Various people (BeagleScout and Vassar Bushmills) have requested that I expand some comments I made last week about George Soros into a diary.

So as Pat Benatar sings: “Let’s get down to it!”

In August 2008, George Soros purchased a large amount of stock in Brazilian oil, namely the company known as PetroBras.

“London: Billionaire investor George Soros bought an $811 million stake in Petroleo Brasileiro (Petrobras) in the second quarter, making the Brazilian state-controlled oil company his investment fund’s largest holding….

In November, Petrobras announced the discovery of Tupi, a field with as much as 8 billion barrels of reserves, making it the largest find in the Americas since 1976.
“Petrobras has something that other oil companies don’t have: oil – lots of it and they’re going to find more,” said Ricardo Kob-ayashi, equity fund manager with UBS Pactual in Rio de Janeiro.”

(My Emphasis above)

See:

http://gulfnews.com/business/oil-gas/soros-hedge-fund-invests-811m-to-buy-petrobras-stake-1.125134

And so what does Soros do in America? Interestingly, he supports the Democrats whole-heartedly with their anti-oil, anti-drilling, anti-exploration agenda. Brilliant, actually.

And was it a coincidence that the U.S. decided to loan Petrobras $2 Billion in August 2009? From a rather shocked Wall Street Journal article:

“…the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.
The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil’s Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan. The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a “preliminary commitment” letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574346610120524166.html

The writer of the article seems not to have made the connection between the large Soros investment in Petrobras and his influence in the Obama Administration.

Petrobras is a long-term investment for Soros, and he sells its shares now and then. In a report from May 2009 which shows Soros selling some Petrobras shares, we see this interesting Soros-fund stock purchase in Nuclear Energy! (Why put all those eggs in one Swiss bank account?)

“I’m most intrigued with him (Soros) picking up a stake in Entergy (ETR). They are the second largest producer of Nuclear power in the U.S. They just reported an okay quarter. The numbers were down, but they reaffirmed ’09 guidance. They don’t serve a lot of industrial clients which has helped them from being hit too hard by the recession. I do like the idea of buying into nuclear a bit. There is a lot of pressure coming down soon on carbon-burning plants with the talk of cap-and-trade, or something like it coming. Nuclear might benefit, even if it just means people moving their money out of the other stocks and into these.”

(My Emphasis Above)

http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewarticle/articleid/3235259

And so are we surprised that months later BIG BRObama is suddenly in favor of building nuclear energy plants in America?

Let us now switch to politics and the influence that Soros exerts in an attempt to manipulate the outcome.

Soros is precise in his attack, yet subtle. By focusing on elections which voters often ignore, specifically state elections for Secretary of State, George Soros has found a method to influence races for the House and Senate. Examples of this malign plan in Minnesota were exposed by Matthew Vadum late last year in articles for American Spectator.

An excerpt:

“Minnesota’s secretary of state isn’t a Democrat by happenstance.
(Mark) Ritchie, who defeated two-term incumbent Republican Mary Kiffmeyer in 2006, received an endorsement and financial assistance for his run from a below-the-radar non-federal “527″ group called the Secretary of State Project. The entity can accept unlimited financial contributions and doesn’t have to disclose them publicly until well after the election…
The secretary of state candidates the group endorses sing the same familiar song about electoral integrity issues: Voter fraud is largely a myth, vote suppression is used widely by Republicans, cleansing the dead and fictional characters from voter rolls should be avoided until embarrassing media reports emerge, and anyone who demands that a voter produce photo identification before pulling the lever is a racist, democracy-hating Fascist.”

See:

http://spectator.org/archives/2008/11/07/sos-in-minnesota/1

Although, to his credit, Soros funneled money into Czechoslovakia to hasten the fall of Communism there in 1989, he ultimately is a fervent Socialist who does not believe in the freedom of individuals to work and invent through open markets, but rather thinks a “government-controlled” socialist economy must be imposed world-wide, and especially in the United States.

Matthew Vadum continues his investigation of Soros in a different article, this time focusing on the misnamed, Soros-sponsored “Institute for New Economic Thinking” (INET), which of course through Orwellian language masks that it actually fosters old economic thinking, i.e. socialism:

“Although markets have helped make him a billionaire almost a dozen times over, Soros blames markets — and not the suffocating regulations and high taxes his funding of left-wing groups promotes — for the current economic meltdown. “The entire edifice of global financial markets has been erected on the false premise that markets can be left to their own devices, we must find a new paradigm and rebuild from the ground up. I decided to sponsor INET to facilitate the process.”

Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh channels Soros in describing the purpose of INET. The new institute, Hirsh writes, will “make research grants, convene symposiums, and establish a journal, all in an effort to take back the economics profession from the champions of free-market zealotry who have dominated it for decades, and to correct the failures of decades of market deregulation.”

See:

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/11/04/killing-capitalism-soros-style/1

Unfortunately for Soros and his fantasy, as Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center demonstrates, with a stifling amount of regulation and with bureaucrats’ budgets rising, lack of deregulation is hardly responsible for the late 2008 financial crisis.

“So what does the data say? The graph below shows inflation-adjusted federal spending on finance and banking regulations between 1960 and 2010. As we can see, with very few exceptions, regulatory spending on finance and banking has gone up for the last 50 years from to $190 million in 1960 to $2.3 billion in fiscal 2010. Also, real expenditures for the finance and banking regulation category have risen 45.5 percent from 1990 to 2010, with a 20 percent increase in the last ten years. It rose by 26 percent during President George W. Bush’s administration.”

See:

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/september/is-this-what-deregulation-looks-like

And from my earlier comments, for those who missed them:

Don’t forget this meeting with Soros and socialist plutocrats before the election in November 2004!

“…a week after the Democratic Convention, a clandestine summit meeting took place at the Aspen Institute, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The participants, all Democrats, were sworn to secrecy, and few of them will discuss the event. One thing that is certain, however, is that the guests formed a tableau that not many people would associate with the Democratic Party of the past. Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

“No one was supposed to know about this,” an assistant to one participant told me, declining to be named. “We don’t want people thinking it’s a cabal, or some sort of Masonic plot!” His concern was understandable: the prospect of rich men concentrating their wealth in order to sway an American election was an inflammatory one, particularly given the Democratic Party’s populist rhetoric.”

See:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/10/18/041018fa_fact3

And from “Billionaires for Big Government”:

“In April 2005, Soros and the other major players assembled a large group for a secret planning session. Seventy millionaires and billionaires met in Phoenix, Arizona, to discuss how to develop a long-term strategy. The attendees including former Clinton White House aides Mike McCurry, Sidney Blumenthal, and LBJ staffer turned PBS talking head Bill Moyers, listened as officials from all the pro-Democratic Party 527 groups on which they had lavished millions of dollars explained why they failed to deliver the election to Kerry.”

See:

http://www.capitalresearch.org/news/news.html?id=551

If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

From the London Daily Mail:

“Representatives of George Soros’s investment business were among an all-star line up of Wall Street investors at an ‘ideas dinner’ at a private townhouse in Manhattan, according to reports.
A spokesman for Soros Fund Management said the legendary investor did not attend the dinner on February 8, but did not deny that his firm was represented.
At the dinner, the speculators are said to have argued that the euro is likely to plunge in value to parity with the dollar.
The single currency has been under enormous pressure because of Greece’s debt crisis, plus financial worries in Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland.
But, it has also struggled because hedge funds have been placing huge bets on the currency’s decline, which could make the speculators hundreds of millions of pounds.
The euro traded at $1.51 in December, but has since fallen to $1.34. Details of the secretive dinner emerged days after Mr Soros, chairman of Soros
Fund Management, warned in a newspaper article that the euro could ‘fall apart’ even if the European Union can agree a deal to shore up support for stricken Greece.

(My Emphasis Above)

See:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1253791/Is-man-broke-Bank-England-George-Soros-centre-hedge-funds-betting-crisis-hit-euro.html#ixzz0gh3W9B0Y

And of course the Euro is plunging!

Also:

“Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, suggested Friday the organization might one day be called on to provide countries with a global reserve currency that would serve as an alternative to the U.S. dollar.

“That day has not yet come, but I think it is intellectually healthy to explore these kinds of ideas now,” he said in a speech on the future mandate of the 186-nation Washington-based lending organization.

Strauss-Kahn said such an asset could be similar to but distinctly different from the IMF’s special drawing rights, or SDRs, the accounting unit that countries use to hold funds within the IMF. It is based on a basket of major currencies.

He said having other alternatives to the dollar “would limit the extent to which the international monetary system as a whole depends on the policies and conditions of a single, albeit dominant, country.”

See:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9958995

And of course it would mean that a small group of international bankers/financiers – like Soros – would be in charge of the currency!

This is the hallmark of the Socialist World Order: arrogant technocrats at the top pulling the strings, because they are the ones who know everything better, they are the ones who deign to keep the wheels of the planet greased and moving, they are the ones for whom elections are an inconvenient obstacle to be manipulated, the way they manipulate their money holdings. And what gives them the right to do so?

George Orwell explained it in Animal Farm:

All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.