[Needtoknow] Walt Sheasby: Soros and Neo-Centrics

[Owen Broadhurst]

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 a 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 Langley or
Moscow. Soros does not control the left, as right-wingers imagine, but his
monetary influence is one of those hushed secrets inside the left usually
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 Clinton. $75,000 went to Robert S.
McIntyre’s Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, $50,000 to the
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 Westchester, N.Y., Soros early on raised $115,000
from his friends  for  candidate Dean. According to the Washington
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 Clinton
chief of staff John D. Podesta, Clinton Advisors Jeremy Rosner and
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 U.S. politics, which the 
election
of  any of the democrats would not be.

   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
Vermont political scientist says: *Howard is not a liberal. He’s a pro-
business Rockefeller Republican.”

   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.

-30-
.

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