Soros
GEORGE
SOROS
AND THE RISE OF THE NEO-CENTRICS
By Walt
Contreras Sheasby
2003 has seen the rise of a new current in US politics, best described as
NeoCentrics, or simply NeoCens, for ease of comparison with a
better known defection of Socialists to the Conservative Right. Although allied
with long-time social democrats (who were once distinguished by
whether they accepted secret funding in bags from John A. McCone's office or
Armand Hammer's office), the NeoCens are former radical critics
of "lesser-evilism" who have decided a year before the 2004 election
that the whiff of fascism is in the air.
Funding for some of the Neo-Centrics comes from George Soros, who
gives away $400m a year through his Foundation and thus subsidizes
many of the activist groups, luminaries and publications of the American left,
probably dwarfing the sums that once trickled out of
dismissed as conspiracy-thinking. He has given $60,000 to the Independent Media
Institute, whose executive director, Don Hazen, is a
former publisher of Mother Jones. A $50,000 grant went to the Nation Institute
to support Radio Nation. KPFA received a $40,000 grant in
1995. A $35,000 grant went to American Prospect magazine. The list goes
on and on.
$150,000 has gone to the Feminist Majority Foundation, whose
President, Eleanor Smeal, once
broke with the Democrats and formed the
21st Century Party before endorsing
Network for a Progressive Texas, $75,000 to the Economic Policy Institute, and
even $200,000 to the prison reform group, Critical
Resistance. Christian Parenti, a writer on the prison-industrial system and son
of Michael Parenti, is a Senior Fellow at George Soros's Open
Society Institute (named after a book by his fiercely anti-Marx mentor, Karl
Popper), as are a number of other radicals.
All his gifts to the radical left are penny ante compared
to his high stakes, his dispensations to the liberal democrats, however. On
Tuesday,
Nov. 11 Soros told the Washington Post that the day before he had given
five million dollars to MoveOn.org to benefit Howard Dean. He has donated
more modest sums to other Democratic candidates and had already given 10
million dollars in August to "America Coming Together." ACT is one
of the pseudo-parties created (often referred to as 527's, after
their section of the new tax code) to get around the
McCain-Feingold
campaign-finance law that made it illegal for Fat Cats to give huge sums directly
to a political party. By refusing to adhere to the limit imposed by
public funding, Dean is now free to accept large contributions through this loophole.
At his home in
Post, the Soros campaign for Dean began last summer with the help of Mort
Halpern, a liberal think tank veteran. “Soros invited Democratic
strategists to his house in Southampton, Long Island,” including
Robert Boorstin, and Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.
They discussed the coming election.” Standing on the back deck, “the evening
sun angling into their eyes,” Soros took aside Steve
Rosenthal, CEO of America Coming Together and former political director of the
AFL-CIO, and Ellen Malcolm, its president and founder
and donor of Emily’s List. After his announcement of the $10m, “They were ready
to kiss me,” Soros quipped.
Other Fat Cat guests followed his lead. Before coffee the next morning,
his friend Peter Lewis, chairman of the Progressive Corp., had
pledged $10 million to ACT. Rob Glaser, founder and CEO of RealNetworks,
promised $2 million. Rob McKay, president of the McKay
Family Foundation, gave $1 million and benefactors Lewis and Dorothy Cullman
committed $500,000. Soros also promised up to $3 million to
Podesta’s new think tank, the Center for American Progress.
The Neo-Cen attack on Ralph Nader has been welcomed by unreconstructed
social and liberal democrats who have long been critics
of the Green Party and independent political action. Michael Tomasky, executive
editor of the American Prospect, wrote a piece for the L.A.
Times Book Review titled *A Lesson for the Left: Go to the Aid of the Party*
on Nov. 9, 2003. He reviewed two books by radical intellectuals, G.
William Domhoff’s Changing the Powers That Be: How the Left Can Stop Losing
and Win, and James Weinstein's The Long Detour: The
History and Future of the American Left.
Both books are monuments to the new revisionism transforming
the most trenchant critics of co-optation in the 1960s. Considered ultra-left
then, they are masters of the back-flip in the new century. Through many books,
like Fat Cats and Democrats, Domhoff hammered home the reality
that the corporate rich dominate both the Republican and Democrat Parties and
that grass roots insurgencies were inevitably co-opted. I was
one of many students who took up that thesis in a paper I wrote that Domhoff
approved on the Fund for the Republic. Weinstein showed that
Progressive politics in both mainstream parties were aimed at co-opting and
deflecting the Socialist Party in its heyday.
The Neo-Cens have been joined by any number of former leftist revolutionaries
like Carl Davidson and Angela Davis. The Green Party is
split between Neo-Cens who previously touted the line *Neither Right nor Left,
but out in Front," to those who are supporting the intransigent Ralph
Nader and/or Peter Camejo for President. Camejo says, *The Green Party is under
enormous pressure and attacks, including some from liberal or
progressive Democrats. I consider the campaign against Ralph Nader and the
Green Party part of the same anti-democracy campaign that includes
the Patriot Act....*
The division could weaken the Green Party and perhaps result in
its demise. On the other hand, if the counter-revisionists rally to their own
Party, this could be a real turning point in
Business Week on Aug. 11, 2003 wrote that *Dean had a knack
for positioning himself and never lost an election. Those who know him best
believe Dean is moving to the left to boost his chances of winning the nomination.”
If he wins the nomination, he’ll run back to the center. A
If Howard Dean wins the nomination and puts Wesley Clark on
the ticket, as he planned before Clark himself entered the race, the final days
of September and October 2004 could be a real awakening for the left. Or perhaps
a bestirring of the ghost of the Rockefeller vision of a genuine
Internationale of the bourgeoisie. The General, after all, has
been a central figure in one of Soros' most influential institutions, the
International Crisis
Group.
Founded in 1986 as a private multinational organization “committed
to strengthening the capacity of the international community to understand
and respond to impending crises,” the ICG comprises numerous ex-politicians,
diplomats and representatives of business and the media.
Beside the Open Society Institute, foundation and private sector donors
include The Atlantic Philanthropies, Carnegie Corporation of New
York, Ford Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William & Flora
Hewlett Foundation, The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc., John D. &
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The John Merck Fund, Charles Stewart Mott
Foundation, Ploughshares Fund, The Ruben & Elisabeth
Rausing Trust, the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, the Sarlo Foundation of the
Jewish Community Endowment Fund and the United States Institute
of Peace.
George Soros would have a great deal of influence over a
Dean-Clark Administration, but particularly so in the international context.
For that
vision to be achieved, the Neo-Centrics are needed to steer the former Nader
voters and the independent left back into the Democratic Party.
Soros is a past master at forging unlikely alliances, and the odds seem to be
moving in his favor once again.
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