The Soros Web and the Spiders Within
By Ed Lasky
AmericanThinker.com
Barack Obama's latest straw-man style of attack
is focused on the United States Chamber of
Commerce. The Chamber has earned his ire by
being a free-enterprise group, and one that is
practicing its First Amendment rights to
criticize an administration bereft of officials
with real-world experience but chockablock with
animus toward capitalism. Obama's latest claim
is that the ads run by the Chamber are funded by
foreign sources.
Who is helping perpetuating this claim -- for
which there is no evidence? George Soros:
Obama's pal and donor, and a man who wielded his
power over his 527 groups to help power Obama to
the Oval Office.
The issue of the chamber's funding first
gained notice this week when
ThinkProgress,
a blog affiliated with the Center for
American Progress, an influential liberal
advocacy group, posted a lengthy piece with
the headline "Exclusive: Foreign-Funded
‘U.S.' Chamber of Commerce Running Partisan
Attack Ads."
The piece detailed the chamber's overseas
memberships, but it provided no evidence
that the money generated overseas had been
used in United States campaigns. Still,
liberal groups like
MoveOn.org
pounced on the allegations, resulting in
protests at the chamber's offices, a demand
for a federal investigation by Senator
Al Franken,
Democrat of Minnesota, and ultimately the
remarks by Mr. Obama himself.
White House officials acknowledged Friday
that they had no specific evidence to
indicate that the chamber had used money
from foreign entities to finance political
attack ads.
Soros is pulling the strings of his puppets --
again.
Think Progress is a branch of the Center for
American Progress, the think-tank founded and
funded to a great extent by George Soros and his
political allies, Herb and Marion Sandler. The
Center has been
described
by Bloomberg News as the "Soros-Funded
Democratic Idea Factory." The CAP also provided
the administration with many of its officials,
including the controversial Green Jobs Czar, Van
Jones (he returned to his sinecure at the CAP
when he was "resigned" in the wake of
revelations about his radicalism). The head of
the CAP, John Podesta, managed the transition
from Senator Obama to President Obama. The Obama
administration has plenty of alums from the
Center for American Progress.
The next step in the proliferation of the
man-made virus was to get MoveOn.org to spread
the canard that the Chamber was using foreign
money to fund political campaigns in America.
MoveOn.org is the jewel in the crown of
Soros-funded 527 groups (Soros is the single
largest funder of such groups). The fact that
Soros runs an offshore hedge fund that keeps its
investors hidden (and most probably includes a
slew of foreigners) is rarely mentioned. The
riches of Soros include hefty management fees
extracted from foreign investors; money is
fungible. Can we logically consider that some of
the money Soros liberally spreads in American
politics is foreign money?
Then Senator Al Franken used his pulpit from the
Senate (where he usually slumbers or mugs
insulting facial expressions when Senate
minority leader Mitch McConnell speaks) to get
media coverage to hype the charge regarding
foreign money. Al Franken was the beneficiary of
George Soros when he ran his campaign against
the incumbent Republican Senator Norm Coleman.
Franken owes a great deal to Soros, who was the
donor to a range of 527 groups based in
Minnesota which ginned up false and specious
charges against Coleman -- a story that I
covered
in "The Soros Connection in the Minnesota Senate
Race Vote Count."
Soros wanted Coleman -- probably the sharpest
monitor and critic of the United Nations -- out
of the Senate. Coleman was focused like a laser
beam when exposing fraud (especially the Oil for
Food Scandal) and other problems at the United
Nations (see "Why
Soros Wants Norm Coleman Out of the Senate").
Soros was a donor to Franken, and he also helped
cover the expenses of the legal campaign waged
by Franken to take the seat by, among other
steps, hosting a big
fundraising party
at his fancy digs in Manhattan.
The election of Franken was fraught with
problems but nevertheless was made official by
Minnesota's Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie.
Ritchie was elected with the help of the
Secretary of States Project
-- an undertaking of a group called the
Democracy Alliance.
This is a group of billionaires led by George
Soros and Democratic activists and operatives
(including Anna Burger, a highly placed official
of the Service Employees International Union)
that has undertaken to change the political
landscape of America and is using a bulldozer to
do so. The agenda of the Secretary of States
Project was to place into office politicians
whom they consider friendly towards their goals
-- among them electing Democrats. These
Secretaries are responsible for ensuring the
integrity and honesty of the voting process in
states.
And what have we discovered since Franken's
election was made official by the Secretary of
State of Minnesota? A citizens' group has run
its own investigation regarding the integrity of
his election and, lo and behold, has discovered
enough
fraudulent votes
cast for Franken that suggest his election, in
retrospect, was at the very least worthy of
further investigation .
Then, to cap it off, President Obama ranted and
raved about the Chamber and the influence of
foreign money in American politics. George Soros
and Barack Obama have a long history together.
Soros was an early and ardent supporter of
Senator Barack Obama -- even finding a loophole
in campaign finance laws that allowed him and
Soros family members to escape the limits that
normally apply in terms of donor giving. They
flooded Obama with money, a topic I covered in
an article I wrote for American Thinker back in
early 2007 ("Soros,
Obama and the Millionaires Exception").
The canard being promoted by Obama and George
Soros has no basis in fact, as the New York
Times makes clear:
Organizations from both ends of the
political spectrum, from liberal ones like
the
A.F.L.-C.I.O.
and the
Sierra Club
to conservative groups like the
National Rifle Association,
have international affiliations and get
money from foreign entities while at the
same time pushing political causes in the
United States.
Such groups, which collectively have spent
hundreds of millions dollars on political
causes to advance their agenda, are required
by law to ensure that any foreign money they
receive is isolated and not used to finance
political activities, which would violate a
longstanding federal ban. The Chamber of
Commerce says it has a vigorous process for
ensuring that does not happen, and no
evidence has emerged to suggest that is
untrue.
Even the White House was eventually forced to
own up to the rhetorical ruse:
White House officials acknowledged Friday
that they had no specific evidence to
indicate that the chamber had used money
from foreign entities to finance political
attack ads.
"The president was not suggesting any
illegality," Bob Bauer, the White House
counsel, said. Instead, he said Mr. Obama's
reference to the chamber was meant to draw
attention to the inadequacies of campaign
disclosure laws in allowing groups to spend
large amounts of money on politics without
disclosing their donors.
Of course, their admission happened at the end
of Friday -- always the dumping ground for
embarrassing admissions -- timed to a news
cycle that all but takes weekends off.
The strategy was clear: gin up a canard so it
enters the spin cycle (spun by Soros-linked
enterprises) during the week in a very active
political season. The hope was to generate
enthusiasm with the Democratic base to pony up
some campaign money and desire to cast votes.
Mud was slung onto the Chamber by using a
baseless charge. Then -- when the truth came out
-- an admission that there was no backing for
the charge, no evidence, was made during the
dead zone of the news cycle. This is how a virus
spreads. How to stop the virus? Vote the right
way in November.
The entire campaign is dishonest in the extreme.
Michael Barone
calls it "projection" because Obama's own 2008
campaign all but invited foreign donations:
... it's well documented that the
2008 Obama campaign did
not put in place address verification
software that would have routinely prevented
most foreign donations. In effect they were
encouraging donations by foreign nationals.
Here's the
Washington Post on
this back in October 2008:
"Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign
is allowing donors to use largely
untraceable prepaid credit cards that could
potentially be used to evade limits on how
much an individual is legally allowed to
give or to mask a contributor's identity,
campaign officials confirmed. Faced with a
huge influx of donations over the Internet,
the campaign has also chosen not to use
basic security measures to prevent
potentially illegal or anonymous
contributions from flowing into its
accounts, aides acknowledged." (snip)
Then there's the question of whether foreign
nationals are contributing to the Obama
campaign. There is more than enough evidence
to warrant a full-scale investigation by the
Federal Election Commission, including the
$32,332.19 that appears to have come from
two brothers living in a Hamas-controlled
Palestinian refugee camp in Rafah, GA
(that's Gaza, not Georgia). The brothers'
cash is part of a flood of illegal foreign
contributions accepted by the Obama
campaign.
A Chamber spokesman alluded to this bit of
history by suggesting those in glass houses
should not throw stones. Regardless of the
blatant dishonesty of the Big Lie regarding
Chamber spending, the latest news from Mike
Allen's Playbook on
Politico is that Barack Obama and his
supporters will continue to spread the Big
Lie and "double down on it." Arrogance and
impunity in action.
How is that hope and change mantra that
lulled so many Americans to suspend their
disbelief coming along? The strategy may be
clear and despicable, but the network behind
it remains murky to the general public. So
much for Obama's transparency pledge and the
politics of hope and change.
Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.