I found an article at ‘The Guardian’ that reviewed George Soros’s failures. It’s obvious that the writer likes Soros, but he does not gloss over the failures. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jul/06/the-george-soros-philosophy-and-its-fatal-flaw
One of those failures – Soros’s biggest – is not understanding that this country is a democratic republic, not a democracy, and that’s why it works so well. Democracies fail. When Rome stopped being a republic and became a democracy as idealized by Pericles and Cleisthenes in Athens, it began to fail. Soros thinks that the USA is a democracy, which is incorrect.
We should outlast Rome, if we don’t fiddle with it.
He really disliked Bush’s war-oriented reaction, a completely natural response, to the 9/11 hijackers’ use of passenger planes as flying bombs, and a means of committing mass murder. It was warlike and reactionary (no, really?) and should have been less aggressive, according to Soros. Yes, let’s do appease those who wish to kill us in large groups.
He thinks Trump is a dictator. Trump is a lot of things, but a dictator? Not even! He’s just really good with timing. I’ve seen stopwatches that are less accurate. He knows how to throw a bone out there with a string attached to it and reel in the fish that swallowed it. I’m sure he could successfully herd cats.
The Guardian’s rather interesting article is about Soros’s complete failure to understand how important capitalism is to a prosperous and healthy economy. This is really quite odd, because he’s a hedge fund manager, someone who manipulates financial markets to make a profit. That is pure, unadulterated, unfiltered capitalism. There’s a real serious disconnect there.
Per The Guardian article, Soros seems to be slipping further to the Left of the political spectrum. He looks at Hungary’s Orban as a “dictator” the same way he looks at Trump. Is this some kind of ‘turf jealousy’? I must pay more attention to Hungary. This is interesting.
Where else in Europe is this going on? Oh, that’s right: Germany. They just had their elections.
Merkel is not going for a 5th term. The AfD party (right-wing) received 12%+ of the most recent vote and now has a seat in the German parliament, while Merkel’s two centrist parties (CDU and SPD) lost votes. She can no longer achieve a majority vote, so she’s giving up. I think our two-term president rule is much better. We really don’t want a Prezzie for life, like Xi Jinping. Even Vlad Putin is slipping in popularity. This ain’t Venezuela.
Soros is the guy who shorted the British pound sterling in 1991-1992 and got it yanked out of EU circulation. It was generally described as ‘breaking the pound’. Remember our brief recession then? You think there’s no connection? Soros is a financial speculator, not an investor. Taking that into consideration, I would like to know how many fingers he had in the US financial pie prior to the disastrous collapse of US financial markets in 2009. And how much did his hedge fund profit from it? Understand that when you manipulate financial markets the way he can, you can trip over your own hubris.
As much practice as he’s had, he could have done to the US dollar, the basis for international currency values and trade support, what he did to the British pound. If you understand that, you’ll know how close we came to a worldwide financial disaster.
The Guardian’s final paragraph: “Presently, Soros’s cosmopolitan dreams remain exactly that. The question is why, and the answer might very well be that the open society is only possible in a world where no one – whether Soros, or Gates, or DeVos, or Zuckerberg, or Buffett, or Musk, or Bezos – is allowed to become as rich as he has.”
Think about that for a minute: a world where NO ONE is allowed to become wealthy or rise from poverty to a better life. NO ONE. Ask people who finally were allowed to leave the Soviet Union and subsequently, Russia, what that feels like. Strangely, many of them are like my skating teacher, who is Polish by birth, and Russian immigrants, and who found a home and support in Skokie, IL, when they got here, and were able to get right on track to a better life.
We have pockets of severe poverty in this country, places like the Big Ugly district in WV, in the heart of coal country, where people are having a desperate struggle for basics and the kids want books and school time. https://www.stepbystepwv.org
In this country, a West Virginia coal country teenager with the stuff of dreams in his head can learn to build rockets and go to work for NASA, like Howard Hickam did.
In a “Soros cosmopolitan society”, it won’t happen. There’s no moving forward, no progress, no inventiveness, no exploration, no discovery. Stagnation is what happens instead. Why else would the Soviets look for people in the US to sell them classified information on engineering and rocket science?
Stagnation and decay – yes, that’s a real good way to muck up a thriving economy. Even China knows better than that. Don’t weep for poor old Venezuela or Cuba. Some day, Maduro and the Castros will die. Then what do you think will happen?
It’s the struggles that make us who we are, not waiting to be handed ‘stuff’ or told what to do, which is how Soros thinks things should be done. He does not understand squat about human beings at all. A strong rise occurred in England’s economy during the reign of Elizabeth I because she had enough good sense to get out of the way of people who had good ideas. She also had excellent advisers at her back. Ditto for Queen Victoria. None of us – not a single one of us – needs permission to think for ourselves or to speculate about the shape of things to come.
Does what Soros want sound like a dictatorship to you? It does to me. Sounds like the “benevolent” dictator who thinks he knows better than you do what is best for you. Soros doesn’t seem to have even the slightest understanding of humans as a competitive species. This is quite odd, because his entire life has been aimed at acquisition of wealth in a competitive industry. So it’s okay for him, but not for us?
Yeah, well, he can take his cosmopolitan twinkle twaddle and stick it right where the sun don’t shine. These gasbags all fail in that they are just as mortal as the rest of us, but they do not recognize it. Ask Stalin about his brain cramp, which killed him. After he was discovered dead in his bedroom, Krushchev took the reins and things began to loosen up, a millimeter at a time until finally, the USSR ceased to exist because its war of acquisition in Afghanistan had bankrupted an already stagnant economy.
I’ll repeat what The Guardian says about Soros’s failures: The system that allows George Soros to accrue the wealth that he has created has proven to be one in which cosmopolitanism will never find a stable home.
The open (cosmopolitan) society is only possible in a world where no one – whether Soros, or Gates, or DeVos, or Zuckerberg, or Buffett, or Musk, or Bezos – is allowed to become as rich as Soros has. – Article
You all have a good week, and go vote on Tuesday (if you haven’t already).
