25.1.2008 by admin.

THE MONEY MAN
by JANE MAYER
Can George Soros’s millions insure the defeat of President Bush?
Issue of 2004-10-18
Posted 2004-10-11

On August 6th, 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. This private meeting of plutocrats was an unintended consequence of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform law of 2002. Previously, wealthy donors had contributed “soft money” to the political parties, which controlled how the funds were spent. The reform legislation had banned such gifts, forcing donors to find new ways of influencing the political process.

The meeting’s organizer was Peter B. Lewis, the seventy-year-old reclusive chairman of the Progressive Corporation, an insurance company based in Cleveland, Ohio. He has spent much of 2004 discreetly directing millions of dollars to liberal groups allied with the Democratic Party, such as America Coming Together and MoveOn.org, while cruising the Mediterranean Sea on his two-hundred-and-fifty-foot yacht, Lone Ranger. The yacht has communications equipment that allows Lewis to monitor political developments in America while sunbathing off the coast of Italy. Lewis, a major backer of efforts to decriminalize marijuana, has helped underwrite campaigns to hold referenda on decriminalization in Arizona and California. (In 2000, he was arrested in New Zealand for possessing marijuana.) According to Lewis’s friends, he concluded that it would be best to remain a shadow figure in the 2004 campaign; he has declined all requests for interviews.

Flying in from Arizona was John Sperling, an octogenarian businessman who in 1976 created the for-profit University of Phoenix. Sperling is also the co-author of a recent book, “The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America,” which suggests that the 2004 election is a contest between “‘God, Family, and Flag’ folks”—who live in the South, the Great Plains, the Rockies, and Appalachia—and forward-thinking metropolitans who support “economic modernity,” “religious moderation,” and “excellence in education and science.”

Herb and Marion Sandler, a California couple in their seventies, came to Aspen looking for ways to give back to a country that had allowed them to prosper. The founders of Golden West Financial Corporation, a savings-and-loan company worth seventeen billion dollars, the Sandlers are devoted to the idea of preserving progressive income taxes and inheritance taxes.

The wealthiest participant at this meeting of hard-core partisans—and the one whose presence was the most surprising—was George Soros, the seventy-four-year-old Wall Street speculator turned philanthropist. Soros, who was born in Budapest in 1930, is short, with a crest of gray hair, owlish glasses surrounding blue eyes, and a hearing aid in one ear. At Aspen, his deep Hungarian accent, and his taste for abstract ideas, made him seem like a European professor who had walked into the wrong seminar. “The participants kind of talked past each other,” a person who attended the meeting told me.

To the distress of some of the strategists present, the billionaires spent much of the time bemoaning the superior powers of the G.O.P. In exasperation, one participant, Harold Ickes, Bill Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, attempted to rally the group with a look back at liberalism’s legacy of achievement, from the civil-rights era to the feminist movement. Much remained to be accomplished, he suggested.

Sperling proposed a potential new project for the group: unionizing Wal-Mart workers. Soros, however, had no interest in union drives. He wanted to stay focussed on the main objective—ousting Bush. Yet he also warned the group against the idea of combatting right-wing propaganda with leftist demagoguery. “I do not have an interest in replacing one extremist movement with another,” he said.

Andrew Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, a holdover from the traditional working-class base of the Democratic Party, was also at the summit. In an interview not long ago, he conceded that consorting with billionaires had become a strange but increasingly common part of his job. “I have to admit, I used to think I was doing well when I met millionaires,” he said. “I’m glad we’ve got the billionaires with us. But it did feel a bit odd.”………..

Uni Münster

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25.1.2008 by admin.

Serbien: Peter Handke unterstützt Nationalisten

Wenn er die Wahl hätte

Der Schriftsteller Peter Handke hat seine Empfehlung für die serbische Präsidentenwahl ausgesprochen: Am 3. Februar würde er den radikalen Nationalisten Tomislav Nikolic wählen.

Peter Handke wurde heftig kritisiert, als er an der Beerdigung des ehemaligen Autokraten Slobodan Milosevic teilnahm. Foto: dpa Der Schriftsteller Peter Handke hat bei der serbischen Präsidentenwahl zur Unterstützung des extrem nationalistischen Kandidaten Tomislav Nikolic aufgerufen. “Wenn ich die serbische Staatsbürgerschaft besäße, würde ich heute in Serbien für Nikolic stimmen”, sagte Handke bei einem Treffen mit Nikolic, berichtete die Zeitung Politika am Mittwoch in Belgrad. Das Blatt veröffentlichte dazu ein Foto, das ein freundschaftliches Händeschütteln der beiden Männer zeigt. Der Ultranationalist Tomislav Nikolic hat bei der serbischen Präsidentenwahl mehr Stimmen als Amtsinhaber Boris Tadic erhalten, die Mehrheit für einen Sieg in der ersten Runde aber verfehlt. Er tritt in der Stichwahl am 3. Februar gegen den prowestlichen Amtsinhaber Tadic an.

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