SOROS: [W]ell, 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.

In 2000 Soros wrote a foreword to a book by his father, which had originally been published decades earlier. In it, Soros recalled the Nazi occupation of Hungary and described his life during that time in a way that has come across as odd to many people. "It is a sacrilegious thing to say," he wrote, "but these ten months were the happiest times of my life. . . . We were pursued by evil forces and we were clearly on the side of the angels because we were unjustly persecuted; moreover, we were trying not only to save ourselves but also to save others."

ADULT CONTENT.

Since this story doesn't lend itself well to a sound bite, let me be clear: No one is trying to make the case that a fourteen-year-old child was evil for trying to survive. The point is that Soros endured horrors in his childhood that most people can't even fathom. These are events that would change the life of anyone who experienced them. How Soros has dealt with these events, in a way that he himself admits most see as "sacrilegious" and "strange," is an undeniably important window into his thought process.

Soros had made very similar comments a couple of years earlier in the 60 Minutes segment: It was, actually, probably the happiest year of my life. For me, it was a very positive experience. It's a strange thing because you see incredible suffering around you and the fact you are in considerable danger yourself. But you're fourteen years old and you don't believe that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have a belief in your father. It's a very happy-making, exhilarating experience.

When the communists swallowed Hungary in 1947, the Soros family relocated to England, where George attended the London School of Economics. In his third year there, he selected the Viennese philosopher Professor Karl Popper as his "tutor."

Soros would later adopt Popper's idea of an "Open Society" as a vision of a future governed by universal standards and relativist principles, as opposed to "closed" societies that were based on absolute or "self-evident" truths. The one part of Popper's philosophy that Soros found objectionable later in life? His admiration for the United States. Popper said his first trip to America "tore me forever out of a depression caused by the overwhelming influence of Marxism in postwar Europe." He went back twenty-five times, gushing "each time I have been more deeply impressed."

Soros found that optimism to be fleeting: Who would have thought sixty years ago, when Karl Popper wrote Open Society and Its Enemies, that the United States itself could pose a threat to open society? Yet, this is what is happening, both internally and externally.

In 1956, Soros moved to New York City. At the time, he admits, he "did not particularly care for the United States. . . . [They] were, well, commercial, crass, and so on." He had devised a "five-year plan" to save half a million dollars and then return to Europe. Somewhere along the way that plan evidently changed and Soros instead became a citizen. Five hundred grand, after all, was thinking small, and George Soros always thinks big.

What the Constitution Ought to Be

In his 2003 book, The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros wrote that the principles of America's Declaration of Independence "are not self-evident truths but arrangements necessitated by our inherently imperfect understanding." In 2010, the Open Society Institute, which Soros founded, was one of the principal sponsors of a conference on "The Constitution in 2020," the purpose of which was to produce "a progressive vision of what the Constitution ought to be." He also described the "bubble of American supremacy" as the greatest threat to world peace.

He eventually found himself as a portfolio manager at the investment bank Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder and established the "Double Eagle Fund" with $4 million in capital, including $250,000 of his own money. Four years later, the Double Eagle Fund changed its name to the "Soros Fund." By 1985, the fund had again been renamed, this time to the "Quantum Fund." It was worth more than $1 billion.

"[A] global open society requires affirmative action on a global scale."

To turn $4 million into $1 billion, you have to be smart, and Soros has never had trouble being amazed by his own brilliance. When an interviewer once told him, "There are some people who believe it's possible to be too smart in this business and that the smartest people are rarely the most successful investors," Soros responded simply: "I hope you are wrong."

Soros built his fortune not only with smarts, but with an ethical relationship with the rest of humanity that some would call . . . disconnected. Others, like me, for instance, would call it borderline malbonega (that's Esperanto for "evil").

Lessons in Esperanto

Man egema-(adj) Having an intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth or power. Greedy.

Soros was a speculator who, by his own account, was not constrained by scruples. One of his more notorious exploits was his short-selling of the British pound, forcing a devaluation of the British currency. For those of you who aren't glued to CNBC, that basically meant that Soros was rooting for the British currency to take a nosedive. He was right, and he pocketed a billion dollars off the trade.

"When I sold sterling short in 1992," he wrote in his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism: The Open Society Endangered, "the Bank of England was on the other side of my transactions and I was taking money out of the pockets of British taxpayers. But if I had tried to take the social consequences into account, it would have thrown off my risk/reward calculation, and my chances of being successful would have been reduced."

It's like a truck driver saying, "Sure, I felt the bumps. But if I stopped to think about the fact that each bump was a human being that I was running over, I would have never made the delivery on time."

Soros would argue that there is no morality necessary in financial markets because markets themselves are amoral. The British pound, for example, would've been devalued anyway-his trade only sped that process up. Or, as the truck driver would say, "Those people would have eventually died at some point anyway."

The Ultimate Insider

Markets might not have morals, but they do have rules. In 2005, Soros was fined $2.9 million after a French court convicted him of insider trading in connection with a takeover bid for the bank Societe Generale.

It's twisted logic, and it's not necessarily been left in his past. In 2010, as the euro was under immense pressure due to the financial crises in countries like Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, a British newspaper reported that "[a] secretive group of Wall Street hedge fund bosses are said to be behind a plot to cash in on the decline of the euro. Representatives of George Soros's investment business were among an all-star line up of Wall Street investors at an 'ideas dinner' at a private townhouse in Manhattan, according to reports."

I guess this proves that playing with economies, and the lives of the taxpayers who participate in them, never gets dull-no matter how much money you have.

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY Regardless of morals, Soros was not content with simply accumulating wealth. He had a far more grandiose ambition: to change the world. To achieve this goal he began investing his wealth in tax-exempt organizations whose purpose was not to produce products for people's consumption, but to produce propaganda for their minds.

These investments began in earnest in 1984 with the creation of the first of his "Open Society Foundations" in Hungary. That was followed in the ensuing years by a series of foundations that he established throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In 1993, Soros established the flagship of his network, the New Yorkbased Open Society Institute (OSI). The stated mission of these foundations was "to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to its citizens," a slogan as believable as a rat-infested diner claiming it serves the "World's Best Coffee."

Soros appointed Aryeh Neier as director of both the Open Society Institute and the entire global network of Soros foundations. Neier, a former sixties radical, spent fifteen years as an operative of the ACLU, including eight years as its national executive director. Neier was also the founder and executive director of Human Rights Watch, a group famous for absurdly making the United States and Israel the chief targets of its "human rights" protests.

Franchise Opportunities Available

Today, the Open Society Foundations funded by Soros and run by Neier are active in more than seventy countries around the world and his Open Society Institute is a $1.9 billion operation.

Soros claims that he has donated over $7 billion to his Open Society organizations and he has successfully organized other billionaires to follow his example. Among those that have received his money: Organizations that oppose America's post-9/11 national security measures, such as the ACLU and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, which has persuaded the governments of more than four hundred American cities to pledge noncompliance with the Patriot Act; The Center for Constitutional Rights, founded by four longtime supporters of communist causes, which has condemned the "immigration sweeps, ghost detentions, extraordinary rendition, and every other illegal program the government has devised" in response to "the so-called War on Terror"; Organizations that promote "open borders" and full citizenship rights for illegal aliens such as the American Immigration Council and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which tries to shield illegal aliens from the law; Organizations such as the Sentencing Project, which attacks the American prison system as racist; The Gamaliel Foundation and the Midwest Academy, whose radical instructors train political organizers, Barack Obama among them, to fight for "social, economic and racial justice"; The pseudo-anarchist Ruckus Society ("actions speak louder than words"); The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an organization founded by self-declared (former, if you listen to him) communist Van Jones.

Because his overall goal is the transformation of American society, Soros has also made donations-really investments-in an astonishing number of media organizations and activist groups: *

Lessons in Esperanto

Iluzio-(n) A deceptive appearance or impression. Illusion.

NBC, ABC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post; The Columbia Journalism Review and ProPublica; The Center for Public Integrity, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Lens, the Columbia School of Journalism, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Organization of News Ombudsmen, National Public Radio, the socialist American Prospect Inc.; The far-left media organizations the Nation Institute, Pacifica Foundation, Independent Media Center, Media Fund, Independent Media Institute, and Media Matters For America; Left-wing religious organizations such as Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good; Sojourners, whose founder, Jim Wallis, merits a chapter of his own; People Improving Communities through Organizing; and Catholics for Choice, a nominally Catholic organization that "believes in a world where everyone has equal access to . . . safe and legal abortion services"; Global Exchange, whose founder, Medea Benjamin, is a pro-Castro radical who created Iraq Occupation Watch for the purpose of encouraging American troops to desert. In December 2004, Benjamin announced that Global Exchange would be sending aid to the families of terrorist insurgents who were fighting American troops in Iraq.

The Tides Foundation, which receives cash from individuals, groups, and other foundations and then funnels it to designated left-wing recipients. Having given more than $400 million to "progressive nonprofit organizations" since 2000, Tides is the chosen vehicle for many progressives to donate cash to questionable organizations without leaving their fingerprints on it.

Various groups supporting drug-legalization and needle-exchange programs. In 1996, former Carter administration official Joseph Califano called Soros "the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization."

Groups promoting physician-assisted suicide such as the Project on Death in America (PDA), whose purpose was to provide "end-of-life" assistance and to enact public policy that would "transform the culture and experience of dying and bereavement." Over a nine-year period, the Open Society Institute gave $45 million to PDA.

Leftist organizations whose perspectives are "internationalist" and who see American sovereignty as an obstacle to their goals, such as the United Nations Foundation and the Coalition for an International Criminal Court, which sought to subordinate American criminal justice to an international prosecutor. Soros once wrote: "In short, we need a global society to support our global economy." "The sovereignty of states must be subordinated to international law and international institutions."

MAN OF ACTION.

George Soros is not a man who simply thinks big; he puts his ideas, and his money, into action. Soros showed just how serious he was about global regime change by deploying his Open Society Institutes, and the cluster of socially involved organizations he had built around them, in efforts to overthrow the governments of several countries, while also banking loads of cash on the side.

Right around the turn of this century, Soros began to target Central Asian countries that were former members of the Soviet bloc. These nations were generally in a state of disintegration under the pressures of American military and economic power. Among the regimes in Europe that Soros himself took credit for overthrowing were those in Serbia, Croatia, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where, according to the Los Angeles Times, he played an "important role" in preparing the country for a revolt against their president. "I'm delighted by what happened in Georgia," Soros said, "and I take great pride in having contributed to it."

Soros's preferred method in these countries was to set up Open Society Institutes, which had a broad mandate to influence and infiltrate social institutions and media outlets, and to fund activist organizations that could organize street protests charging the existing regimes with corruption and other crimes. Franjo Tudjman, the late president of Croatia who fought a long (and, ultimately, losing) battle with Soros, described his opponents this way: [Soros and his allies] have spread their tentacles throughout the whole of our society. . . . [Their aim is to] control of all spheres of life . . . setting up a state within a state. . . .

Soros not only admitted to this subversion, he in fact became addicted to the experimentation: When you try to improve society you affect different people and different interests differently and they are not actually commensurate, you very often have all kinds of unintended adverse consequences. So I had to experiment. And it was a learning process. The first part was this subversive activity, disrupting repressive regimes. That was a lot of fun and that's actually what got me hooked on this whole enterprise. Seeing what worked in one country, trying it in the other country.

That image in your mind of an evil billionaire dictating world events while maniacally laughing from his midtown penthouse apartment with a furry white cat on his lap may not be that far off. These methods were effective in small, poor countries, but America presented much larger problems. So he went right to the top.

Around the time that George Soros launched the Open Society Institute, he also forged a close relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton, the new president and first lady. "We actually work together as a team," he boasted. When the Clintons took office in early 1993, they faced the daunting task of cultivating a productive relationship with the collapsed Soviet empire, which was attempting to rise from its ruins. Soros was chosen to serve as a key adviser on the project.

Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard professor whose work Soros had previously funded through one of his foundations, was tapped to head the economic team to oversee Russia's transformation to a market economy. Soros worked closely with Sachs, and the pair held such enormous sway over Russian president Boris Yeltsin that Soros once quipped "the former Soviet Empire is now called the Soros Empire."

Lessons in Esperanto

Egoista-(adj) Lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure. Selfish.

That new empire turned out to be massively corrupt. An enormous money-laundering scheme, which came to be known as "Russiagate," led to the diversion of $100 billion out of the country and the transfer of valuable public properties into private hands for a fraction of their value.

The mess was eventually investigated by the U.S. House Banking Committee and Soros was called to testify. He denied any responsibility but did admit that he had used insider access in a deal to acquire a large portion of Sidanko Oil. Soros further acknowledged that some of the missing Russian assets had made their way into his personal investment portfolio and conceded that the Sidanko deal "was part of the crony stuff that was going on." House Banking Committee chairman Jim Leach later characterized the entire sordid affair as "one of the greatest social robberies in human history."

Think about the significance of this for a moment. The Soviet Union's opportunity for transition to a free-market economy could have been the knockout blow in a century-long battle between capitalism and communism. If capitalism were to have worked in the former Soviet Union, capitalism could work anywhere. There would be no more plausible arguments to be made for socialism and communism. With all of that on the line, the man with his fingers deep in the cookie jar was none other than George Soros. It's no wonder that the Soviet transition was so messy, corrupt, and for a select few, very, very profitable.

SHADOW PARTY.

Another area of close collaboration between the Clintons and Soros was the campaign to socialize the American health-care system. The defeat of Hillarycare convinced Soros that he would have to change the political process if progressive ideas were to triumph. The key would be to create the illusion of a mass movement so that members of Congress would feel that everywhere they looked-academic institutions, the business community, religious groups, the media-there was a clamor for reform.

Lessons in Esperanto