Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Conclusion

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"Getting...the White House, Soros said in 2003, became the `central focus' of his life. In July 2003, he convened Democratic activists and two political strategists, Mark Steitz and Tom Novick, at his summer estate in...Southampton, Long Island...The plan was about how Soros...could throw money--and a lot of it--into the political arena...

"...The second key part of the plan highlighted that...donors...could give money to...groups...Pushed by Jane Mayer in her New Yorker interview about the perceived hypocrisy of his spending large amounts of money on politics, Soros said, `...The ends justify every legal means possible.'

"Soros donated $5 million to MoveOn.org...He pledged money to America Coming Together, a group intended to mobilize voters in 17 swing states...He gave to the Center for American Progress...Altogether, Soros spent $27 million to...elect...John Kerry...The aforementioned 2004 New Yorker article on his spending was titled `The Money Man.' Jane Mayer conducted an interview with Soros over lunch at his Southampton estate...

"...Soros...supported NATO's military intervention, which did not have U.N. approval, in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s...Open Society had also been involved in Ukraine...Soros had been funding various civil society groups in Ukraine for a decade...George Soros...made money all over the world; he made...financial decisions that caused...average people to lose large amounts of money and private-equity funds he controlled used an offshore law firm Appleby...A 2017 article published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists...quoted Brooke Harrington, a Copenhagen Business School professor, as saying that the offshore industry makes `the poor pporer' and excerbates wealth inequality...

"...Soros...wants to be one of the people dictating the future of politics...Soros, through Open Society, does support NGOs...Soros was never elected...The NGOs he supports...are not accountable to the general public. Soros does have far more power than the average person, and his...work isn't bound by borders, and he did make his money as a speculator. All of that is true..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 10

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"A billionaire with so much money, accountable to no one, unelected by any people to any government...It is Soros, with all his money and all his power, who is picking people--like Licht, like Finci, like Trbic'--who are then...empowered...They were given power to advance their personal agendas...

"...It seemed wrong to me that one man from abroad could have such a large role in determining who in a society was able to have a voice and a platform and tremendous sums of money with which to execute an agenda...George Soros was not from Bosnia, or the former Yugoslavia, and yet had had power and influence in the society...And who is George Soros to decide that this is the issue on which...aid and attention should be spent? Why was George Soros essentially an actor in a civil war across the world? Who appointed him...?

"...The Charter 77 Foundation, which funded...Czeck and Slovak dissidents...was launched in Stockholm in the late 1970s. Soros, working with Czechs and Slovaks in exile, was, by his own admission, their main source of support..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 9

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"Soros has justified speculation...The value of the baht plunged 32 percent against the dollar, and millions of Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund made $750 million...The Thai financial crisis sspread, becoming the Asia financial crisis, and Soros was blamed...At the 1997 World Bank and International Monetary Fund [IMF] meetings, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahather Mohamad called Soros a `criminal'...and claimed that he...caused the crash of the Malaysian ringgit...Soros...shorted the British pound...He and his employees helped trigger the Asian financial crisis..

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"`The industry in which he made his money is an industry whose norms and rules have generally served to disenfranchise regular people over the last thirty, forty years,' said Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, a look at the way in which the very wealthy use philanthropy to protect the status quo and paper over problems they themselves have created, in a September 2019 phone interview...

"Soros...was still participating in a system that actively disenfranchises people...Soros...worked in finance in such a way that it broke countries' currencies..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 8

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"By the 1990s, there were enough foundations established that Soros's work evolved into a network. The staff in New York was growing...and Soros ended up opening an office space on Seventh Avenue...By 1994, when [Journalist Michael] Lewis traveled with Soros through Eastern Europe, Soros was dining with multiple presidents in one day and told his interlocutor, `Just write that the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire.'...

"Soros said...`As a hedge fund manager I...tried to maximize my profits'...In October [1991],..The Daily Mail ran a photo of Soros with the headline, `I Made A Billion Crashing the Pound.'...Soros said that [Soros's] Quantum and its offshoots had bet...ten billion dollars against sterling, and that...speculation had gotten roughly two billion dollars in profits.

"Invisible investors like Soros, owing no allegiance as citizens, could place bets big enough to change economic outcomes for entire nations,' Martin Vander Weyer, business editor of The Spectator, wrote for The Telegraph in 2012...A country was thrown into economic chaos...And this happened at least in part because Soros saw an opportunity to make a lot of money...Soros...wanted his empire to be grand and global..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 7

 In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"...Geza Jeszenskzky, who was minister of foreign affairs for Jozsef Antall...prime minister of Hungary, told me over email that Soros offered to settle Hungary's national debt in echange for stake in Hungary's state-owned companies. Jeszenskzky remembers the meeting as being in the fall of 1989 `at what was then called Hotel Novotel near the Southern Railway Terminal'...

"In addition to giving out scholarships, one of the Hungarian Soros Foundation's first projects was to offer photocopiers to institutions...Soros provided...many photocopiers...It was subversive--Soros was, in effect, funding underground...information...It was their first real, successful foray into philanthropy as subversion...Gabor Horn...in the late 1980s and early 1990s, received support from Soros as a representative of an independent labor union...

"The Soros Foundation was not the only institution to support...opposition movements, as Timothy Garton Ash...a professor of European studies at Oxford, told...over the phone from the United Kingdom...He got to know Soros `fairly quickly' because he was traveling around...Eastern Europe in the 1980s writing for the New York Review of Books. He described Soros as a `very important supporter of...opposition movements'...There were others involved, like the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It was not just Soros.

"But Soros was indeed there supporting these opposition groups, including that group...Fidesz...Fidesz transformed from a youth organization to a political party..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 6 `

 

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"Philanthropy...is effectively a legal form of tax evasion, and Soros is one of many wealthy people who have set up charitable trusts or philanthropic organizations...toward these ends. Those with enough money can use it...to hold on to their money for themselves and their heirs...Soros...by his own admission...first set up a charitable...trust to keep money in the family and hand less of it over to the state for redistribution...

"...In 1980, he turned to...awarding scholarships to dissidents in Eastern Europe...He also began directly financially supporting dissident movement like Solidarity in Poland.., Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia (a group led by intellectuals), and Andrei Sakharov's...movement in Soviet Russia. The idea that Soros has...funded groups that worked against the ruling government or parties is not...untrue...

"...The Soros Foundation in Hungary, once established, continued to operate on a somewhat slective and secretive basis...From its earliest days, there was--by design--comething secretive about how George Soros gave the money away..."

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 4

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"After graduating from LSE, Soros...wrote to all the merchant banks in London...At Singer & Friedlander...one of the managing directors was Hungarian.

"He got a job there in 1953 and worked in arbitrage and the stock exchange...George followed his brother and moved to America to work at a small brokerage firm on Wall Street owned by the father of one of his co-workers at Singer & Friedlander...George Soros moved to New York City to work in international arbitage...He lived...in a two-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive...

"Soros stayed at the brokerage firm, F.M. Mayer, for three years, but then, in 1959, moved to Wertheim & Co., an investment firm...In 1960, he married...Annaliese Witschak...with whom he moved to an apartment on Sheridan Square and built a house in Southampton...Another firm, Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder came calling. Soros began there in 1963...

"...In 1966, at Arnhold & S. Bleichroeder, he set-up a model account with $100,000 of the firm's money...In 1969, he used $4 million to set up a hedge fund...named Double Eagle Fund...The Double Eagle Fund was successful...Soros was recommending stocks to clients that he was also potentially buying for his own account and so could have been accused of recommending stocks to make his own stocks perform better..." 

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's `The Influence Of Soros' 2020 Book: Pt. 2

In her 2020 book, The Influence Of Soros, a U.S. senior editor of New Statesman magazine, Emily Tamkin, noted:

"...Soros was never elected...The NGOs he supports...are not accountable to the general public. Soros does have far more power than the average person, and his...work isn't bound by borders, and he did make his money as a speculator. All of that is true...

"This is...the problem with billionaire philanthropists: at the end of the day, they're still the ones with the money, and the power to decide what to do with it..

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"...`My defense is that I operate within the rules,' Soros said in 1995. `...I have absolutely no moral qualms in being branded a speculator...I am the classic limousine liberal...' He also noted that he...didn't start giving his money away...until he had made millions...

"One could argue...that it's easy to criticize a system that allows people to amass great sums of money through speculation after one has done exactly that...After one has used it to become rich, live in luxury, and exert great influence..." 

NPIC: Will the revolution be funded?

Are Human Rights Watch Inc. Executives Making Big Money From Human Rights Monitoring Industry?

Being an executive at a U.S. power elite foundation-subsidized human rights monitoring NGO in the United States in the 21st-century can apparently be a lucrative gig. Human Rights Watch Inc. Executive Director Kenneth Roth, for example took home an annual salary/total compensation package of $412,607 between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009, according to Human Rights Watch Inc.’s form 990 financial filing for 2009. In addition, nine other Human Rights Watch Inc. executives were also given annual salary/total compensation packages that exceeded $167,000 during this same period by the U.S.-based human rights monitoring NGO.

Of the $45 million in foundation “charitable” grants and rich individual donor contributions received by Human Rights Watch Inc. between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009, $27 million was spent on just paying the salaries of Human Rights Watch Inc.’s employees; and in 2009, the “non-profit,’ tax-exempt U.S.-based Human Rights Watch Inc. human rights monitoring firm controlled over $122 million in assets—including, apparently, corporate stock in various transnational corporations that exploit working-class human beings in both the United States and foreign countries.