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http://keywiki.org/index.php/George_Soros

George Soros (born August 12, 1930, as György Schwartz, in Budapest, Hungary), is one of the wealthiest people in the world (rated number 35 in 2010) and is a leading funder and organizer for progressive organizations and progressive causes. He is a proclaimed atheist.

Soros is the Chairman of Soros Fund Management, LLC and founder of The Open Society Institute. Soros claims his political activities are separate from the Open Society Institute.[1] He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Soros has been married and divorced twice. He has had three children with Annaliese Witschak (Robert, Andrea and Jonathan) and two with Susan Weber Soros (Alexander and Gregory). His elder brother, Paul Soros, also a private investor and philanthropist, is an engineer, who headed Soros Associates and established the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.[2] George Soros’ nephew Peter Soros, a son of Paul Soros, is married to the former Flora Fraser — a daughter of Lady Antonia Fraser and the late Sir Hugh Fraser, and a stepdaughter of the late 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter.[3]

His son Alexander Soros is also gaining prominence for his donations to social and political causes. Alexander led the list of student political donors in the 2010 election cycle.

Early Life

George Soros’ father was named Tivadar Schwartz, a successful attorney and an Orthodox Jew who, in 1936, changed the family surname from Schwartz to Soros in order to enable his family to conceal its Jewish identity and thus to survive the Nazi Holocaust. Soros sounded Hungarian, but was obscure. It means “soar” (in the future tense) in Esperanto, the made-up trans-European language promoted by those who dreamed of a world free of nationality. Tivadar was among its leading proponents.[5]

When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, Soros’ father decided to split up his family, so as to minimize the chance that all its members would be killed together. He purchased forged papers for each of them and then bribed a government official to claim George as his Christian godson and to let the boy live with him.

“While hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were being transported to death camps,” reports the Sweetness & Light website, “George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his appointed rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.” (Many years later — in December 1998 — a CBS interviewer would ask Soros whether he had ever felt any guilt about those circumstances. Soros replied: “[T]here was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would — would — would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the — whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the — I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.” Soros has repeatedly said that 1944 was the best year of his life.

From The New Yorker:

“I don’t deny the Jews their right to a national existence - but I don’t want to be part of it.” That experience notwithstanding, Soros has chosen to exclude Israel and Jewish causes, by and large, from his massive philanthropy - a decision that has caused comment among one of his colleagues in the financial community, particularly those who are strong supporters of Israel. In Hungary, Soros has been subject to anti-Semitic attacks. Referring to being a target, Soros, in his book “Underwriting Democracy,” wrote, “I am ready to stand up and be counted.” When I mentioned that rather suggestive line to Soros during one of several extended interviews with him, he responded quickly, “Right. It took me a long time.”

He continued, “My mother was quite anti-Semitic, and ashamed of being Jewish. Given the culture in which one lived, being Jewish was a clear-cut stigma, disadvantage, a handicap - and, therefore, there was always the desire to transcend it, to escape it.” He confirmed what someone had told me - that his family name had long ago been changed from Schwartz. “So the assimilationist Jews of Hungary had a deep sense of inferiority and it took me a long time to work through that,” he said, adding, however, that he succeeded in doing so many years ago... “I am escaping the particular. I think I am doing so many years espousing this universal concept of open society. In other words, I don’t think that you can ever overcome anti-Semitism if you behave as a tribe... The only way you can overcome it is if you give up the tribalness.”[6]

In 1947, Soros’ family relocated from Hungary to England. Five years later, Soros graduated from the London School of Economics. He subsequently worked for a London stockbroker. In 1956, he emigrated to the United States.[7]

Biography

Soros is a global financier, philanthropist and the founder and chairman of a network of foundations that promote the creation of democratic societies “based upon the rule of law, market economies, transparent and accountable governance, freedom of the press and respect for human rights.”[8]

Philosopher Karl Popper’s ideas on an open society had a profound influence on his intellectual development while he was studying at the London School of Economics. After immigrating to the United States, he worked as a trader and an analyst until 1963. In 1967, he helped to establish an offshore investment fund and in 1973 he set up a private investment firm that eventually evolved into the Quantum Fund, one of the first hedge funds. This is where he developed his vast fortune.

Soros applied his wealth to help black students attend the University of Cape Town during apartheid in South Africa in 1979. He created a foundation in Hungary to support culture and education and the country’s transition to democracy. Soros also gave funds to the underground Solidarity movement in Poland, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet physicist-dissident Andrei Sakharov. In 1982, Soros named his philanthropic organization the Open Society Fund, in honor of philosopher Popper and granted scholarships to students from Eastern Europe. He created more programs to assist the free flow of information. He also supported educational radio programs in Mongolia and later contributed $100 million to provide Internet access to every regional university in Russia.

In 2003, Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was one of his main priorities. During the 2004 campaign, he donated significant funds to various groups that were dedicated to removing the president.

[Snipping a section about Karl Popper]

Possible KGB Ties

Commentators have pointed out that in order for George Soros to have achieved what he did in his early days, he must have been favored by the communists. The following observations have been made by prominent Czech former dissident leader Petr Cibulka and Jani Allan, a former British Spectator correspondent.[11]

George Soros as a young man traded currencies on the black market during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. Soros lived there until 1946 when he left the country as it was under Soviet occupation and he, without money and at age of 16, ended up in London, U.K. in 1947. According to claims Soros has made, he left his native Hungary because of the Soviet occupation.

Simply said, this must be explained to the American public because these facts are not possible to be true under any normal circumstances. Soros admits to trade currencies on the black market, but that was always punishable by death during the Nazi era in any occupied country. Also what is important is the allegation that the Soros family collaborated with the Hungarian Nazi regime during WW2.

That would make the whole family [no doubt] a target of reprisals from the victims of the Nazi regime and the occupying Soviet forces would treat Soros’ family very harshly [most of the high level Nazi collaborators were hanged]. The only way out of this would be an agreement to co-operate with the GRU Soviet [Russian] military intelligence or perhaps also with the NKVD [later KGB] espionage.

Young George was able to leave the country, he was able to make it through countless Red Army check points, without a passport that would be valid, without a Soviet approved permit to leave the country, without money and without any outside help.

Soros was not only able to “pass through” these check points, but he was able to cross the border to Austria, where the Red Army was also present at the time, and Soros was able to get through the Red Army check points in Austria and “defect” to the West all the way to London, U.K. Un-parallel achievement and because of my personal experiences as a political refugee who had to go through some difficulties escaping the communist oppression, I know what I’m talking about.

I don’t know how this Soros’ “life story” sounds to anybody, but this is impossible to happen unless George had a permit and proper Soviet approved passport, because if he was so brave to try to run these check points, he would’ve been shot dead on the spot by the communists.

His stay in the U.K. and his 1947 enrollment to London School of Economics, and to be able financially to support himself during that time, with no mentioned substantial help or financial backing and to be able to graduate in 1952 at that young age, this all gives me chills where I missed my own opportunities and how come I wasn’t able to be so “fortunate” and to have such “miraculous achievements” in my life.

Soros, after a brief period of working in financial services in Britain, was able to start his own financial institution. What an achievement again. No money at all from the beginning and after just a few years he’s got his own financial company.

That requires starting capital, these expensive ventures don’t come easy, these are not hamburger stands, but virtual banks with lots of money inside - who supplied the money to Soros or has he won a huge jackpot in Britain?

“Opening the Soviet System”

In his “Opening the Soviet System” Soros recollects about his 1989 Prague meeting with Marian Calfa and says the following:[12]

Together with Prince Karel Schwartzenberg we went to see Marian Calfa, who was then acting president. It was meant to be a courtesy visit but it turned into a moving occasion. Calfa opened his heart. He said that the last three weeks had really shaken his view of the world. He had not realized how far out of touch his party was with reality.

He had had an intimate conversation with Jiri Dienstbier, the former political prisoner and newly-appointed Foreign Minister, and that is when he found out that dissidents’ children had been regularly denied the right to be educated in Czechoslovakia. (Dienstbier’s daughter had managed to get to Switzerland.)

He was deeply ashamed and determined to establish democracy in Czechoslovakia. We all agreed that it was imperative to have Vaclav Havel elected president by the present rubber-stamp parliament; to organize a plebiscite would delay matters and create uncertainties.

Havel as president would consolidate the “gentle revolution.” Unfortunately, the leaders of the party do not agree with me but, as acting president, I have certain prerogatives and I intend to use them,’ he said. He sounded genuine and we were impressed.

It was an unbelievable situation: the head of an apparatus of repression which only a few weeks ago hit students on the head voluntarily abdicating in favor of a dissident without an organization who would have trouble winning a plebiscite.

According to Cibulka and Allan, Calfa was never a president, but a Prime Minister. He changed positions after he was for some years the Deputy PM in communist Czechoslovakia. The authors also make some interesting claims about Dienstbier:

Jiri Dienstbier - during the 1950’s and 1960’s, alleged KGB or directly GRU cadre, as communist journalist he was able to travel around the World during the communist era in Czechoslovakia. Between 1958-69, he worked as foreign political commentator and editor for Czechoslovak [communist] Radio. Between 1964-67, Dienstbier was the CZ Radio correspondent for the Far East and was in Jakarta, Indonesia at the time when there was [thank God unsuccessful] a communist coup.

In 1968-69, he worked as foreign correspondent in the United States, possibly for communist party newspaper Red Right [Rude Pravo]. A CPCZ member since 1958 till 1970, Dienstbier is a founding member of Charter 77, a speaker of Charter 77 in 1979 and later in 1985. After the “collapse of communism” in Czechoslovakia, he became Czechoslovak Government’s Deputy Prime Minister in a government of PM Marian Calfa and Dienstbier later became CZ Foreign Minister. While in his post as Foreign Minister, Dienstbier was involved in various scandals regarding appointing various “former” communists and STB agents [STB foreign espionage section mostly] as Czechoslovak Ambassadors around the World.

Later Communist Collaborations

Cibulka and Allan also commented on Soros’ later ties to communist regimes and movements:

Circa 1978, Frantisek Janouch, “former” Czech communist and nuclear physicist, and George Soros were key financial backers of the Charter 77 Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. It was asserted that the foundation was an “anti-communist” group, however it was sending funds to communist Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel and company. Janouch claims that Soros supplied 1/3 of the total amount of these funds.

On Dec. 14, 1989, Soros was present at the meeting in Prague on December 14, 1989 where he, Janouch, Karel Jan Schwartzenberg (later to become Vaclav Havel’s Chief of Staff) met with Czechoslovak newly appointed Prime Minister, a communist and allegedly KGB and STB agent, Marian Calfa. Calfa thanked Soros for everything he had done for Czechoslovakia.

Soros was also the main financial contributor to the Polish Labor Union called Solidarity. Its leadership had to be made up of members of the Communist Party, or of communist agents.

It is strange that Soros was allowed to set up his Open Society Institutions in the communist Hungary in 1984 and later in the Soviet Union in 1987. Such ventures were only possible for communists or communist agents and not for an American businessmen like Soros. The agreement between Soros and the communist government in Hungary had to be approved by the Communist Party General Secretary Janosz Kadar. Kadar was during the 1950s personally involved in torture and murders of anti-communist opposition members in Hungary.

South Africa

George Soros has been involved in financing organizations in South Africa since 1979, though most of the money he made came from his British Pound scheme in 1992. Much of the money went into communist dominated South African Unions and also to Cape Town University where Soros financed people who are today involved in the African National Congress/South African Communist Party government.[13]

China

In 1986, Soros attempted to set up his Open Society Foundation in communist China.[14]

I went to China [in 1986 - ed. note] with Liang Heng, who became my personal representative, and set up a foundation on the Hungarian model with Chen Yizi’s institute as my partner.

Boo Tung, Communist party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang’s principal secretary, cut through the red tape and approved the foundation on the spot.

Both he and the foundation got into a lot of trouble as a consequence because his political enemies tried to use the foundation as a vehicle for attacking him. They prepared an elaborate dossier which claimed that I was a CIA agent and anti-Communist conspirator.

Boo Tung counter-attacked and presented voluminous information about my other foundations to prove my good faith.

That was not too difficult because I had always been very open about my intentions and by 1987 I had also established a foundation in Moscow.

Nevertheless, some high party council decided to liquidate the foundation and refund the money.

It took the personal intervention of Zhao Ziyang to rescind the decision.

He arranged for Chen Yizi to resign as co-chairman and for the International Cultural Exchange Center, whose chairman turned out to be a high official in the security service, to take over as our host organization.

The authors ask exactly how George Soros, could prove, as an American citizen and therefore enemy of the communists, that he was NOT a CIA spy and anti-communist?

How is it possible, that the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party fixed the problem for Soros - “this wouldn’t happen unless (UNLESS) Soros is a communist agent himself and is involved in communist operations - otherwise they would never allow Soros inside the country nor would they allow him to open as much as a hot dog stand in a Beijing (or Moscow).”

I’ll post more in a minute.

I tried copying info about “Currency/Regime Collapses and Market Manipulation” but it became a wall of text, so people can go to the link to read it. Here is a list of organizations that he funds. Each organization name is a link.

http://keywiki.org/Organizations_Funded_Directly_by_George_Soros_and_his_Open_Society_Institute

Air America
All Of Us Or None
Alliance for Justice
America Coming Together
America Votes
America’s Voice
American Bar Association Commission on Immigration Policy
American Civil Liberties Union
American Constitution Society for Law and Policy
American Family Voices
American Federation of Teachers
American Friends Service Committee
American Immigration Council
American Immigration Law Foundation
American Institute for Social Justice
American Library Association
Amnesty International
Arab American Institute Foundation
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Brennan Center for Justice
Brookings Institution
Campaign for America’s Future
Campaign for Better Health Care
Campus Progress
Casa de Maryland
Catalist
Catholic Campaign for Human Development
Catholic Legal Immigration Network (CLINIC) [3]
Catholics for a Free Choice
Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good
Catholics United[3]
Center for American Progress
Center for Community Change
Center for Constitutional Rights
Center for Economic and Policy Research
Center for Investigative Reporting[4]
Center for Reproductive Rights
Center for Responsible Lending
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS)
Change America Now
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
Coalition for an International Criminal Court
Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund
Democracy Alliance
Democracy 21
Democracy Now!
Democratic Justice Fund
Democratic Party

Earthjustice
Electronic Privacy Information Center
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
EMILY’s List
Energy Action Coalition
Fair Immigration Reform Movement
Faithful America
Feminist Majority
Four Freedoms Fund
Free Exchange on Campus
Free Press
Funding Exchange
Gamaliel Foundation
Gisha: Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement
Global Exchange
Grantmakers Without Borders
Green For All
Health Care for America Now
Huffington Post
Human Rights First
Human Rights Watch
I’lam
Immigrant Defense Project
Immigrant Legal Resource Center
Immigrant Workers Citizenship Project
Immigration Policy Center
Independent Media Center
Institute for America’s Future
Institute for Policy Studies
Institute for Public Accuracy
Institute for Women’s Policy Research
International Crisis Group
J Street
Jewish Funds for Justice
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice[4]
Joint Victory Campaign 2004
LatinoJustice PRLDF
Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
League of United Latin American Citizens
League of Women Voters Education Fund
Lynne Stewart Defense Committee
MADRE
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition
Media Fund
Media Matters for America
Mercy Corps
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund
Meyer, Suozzi, English and Klein, PC
Midwest Academy
Migration Policy Institute
Military Families Speak Out
Million Mom March[4

MoveOn.org
Ms. Foundation for Women
NARAL Pro-Choice America
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund
National Abortion Federation
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy
National Committee for Voting Integrity
National Council for Research on Women
National Council of La Raza
National Council of Women’s Organizations
National Immigration Forum
National Immigration Law Center
National Lawyers Guild
National Organization for Women
National Partnership for Women and Families
National Priorities Project
National Public Radio
National Security Archive Fund
National Women’s Law Center
Natural Resources Defense Council
Pacifica Foundation
Peace and Security Funders Group
Peace Development Fund
People for the American Way
Physicians for Human Rights
Physicians for Social Responsibility
Planned Parenthood
Ploughshares Fund
Presidential Climate Action Project
Prison Moratorium Project
Progressive States Network
Project Vote
Pro Publica
Proteus Fund
Public Citizen Foundation
Rebuild and Renew America Now (a.k.a. Unity ‘09)
Secretary of State Project
Sentencing Project
Shadow Democratic Party
Sojourners
Southern Poverty Law Center
The American Prospect, Inc.
The Nation Institute
Think Progress
Thunder Road Group
Tides Foundation and Tides Center
U.S. Public Interest Research Group
Universal Healthcare Action Network
Urban Institute
USAction Education Fund
Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia
Working Families Party
World Organization Against Torture
YWCA World Office, Switzerland