* Multi-billionaire funder of leftwing causes and groups
* Founder of the Open Society Institute
* Stated that defeating President Bush in the 2004 election "is the central focus of my life"
George Soros was born on August 12, 1930 in Budapest, Hungary. His father, Teodoro Schwartz, was an Orthodox Jew who, in 1936, changed the family surname from Schwartz to Soros in order to enable his family to conceal its Jewish identity and thus to survive the Nazi Holocaust. In 1947 Soros' family relocated from Hungary to England. Five years later, George graduated from the London School of Economics. He subsequently worked for a London stockbroker.
In 1956 Soros, with meager personal assets, emigrated to the United States. He would go on to become one of the world's leading hedge fund investors and currency traders. In 1969 he started his enormously successful Quantum Fund, which, over the ensuing three decades, yielded its long-term investors a four thousand-fold gain on their initial 1969 investments.
In a $10 billion 1992 deal whose success was contingent upon the devaluation of the British Pound, Soros earned himself a $1 billion profit and the title, "the man who broke the Bank of England." To date, he has amassed a personal fortune exceeding $7 billion. In addition, his management company controls billions of dollars more in investor assets.
In 1979 Soros established the Open Society Institute (OSI), which serves as the flagship of a network of Soros foundations that donate tens of millions of dollars each year to a wide array of individuals and organizations that share the founder's agendas. Those agendas can be summarized as follows:
* promoting the view that America is institutionally an oppressive nation
* promoting the election of leftist political candidates throughout the United States
* opposing virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by U.S. government, particularly the Patriot Act
* depicting American military actions as unjust, unwarranted, and immoral
* promoting open borders, mass immigration, and a watering down of current immigration laws
* promoting a dramatic expansion of social welfare programs funded by ever-escalating taxes
* promoting social welfare benefits and amnesty for illegal aliens
* defending the civil rights and liberties of suspected anti-American terrorists and their abetters
* financing the recruitment and training of future activist leaders of the political Left
* advocating America's unilateral disarmament and/or a steep reduction in its military spending
* opposing the death penalty in all circumstances
* promoting socialized medicine in the United States
* promoting the tenets of radical environmentalism, whose ultimate goal, as writer Michael Berliner has explained, is "not clean air and clean water, [but] rather ... the demolition of technological/industrial civilization"
* bringing American foreign policy under the control of the United Nations
* promoting racial and ethnic preferences in academia and the business world alike
* promoting taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand
* advocating stricter gun-control measures
* advocating the legalization of marijuana
To view a list of many of the more important Soros donees that support the foregoing agendas, click
here.
