Tag: George Soros

Sibelius Resigns. When the Going Gets Tough…

On By kingsjesterIn Politics2 Comments

SibeliusGo on, take the money and run…

Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, is resigning, ending a stormy five-year tenure marred by the disastrous rollout of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act.

Mr. Obama accepted Ms. Sebelius’s resignation this week, and on Friday morning, he will nominate Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to replace her, officials said.

The departure comes as the Obama administration tries to move beyond its early stumbles in carrying out the law, convince a still-skeptical public of its lasting benefits, and help Democratic incumbents, who face blistering attack ads after supporting the legislation, survive the midterm elections this fall.

Sylvia Mathews Burwell has been mired in fiscal fights and has also handled health policy as part of her job as budget director.

Officials said Ms. Sebelius, 65, made the decision to resign and was not forced out. But the frustration at the White House over her performance had become increasingly clear, as administration aides worried that the crippling problems at HealthCare.gov, the website set up to enroll Americans in insurance exchanges, would result in lasting damage to the president’s legacy.

Even last week, as Mr. Obama triumphantly announced that enrollments in the exchanges had exceeded seven million, she did not appear next to him for the news conference in the Rose Garden.

The president is hoping that Ms. Burwell, 48, a Harvard- and Oxford-educated West Virginia native with a background in economic policy, will bring an intense focus and management acumen to the department. The budget office, which she has overseen since April of last year, is deeply involved in developing and carrying out health care policy.

Let’s take a closer look at the next HHS Secretary, shall we? According to Forbes.com,

Sylvia Mathews Burwell, President, The Walmart Foundation (Jan. 2012 – April, 2013); President, Global Development Program (Apr. 2006 – Dec. 2011). Ms. Burwell joined the Foundation in 2001 as Executive Vice President and served as its Chief Operating Officer from 2002 to April 2006. Prior to joining the Foundation, she served as Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget in Washington, D.C. from 1998. Ms. Burwell served as Deputy Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 1998, and was Chief of Staff to Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin from 1995 to 1997. She also served as Staff Director for the National Economic Council from 1993 to 1995. Ms. Burwell was Manager of President Clintons economic transition team. Prior to that, she was an Associate at McKinsey and Company from 1990 through 1992. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Aspen Strategy Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Nike Foundation Advisory Group, a member of the Board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, an Advisory Board member for the Next Generation Initiative and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and a member of the Professional Advisory Board for the ALS Evergreen Chapter. Ms. Burwell received a bachelors degree in government, cum laude, from Harvard University in 1987 and a bachelors degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Ms. Burwell has been a Director of MetLife and Metropolitan Life Insurance Company since 2004. On April 19, 2013, Ms. Sylvia Mathews Burwell resigned from the Board of Directors of MetLife, Inc., effective as of that date.

One group in Ms. Burwell’s biography jumped out at me. The Aspen Strategy Group is a part of the Aspen Institute.

Who are they? I’m glad you asked.

According to discoverthenetworks.org, the main things to remember about the Aspen Institute are that the institute

  • Views the United States as a nation rife with deep-seated “structural racism”

  • Warns that “the circumpolar Arctic region is experiencing significant ecological change due to global climate change” caused by human industrial activity

  • Receives financial support from George Soros’s Open Society Institute

…AI has numerous noteworthy connections to the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. For example, in August 2004 Soros and other wealthy Democrats gathered at the Institute to brainstorm ways in which they could use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of George W. Bush in the upcoming presidential election. That same year, Soros spoke at an AI seminar (which also featured an appearance by Al Gore) titled “America’s Role in the Fight Against Global Poverty.” In 2006 Aspen sponsored a Soros talk where the billionaire promoted his book The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror. Jim Spiegelman, Aspen’s director of communications, formerly worked as a “special assistant” to Soros. And Arjun Gupta, who serves on Aspen’s board of overseers, is a vice president with the Chatterjee Group which advises Soros and the Soros Fund Management Group.

Soros’s Open Society Institute (OSI) has awarded the Aspen Institute numerous large grants over the years, including $50,000 in 2004, another $50,000 in 2005, $195,000 in 2008, and $125,000 in 2009. The latter grant was earmarked for “international human rights and international humanitarian law and their application in American jurisprudence.” In 2011, OSI funded AI’s publication of a report blaming the overrepresentation of blacks and Latinos in U.S. prison populations on “the failure of so many of our society’s institutions.”

Soon after the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009, AI developed a close working relationship with the U.S. State Department. Said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that year: “We can’t imagine a better partner than the Aspen Institute.”

Indeed. 

So, the White House Door revolves again. A Hardcore Liberal leaves, replaced by another Hardcore Liberal.

Incestuous little bunch, aren’t they?

Of course, Sibelius is “getting while the getting is good”, before the rest of the you-know-what hits the rotary oscillator.

But, as long as OUR MONEY holds out, the Obama Administration will keep on spending it.

I wonder if Uncle George Soros would give us American Taxpayers a grant, too?

Until He Comes,

KJ

 

The Return of the Puppet Master

On By kingsjesterIn Politics4 Comments

Obama’s re-election bid is not going as smoothly as was predicted by all of the political prognosticators. In response, the Democratic Powers-That-Be are calling in the Big Guns.

After months on the sidelines, major liberal donors including the financier George Soros are preparing to inject up to $100 million into independent groups to aid Democrats’ chances this fall. But instead of going head to head with the conservative “super PACs” and outside groups that have flooded the presidential and Congressional campaigns with negative advertising, the donors are focusing on grass-roots organizing, voter registration and Democratic turnout.

But in interviews, donors and strategists involved in the effort said they also did not believe they could match advertising spending by leading conservative groups like American Crossroads and Americans for Prosperity, and instead wanted to exploit what they see as the Democrats’ advantage in grass-roots organizing.

…In a move likely to draw in other major donors, Mr. Soros will contribute $1 million each to America Votes, a group that coordinates political activity for left-leaning environmental, abortion rights and civil rights groups, and American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC that focuses on election-oriented research. The donations will be Mr. Soros’s first major contributions of the 2012 election cycle.

“George Soros believes the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United opened the floodgates to special interests’ paying for political ads,” said Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Mr. Soros. “There is no way those concerned with the public interest can compete with them. Soros has always focused his political giving on grass-roots organizing and holding conservatives accountable for the flawed policies they promote. His support of these groups is consistent with those views.”

What a noble, giving guy Mr. Soros is, huh?  Wrong.

Two years ago today, I posted an article titled, “Black Thursday…Almost” about an unexpected dive in the Stock Market.  Within that post, I included a short summary of how George Soros made his money:

George Soros set up the now famous Quantum Fund as one of the world’s first Hedge Funds. It took money from the wealthy and invested in risky but potentially highly profitable international deals.

It did very well out of the collapse of fixed exchange rates in the 1970s and the deregulation of global capital markets. By 1980, George Soros was worth more than £16.5 million and his fund £67 million. The stage was set for his intervention in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a system established in 1979 for controlling exchange rates within the European Monetary System of the European Union(EU) that was intended to prepare the way for a single currency.

Around spring 1992, Soros had decided that the pound would have to be devalued because it had been pushed into the Exchange Rate Mechanism at too high a rate.

He knew that the Bundesbank was in favor of a devaluation of both sterling and the Italian lira and believed it would have to happen because of the disastrous impact that high British interest rates were having on asset prices.

Soros spent the next few months in preparation to profit from that devaluation. He borrowed sterling heavily, reportedly to the tune of £6.5 billion, and converted that into a mixture of Deutschmarks and French francs.

On Black Wednesday, September 16, 1992, Soros won his bet.  The UK Conservative government was forced to withdraw the Pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) due to pressure by currency speculators, most notably Soros himself.

In the following days, he took care of business, paying back what he borrowed and ending with a profit of around £1 billion.  At the same time, Soros bought as much as £350 million of British shares, gambling that equities often rise after a currency devalues.

He later admitted that his actions had benefited no one but himself.

There are several culprits in the American Stock Market Crash of 2008 that helped cost John McCain the Presidency, but one key source of the problem escaped almost everyone’s attention:  an economic index that can be easily manipulated by Hedge Funds and whose erratic movements have shaken the foundation of Wall Street: the ABX index, launched in 2007 by the Markit Group, aLondon-based company that specializes in credit derivative pricing and that administers the index.

The heart of the mortgage mess we are still recovering from was uncertainty regarding the value of subprime securities. The ABX Index is used to determine the value of these securities: it is a benchmark of the market for all the home loans issued to borrowers with weak credit . A collapse of this index led to home loans being marked down in value.

Looking back, it’s pretty clear that the ABX was manipulated by Hedge Funds. As the ABX subprime mortgage index crashed, so did much of our economy.

Some investors made out like bandits. George Soros for one. Soros had become a political powerbroker of unrivaled influence within the Democratic Party (see The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party) and, even now, has an empire of politically active 527 groups, of which he is the number one donor, by far, in America.

There is a now infamous lunch whispered about between Soros and John Paulson, a Hedge Fund Manager who made millions during the collapse.  Soros invited Paulson for lunch, “asking for details of how he laid his bets, with instruments that didn’t exist a few years ago”.

Soros’s Hedge Fund, like most Hedge Funds, is based overseas and escapes much scrutiny and regulation.
Especially, during this Administration.