Soros in ‘Fortune’, and on Iraq

Thanks to Margaret Powell who sent me a link to this great article in the current issue of Fortune, which described how financial whiz George Soros has decided that intense political engagement against the Bushies is the only way to try to make the world safe again.
Here’s a little of what writer Mark Gimein has to say:

At the age of 73, George Soros has found new purpose: He has recast himself as a fierce, angry, partisan critic of the Bush administration and American policy…. Soros has argued that the U.S. right now is in the midst of a crisis. He believes that both at home and abroad, the American government has put in jeopardy the values of openness and democracy in a search for “invisible enemies.” A careful observer of the international political scene, with contacts ranging all the way from UN chief Kofi Annan to Brazilian President Luiz Lula da Silva to Bush foreign-policy eminence Paul Wolfowitz, Soros attacks Bush in the most direct and dramatic terms.
“I lived through both German and Soviet occupation,” Soros told me as we walked through a park on Budapest’s Margaret Island. “When I hear President Bush say that those who are not with us are against us, I hear alarm bells.” He calls Bush’s speeches “Orwellian” and compares the Bush vision of international democracy?”You can have freedom as long as you do what we tell you to do”?to Soviet rhetoric about “people’s democracies.”
Soros has just committed $10 million of his own money to an effort to drum up support for Democrats in key states, immediately becoming one of the biggest individual donors to next year’s electoral race. In September he staged a fundraiser for former Vermont governor Howard Dean. And after years of writing moderate, carefully argued–and not very influential–tracts about the international economy, he is now almost ready to publish a very different kind of work, a book to be called The Bubble of American Supremacy. It’s a no-holds-barred attack on what he sees as the hubris of American policy. “I’ve come to the conclusion,” Soros told FORTUNE, “that one can do a lot more about the issues I care about by changing the government than by pushing the issues.” In short, he has become the world’s angriest billionaire.

One initiative Soros’s Open Society Institute has launched has been the “Iraq Revenue Watch” website, to which alert JWN reader Dan pointed us in a Comment posted last night. I hadn’t been to the IRW site for a while– it has become excellent. Check out in particular their Links list and their resources section.
Thanks, Margaret and Dan!