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August 12: George Soros

lawrencebush
August 12, 2012

Billionaire investor and politically active philanthropist George Soros (Schwartz György) was born in Budapest on this date in 1930. His father was a writer in Esperanto; Soros is one of some 1,000 native speakers of the international language. A survivor of the 1945 Battle of Budapest (between Nazi and Soviet forces), he emigrated to England in 1947 and to the U.S. in 1956. He became a billionaire by short-selling the British pound when it devalued sharply in 1992. Between 1979 and 2011, Soros contributed more than $8 billion to the causes of human rights, ending poverty, drug legalization, the ending of apartheid in South Africa, the peaceful transition from communism to capitalism in Hungary, and the election of liberal American politicians. By all accounts, he is the largest single funder of progressive movements in America — which has also made him the object of right-wing hatred and conspiracy-theorizing, some of it tinged with anti-Semitism. His own response to resurgent anti-Semitism has been to blame it, at least in part, on “the policies of the [George W.] Bush administration and the [Ariel] Sharon administration . . . If we change [the] direction [of those governments], then anti-Semitism also will diminish.” He somewhat modified this statement in the New York Review of Books, writing: “I do not subscribe to the myths propagated by enemies of Israel and I am not blaming Jews for anti-Semitism. . . . At the same time, I do believe that attitudes toward Israel are influenced by Israel’s policies, and attitudes toward the Jewish community are influenced by the pro-Israel lobby’s success in suppressing divergent views.” The founder of the Open Society Foundation, Soros has written more than a dozen books on economics, philosophy, and democracy. Forbes magazine counts him as the 22nd richest man on the planet and the 7th richest American.
“I think there’s a lot of merit in an international economy and global markets, but they’re not sufficient because markets don’t look after social needs.” —George Soros