George Soros Events Aim: Remake the Financial Order and the Media

[American Patriot]

Two George Soros Events Aim to Remake the Financial Order and the Media -- So Where's the Reporting?

By Dan Gainor
Published April 06, 2011
| FoxNews.com


FILE: Billionaire financier George Soros speaks at a Reuters Newsmaker event in New York on Sept. 15, 2010.

Apparently, megalomaniacs need schedulers.
Just ask George Soros. The left-wing billionaire is helping fund two major conferences that start on the same day, in two different locations just a three hours apart by car. Two liberal events packed into one long weekend. God created the world in six days. Apparently, Soros, who sees himself as “some kind of god,”needs just a long weekend to start remaking today's world in his image.
The emphasis of both conferences is a familiar one to American voters – change. Soros wants to begin changing the global economy in one event. In the other, his flunkies want to “Change the world. Change the media.”
Now that is change you can believe in. Sadly, those who actually report the news must believe in it because they sure as heck aren’t reporting on Soros or either event. And that’s even though staffers or even executives from Reuters, the Financial Times, NPR, [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]PBS[/COLOR][/COLOR], The Washington Post and other major media outlets are speaking at one event or the other.
The first gathering in Bretton Woods, N.H., is an economic conference Soros once described as “a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order.” In October 2009, Soros committed $50 million to the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET). A week later, the glib lefty investor wrote a column calling for a new Bretton Woods event, to recreate the one that helped design the post-WWII economy. Only he wants this one to knock America down a peg or three.

Now, it's been a little over a year later and the group he funded is making King George’s wish come true – bringing together a whole slew of important people to discuss how to change the global economy. In Soros speak, that means “establish new international rules” and “reform the currency system.”
The announced speakers include a lot of prominent lefties, globalists and economists on the board of the organization he has throwing the event – more than two-thirds of the overall total have ties to Soros. To underscore their connection to history, INET is hosting the conference at the Mount Washington Resort, the very same hotel that held the first gathering.
INET Executive Robert Johnson defended his event in a March 31 interview with Lou Dobbs. Johnson, a former managing director at Soros Fund Management, who is on the Board of [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]Directors[/COLOR][/COLOR] for the Soros-funded Economic Policy Institute, avoided saying “Soros” despite Dobbs mentioning Johnson’s boss several times. In his last response, he tried to rationalize the Soros connection, by saying “I have a group of funders including George Soros.” With $50 million, Soros alone makes a pretty big group. Of course, Soros will also be speaking in Bretton Woods about “The Emerging Economic and Political Order.”
Just down the road in Boston, a Soros-funded media conference is trying to manipulate that emerging order as well. Close to 350 left-wingers from a variety of organizations are gathering there for the National Conference for Media Reform.
That “change the world” conference includes two commissioners from the FCC, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Bernie Sanders, four Democratic representatives, the head of Columbia University, and assorted left-wing journalist types, from Salon’s Glenn Greenwald to disgraced former MSNBC host David Shuster, who now works for a Soros-funded investigative operation.
The rest of the list reads like a "Who’s Who" of left-wing organizations and talking heads, including the president of PBS, a senior vice president with American Public Media, an Al Jazeera English executive,the president of the Newspaper Guild – CWA and Washington Post columnist Rob Pegoraro. Many others have Soros connections, such as:
Common Cause, which has been going after conservative Supreme Court justices who have some connection to the Koch brothers. Common Cause seems immune to similar investigations of their own gravy train.
Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman. He ischief of the review’s “The Audit” section and a 2006 Katrina Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute, the primary Soros charitable foundation.
Free Press, which is holding the conference. Free Press has received more than $1 million from Soros since 2003 and has 18 presenters pushing for things like “strong public media” or an extremely expensive national broadband plan they quaintly describe as “universal access to communications.”
Think Progress’s Koch-hating Lee Fang. Think Progress is a project of Democrat John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, which was founded with Soros money. Fang is on the panel for: “Real Issues vs. Astroturf: Confronting the Koch Brothers,” and makes the laughable claim “this is not about liberals versus conservatives” when the entire goal of the left is to shut down the Kochs to defund the right.
Everywhere you they go in Boston, they’ll be making more left turns than NASCAR. It’s an event filled with lefties dissatisfied that the news media aren’t even more liberal, and their goal will be to make that happen. Whether it’s “Beyond Pronouns: Creating Real Stories About Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People” or pushing for illegal immigrant rights, the conference is a predictable liberal take on pretty much everything.
But the over-arching theme is getting government to fix the media. Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, whose school also includes the well-known and partly Soros-funded Columbia School of [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue !important]Journalism[/COLOR][/COLOR], is one of several speakers advocating for increased government funding for media. He called for federal funding of the media in a 2010 Wall Street Journal piece with the terrifying headline: “Journalism Needs Government Help.” Bollinger pushed for the creation of a public media that combines NPR, PBS and Voice of America. He also wants to “end to the regulation of ‘indecent’ language and images in broadcast programming” and return to the Fairness Doctrine.
Two other speakers, Free Press founder Robert McChesney and co-author John Nichols, have been pushing for $35 billion a year to fund media. Though their solution has gone from $20 billion a year for three years to $35 billion indefinitely, they are consistent in wanting U.S. media to be more like it is in Europe and oppose the “fantasy of a free-market solution.”
That’s not surprising. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who is speaking at both conferences, is wildly critical of people who support free markets, or what he calls “free market fundamentalists.” Free markets are directly in opposition with the Soros-funded group think that sees Big Government as merely a starting point for Ever Bigger Government.
This weekend, we get two visions of taxpayer-funded solution, only most in the news media are too short-sighted to see them.
Dan Gainor is the Boone Pickens Fellow and the Media [COLOR=blue !important][COLOR=blue ! important]Research [COLOR=blue ! important]Center[/COLOR][/COLOR][/COLOR]’s Vice President for Business and Culture. He writes frequently for Fox News Opinion. He can also be contacted on FaceBook and Twitter as dangainor.



Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/...#ixzz1IqGwWqrD

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House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Bernie Sanders, four Democratic representatives, the head of Columbia University, and assorted left-wing journalist types, from Salon’s Glenn Greenwald to disgraced former MSNBC host David Shuster, who now works for a Soros-funded investigative operation.

The Marxist cabal is beginning to rear it's ugly head.

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Funding of Bretton Woods II by George Soros Exposed

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Written by Bob Adelmann

Wednesday, 30 March 2011 10:14

When billionaire George Soros wrote two years ago that what the world needed now was “a new world architecture,” he was already laying plans for Bretton Woods II, April 8-11, 2011, to be held at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire (pictured, left). Soros wrote: While international cooperation on regulatory reform is difficult to achieve on a piecemeal basis, it may be attainable in a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order. A new Bretton Woods conference, like the one that established the international financial architecture after World War II, is needed to establish new international rules…reconstitute the International Monetary Fund (IMF)…[and] to reform the currency system… Claiming that the international monetary system “cannot survive in its present form,” Soros argues that it could and should be revamped so that American leadership would be “re-established…in a more acceptable form. ” In the formal announcement of the meeting, sponsored and funded to the tune of some $50 million by Soros’ Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), the stated purpose of bringing together “more than 200 academic, business and government policy leaders” is to move beyond the original Bretton Woods conference agreements in 1944 which established the IMF, the World Bank, and the United Nations and to “engage the larger European Union, as well as the emerging economies of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. ” Such a meeting should surprise no one watching the current scene. Soros has made clear his economic and political philosophy, writing back in 1997 that “the main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat. ” Writing for the Atlantic, Soros explained his position as an economic and political progressive: Insofar as there is a dominant belief in our society today, it is a belief in the magic of the marketplace. The doctrine of Laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by uninhibited pursuit of self-interest. [However] unless it is tempered by the recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests, our present system…is liable to break down [Emphasis added.]. Ironically (as Soros became fabulously wealthy as an international financial and currency speculator), he wrote: “Wealth does accumulate in the hands of its owners, and if there is no mechanism for redistribution, the inequities can become intolerable.” He then quoted Francis Bacon, the 16th century English philosopher: “Money is like muck, not good except that it be spread. ” The best way to accomplish this, of course, is to promote international controls and regulations so that that nasty private wealth can be monitored, tracked, followed, and moved into places where it will do the most good. Soros is bringing many stars of the Anglo-American universe to New Hampshire for the meeting, including Paul Volcker, former head of the Federal Reserve System; Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute; Joseph Stiglitz, holder of the Nobel Prize in Economics; and Rob Johnson, INET Executive Director. The goals of the meeting have been widely explored and analyzed elsewhere on this website here and here, and reinforce the internationalists' continuing perceived “need” for international cooperation through international agreements and sanctions. The role of Soros in such machinations has been made out to be more than it is. When Media Research Center first wrote about the meeting, Dan Gainor concluded that “this is a Soros event from top to bottom.” That may well be the case for this particular meeting, but as Anthony Wile noted: The one world conspiracy goes back at least 100 years in its modern incarnation and probably longer. Soros hasn’t been alive that long. He’s a Johnny-Come-Lately, relatively speaking. Sure, Soros has a role to play in this monetary drama. But the Anglo-American elite operating mostly out of the one-square-mile City of London is evidently and obviously behind this currency evolution. The IMF, Soros [and others]…are instrumentalities, not initiators. One of the beauties of the Internet is that this meeting, which had initially been clandestine and low key, was brought out into the open by Media Research Center and then picked up by the Wall Street Journal. In years past, meetings, conferences, and events such as this one (i.e., Jekyll Island in 1910, Bretton Woods in 1944) would have been brought to the public’s attention only after the fact. Today, the whole world is watching, and proving (if more proof be needed) that sunshine is the best disinfectant after all.

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Companion Post:

• George Soros: The United States Must Stop Resisting The Orderly Decline Of The Dollar, The Coming Global Currency And The New World Order

George Soros Says The US Should Take On More Debt And Not Be Obsessed With Budget Cuts

Gregory White | Apr. 9, 2011, 9:22 AM | 5,105 | 53

Famed investor George Soros spoke to Bloomberg Television about the U.S. economy yesterday, specifically the debate over cuts versus government spending. Soros argues that the U.S. should take on more debt and spend it on infrastructure.

• 0:20 It is a really open question; How much debt is too much and when should you tighten? We're in the midst of a difficult, delicate, two-speed maneuver.
• 1:15 If you have a growing economy, you can tolerate a high level of debt. If you have an economy in recession, and too much debt, you get into what's called a debt trap.
• 1:50 This argument is overshadowed by political considerations. In Europe, you have debate of eurozone members and their debt.
• 2:25 We can issue our own currency in the U.S., and the dollar is quite strong.
• 3:20 There is a danger than, by pushing budget cuts too far, you can endanger it. I fear political forces are going to force the economy back into recession.
• 3:50 The U.S. economy could absorb some more debt to get the economy going. If you use it to reinforce consumption, you get no benefit from it. Building infrastructure or improving productivity is where it should be used.
• 5:30 The U.S. dollar is considered to be riskless, but it's a question as to the degree of future inflation. One way to decrease the future weight of debt is to have inflation.

[American Patriot]

Maybe he should take on more debt?

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Soros and friends reorder global finance at new Bretton Woods

• By: Mary Claire Kendall 04/09/11 8:05 PM
  Op-Ed Contributor

While all the focus is now on the three-ring circus in Washington vis-a-vis passing the fiscal 2011 budget the Democrats failed to pass in 2010, up in New Hampshire this weekend at Bretton Woods, the Institute for New Economic Thinking is convening a very important conference, "CRISIS and RENEWAL: International Political Economy at the Crossroads."

It's no accident they're meeting on the very same site as the Bretton Woods Conference -- formally United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference -- that met from July 1-22, 1944, during World War II to plan the postwar financial world after the expected defeat of Germany and Japan.

That's because the purpose of this weekend's conference is to reorder world finance in the wake of the near-collapse of the global financial system in 2008. Like Bretton Woods, they must expect some new calamity, with winners and losers.

The groundwork was laid a year ago at INET's inaugural meeting at which George Soros teed off with his "Anatomy of Crisis - The Living History of Last 30 Years: Economic Theory, Politics and Policy."

"I am afraid," he said, "the current discussions miss the main point: namely that the recent financial crisis was not only a market failure but also a regulatory failure.

"And what matters now is not so much who regulates, but how. Regulators ought to undertake a course of critical self-examination - Chinese style."

Soros, by the way, is funding this initiative to the tune of $50 million whereby 200 academic, business and government policy leaders focus on "establishing new international rules" and "reform the currency system."

Maybe that's why President Obama is cool as a cucumber -- spending nearly a billion to invade Libya without breaking a sweat despite the fact we are broke, and skipping town to campaign for his 2012 re-election in the middle of tense budget negotiations.

Obama knows the world financial system is being reconfigured - "Chinese style." He may be reasoning that "George has got my back."

America is worn out from funding the world's needs, so now, lagging behind financially as a result, it's time to reorder the global financial order to reflect present-day economic realities.

And, boy have we shelled out the dough.

Just a week ago, on April Fool's no less, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke lost his two-year battle to protect "crisis-squeezed" banks from the "stigma" of having received "public loans" during the 2008 unraveling.

What was revealed is that foreign interests disproportionately benefited from American largesse - including local governments in Belgium, a Japanese fishing-cooperative financier and a company part-owned by the Central Bank of Libya.

Brussels and the Paris-based Dexia SA (DEXB) borrowed some $33.5 billion from the Fed's 97-year-old "discount window" lending program and Dublin-based Depfa Bank Plc (a German real-estate lender took it over in 2007, before it was seized by the German government), drew $24.5 billion.
At the peak of the crisis during the record surge in October 2008, 70 percent of the $110.7 billion borrowed went to foreign banks.

These disclosures - contained in Fed documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request - will surely prompt a re-examination of the risks U.S. taxpayers bear because of the Fed's role in global financial markets.

All the while, Americans can't get loans to start and/or invest in businesses or afford a home; two-thirds of consumers can't even afford to refinance their mortgages, often to avoid defaulting.

With Soros and company picking winners and losers - "Chinese style" - little wonder Donald Trump - as canny as they come, vis-a-vis America's global financial position - is surging in the polls among Republican presidential primary voters.

Mary Claire Kendall served as special assistant to the assistant secretary for health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, from 1989 to 1993.

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Report from Bretton Woods II

Uploaded by lonelantern on Apr 12, 2011

http://RTR.org | http://RealityReport.com | American Free Press editor, Mark Anderson sits down with Gary Franchi to let us in on what happened in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire at the Bretton Woods II meetings, where the economic elite gathered over the weekend.

http://AmericanFreePress.net Join the discussion at our RTR Group:http://rtr.org/group/745

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Soros Event Sets in Motion New Attacks on Dollar

Business & Media Institute ^ | 04/20/2011 | Dan Gainor
Posted on Thursday, April 21, 2011 8:55:13 PM by RobertClark

It's been two weeks since George Soros bought himself a major economic conference designed to remake the entire global economy. Just because the event received little major news attention, it still had an impact Americans might be reeling from for years. When the anti-American Soros spent $50 million creating the New York City-based Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), he set in motion a major move against the dollar. The billionaire who once crushed the British pound through currency trading openly declared his plans to 'reform the currency system.' In the Machiavellian mind of Soros, the dollar needed to take a back seat and end its stint as the world reserve currency. 'The dollar no longer enjoys the trust and confidence that it once did, yet no other currency can take its place,' he wrote in late 2009.

In 2011, he was already pushing aside the dollar. 'The big question is whether the U.S. dollar should be the reserve currency; and, in fact, it no longer is,' Soros told Bloomberg.

He's not the only one. Nobel Prize winning economist and Soros buddy Joseph Stiglitz said he is arguing for 'a global reserve currency.' Stiglitz, who also chairs the UN General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, called for a new 'global system,' saying the current one is 'fundamentally unfair because it means that poor countries are lending to the U.S. at close to zero interest rates.'

In the short time following the Soros-funded Bretton Woods event, the move against the dollar has gained momentum rapidly. Soros wrote in 2009 that 'the rising powers must be present at the creation of this new system to ensure that they will be active supporters.' Here come those rising powers right now, singing the Soros tune.

The five BRICS nations - Brazil, Russia, India, China and new member South Africa - had their third summit meeting one week after Soros held his. Unsurprisingly, the themes were similar, with BRICS nations calling 'for a restructuring of the World War II-era global financial system and an eventual end to the long reign of the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency.'

We've heard that all before - from Soros himself. In 2009, Soros called for the increased use of an obscure economic tool called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). Before your eyes glaze over, SDRs are essentially a 'basket of currencies' - the euro, Japanese yen, pound sterling and U.S. dollar. If the world starts using them more and the dollar less, then U.S. economic status declines.

According to The Pioneer of India, those five nations 'have called for 'a broad-based international reserve currency system providing stability and certainty.'' The group also wants more of a say in how international economic institutions are run and what currencies make up the SDR basket. That last concern reflects an existing move to include the Chinese remimbi in the SDR selection.

The Wall Street Journal agreed that's what's going on, quoting Chinese central bank-governor Zhou Xiaochuan saying the G-20 nations are considering adding China's currency to the four other in the SDR. ''If someone suggests that the RMB [the renminbi] should be in the SDR, I welcome this kind of opinion,' Mr. Zhou told a panel discussion.' He's not alone. Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University and a senior associate at the Soros-funded Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, claimed that the dollar is even bad for the United States. In a Financial Times opinion piece, he argued 'America must give up on the dollar.' The Financial Times, you'll remember, had five news employees speak at Soros's Bretton Woods event, too.

But this isn't an organized effort or anything.

The push for a new world currency wasn't the only major news coming from the Soros conference, though most major news outlets ignored the entire gathering. The International Monetary Fund might be getting a new leader, one of the speakers at the event in fact. The IMF is part of the old world economic order that came from the first Bretton Woods. To promote your candidacy these days, all you have to do is hang with the right people.

According to the Daily Mail, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown 'has emerged as a favourite for the £270,000-a-year role after networking this week at a conference of policymakers at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, where the IMF was founded.' It's not what you know, it's who after all. So, the pro-Soros movers and shakers are making their push to control the IMF too.

Brown is a perfect fit for the Soros economic view. At the conference, one of his takeaway lines was: 'American and European dominance is no longer a fact.'

Clearly, that's the takeaway that Soros wants us to believe, at least.

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Soros considers his options

By: Kenneth P. Vogel
April 28, 2011 07:41 PM EDT


'Since I don’t know what I’m going to do, I can’t tell you,' Soros told

POLITICO. | Reuters Close

By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 4/28/11 7:41 PM EDT

For Democrats hoping George Soros will write an eight-figure check to boost their 2012 efforts, conservatives seeking to use Soros as a bogeyman to rally their base and market analysts trying to predict his next play, a top Soros aide has some advice: Read Karl Popper.

The 20th century Austrian philosopher’s theory that ultimate truth is unattainable undergirds Soros’s ideology, “to the extent that he has one,” said Michael Vachon, Soros’s political advisor and spokesman. “Soros’s investment style and his philanthropy reflect that. It is very responsive to reality.”

And Soros’s assessment of political reality could have a lot to do with shaping the political landscape in 2012 and beyond. Political operatives from across the ideological spectrum have become increasingly fixated on the question of whether the Hungarian-born billionaire investor will once again reprise the role he played in the 2004 election, when he contributed more than $20 million to Democratic causes, or whether he will continue to focus his domestic philanthropy elsewhere.

In a brief interview Thursday, Soros did not clarify his intention, begging off a question about whether he intended to make large contributions to outside advertising groups.

“Since I don’t know what I’m going to do, I can’t tell you,” he told POLITICO.

Last October, Soros suggested he may be permanently shifting his giving away from electoral groups like those he supported in 2004, characterizing his involvement that year as “an exception.”

But Democratic political professionals have been buzzing about the implicit blessing bestowed this month by the Democracy Alliance, a Soros-linked donor network, on a coalition that hopes to spend tens of millions of dollars boosting President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats in 2012 – though Vachon suggested it’s unlikely Soros will come close to matching his 2004 investment.

Conservatives, meanwhile, seized on two conferences put on this month by Soros-funded groups – an international economics forum in Bretton Woods, N.H., and a media reform conference in Boston – as yet more evidence that he’s trying to “remake the financial order and the media,” with one group blasting out a fundraising email declaring “we cannot allow these kinds of reprehensible events to go unchallenged.”

During a Thursday afternoon speech at an unusual setting – the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington – Soros bemoaned political polarization as “endangering our open society,” hinted at his growing interest in media reform and challenged his portrayal as a knee-jerk liberal.

“As I see it, the two sides in the current disputes have each got hold of one half of the truth which they proclaim to be the whole truth,” Soros said at the Cato forum celebrating Friedrich August Hayek, an Austrian free-market economist and philosopher who is a hero among libertarians.

Hayek and Popper were friends and colleagues at the London School of Economics – where Soros studied under Popper in the late 1940s – though the two Austrians diverged on scientific methodology and, to some extent on the role of government.

“The political controversy on the role of the state in the economy is raging in full force today, but the standards of political discourse have greatly deteriorated,” said Soros, whose Open Society Foundations are named for the “open society” philosophy developed by Popper.

“Although I am often painted as the representative of the far left and I am certainly not free of political bias, I readily recognize that the other side is half right in claiming that the government is wasteful and inefficient and ought to function better,” Soros said Thursday, at one point referring to “the so-called left, in so far as it exists.”

Some Democrats, though, charge that, if the left is in a weakened state, it’s partly because Soros and his fellow Democracy Alliance donors ceased funding outside advertising campaigns after their 2004 efforts failed to stop George W. Bush from being reelected as president.

Erica Payne, who was involved in the creation of Democracy Alliance, said wealthy liberals have simply not had the long-term commitment of conservatives such as the industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, who – perhaps ironically – have in the last few months become symbols for the left in much the same way Soros is for the right.

“There is not a single liberal donor in the country who has displayed the same combination of resources, multifaceted investment strategy, ideological focus, and stick-to-itiveness we have seen by Koch - and that includes George Soros and all the other so-called ‘liberal billionaires,’” said Payne, who now heads a donor-advisory group called the Agenda Project.

“Most liberal funders see funding as a hobby, not as an investment. As such they fund at the hobby level rather than the investment level.”

In 2004, motivated by a deep and abiding opposition to the Iraq War and other Bush administration policies, Soros, along with insurance magnate Peter Lewis and other major liberal donors, combined to contribute a total of nearly $200 million to two liberal groups, America Coming Together and the Media Fund , that paid for get-out-the-vote efforts and aired ads boosting Democrat John Kerry’s unsuccessful campaign against Bush.

But after Kerry’s defeat, Soros – of all the big donors – “was probably the most disappointed in the 2004 effort, wondering how progressives could spend all that money and not achieve success,” said one Democratic consultant involved in a fledgling coalition of outside advertising groups hoping to raise tens of millions of dollars to counter a network of big-money Republican-allied groups conceived before the 2010 midterm elections by Bush-era GOP strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie.

Not long after the 2004 election, Soros became one of the original members of Democracy Alliance, which had the goal of shifting major liberal donor cash from non-profits that focused on campaign advertising to those centered around policy, issue advocacy and voter mobilization, with the goal of building more permanent intellectual infrastructure that transcends any given election cycle.

The Alliance model was patterned in part on the giving of wealthy conservatives to a well-established network of think tanks like the Cato Institute, American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution, which have long been the beneficiaries of huge checks from major conservative donors like the Koch brothers.

It is within that context that Soros’s foundations since the 2004 election have given $7.3 million to the Center for American Progress, which seeks to shape Washington’s messaging and policy battles, $1.4 million to the media reform group Free Press, which sponsored this month’s conference, and $1.1 million to Media Matters, which is prosecuting a war on conservative-leaning Fox News Channel.

After his speech at Cato, Soros dismissed as “a sideshow” former Fox News host Glenn Beck, who hosted a three-part series attacking Soros as a puppet-master. But he asserted Beck’s departure from Fox this month “hasn’t changed anything at Fox really,” explaining his grants to Media Matters were an effort to hold the network accountable, but stressing that media slant on both sides is a problem that adds to the polarization of the national discourse.

“Neutralizing” Fox can’t be accomplished he said, “because it has an audience. But I think holding its feet to the fire is appropriate. Not only for Fox (but) the other side also in so far as they use techniques which are deceptive.”

Though Soros and other donors continued giving in smaller amounts to political advertising groups after 2004, the shift away from that type of giving was abetted by Obama himself. His 2008 presidential campaign discouraged big donors from giving to outside groups, partly as an effort to prove the candidate’s commitment to changing the political system, but also because his campaign raised a record-shattering $750 million and didn’t need the help – or the risk that outside groups would step on his message.

At a Democracy Alliance meeting in Washington a few days after the 2010 election (not long after the White House gave a clear green light to big-dollar ad campaigns by independent groups), Soros expressed frustration with Obama to a small group of donors on the sidelines of the meeting and made the case that, even in light of conservatives’ advantage in outside spending, liberals should continue to focus their cash on groups that pressure Democrats from the left on issues.

Even as Republican-allied independent groups – emboldened by a January 2010 Supreme Court decision allowing corporate and anonymous donations to be spent on campaign ads - last year helped launch a handful of new big-spending outside advertising groups, Soros and his cohort stayed on the sidelines.

Shortly before the election Soros said that though the prospects of a GOP Congress concerned him, “I’m not in a position to stop it. I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche.”

But at a conference this month in Laguna Beach, Calif., Democracy Alliance seemed to point in a different direction by facilitating contributions from its wealthy members – who are required to contribute a total of at least $100,000-a-year to recommended groups – to groups like those that Soros funded in 2004.

The conference featured a panel at which representatives from four groups in the new Democratic coalition – including an as-yet unnamed group run by former White House aides Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney that hopes to raise $100 million to boost Obama’s reelection bid – explained their missions to donors.

Soros, a founding member of the alliance, didn’t attend the conference. But Vachon, who sits on the Democracy Alliance board, was there.

The conference, which was closed to the public and media, was revealed this week by the investigative journalism non-profit Center for Public Integrity (to which Soros’s foundations have contributed $3.7 million since 1999 and at which this reporter worked in 1999 and 2000).

And Democratic operatives who regard Soros as a bellwether of sorts for the intentions of other major donors, emerged from the conference hopeful that Democracy Alliance members and other major donors would open their wallets to the independent expenditure efforts.
The conference was “the beginning of a series of conversations. And certainly we hope that something will come out of it, but it’s too early to put a dollar figure on it.”

Vachon said the groups probably shouldn’t expect another $20 million from Soros, but he also didn’t shut the door to Soros becoming seriously involved. “I would be surprised if he got involved at the same levels as in 2004,” he said, “but the election is a long way off and it’s not his focus right now.”

Soros’s high-profile spending and inflammatory rhetoric starting in the 2004 campaign – when he compared the Bush administration’s rhetoric to that of the Nazis (a comparison he also in February applied to Fox News) and described defeating the Republican president as “the central focus” of his life and “a matter of life and death” – has made him a favorite target of the right, which has continued to portray him in fundraising appeals as an anti-American puppet master steering the Democratic Party and the nation towards socialism.

In fact, most of Soros’s philanthropy focuses on international efforts fostering human rights and civil society building, and fighting poverty corruption. And – like Koch brothers’ philanthropy – the recipients of Soros’s largesse do not all fit into neat liberal-conservative constructs.

Soros’s Open Society Foundations, for instance, have contributed $431,000 since 1996 to the Cato Institute to fund its drug reform, civil liberties and anti-corruption programs.

And the Kochs have contributed tens of millions to the arts and cancer research.

Still, the left’s increasing targeting of the Koch brothers seems to have only further fueled the right’s targeting of Soros, and vice versa.

“Soros wants to radically transform this country, while the Kochs represent capitalism and have a libertarian bent,” said Andrew Breitbart, the conservative Internet entrepreneur, who last year spoke at the winter installment of the twice-a-year Koch-sponsored donor conferences that are similar in some ways to the Democracy Alliance meetings.

Vachon, though, rejected the Koch comparison, asserting “many on the right seek to compare Soros to the Koch brothers because it suits their partisan or ideological purposes, but in truth this is not an apt comparison. Soros is completely transparent about his funding, both in philanthropy and politics. And he funds activities and advocates for policies that would hurt his bottom line.

Both sides need to chill out, said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, which was co-founded by Charles Koch in 1977.

“There is a tendency to put people in either a red or a blue box and to polarize the debate, and to accuse one side of being socialist and the other side of being anarchist or facist, which are actually opposites, so that’s a confused argument to begin with,” he said. “It would be better to talk about ideas and argue about policies…If people don’t like what the Kochs believe or what they support, they should argue with those ideas and the same thing is true with Soros.”

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Why Don't We Hear About Soros' Ties to Over 30 Major News Organizations?

By Dan Gainor
Published May 11, 2011 | FoxNews.com

Editor's note: This is the first of a two part series.

When liberal investor George Soros gave $1.8 million to National Public Radio , it became part of the firestorm of controversy that jeopardized NPR’s federal funding. But that gift only hints at the widespread influence the controversial billionaire has on the mainstream media. Soros, who spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004, has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets – including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.

Prominent journalists like ABC’s Christiane Amanpour and former Washington Post editor and now Vice President Len Downie serve on boards of operations that take Soros cash. This despite the Society of Professional Journalist’s ethical code stating: “avoid all conflicts real or perceived.”

This information is part of an upcoming report by the Media Research Centers Business & Media Institute which has been looking into George Soros and his influence on the media.

The investigative reporting start-up ProPublica is a prime example. ProPublica, which recently won its second Pulitzer Prize, initially was given millions of dollars from the Sandler Foundation to “strengthen the progressive infrastructure” – “progressive” being the code word for very liberal. In 2010, it also received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from the Open Society Foundations. In case you wonder where that money comes from, the OSF website is www.soros.org. It is a network of more than 30 international foundations, mostly funded by Soros, who has contributed more than $8 billion to those efforts.

The ProPublica stories are thoroughly researched by top-notch staffers who used to work at some of the biggest news outlets in the nation. But the topics are almost laughably left-wing. The site’s proud list of “Our Investigations” includes attacks on oil companies, gas companies, the health care industry, for-profit schools and more. More than 100 stories on the latest lefty cause: opposition to drilling for natural gas by hydraulic fracking. Another 100 on the evils of the foreclosure industry.

Throw in a couple investigations making the military look bad and another about prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and you have almost the perfect journalism fantasy – a huge budget, lots of major media partners and a liberal agenda unconstrained by advertising.

One more thing: a 14-person Journalism Advisory Board, stacked with CNN’s David Gergen and representatives from top newspapers, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal and the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster. Several are working journalists, including:

• Jill Abramson, a managing editor of The New York Times;

• Kerry Smith, the senior vice president for editorial quality of ABC News;

• Cynthia A. Tucker, the editor of the editorial page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

ProPublica is far from the only Soros-funded organization that is stacked with members of the supposedly neutral press.

The Center for Public Integrity is another great example. Its board of directors is filled with working journalists like Amanpour from ABC, right along side blatant liberal media types like Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post and now AOL.

Like ProPublica, the CPI board is a veritable Who’s Who of journalism and top media organizations, including:

• Christiane Amanpour – Anchor of ABC’s Sunday morning political affairs program, “This Week with Christiane Amanpour.” A reliable lefty, she has called tax cuts “giveaways,” the Tea Party “extreme,” and Obama “very Reaganesque.”

• Paula Madison – Executive vice president and chief diversity officer for NBC Universal, who leads NBC Universal’s corporate diversity initiatives, spanning all broadcast television, cable, digital, and film properties.

• Matt Thompson – Editorial product manager at National Public Radio and an adjunct faculty member at the prominent Poynter Institute.

Once again, like ProPublica, the center’s investigations are mostly liberal – attacks on the coal industry, payday loans and conservatives like Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. The Center for Public Integrity is also more open about its politics, including a detailed investigation into conservative funders David and Charles Koch and their “web of influence.”According to the center’s own 990 tax forms, the Open Society Institute gave it $651,650 in 2009 alone.

The well-known Center for Investigative Reporting follows the same template – important journalists on the board and a liberal editorial agenda. Both the board of directors and the advisory board contain journalists from major news outlets. The board features:

• Phil Bronstein (President), San Francisco Chronicle;

• David Boardman, The Seattle Times;

• Len Downie, former Executive Editor of the Washington Post, now VP;

• George Osterkamp, CBS News producer.

Readers of the site are greeted with numerous stories on climate change, illegal immigration and the evils of big companies. It counts among its media partners The Washington Post, Salon, CNN and ABC News. CIR received close to $1 million from Open Society from 2003 to 2008.

Why does it all matter? Journalists, we are constantly told, are neutral in their reporting. In almost the same breath, many bemoan the influence of money in politics. It is a maxim of both the left and many in the media that conservatives are bought and paid for by business interests. Yet where are the concerns about where their money comes from?

Fred Brown, who recently revised the book “Journalism Ethics: A Casebook of Professional Conduct for News Media,” argues journalists need to be “transparent” about their connections and “be up front about your relationship” with those who fund you.

Unfortunately, that rarely happens. While the nonprofits list who sits on their boards, the news outlets they work for make little or no effort to connect those dots. Amanpour’s biography page, for instance, talks about her lengthy career, her time at CNN and her many awards. It makes no mention of her affiliation with the Center for Public Integrity.

If journalists were more up front, they would have to admit numerous uncomfortable connections with groups that push a liberal agenda, many of them funded by the stridently liberal George Soros. So don’t expect that transparency any time soon.