign, and hawkish friends of Israel dislike his rhetoric with inflammatory comparisons to Nazi Germany and Yasser Arafat.

Former National Review contributor and ex-House Republican staffer Phil Brennan called Soros a "socialist billionaire".[1] Lowell Ponte of David Horowitz's Frontpage called Soros a "Billionaire for the Left".[1] Scott Shore of IntellectualConservative.com called him a "Soft Money Marxist."[1] He has also been called a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite.

At a Jewish forum in New York City, Soros reportedly attributed a recent resurgence of anti-Semitism to the policies of Israel and the United States, and to successful Jews such as himself:

"There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that," Soros said. "It's not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti- Semitism as well. I'm critical of those policies."

"If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish," he said. "I can't see how one could confront it directly." ...

"I'm also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world," said Soros ... "As an unintended consequence of my actions," he said, "I also contribute to that image."[1]

It should be noted that this could be a result of Soros's Popperian tendency toward self-criticism.

Quotes

• "How can we escape from the trap that the terrorists have set us," he asked. "Only by recognizing that the war on terrorism cannot be won by waging war. We must, of course, protect our security; but we must also correct the grievances on which terrorism feeds....Crime requires police work, not military action."

• "An open society is a society which allows its members the greatest possible degree of freedom in pursuing their interests compatible with the interests of others,” Soros said. “The Bush administration merely has a narrower definition of self-interest. It does not include the interests of others."

• "The supremacist ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to the principles of an open society, which recognize that people have different views and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. The supremacist ideology postulates that just because we are stronger than others, we know better and have right on our side. The very first sentence of the September 2002 National Security Strategy (the President's annual laying out to Congress of the country's security objectives) reads, 'The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.'

The assumptions behind this statement are false on two counts. First, there is no single sustainable model for national success. Second, the American model, which has indeed been successful, is not available to others, because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system, and we are not willing to yield it."[1]

Philanthropy

Soros has been active as a philanthropist since 1979, when he began providing funds to help black students attend the University of Cape Town in apartheid South Africa. Soros' philanthropic funding in Eastern Europe mostly occurs through the Open Society Institute and national Soros Foundations, which sometimes go under other names, e.g. the Stefan Batory Foundation in Poland. He also pledged an endowment of $250 million to the Central European University (CEU).

He received honorary doctoral degrees from the New School for Social Research (New York), the University of Oxford in 1980, the Budapest University of Economics, and Yale University in 1991. Soros was a student of Karl Popper and says that his investment strategies are based on a Popperian skepticism about the reliability of any one human belief.

Soros vs. Bush

For many years, Soros did not involve himself greatly in US politics, but that changed under President George W. Bush. In an interview with The Washington Post on November 11, 2003, Soros said that removing Bush from office is the "central focus of my life" and "a matter of life and death" for which he would be willing to sacrifice his entire fortune. In 1993, Soros gave $3 million to the Center for American Progress, committed $5 million to MoveOn.org, while he and his friend Peter Lewis each gave America Coming Together $10 million. (All are groups working to support Democrats in the 2004 election.) Soros has been criticized for his large donations, as he also pushed for the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 which was intended to ban "soft money" contributions to federal election campaigns. Soros has responded that his donations to unaffiliated organizations do not raise the same corruption issues as donations directly to the candidates or political parties.

Soros has contributed money to the Million Mom March.

Ironically, Soros's Harken Energy bailed out Bush in 1986 by buying his ailing oil venture, Spectrum 7.

His most recent book, The Bubble of American Supremacy, was published in January 2004. [1] Soros is married with three children.

Books

• The Alchemy of Finance (Simon & Schuster, 1988) ISBN 0671662384 (paperback: Wiley, 2003; ISBN 0471445495)
• Opening the Soviet System (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990) ISBN 0297820559
• Underwriting Democracy (Free Press, 1991) ISBN 0029302854
• Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (1995) ISBN 1891620274
• The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (PublicAffairs, 1998) ISBN 1891620274
• Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism (PublicAffairs, 2000) ISBN 1586480197
• George Soros on Globalization (PublicAffairs, March 2002) ISBN 1586481258
• The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power (PublicAffairs, December 2003) ISBN 1586482173
• MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country: How to Find Your Political Voice and Become a Catalyst for Change by MoveOn.org (Author) , Inner Ocean Publishing; (March 2004) ISBN 193072229X

External links and references

• Project Syndicate
• The Soros Foundation
• George Soros, "The Bubble of American Supremacy", Editorial in The Korea Herald, March 12, 2003.
• if the Korea Herald link above is unavailable to you, read "The Bubble of American Supremacy" at The Atlantic
• Analysis of Soros' role in Eastern Europe
• Soros viewed as a post-modern philosopher (1) (2)
• Long article with many references (pro-socialist point of view)
• Laura Blumenfeld, "Billionaire Soros Takes On Bush," MSNBC, November 11, 2003.
• George Soros, expanded "The bubble of American Supremacy", Column in the Atlantic Monthly, December 2003.
• Open Season on 'Open Society': Why an anti-communist Holocaust survivor is being demonized as a Socialist, Self-hating Jew From Reason magazine
• Articles about George Soros
• "The Man Who Would Be King" by James O. E. Norell, p 36, April 2004 America's 1st Freedom
• "George Soros's anti-Gun Vision for America" by James O. E. Norell, p 16, April 2004 America Rifleman
• "CLN financier Soros attacked with glue in Ukraine," "UCCTruths.com", April 5, 2005, Billionaire George Soros, chief financier of the "shadow" political action group that funds the Clergy Leadership Network, was attacked with glue in the Ukraine today. Besides spending millions in the U.S. skirting campaign finance laws, the Hungarian-born billionaire and his hedge fund have been blamed for breaking the British Pound in 1992 (and making 1 billion in one day doing it), starting the Asian financial crisis of 1997 by attacking the Thai baht (which virtually destroyed the economies of Thailand and Indonesia) and almost bankrupting Russia in 1998. It's no wonder that Ukrainians are skeptical of his political meddling.