The Soros Thread (Retitled)

[JackRiddler]

Hallelujah, the Great Wombat has re-titled this thread!

Anyone care to discuss or debate the above challenge?

Submitted: Soros is different from two specified examples of other billionaires with foundation complexes: Gates and the Kochs. By comparison to either of these examples, Soros' world of activity is relatively small in size, and I shall furthermore argue inconsequential in actual impact on events.

What the hell, let's add more: his impact is vastly exaggerated, specifically by right-wing ideologues who have cast him for the non-existent role of "left-wing" billionaire "puppetmaster" whom they can blame for stuff -- and also by persons committed to Jewish Grand Conspiracy narratives of all history, such at least one poster on this thread.

Contest, debate, discuss.

[Sounder]

Jack wrote...

The Soros-obsessed present him as the only agent, a "puppet-master" solely responsible for developments that actually require whole ruling classes, industries, states and ideologies.

Not true, you assert that others present Soros as the ‘only agent’. Of course it is to your advantage to frame the issue with an absurdity coming from critics. Koch and Gates may be and are in my opinion just as bad, but they are not the ones vocally supporting Avazz, White Helmets and color revolutions in many countries. Koch, Gates et al make their billions through vertical integration, usually in a monopolistic style. Yeah, not real keen on those folk, but when a rich man fucks directly with many people’s lives just so he can acquire some assets on the cheap, well yes I think that that is a special kind of scum.

What would have been different if there had been no Soros?

Probably not much, the rich mans club would have to find a different front man for this aspect of operations.

[JackRiddler]

Jack wrote...

The Soros-obsessed present him as the only agent, a "puppet-master" solely responsible for developments that actually require whole ruling classes, industries, states and ideologies.

Not true, you assert that others present Soros as the ‘only agent’. Of course it is to your advantage to frame the issue with an absurdity coming from critics.

No, no, no. You don't get away with denying what you yourself endorse.

You posted this:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39996&start=15#p610006

It is exactly that: Soros as the "only agent." It is in fact entitled:

How George Soros Singlehandedly Created the European Refugee Crisis—and Why

And how he did it, according to the article, was first to singlehandedly create the prior 30-40 years of European and global history! His spider's web was everywhere!

It is a shameful piece of sophistry. You served up this steaming shit sandwich, now EAT IT. Stand by your views with pride, or admit you are wrong. But none of this coy dicking around any more. Such a fucking wimp.

You are also avoiding what I said. I wasn't talking only about the Gates or Koch business models alone, though those are very interesting. IN all three cases, we are also talking about what they do voluntarily with the swag once earned so as to change the world according to vision. And in both of those cases, there is no comparison: Gates and Kochs through their political/social activities have had impact and accomplished horrors that would not have happened without them. Whereas Soros' has been a mere echo of what would have happened without him. And I will show this in our discussion. You are absolutely among the Soros obsessed.

[tapitsbo]

Maybe if Sounder's sources had funding from Soros and Omidyar, they could cook up a slicker narrative.

How many oligarchs does it take to make a Theresa Duncan saga?

[Sounder]

Ok, Jack you got me, I endorse an article that states that Soros singlehandedly created the European refugee crisis. Here is the relevant part. Yep Soros, not Gates, not Koch, not Carlos Slim paid the money that facilitated the refugee situation. So yes it is not unreasonable to say that Soros singlehandedly created the crisis, it might be a bit of overblown rhetoric but it is in the ballpark of what happened no matter how much spit you leave on your screen finding a suitable response. You are the obsessed one, obsessed with fear that you may be an idiot.

That might even have something to do with your anger issues.

Soros’s agenda is fundamentally about the destruction of national borders. This has recently been shown very clearly with his funding of the European refugee crisis.

The refugee crisis has been blamed on the civil war currently raging in Syria. But did you ever wonder how all these people suddenly knew Europe would open its gates and let them in?

The refugee crisis is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It coincided with OSF donating money to the US-based Migration Policy Institute and the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, both Soros-sponsored organizations. Both groups advocate the resettlement of third-world Muslims into Europe.

In 2015, a Sky News reporter found “Migrant Handbooks” on the Greek island of Lesbos. It was later revealed that the handbooks, which are written in Arabic, had been given to refugees before crossing the Mediterranean by a group called “Welcome to the EU.”

Welcome to the EU is funded by—you guessed it—the Open Society Foundations.

Soros has not only backed groups that advocate the resettlement of third-world migrants into Europe, he in fact is the architect of the “Merkel Plan.”
The Merkel Plan was created by the European Stability Initiative whose chairman Gerald Knaus is a senior fellow at none other than the Open Society Foundations.

The plan proposes that Germany should grant asylum to 500,000 Syrian refugees. It also states that Germany, along with other European nations, should agree to help Turkey, a country that’s 98% Muslim, gain visa-free travel within the EU starting in 2016.

[tapitsbo]

The long-term agenda for mass immigration between different areas of the world involves a lot more players than just Soros, I'd think. The UN for one, which has stated goals to bring mass immigration to places like South Korea which could imaginably be more recalcitrant than thoroughly spent/exhausted northwestern europe...

The "migrant crisis" such as it is and the "clash of civilizations" being memed into existence from the top down are both ops nested and nestled within larger and larger concentric rings of deep ops...

Jack brings up far-right polemics tarring Soros as a "Zionist" which is funny even if somehow true because even the far-right know about the loathing Soros has acquired from the Israeli mainstream...

There's a reason that mass media rightists are allowed to finger Soros while they gatekeep about a lot of other oligarchs - I suspect that he's often the public face of collective actions on their part. Handy new scapegoats like "Saudi royals" are also seeing escalating coverage. No doubt all of these people have authored all sorts of dastardly plans, but with how much autonomy, I ask?

[kool maudit]

Soros' foundation works within the tensions between the traditional and the modern – that's his inflexion-point of choice.

This is obviously an incursion against the right, and leftists are right to either downplay or underemphasise it.

I know a lot of people at orgs funded by OSF in various ways, and these are generally just Guardian-type people writing Guardian-type things because it's what they think is best. The hand isn't notably heavy.

That said, this particular type of influence is potentially of interest to people on both the right and the left who favour the local over the transnational, the small over the large, or the particular over the general.

But we're not going to get a bipartisan thing going on Soros and that's just that.

[brainpanhandler]

You (Jack) are the obsessed one, obsessed with fear that you may be an idiot.

That might even have something to do with your anger issues.

[JackRiddler]

Again, to review, the following was not pulled off the top of my head. It is a run-down of the article Sounder posted and promptly forgot he posted. It was a case of Soros Obsession 101, and not deniable. That's why it hurts, but a bad boxer doubles down: Swing away, Sounder, next blow won't hurt nearly as bad. Kissing the mat is always a relief.

The Soros-obsessed present him as the only agent, a "puppet-master" solely responsible for developments that actually require whole ruling classes, industries, states and ideologies. What would have been different if there had been no Soros?

Capitalism would still work the way it does (the way he sometimes actually describes it as working, when he plays the intellectual). Without Soros, the pound would still have dropped against the mark and some other bond vigilantes would have seized the windfall. (Quick, who were the bond vigilantes who attacked the franc during Mitterand's attempt at Keynesianism? They made billions in windfall by financial aggression, when they saw they could. Why can't any of us name them?)

For all the causes Soros supports, when did his support not rhyme with State Department policy? And when did his support make the difference? There is a whole world of NGOs beyond those he funds, and many of them with the same thrust. I'm not saying Soros' initiatives never made a difference, I'm saying you can rarely know for sure when and how they did; and furthermore, you can know that the big outlines of history would have run the same way.

Without Soros, the EU would have expanded and put through EMU. The Berlin wall would have fallen, the post-communist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe would have privatized their economies and overseen many years of plunder and oligarch-mafioso rule. The Asian bubble would have popped. The bubbles would have kept popping.

Did Soros select Bush? US-UK would have invaded Iraq, initiating the disintegration of the Middle East. The Arab peoples would have risen up against their regimes. The oil kingdoms would have struck back with U.S. backing. The wars in Ukraine and Syria would still be happening. The refugees would still be fleeing conflicts all over the planet. The nationalist paranoids would still be hating the refugees and blaming some theoretical dark forces for sending the refugees by plan. The left would still be calling the nationalist paranoids racists and Islamophobes.

The article like the one posted by Sounder above, with its Soros-driven monocausal theory of history, largely based on the work of the demented David Horowitz, is fucking insane. Unlike with the article's failure to point out that Horowitz is an ultra-hardcore Likudnik, however, among the Soros-obsessives the "Zionist" tag as the primary label for Soros is never far behind. That's why he's so much more a subject for the Soros-obsessives than the Kochs, Gates, Zuckerberg (though I'm waiting for that one), Carlos Slim, or the Davos set generally. He's no more credible than any of them as a lone evil mastermind driving all political events according to his own plan, but he's so very Jewish! And also configures as "liberal," whatever that means.

Soros has been "treated" on this site all the time, for many years, there are many threads -- why the proliferation with this one and its pretend-naive, odious titling? (That's rhetorical because it's obvious.)

[JackRiddler]

Personally, I'd like to expropriate and jail all three of the following:

Business models - the robber baron part

Soros: Bond vigilante extracts windfall from correctly predicted financial events. Seeks to engineer timing to maximize his own gain. Odious and yet completely systemic. Inseparable from Wall Street and hedge fund standard practices. Shut them down or at least regulate heavily is the only credible response. (He's even half-for that in his intellectual work, the hypocrite.)

Gates: Opportunist wins monopoly, extracts profit from new industry, invests in dominance, crushing technologically superior competitors and keeping 90% of users in special hell for decades. Could have gone differently.

Kochs: Inseparable from political influence. Massive ideological offensives and corruption of politicians tied to deregulation and winning of concessions within chosen field of plunder. Hugely successful and innovative in tools employed.

Political uses of the money through philanthropic complexes

Soros: Eastern European exile, classically anti-communist for the type. As intellectual, dresses up Cold War right-wing liberalism into "open society" concept for post-Wall world. Interventions along conventional political lines, in the sense that foundation complex chooses existing parties and factions to support within given nations. Efforts echo State Department-CIA line in most all cases, though at least he's helping legalize marijuana. Probably serving as CIA money funnel. Often odious, but hard to separate from overall U.S. foreign policy efforts and possibly altogether superfluous or replaceable. Surely innovative and adept in coopting and defusing left-wing forces in particular.

Gates: Singlehandedly (!) providing about 50% of the funding for unrelenting ideological war on public education and teachers' unions. Commandeering school systems as Microsoft buyers and training children as customers under humanitarian guise. Conducting medical experiments on African populations, same guise, again to benefit of companies owned by fortune and foundation. (Possibly developing good treatments in the process? Not excusable!) Heavy on the GMO support. Innovative and pathbreaking.

Kochs: Again, inseparable from business model. Have provided decades of lifesblood for enormous extreme right-wing disinformation and legislative juggernaut that might have never existed at this size without them. Innovative in methods, if basically Turbo John Birch. Hard to see where the anti-climate-change disinfo would be without them nowadays, since even the oil bigs have given up on the denialism.

Public images

Soros: Where known, treated as if he rules the world, made responsible for about a hundred times more than he could have possibly accomplished, defamed for a whole bunch of shit he did not do or was barely involved in. A particular target of 1) right-wing that needs image of "left-wing" billionaire, which he is not and 2) the usual people who believe the Nazi view of the world Jewish conspiracy (without being Nazis for the most part).

Gates: A saint! Used to be an ubernerd if exemplary genius. But now he's a saint!

Kochs: Definition of the devil on the liberal left. Gangsters, correctly assessed (they make it easy). Used by mainstream Democrats as magic shield for their taking money from and giving service to every other billionaire, bank and multi-death corporation (e.g., Gates).

Discuss and debate.

.

[Harvey]

It's in the air just now. Everyone's feeling it, even if they don't know what it is they're feeling.

Lovers will love, haters hate, makers make, soldiers fight, sailors sail, poets sing. The worst are certainly worsting but right now the best can best. Unless they lack all conviction.

[dada]

It's in the air just now. Everyone's feeling it, even if they don't know what it is they're feeling.

Lovers will love, haters hate, makers make, soldiers fight, sailors sail, poets sing. The worst are certainly worsting but right now the best can best. Unless they lack all conviction.

For those who don't know what it is they're feeling, I will explain. It was a surge in the purreal. I'm reading the purrealometer, and it says we're at fifty thousand ParaKeets. (The purreal is measured in ParaKeet units. I invented the system of standardization. Very proud of my ParaKeets.)

Yeah, so I'm going with Gates for evil overlord. Koch bros are probably the nastiest, but their scope is too narrow. They're too caught up in their own personal pet projects. And Soros... I don't know. It doesn't seem like his heart is really in it. Too opportunistic. He'll be a good guy when it suits his interests.

Gates though, he's committed to realizing the technocratic vision. Make eighty percent of the world empty-minded and just barely fed? He's on it.

This is what we're doing, right? Electing the president of the legion of doom?

Why not. It's like the US presidential thing that's going on. Let's play the authoritarian hierarchy game. We're powerless nothings, oh noes! What do we do? Let's look at the media. Oh, the media says we should blame all our problems on some figureheads. Media, tell us our choices! Hey, media says we should talk about Syria. Who do we support in the war? What are our choices, media? The US or Russia, of course. Of course. Lets talk about it. Nod our heads sagely.

Too bad we can't just elect the media for president. Maybe Gates is working on it. Successful business man, humanitarian robot saint. I'm gonna write song about him right now.

[JackRiddler]

2015 estimates of personal wealth, U.S. top 16 - you never know how accurate the sum for each (they don't know themselves) due to variable asset valuations, holding companies controlling much larger assets, global assets in other currencies, front owners, offshore reserves, etc. Somehow Peterson's not on the list. Thiel's at 234. Obvious omission that nationality is no limit, e.g., who out of the top 400 globally isn't going to have American assets and interests and possibly be based in the U.S., etc.

Is there a list estimating the associated philanthropies? Gates "gave away" half his fortune to his and its equity is on the scale of 70, 80 billion.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/8/#version:static

#1 Bill Gates $76 B 60 Medina, WA Microsoft
#2 Warren Buffett $62 B 86 Omaha, NE Berkshire Hathaway
#3 Larry Ellison $47.5 B 72 Woodside, CA Oracle
#4 Jeff Bezos $47 B 52 Seattle, WA Amazon.com
#5 Charles Koch $41 B 80 Wichita, KS diversified
#5 David Koch $41 B 76 New York, NY diversified
#7 Mark Zuckerberg $40.3 B 32 Palo Alto, CA Facebook
#8 Michael Bloomberg $38.6 B 74 New York, NY Bloomberg LP
#9 Jim Walton $33.7 B 68 Bentonville, AR Wal-Mart
#10 Larry Page $33.3 B 43 Palo Alto, CA Google
#11 Sergey Brin $32.6 B 43 Los Altos, CA Google
#12 Alice Walton $32 B 66 Fort Worth, TX Wal-Mart
#13 S. Robson Walton $31.7 B 71 Bentonville, AR Wal-Mart
#14 Christy Walton $30.2 B 67 Jackson, WY Wal-Mart
#15 Sheldon Adelson $26 B 83 Las Vegas, NV casinos
#16 George Soros $24.5 B 86 Katonah, NY hedge funds

[tapitsbo]

Soros' foundation works within the tensions between the traditional and the modern – that's his inflexion-point of choice.

This is obviously an incursion against the right, and leftists are right to either downplay or underemphasise it.

I know a lot of people at orgs funded by OSF in various ways, and these are generally just Guardian-type people writing Guardian-type things because it's what they think is best. The hand isn't notably heavy.

That said, this particular type of influence is potentially of interest to people on both the right and the left who favour the local over the transnational, the small over the large, or the particular over the general.

But we're not going to get a bipartisan thing going on Soros and that's just that.

Speaking of the Guardian, this week alone they've been pushing "TPP as social justice" and "Corbyn is a sexist anti-Semite" and "White Helmets are humanitarians"...

This "shite" is only "leftist" as an utter misnomer.

I do understand the newspaper was "left-wing" in the past.

The Guardian and Soros are two different things, but like Jack (I think) is saying, neither are "leftist".

I might not be a committed leftist but at least I respect the left being an identifiable thing. Guardian/Soros ain't part of it.

[slimmouse]

2015 estimates of personal wealth, U.S. top 16 - you never know how accurate the sum for each (they don't know themselves) due to variable asset valuations, holding companies controlling much larger assets, global assets in other currencies, front owners, offshore reserves, etc. Somehow Peterson's not on the list. Thiel's at 234. Obvious omission that nationality is no limit, e.g., who out of the top 400 globally isn't going to have American assets and interests and possibly be based in the U.S., etc.

Is there a list estimating the associated philanthropies? Gates "gave away" half his fortune to his and its equity is on the scale of 70, 80 billion.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/8/#version:static

#1 Bill Gates $76 B 60 Medina, WA Microsoft
#2 Warren Buffett $62 B 86 Omaha, NE Berkshire Hathaway
#3 Larry Ellison $47.5 B 72 Woodside, CA Oracle
#4 Jeff Bezos $47 B 52 Seattle, WA Amazon.com
#5 Charles Koch $41 B 80 Wichita, KS diversified
#5 David Koch $41 B 76 New York, NY diversified
#7 Mark Zuckerberg $40.3 B 32 Palo Alto, CA Facebook
#8 Michael Bloomberg $38.6 B 74 New York, NY Bloomberg LP
#9 Jim Walton $33.7 B 68 Bentonville, AR Wal-Mart
#10 Larry Page $33.3 B 43 Palo Alto, CA Google
#11 Sergey Brin $32.6 B 43 Los Altos, CA Google
#12 Alice Walton $32 B 66 Fort Worth, TX Wal-Mart
#13 S. Robson Walton $31.7 B 71 Bentonville, AR Wal-Mart
#14 Christy Walton $30.2 B 67 Jackson, WY Wal-Mart
#15 Sheldon Adelson $26 B 83 Las Vegas, NV casinos
#16 George Soros $24.5 B 86 Katonah, NY hedge funds

Dont you just love these Forbes ratings that by some miracle or other seem to exclude the really rich, in terms of land ownership, mining rights etc.

You know, the Mega- stupids that the above ultimately have to tow the line with.