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..

.

"`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. 5

 

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

"...Soros...set up his own hedge fund in 1973. His fund was called the Soros Fund. He brought along Jim Rogers...They opened an office on Columbus Circle, not far from Soros's home at the time at 25 Central Park West. In 1978, the fund changed its name to Quantum Fund...(...around the time that Rogers left the fund.).

"By 1981, the fund had...assets worth $381 million. Soros had a personal fortune of $100 million...Soros said that his financial strategy was informed by his philosphy...When he believed there was opportunity ahead, he went in for the kill. In 1973, for example, the Arab-Israeli War had shifted tectonic plates in the defense industry...Soros...bought defense stocks and made money...

"...Soros met Susan Weber, twenty-five years his junior...in 1978, the same year he left Witschak, the two married in 1983...the same year of his first divorce...

"In 1979, Soros established The Open Society Fund as a charitable lead trust. His motives were not entirely altruistic. `A charitable lead trust is a very interesting tax gimmick.'.., he explained in the early 2000s...'...The principal that remains can be left [to one's heirs] without estate or gift tax. So this was the way I set up the trust for my children.'..."

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. 3

 

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

"It is...an understatement to say that George Soros is influential in politics. In 2004, he threw his financial weight behind then-Senator John Kerry in the hope of defeating the incumbent president...Soros is still, to this day, a political backer...In July 2019, he created a PAC for the 2020 election called Democracy PAC and promptly put $5.1 million into it..

"Gyorgy Schwartz...was born in 1930 in Budapest...It was not until 1936 that Gyorgy Schwartz became a Soros...George Soros's father, Tivadar Soros (born Tivadar Schwartz), was a lawyer...Tivadar would not have his family use an obviously Jewish name. In 1936, Schwartz became Soros...

"Tivadar Soros...was of a certain socioeconomic class and had the means to save himself...His...plan was to obtain documents from Christians...He did for..his younger son, who hid out as Sandor Kiss...

"George Soros as Sandor Kiss hid out with...a Ministry of  Agriculture employee. Tivadar Soros paid the man to take...George in and pretend he was his godson..

"...In 1998, Steve Kroft, interviewing George Soros on 60 Minutes, noted that Tivadar Soros had `bribed a government official to swear that you were his godson,' adding `as hundreds of thousands of Jews were being shipped off to the Nazi death camps...George Soros accompanied his phony godfather on his rounds, confiscating property from the Jews.'..For some people...Lajos Ozme...for example--Tivadar Soros charged quite a lot to obtain false documents...

"...George Soros found life in socialist Hungary constricting...By 1947, Soros...decided to go to England...He got on the train without his permit..." 

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..

.

"...`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..." 

Revisiting Emily Tamkin's "The Influence Of Soros" 2020 Book: Pt. 1

 

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

"...In 2015...Jacobin ran an article titled `Counting on Billionaires,' which argued that `Philanthrocapitalists like George Soros want us to believe they can remedy the economic misery that they themselves create.'...

"...George Soros has wielded and continues to have tremendous influence...It may be an understatement to say that George Soros is influential in finance...He became one of the fathers of the modern-day hedge fund, establishing his own fund, Quantum (advised through the firm retaining his name, Soros Fund Management). He is perhaps the most famous currency speculator in history, credited with...`breaking the Bank of England'...

"Soros...survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary...by pretending to be a Christian...

"It is...an understatement to say that Soros is influential in philanthropy. In the late 1970s...he began a foundation called `Open Society.'..."

NPIC: Will the revolution be funded?

George Philanthropist--Bob A. Feldman

Did Multi-Billionaire Democratic Party Funder Bloomberg's Media Firm and Foundation Increase Wealth When Bloomberg Was NYC Mayor?

In his 2017 book, The Givers: Wealth, Power and Philanthropy, Inside Philanthropy media site editor David Callahan described Democratic Party Funder Michael Bloomberg's life after the multi-billionaire (who grew up in Massachusetts) ended his three terms as a "mayor" of New York City, in the following way:

"Michael Bloomberg prepared to step down as mayor of New York City after 12 years on the job...Bloomberg settled into his post-mayoral life...Bloomberg soon plunged back into...day-to-day management of his...media company, Bloomberg L.P....Bloomberg lived extravagantly...owning a private jet and some 13 properties around the world by 2013--which included estates in London, Bermuda, the Hamptons, and Westchester County...

"...Bloomberg...ended up owning 88 percent of a company that now has 19,000 employees and $9 billion in annual revenue. During his years as mayor, the value of the company had grown steadily. Bloomberg was worth just under $5 billion as he took office in 2002. By the time he left, that figure had soared to $33 billion. Within 2 years of leaving City Hall, his wealth had climbed higher still, to over $40 billion."

The same book also recalled how U.S. Multi-Billionaire Oligarch Bloomberg apparently used his "charitable" foundation to gain political power in New York City, to retain political power in New York City during his years as "mayor" and to continue to influence U.S. political decision-making after the Plutocrat from Massachusetts was no longer New York City's "mayor:"

"Bloomberg...started giving more once at City Hall...He gave many millions to nonprofit groups around the city--giving that some saw as a naked effort to co-opt critics and bolster his power...Never before had a major public official in the United States so adroitly used philanthropy to advance his agenda--just as Bloomberg set a new record for spending his own money to get elected in the first place.

"Bloomberg...quietly built up...his philanthropy during his years in government. He bought a $45 million...mansion on 78th and Madison in 2006 to house his foundation, and in 2010, he appointed his longtime aide Patricia Harris as CEO of Bloomberg Philanthropies, a job she took on while still working at City Hall...You may have imagined that Michael Bloomberg's run as a power player would end when he stepped down as mayor of New York. Of course, nothing of the kind was true. He simply pivoted to pull other levers of influence. Bloomberg...used his great wealth to buy his way into office...

"...Not long before he was elected mayor of New York in 2001, Michael Bloomberg ran into his old friend Vartan Gregorian on the street in New York. Gregorian led the Carnegie Corporation...Bloomberg...soon sent over a very large check to Carnegie, which the foundation was free to use as it saw fit. More big checks followed after Bloomberg took office, arriving each December...Carnegie spread the money...to hundreds of nonprofits around the city, particularly arts and cultural groups. Ultimately, by 2010 more than $200 million would flow from Bloomberg...While the grants were made by Carnegie,...Bloomberg stayed anonymous...The mayor had quietly become one of the largest...funders of nonprofits in the city...

"...The New York Times reported that when Bloomberg was pushing the City Council to revise the city's term limits law, to allow him to run for a third term as mayor, his `aides asked several groups that had received Carnegie grants to lobby for the change publicly'...The change in the law was ultimately approved, allowing Bloomberg to run for a third term in 2009...Bloomberg eked out a narrow victory...He spent $103 million on his final race for office, or about $183 per vote.

"The following year, Bloomberg pulled the plug on the Carnegie grants program for city nonprofits..."

Did U.S. Multi-Billionaire Oligarch Zuckerberg Use Chan Zuckerberg Initiative To Avoid Paying Fair Share Of Taxes?

Like U.S. Multi-Billionaire Oligarch Bill Gates, the U.S. Multi-Billionaire Oligarch Mark Zuckerberg apparently has avoided paying a fair share of local, state and federal taxes in the USA by setting up a "charitable" organization. As Inside Philanthropy media site editor David Callahan noted in his 2017 The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy In A New Gilded Age book:

"On December 1, 2015, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan pledged to use 99 percent of their shares in Facebook to make the world a better place...These shares were worth about $45 billion...

"...ProPublica's Jesse Eisenberg...blasted the couple's choice to create a limited liability corporation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, to handle their good works. That structure would allow them to avoid taxes, as well as oversight, said Eisenberg, since LLCs don't have to disclose their activities...Eisenberg wrote that `we are turning into a society of oligarchs. And I am not...excited...to welcome the new Silicon Valley overlords.'

"Other critics echoed these points...with charges that Zuckerberg and Chan's `non-charity charity,' as The Atlantic dubbed it, amounted to tax avoidance and an undemocratic power grab...

"...Many funders, particularly the newer givers arriving on the scene with huge fortunes, don't reveal much about their giving, and nonprofit laws allow rivers of money to sluice through society in opaque ways...Philanthropists often operate subtly, working behind the scenes to set agendas and shape decisions...Their fingerprints can be hard to see...These givers are becoming more powerful while ordinary Americans struggle to get their voices heard at all..."

The same book also observed:

"Many techies like to think they are on a grand mission to improve life on earth...But the moral blind spots...can be enormous. For instance, Facebook and Google...have both engaged in elaborate tax avoidance schemes using offshore subsidiaries..."

How Super-Rich in USA Block Radical Democratization Of U.S. Society

In his 1975 book, More Power Than We Know: The People's Movement Toward Democracy, long-time U.S. antiwar Movement organizer and 1960's Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial Defendant Dave Dellinger indicated how Super-Rich folks in the USA [like Multi-Billionair Oligarch Bill Gates in 21st-century, for example] block the creation of a radically democratized society in the United States:

"...The persons who rob through banks are enabled to throw their weight around in ways that would make a feudal baron envious...They can use some of their stolen money to set up tax-exempt foundations, which often play a more decisive role in determining public policy and implementation of the law than either elected officials or the courts. They can serve as trustees of both private and state universities...They can buy a string of newspapers and radio and television stations and see that the news is filtered to the public in accord with their private standards of public policy...By their ownership of the media they can decide which members of the Movement are accepted as national spokesmen [or spokeswomen] and which get favorable or unfavorable publicity. They can decide which Movement activities are sympathetically reported and which caricatured and condemned, which aspirants for office have their name and faces constantly in public view, an absolute pre-condition for a successful campaign. In these and other ways they can exercise grossly undemocratic influence on both the Establishment and the forces that oppose it..." 

Time To Limit Life Of Billionaire Oligarch Bill Gates's Foundation?

Obama Awarding  Medal To Billionaire Oligarch Bill Gates  In November 2016

As University of Virginia Commonwealth Professor of History  Oliver Zunz observed in his 2011 Philanthropy In America book, "the foundation that Bill and Melinda Gates created in 2000 with their Microsoft fortune, reinforced by investor Warren Buffett's gift of part of his own fortune to it, is the world's largest...foundation, today's counterpart of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1970's and the Ford Foundation in the 1960's.

But as the Philanthropy In America book also recalled:

"In drafting...tax legislation in the Senate Finance Committee [in 1969], Senator [Albert] Gore [Sr.] introduced...clause that limited the life of foundations to 40 years. `The record shows,' Gore argued, `that in overwhelming proportions and instances foundations are created for the purpose of tax avoidance, to extend economic benefits to members of the creator's family and to continue family ownership and control of property.'...

"...There was also some support on the left for putting a legal limit on a foundation's life...But...liberal philanthropists were opposed...The foundations countered [Gore's] charges against them...and the amendment to defeat the death sentence [proposed by Gore Sr. to put a legal limit on a foundation's life] passed the Senate 53 to 35 [in 1969]..."

How CIA's `QRHELPFUL' Covert Action Program Helped Polish `Solidarity' Group In 1980s: Part 4

During the 1980s a group in Poland that Lech Walesa led, called "Solidarity," was apparently secretly supported by the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] of the Republican Reagan administration. As the Chair and Director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS]'s Transnational Threats Project, Seth G. Jones, recalled in his 2018 book, A Covert Action: Reagan, The CIA, and The Cold War Struggle in Poland:

"Dick Malzahn and other CIA operatives overseeing QRHELPFUL...had assets. But how would they infiltrate money and material into Poland?...Since a direct hand-off of aid from CIA to Solidarity would have risked discovery, case officers and their assets used `ratlines,' in CIA parlance...The operatives utilized smugglers, philanthropists, publishers, and others to move supplies into Poland...The use of assets maximized secrecy by hiding the hand of the CIA...

"Sweden was a primary point of origin for QRHELPFUL infiltration. Somewhere between one quarter and one half of all material entering Poland arrived from Sweden...In 1983 [U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director] Bill Casey flew to Sweden to ask Prime Minister Olof Palme for assistance. Casey wanted to establish a pipeline to funnel supplies to Solidarity on a regular basis...Palme agreed to help. The CIA now had top cover to use ports, ships, and smugglers to move material to...Solidarity...

"...The CIA obligated nearly $1.5 million to Solidarity in fiscal year 1983...In Bonn, a German CIA asset...codenamed QACARROTTOP, passed CIA money from his foundation to a Catholic clergyman...QACARROTTOP also gave funds to the Solidarity offices in Paris and Brussels using CIA money masked as foundation donations...Moscow and Warsaw were accurate in assuming the CIA was involved in aid to opposition groups..." (end of Part 4)

Did Democracy Now! Show Fail To Expose 2013 to 2017 `De Blasiogate Scandal'?

Democracy Now! Co-Host/Rutgers U. Professor Gonzalez with NYC Mayor de Blasio

Near the end of his 2017 book, Reclaiming Gotham: Bill De Blasio and The Movement to End America's Tale of Two Cities, the New York Daily News columnist from 1987 to 2016  (who also began moonlighting in 1996 as the Democracy Now! radio-cable tv show host that former LBJ Press Secretary Bill Moyers' Schumann Media Center foundation has funded in recent years), Rutgers University Professor of Journalism Juan Gonzalez, asserts that "once prosecutors concluded their investigation, the cloud surrounding the de Blasio administration" in New York City "quickly dissipated."

Yet most grassroots Movement activists and New York City tenants (who are generally not invited very much by the Democracy Now! show producers to be interviewed on Democracy Now!) don't agree that "the cloud surrounding the de Blasio administration" in New York City has "dissipated." For as Gonzalez, himself, observed in his book:

"...On March 16 [2017]...federal investigators said they found the mayor and his aides had `solicited donations from individuals who sought official favors from the city,' and that de Blasio had subsequently intervened with city agencies on behalf of those same donors...

"...Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance...blasted de Blasio's 2014 fundraising scheme as `contrary to the intent and the spirit of the laws that impose campaign contribution limits.'...

"Vance's letters...offered...details of how de Blasio and those around him had resorted to...dark money fundraising and skirting of campaign spending limits...It also revealed that Governor Andrew Cuomo was initially involved along with de Blasio in approving the strategy, which top state Democrats dubbed the `Coordinated Campaign.'...

"The Putnam County Democratic Committee, for example, received more than $671,000 from a few wealth donors that summer...Within days, the committee transferred $640,000 to the senate campaigns of two Democrats in the county, thus evading state law that limited individual donations of money to a political candidate to $10,300...The two Democratic senate candidates, according to Vance, then `immediately expanded virtually all of the funds on political consultants such as Berlin Rosen, AKPD, and Red Horse Strategies'--firms whose executives were close friends or advisers of de Blasio.

"In other words, the mayor and his aides raised the money, and then used the state committees as virtual pass through to the Democratic Senate candidates, with the candidates spending the money on the very consultants who also happened to work for the mayor..."

But in the early part of his 2017 Reclaiming Gotham book,  the long-time Democracy Now! show co-host still claimed that:

"...The de Blasio phenomenon, is a fascinating political tale of...activists who brilliantly figured out how to win control of our greatest city...De Blasio rolled out a dizzying set of reforms...De Blasio is...the most prominent example of the new progressive leaders..."

Besides being the nephew of Donald Wilhelm, Jr., who was "a long-time adviser of the shah of Iran, and most likely, a CIA agent,' according to Gonzalez's book, New York City Mayor De Blasio is also the son of Warren Wilhelm Jr., who "in 1950," was "a consultant for Harvard's Russian Research Center, `a think-tank with financial help from the CIA,' who "later worked for several years...at oil giant Texaco's Manhattan headquarters" and of Maria de Blasio, who was a research assistant at Time magazine.

Long-time Democracy Now! show co-host  and former New York Daily News columnist Gonzalez claimed in his 2017 book that de Blasio's mother "never flagged in her support of the downtrodden and of left-wing social causes." Yet, as the Boston Globe recalled in a Sept. 30, 2013 article, “De Blasio moved to Cambridge in 1966, when he was 5” and “his mother, Maria, was a public relations manager at Polaroid.”

The old Polaroid Corporation (that went bankrupt in 2001, had its assets purchased by OEP Imaging Corporation in 2002 and ceased to exist in 2002), in whose public relations department the now-deceased Maria de Blasio Wilhelm worked for nearly 20 years, was formed in 1937 by Edwin Land, with the financial backing of Wall Street investment bankers like James P. Warburg. During World War II Polaroid profited from the war by supplying “$2 million dollars’ worth of still [3-D] Vectographs to the U.S. military,” producing “filters for goggles” for U.S. Navy gunners, and making “periscopes, lightweight stereoscopic rangefinders, aerial cameras, the Norden bombsight, and a mechanism that antiaircraft gunners could use in training their tracer fire,” according to Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land by Victor McEllheny. The same book also recalled that during World War II, “the Navy asked Polaroid to work on a plane-launched, guided anti-ship bomb,” “for the thousand-pound guided bomb, the Navy awarded a contract that paid a total of $7 million dollars to Polaroid over several years” and “the contract represented a substantial fraction of the company’s wartime business.”

During the Korean War, Cold War and Vietnam War eras of the 1950s and 1960s, Polaroid President and Chairman Land also headed the Republican Eisenhower administration’s Technological Capabilities Panel’s intelligence project that helped the CIA develop its secret U-2 spy plane and spy satellite programs. In addition, as a member of both the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities and the President’s Science Advisory Committee (along with former Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank board chairman and MIT President James Killian), Polaroid’s president and chairman was “virtually in control of the development of U.S. technical means for gathering intelligence, especially in the CIA and the National Security Agency, which monitored communications throughout the world” during the late 1950s and early 1960s, according to Insisting On The Impossible.

During the years that de Blasio’s mother was apparently working for Land as a Polaroid Corporation public relations manager, the recipient of the National Education Association [NEA]’s 2012 Rosa Parks Memorial Award, Caroline Hunter, discovered that Land’s Polaroid Corporation was also collaborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa. As the NEA website recalled:

“At the age of 21, fresh out of Xavier University, New Orleans, Hunter landed a good job as a chemist at the Polaroid Corporation. Then one day, quite by chance, she spotted in her workplace an enlarged South African photo identification card. The year was 1970, decades before the anti-apartheid movement in the U.S. had gathered steam. But Caroline Hunter knew the significance of that photo identification card. It was part of what Nelson Mandela called `the hated document’— that is, the South African passbook all Blacks in South Africa were required to carry at all times. It was an important link in the chain that the Apartheid regime used to control and monitor the movement of Blacks.

“Polaroid had in fact been doing business with the apartheid government of South Africa for years. Most important was its ID-2 system, which consisted of a camera, instant processor and laminator. It could generate a photo identification card in just two minutes and more than 200 in an hour—exactly the technology the apartheid government needed to enforce its Pass Laws Act.

“After finding the mock passbook, Caroline Hunter and her colleague (and later husband) Ken Williams, a photographer at Polaroid, launched their campaign. They distributed fliers around the workplace, alerting their colleagues to Polaroid’s complicity with apartheid. They organized demonstrations outside the company’s headquarters, and they spoke out to the larger community. Up until this point, Polaroid had a reputation as a liberal company—`an equal opportunity’ employer. But the Polaroid management did not take well to the protests, and they fired Hunter and Williams…”

In his book Sharpville: An Apartheid Massacre and Its Consequences, Tom Lodge also wrote that “the formation of the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM) by black employees at Polaroid’s Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters signaled wider concerns with US-South African connections: the PRWM was formed to stop Polaroid’s processing of film for South Africa’s passbooks…” And according to Insisting On The Impossible:

 “…Early in 1971, demonstrators protesting Polaroid’s involvement in South Africa and Land’s key role in defense nearly prevented Land from speaking about his color-view research at the American Physical Society in New York…In 1970 and 1971, employees and outsiders demanded that Polaroid cease selling its products in South Africa, including its photo-identification equipment…Some critics even took out large advertisements urging a boycott of Polaroid products. To meet the criticism, Polaroid sent a committee…to South Africa. The committee…recommended continuing sales through Polaroid’s South African dealer, which amounted to $1.5 million a year…”

And Polaroid apparently did not stop selling its products in South Africa until 1977.

Yet during de Blasio’s years as a teenage junior high school and high school student government politico in Cambridge during the 1970s (who was also profiled in the Boston Globe during the late 1970s) he apparently never questioned the morality of the political role his mother was apparently playing as a public relations manager for a corporation that was collaborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Despite long-time Democracy Now! co-host Gonzalez's claim in the early part of his 2017 Reclaiming Gotham book that de Blasio "rolled out a dizzying set of reforms" and is "the most prominent example of the new progressive leaders," most Movement grassroots activists and New York City tenants probably don't think that de Blasio has been that progressive politically as mayor of New York City since early 2014. As the Democracy Now! co-host, himself, observed, for example, in the latter part of his 2017 Reclaiming Gotham book:

"...De Blasio...brought back 66-year-old William Bratton, the city's police commissioner during the early 1990s under Rudy Giuliani...to run the police department a second time...Many leaders in the African-American and Latino communities were skeptical about Bratton's return...By appointing Bratton as his police commissioner, de Blasio...hoped Bratton's presence would reassure...business leaders...The choking death of an unarmed black man, Eric Garner, by a Staten Island cop...opened a rift between de Blasio and...Black Lives Matter advocates...

"...Community leaders criticized his...housing plan because more than two-third of all new housing would still be market rate, and...only a small percentage of the...units would be geared to the lowest income families...By the end of his third year in office, Mayor de Blasio had not significantly improved the availability for New York's lowest-income families, nor had he ameliorated the City's homeless population, as the number of homeless residents in city shelters reached a record 60,000 in 2016..."

In the latter part of his book, Gonzalez also noted how, in exchange for campaign contributions and offering jobs as "consultants" to de Blasio associates, certain special corporate interests apparently received special benefits and favors from de Blasio's "progressive" administration:

"...Before it was closed down in March 2016, Campaign for One New York raised more than $4 million, much of it from wealthy donors...with business before the city...Joseph Dussich, the owner of a company that sells rat-repellent trash...happened to have donated $100,000 to the Campaign for One New York and subsequently received a Parks Department contract to supply the agency his company's trash bags...A transportation executive...gave $100,000 to de Blasio's effort to win a Democratic majority in the state senate, and then received funding from a wage subsidy program created by de Blasio...Two Trees Management, a real estate firm that gave $100,000 to the Campaign for One New York...negotiated a deal with de Blasio to win development rights for a large residential building at the Old Domino factory along the Brooklyn waterfront...

"Often, the same companies hired friends and...advisors to the mayor as their consultants. Two Trees...hired Jonathan Rosen of...Berlin Rosen...Rosen...is one of de Blasio's closest friends and was a key campaign strategist for the mayor. Berlin Rosen, along with Hilltop Public Solutions, another company run by top de Blasio advisers, Nick Baldick andBill Hyers, and AKPD, headed by another mayoral strategist, John Del Cecato, were collectively paid more than $2 million by One New York...Rosen also represented some of the city's biggest real estate companies, all of which have major business interactions with city government...He...skirted legal regulations that require lobbyists to register with the city and file annual report disclosing who their clients are and which city agencies they appear before..."

Yet between 2013 and 2017, the New York City-based parallel left Democracy Now! daily radio-cable tv show apparently failed to expose the apparently corrupt way that the Democratic de Blasio administration's officials was governing between 2013 and 2017, despite the Democracy Now! media firm's claim that it "speaks truth to power." One reason might be because, as Rutgers University Professor of Journalism Gonzalez noted in the "Afterword" to his 2017 Reclaiming Gotham book, the long-time Democracy Now! co-host and former New York Daily News columnist felt "gratitude to the...government officials in New York...who graciously consented to be interviewed for this book." A second reason might be, as New York City Movement organizer and Movement writer Josmar Trujillo observed in a Sept.14, 2017 HuffPost website article, "the fundamental problem with Gonzalez and middle of the road progressives in the city that support de Blasio is that they’re so enthralled by the idea of a progressive ally in City Hall that they’ve failed to hold him accountable in any meaningful way" because "he’s their guy!"

But as Trujillo also observed in his Sept. 2017 review of the long-time Democracy Now! co-host's Reclaiming Gotham book:

"...Gonzalez’ ahistorical, rose-tinted revisioning of de Blasio’s impact on NYC inequality is emblematic of progressives who’ve chosen to turn a blind eye to the true suffering of poor and working class people.

"Not only is de Blasio’s developer-based housing plan a trojan horse for gentrification, as activists across the city have correctly pointed out, the city is experiencing record homelessness, which de Blasio (not singularly responsible, but still responsible) has responded to with policing and a even callous smearing of panhandlers. Not only is the Mayor dedicated to empowering the NYPD and loyal to a racist policing philosophy, but income inequality has actually grown under this administration. What exactly is there to celebrate again?

"...If Gonzalez regurgitates the notion that Bill de Blasio is the standard bearer of effective progressivism, he is almost to a tee supporting the narrative that Berlin Rosen was paid to put forward. Their job was to spin the Mayor’s accomplishments for the working people of New York City as bold, historic, and unprecedented. Reclaiming Gotham does all of that...Gonzalez now has apparently become an appendage to de Blasio with his chief purpose seeming to be to try to reconcile all of the bullshit I’ve laid out (and I could go on) with an effective endorsement of de Blasio not only as mayor, but as a leader of a movement that’s an antidote for Donald Trump.

"...Bill de Blasio is here for...developers...These are the longtime owners of New York City. They don’t need to reclaim it. What they need is a progressive salesman to make us all think he’s the fighting the good fight for the little guy. And even that salesman needs salesmen like Gonzalez...."

Ford Foundation's Ex-Prez McGeorge Bundy: Pushed For 1960's Vietnam War Escalation

Former Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy and LBJ

During the 1960's most New Left Movement people in the United States protested against the Democratic Johnson administration's policy of escalating U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, following the November 22, 1963 elimination of JFK in Dallas, Texas. Yet between 1966 and 1979, the president of the U.S. power elite's multi-billion dollar corporate tax-exempted Ford Foundation (that has funded many tax-exempt liberal-left NGOs in 21st-century with "charitable grants"), the now-deceased McGeorge Bundy, was one of the Democratic Johnson administration officials responsible for the 1965 escalation of U.S. military intervention in Vietnam. As University of Kentucky Alumni Professor of History George C. Herring noted in his 1994 University of Texas Press book, LBJ and Vietnam: A Different Kind of War:

"...LBJ inherited...McGeorge Bundy special assistant for national security affairs with an office in the White House basement...Bundy had carved out a position in the Kennedy White House...He was usually the first to see Johnson on an issue and the last one to see him before a decision was made. During the months when the commitment in Vietnam was steadily escalating, Bundy and [then-Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara were the key figures. The national security adviser was in Vietnam...on February 7, 1965 and he came back a firm advocate of escalation...Through the end of 1965...he was at the center of Vietnam policy making...

"Known around Washington as the `awesome foursome.' [Democratic U.S. President Lyndon] Johnson, Bundy, McNamara, and [former Rockefeller Foundation President and then-Secretary of State Dean] Rusk...began to meet informally for lunch at the White House in 1964, usually on Tuesday. The `Tuesday Lunch'...evolved into the primary instrument for management of the Vietnam War...At the top, the `awesome foursome' continued  throughout 1965 to run the war...The Tuesday lunch continued to be the primary means for making major wartime decisions. It stayed small, although Press Secretary [and Schumann Media Center foundation president and Democracy Now! show funder] Bill Moyers and Director of Central Intelligence Adm. William Raborn were added. Over lunch in the White House the president and his top advisers approved bombing targets, discussed force increases...."

The 1999 HarperCollins book by Richard H. Shultz Jr., titled The Secret War Against Hanoi, also contains a reference to the historical role that former Ford Foundation president Bundy played in pushing for an escalation of U.S. military intervention in the 1960's:

"McGeorge Bundy was Kennedy's special assistant for national security affairs. Bundy would chair the 303 Committee,whose jurisdiction came to include all U.S. covert operations, including those directed against North Vietnam by the CIA and the military...The 303 Committee was assigned responsibility for White House control of covert action, including paramilitary operations. Its jurisdiction came to include all important covert operations worldwide. The 303 Committee had responsibility for the CIA's 1961-1963 operations against North Vietnam. In 1964, military-directed covert action against North Vietnam would become one of its principal accounts. Members of the committee included McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser...Bundy chaired the committee...OPLAN 34A was to begin--as a one-year program of operations, divided into three escalating, 4-month phases...In mid-January of 1964, Lyndon Johnson approved the...Bundy recommendations...MacBundy...wanted the squeeze put on Hanoi..."

Yet in his 2002 book, titled Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg recalled:

"[In May 1971] I took the shuttle to go to a lecture at the Council on Foreign Relations by McGeorge Bundy...Someone said it was his bid to be considered for secretary of state in the next Democratic administration, after he left the Ford Foundation...I listened to Bundy iin New York, saying there had been `no intent to mislead Congress' in connection with the passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution; the resolution `was not meant to be (in Nicholas Katzenbach's phrase in 1967) a `functional equivalent of a declaration of war.'..."
"It was a surreal experience...to be sitting in a room surrounded by my fellow war criminals, listening to Johnson's assistant for national security [and then-Ford Foundation president] tell lies about the war...On January 27 [1965] though I didn't know it at the time, McNamara and [later Ford Foundation president] McGeorge Bundy argued forcefully to the president that the time had come `to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change of Communist policy.'...ON January 28 [1965] De Soto patrols, with the mission of provoking an attack, were ordered back into the Tonkin Gulf for the first time in five months. Naval retaliatory forces were to be in position before the patrols commenced on February 3 [1965]..."