- LOS ANGELES -- George Soros
has donated almost $5bn (£3bn) over the years to help emerging
democracies
in Eastern Europe recover from the shadow of tyranny. Now he is applying
the same principles, and a large chunk of his fortune, to the United
States,
where he believes the defeat of George Bush in next year's presidential
election is "a matter of life and death".
-
- So far, he has spent more than $15m: two-thirds of it
going to a liberal-leaning group called America Coming Together, which
intends to mobilise voters in battleground states next November; $3m of
it going to a new Washington think-tank run by Bill Clinton's former chief
of staff, John Podesta; and $2.5m to the passionately anti-Bush internet
lobbying group MoveOn.org, to help pay for television advertisements
attacking
the President.
-
- Political donations on this scale have precedents. On
the right, figures such as Richard Mellon Scaife and Howard Ahmanson have
given hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades on political
projects both high (setting up the Heritage Foundation think-tank, the
driving engine of the Reagan presidency) and low (bankrolling
investigations
into President Clinton's sexual indiscretions and the suicide of the White
House insider Vincent Foster).
-
- But on the left it is almost unheard of. Mr Soros has
given money to political campaigns before - $122,000 in the 2000 elections
alone. This, though, is very different. In recent interviews he has likened
the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the Bush administration to the
political
language of Nazi Germany. And in a forthcoming book, The Bubble of American
Supremacy, he argues that the destructive arrogance of the White House,
in Iraq and elsewhere, is like an overheating of the stock market that
must and will be corrected.
-
- The Hungarian born financier and philanthropist describes
the Bush administration's policies as a crude form of social Darwinism.
"I call it crude because it ignores the role of co-operation in the
survival of the fittest, and puts all the emphasis on competition."
And he explains why the current administration is so much at odds with
the driving ideology of his worldwide Open Society Institute. "The
supremacist ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to
the principles of an open society, which recognise that people have
different
views and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth," he
writes. "When President Bush says, as he does frequently, that freedom
will prevail, he means that America will prevail. In a free and open
society,
people are supposed to decide for themselves what they mean by freedom
and democracy, and not simply follow America's lead ... A chasm has opened
between America and the rest of the world."
-
- Unlike other critics who have made casual comparisons
between the Bush White House and the Nazis, Mr Soros speaks with some
authority
- he survived the German occupation of Budapest as a boy.
-
- That has not deterred prominent Republicans from hooting
with indignation, or from accusing him of hypocrisy because Mr Soros has
been a champion of campaign finance reform intended to keep big-money
donations
out of politics. "It's incredibly ironic that George Soros is trying
to create a more open society by using an unregulated,
under-the-radar-screen,
shadowy, soft-money group to do it," the Republican National Committee
spokeswoman Christine Iverson said recently. The Washington Post has
similar
reservations, writing in a recent editorial: "Wasn't the whole point
of the new campaign finance law to get big checks of this kind out of
politics?
Are these huge donations healthy for small-d democracy, not just big-D
Democrats?" Mr Soros's response seems to be: I will do whatever it
takes, if the result is defeat for President Bush.
-
- If the Republicans are alarmed, it is partly because
the Soros donations are part of a new form of political activism on the
left, one that takes advantage of the internet. MoveOn.org, with its 1.8
million members, has proved it can raise millions of dollars in days for
a liberal cause and act as a counterweight to political organisations,
including the Democratic Party leadership.
-
- © 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=468293
|
