In the U.S. capital, the OSI Washington Office engages in public education on a range of domestic and international issues, including criminal and civil justice reform, women's rights, U.S. policy in Colombia, and Central Eurasia. The Open Society Policy Center, a separate organization that is incorporated as a 501(c)nonprofit, undertakes lobbying efforts on these and other public policy issues."
In his January 1998 article, "Toward a Global Open Society" published in The Atlantic magazine, George Soros writes:
"We do live in a global economy. But it is important to be clear about what we mean by that. A global economy is characterized not only by the free movement of goods and services but, more important, by the free movement of ideas and of capital. This applies to direct investments and to financial transactions. Though both have been gaining in importance since the end of the Second World War, the globalization of financial markets in particular has accelerated in recent years to the point where movements in exchange rates, interest rates, and stock prices in various countries are intimately interconnected. In this respect the character of the financial markets has changed out of all recognition during the forty years that I have been involved in them. So the global economy should really be thought of as the global capitalist system."
"Global integration has brought tremendous benefits: the benefits of the international division of labor ... But global capitalism is not without its problems, and we need to understand these better if we want the system to survive. By focusing on the problems I'm not trying to belittle the benefits that globalization has brought ... The benefits of the present global capitalist system, I believe, can be sustained only by deliberate and persistent efforts to correct and contain the system's deficiencies. That is where I am at loggerheads with laissez-faire ideology, which contends that free markets are self-sustaining and market excesses will correct themselves, provided that governments or regulators don't interfere with the self-correcting mechanism."
"Our global society contains many different customs, traditions, and religions; where can it find the shared values that would hold it together?"
"WHAT is the open society? ... The principles of the open society are admirably put forth in the Declaration of Independence. But the Declaration states, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident,' whereas the principles of the open society are anything but self-evident; they need to be established by convincing arguments."
"The goal of the Soros foundations network throughout the world is to transform closed societies into open ones and to protect and expand the values of existing open societies. The concept of open society is, at its most fundamental level, based on the recognition that people act on imperfect knowledge and that no one is in possession of the ultimate truth. In practice, an open society is characterized by the rule of law; respect for human rights, minorities, and minority opinions; democratically elected governments; a market economy in which business and government are separate; and a thriving civil society."
"During most of the 1990s, the Soros foundations network developed in the former Soviet empire, helping countries in transition from authoritarian rule build open, democratic societies. Over the past several years, we have expanded our geographical horizons to other parts of the world. Together with partners that share our principles and goals, the network is laying the foundation for a truly global alliance for open society."
"The goal of the Agency (CIA) was exactly the same as that of the Open Society Fund: to dismantle socialism. In South Africa, the CIA sought out dissidents who were anticommunist. In Hungary, Poland and the USSR, the CIA, with overt intervention from the National Endowment for Democracy, the AFL-CIO, USAID and other institutions, supported and organized anticommunists, the very type of individuals recruited by Soros' Open Society Fund. The CIA would have called them "assets."
As Soros said, "In each country I identified a group of people - some leading personalities, others less well known - who share my belief..." Soros' Open Society organized conferences with anticommunist Czechs, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians, Croatians, Bosnians, Kosovars. His ever-expanding influence gave rise to suspicions that he was operating as part of the U.S. intelligence complex. In 1989, the Washington Post reported charges first made in 1987 by the Chinese government officials that Soros' Fund for the Reform and Opening of China had CIA connections."
"The Open Society Institute's initiatives address specific issue areas on a regional or network-wide basis around the world. Most of the initiatives are administered by OSI in New York or OSI-Budapest and implemented in cooperation with Soros foundations in various countries."
"The nearly 20 OSI initiatives cover a range of activities aimed at building free and open societies, including the strengthening of civil society; economic reform; education at all levels; human rights; legal reform and public administration; media and communications; public health; and arts and culture. OSI in New York also operates special initiatives such as the Central Eurasia Project, the Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative, and the European Union Accession Monitoring Program."
And Yet:
Soros said the Bush administration "violated human rights and damaged American security by invading Iraq and deposing the regime of Saddam Hussein. 'The idea that we can impose our will on the world is really just the wrong idea,'" he said, vowing "to do everything in his power to prevent Bush from winning re-election.
In a March 14, 2003, Op-Ed, Soros likened the Bush administration's "pursuit of American supremacy" to "a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market." Both, he argued, "have a solid basis in reality but reality is distorted by misconception. In this case, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of supremacy the misconception. Reality can reinforce the misconception but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable. During the self-reinforcing phase, the misconception may be tested and reinforced. This widens the gap leading to an eventual reversal. The later it comes, the more devastating the consequences."
In his book The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power, Soros writes that "the Bush administration's foreign policy plans come from the same sort of 'bubble' psychology afflicting U.S. markets in the late 1990s. He says they have used a real fact, overwhelming military supremacy of the United States, to create a deluded worldview that might makes right and 'you're either with us or against us,' in the same way the recent boom used a real fact, the growth in technology, to lead to a delusion, the 'new economy.'"
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