King of 'Hit and Run' Capitalism Wants Free Reign Over Unplundered Global Resources

• Defended by libertarians as a great free market capitalist, the multi-billionaire George Soros is accused by his victims of being the father of "rape-and-pillage" speculation.

In speech before the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), George Soros delivered a globalist call for "a society based on international law and international institutions" and praised the World Trade Organization for opening global markets and easing the free movement of capital, which has weakened nation-states.

Soros was in Chicago to promote his book, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism. However, the 500 people who paid to hear the "guru of hedge funds" and buy his book hoping to glean some wisdom will be disappointed because who George Soros really is -- and how he operates -- are closely guarded secrets.

"The devolution in the power of the state is a good thing," Soros told the Chicago CFR on Nov. 20.

Lauded as one of the most successful investment managers in history and the first American to earn more than $1 billion in one year, Soros, a Bilderberger, has admitted having "some rather potent messianic fantasies" and at times thinking that he is God.

Considered a philanthropist by some and the front man for the Rothschild banking group by others, Soros said, "the private sector is not a philanthropic system," hinting that the aid given by his Open Society Institute (OSI) to the nations of eastern Europe is not motivated solely by altruism.

The OSI insinuated itself, and the Soros agenda, into academia, media and government in the newly liberated republics of the Soviet Union in 1993. It has since expanded and opened offices around the world, including several in the United States.

"He's the only man in the U.S. who has his own foreign policy -- and he can implement it," Morton Abramovitz, former American ambassador to Turkey, told The New Yorker in 1995.

Initially Soros had difficulty deciding what causes to support, because he does not consider himself American, Jewish, or Hungarian.

Soros decided the one thing he did care about was Karl Popper's "open society," a universalistic concept that transcends national, racial and religious identities.

By financing the American Committee to Save Bosnia, and other groups, Soros was a key figure in the propaganda campaign calling for U.S. bombing of Serbia and Kosovo.

Today Soros is involved in the restructuring of the Balkans and has established himself as the official banker and chief investor in the region using U.S. taxpayer money.

Soros signed a deal with an agency of the U.S. government, in July, to manage a $150 million fund to develop private ventures in the Balkan states of the former Yugoslavia (except Serbia), as well as Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey.

Soros invested $50 million in the Southeast Europe Equity Fund, while the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation -- a U.S. federal agency -- provided $100 million in "loan guarantees," all of which he controls.

DUAL PERSONALITY

George Soros was born on Aug. 12, 1930, to Tivadar Soros and Elizabeth Szucs, upper-middle class Jews living in Budapest, Hungary.

Soros survived in Nazi Hungary during the war by adopting what he calls a double personality.

Soros said in a radio interview that his father gave him Nazi credentials and, pretending to be "Janos [or Sandor] Kis," the godson of a Hungarian government official whose job it was to deliver deportation notices to Jews and take possession of their property, he helped loot wealthy Jewish estates.

"In many ways it was the happiest year of my life," he told Michael Lewis of The New Republic, "It was dangerous and exciting. It made me a bit of a risk-taker."

Soros said that the skills he learned at 14 later helped him as an investor.

In 1947, he moved to London where he enrolled at the London School of Econo mics and studied under Karl Popper who introduced him to the concept of "open societies."

In 1956, he emigrated to the United States and began working as an arbitrage trader. Five years later he became a naturalized American citizen.

Soros and a partner, Jim Rogers, started an offshore hedge fund in 1969 with several million dollars raised from private investors, primarily wealthy Europeans.

The Quantum Fund, managed by Soros, was based in the tax haven of CuraÁao, in the Netherlands Antilles, to conceal his investors and their money from government regulators.

The Task Force on Money Laundering of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has repeatedly cited the Netherlands Antilles as one of the world's centers for laundering drug money.

Soros has many prominent investors, including Britain's Queen Elizabeth. The fund's directors are American, Swiss, Italian and British. For legal reasons Soros serves as "investment adviser" through another company, Soros Fund Management. In 1997, Quantum claimed between $11 billion and $14 billion in assets.

Soros is a "macro" operator who bets on currencies and interest rates. Soros, the speculator, has attacked the currencies of Italy, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Mexico.

Soros is known as "the man who broke the Bank of England" in September 1992. He wagered $10 billion of mostly borrowed money against the value of the British pound and made between one and two billion dollars by making bets and then coordinating a massive sell-off of sterling, forcing the pound to be devalued.

Hit and Run Capitalism

On "Black Wednesday," the Bank of England was forced to withdraw the pound from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and devalue it below the range fixed by the ERM. Soros borrowed billions of pounds and converted them into German marks. After the pound fell he repaid the loans in devalued currency and pocketed the difference.

One of Soros' tactics is to enter a newly opened and unsophisticated financial market with funds he manages and begin buying stocks or bonds, which causes others to follow, thinking he knows something they don't. When the smaller investors follow his lead, prices rise and Soros begins to sell off to the eager new buyers reaping a good profit. As quickly as he came, he exits the market.

This technique is known as "hit and run" capitalism because Soros leaves behind a collapsed market and financially ruined national investors.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad called Soros a "criminal" and said he destroyed in weeks what Malaysia had built for 40 years.

JEWISH MAFIA

According to William Engdahl writing in Executive Intelligence Review in 1996:

Soros is part of a tightly knit financial Mafia....

Anyone who dares to criticize Soros or any of his associates is immediately hit with the charge of being "anti-Semitic" -- a criticism which often silences or intimidates genuine critics of Soros' unscrupulous operations.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) considers it a top priority to "protect" Soros from the charges of 'anti-Semites' in Hungary and elsewhere in Central Europe, according to ADL National Director Abraham Foxman.

According to knowledgeable U.S. and European investigators, Soros' circle includes indicted metals and commodity speculator and fugitive Marc Rich of Zug, Switzerland and Tel Aviv; secretive Israeli arms and commodity dealer Shaul Eisenberg, and "Dirty Rafi" Eytan, both linked to the financial side of the Israeli Mossad; and, the family of Jacob Lord Rothschild.

Understandably, Soros and the Rothschild interests prefer to keep their connection hidden far from public view, so as to obscure the well-connected friends Soros enjoys in the city of London, the British Foreign Office, Israel, and the U.S. financial establishment. The myth, therefore, has been created, that Soros is a lone financial investment "genius" who, through his sheer personal brilliance in detecting shifts in markets, has become one of the world's most successful speculators. According to those who have done business with him, Soros never makes a major investment move without sensitive insider information.

Soros' relation to the Rothschild finance circle represents no ordinary or casual banking connection. It goes a long way to explain the extraordinary success of a mere private speculator, and Soros' uncanny ability to "gamble right" so many times in such high-risk markets. Soros has access to the "insider track" in some of the most important government and private channels in the world.

NO ROBIN HOOD

Time magazine characterized Soros as a "modern-day Robin Hood," who robs from the rich to give to the poor countries of eastern Europe and Russia.

It said that Soros makes huge financial gains by speculating against western central banks, in order to use his profits to help the emerging post-communist economies of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, to assist them to create what he calls an "open society."

"The statement is entirely accurate in the first part, and entirely inaccurate in the second," said Engdahl. "He robs from rich western countries, and uses his profits to rob even more savagely from the East, under the cloak of 'philanthropy.' His goal is to loot wherever he can.

"What Soros means by 'open' is a society that allows him, and his financial predator friends, to loot the resources and precious assets of former Warsaw Pact economies," he said.

SHOCK THERAPY

"Soros has been personally responsible for introducing shock therapy into the emerging economies of eastern Europe since 1989. He has deliberately fostered on fragile new governments in the East the most draconian economic madness, policies which have allowed Soros and his financial predator friends, such as Marc Rich and Shaul Eisenberg, to loot the resources of large parts of eastern Europe at dirt-cheap prices," Engdahl said.

Soros admits he knew in advance that his shock therapy would cause huge unemployment, closing of factories and social unrest.

"The private sector has to share the burden," he said while in Chicago.

It was Soros who, in late 1991, introduced shock therapy into Russia,

"I started mobilizing a group of economists to take to the Soviet Union (July 1990). Professor Jeffery Sachs, with whom I had worked in Poland, was ready and eager to participate," Soros said.

He suggested a number of other participants: Romano Prodi from Italy and David Finch, a retired official of the International Monetary Fund.

"I wanted to include Stanley Fischer and Jacob Frenkel, heads of research at the World Bank and IMF; Larry Sum mers from Harvard and Michael Bruno of the Central Bank of Israel," he said. Summers became treasury secretary and was recruited into Bilderberg.

Shock therapy brought chaos and hyperinflation to Russia. Scientists from advanced research institutes fled in pursuit of jobs in the West.

Igor Gaidar and the Yeltsin government imposed draconian cuts in state spending for industry and agriculture, even though the entire economy was state-owned. A goal of a zero deficit budget within three months was announced. Credit to industry was ended and enterprises piled up huge debts as inflation went out of control.

Soros and his friends lost no time in capitalizing on this situation. Marc Rich began buying Russian aluminum at cheap prices, with hard currency, and dumped the aluminum into western industrial markets, causing a 30 percent collapse in the price of the metal.