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This article appears in the November 7, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
DEMS' NEW DISASTER

Soros's Drug Money Funds a New
`Protection Racket for Cheney'

by Michele Steinberg

At a two-day Washington conference, "New American Strategies for Security and Peace," held Oct. 28-29, drug pusher and offshore speculator George Soros unveiled his "Center for American Progress" (CAP), a so-called progressive think-tank, created with $10 million worth of Soros' blood- and drug-money, and run by the "third way" Democrats John Podesta, Morton Halperin, and Gene Sperling—all veterans of the Clinton Administration during the reign of Kenneth Starr and the "Principals Committee." The credentials of these three CAP leaders are awful: Podesta most recently comes from the discredited Democratic Leadership Council (DLC); Halperin is the Director of dope pusher Soros' Open Society Institute in Washington, and Sperling's claim to fame is pushing through the anti-development "balanced budget" legislation in the Clinton Administration, the same policy that has led to the massive deficits of 47 out of the 50 Federal states.

Drug legalizer, predator, and profiteer George "Monica Lewinsky" Soros' sucking up to the Democratic Party will have the same disastrous results as the previous Lewinsky's stalking activities. The objective of this Soros enterprise is to bury the growing resistance to the fascist policies of Dick Cheney's neo-conservative warmongers, in a toothless loyal opposition, a rerun of the DLC. From the deliberately tepid speeches by the leading "stars" of Soros pre-Hallowe'en show—keynoter Gen. Wesley Clark, dinner speaker and pious hypocrite Zbigniew Brzezinski, Vice Presidency seeker Hillary Clinton—it is clear that those pushing the wisdom of taking George Soros' money are making a Faustian bargain with the neo-con Straussian cabal that Lyndon LaRouche has identified as the "Children of Satan." Indeed, there seems to be only one common rule for the scripted presentations at the conference: Do not mention "Dick Cheney" or "neo-conservatives."

Unfortunately, some of the leading fighters against those Cheney policies from both parties felt obliged to participate. In most cases, their speeches were pale shadows of the effective interventions that have been made in Congress and in other arenas.

Lyndon LaRouche, the real "progressive" statesman, the first to expose Cheney, and who has been relentlessly driving for his resignation since September 2002, warned against this Soros infiltration. "My line is that any Democrat who takes Soros's money, perhaps should think about retiring," said LaRouche. "Or the very least they should do, is admit that they are taking that money.... I, as a Democratic candidate, say that anybody who is taking money from Soros ought to know what Soros's policies are. And then: What do they have to say about drugs? Are they, in one sense or another, actually drug pushers? And if so, why, they should say so; put that on their campaign website: 'I am a drug-pusher. I'm pushing cocaine.' "

EIR Blows the Game

Purporting to be the anti-President Bush movement in the United States, Soros' CAP is nothing of the kind. In short, it is a sure-fire route to re-elect George W. Bush and the gaggle of neo-cons and Christian fundamentalist fanatics that have brought us the anti-Islam Clash of Civilizations war in the Middle East. CAP is nothing more than a refurbished version of the DLC of Sen. Joe Lieberman and organized crime-linked financier Mickey Steinhardt. One Washington source asserts that Podesta "morphed" his DLC spin-off, the American Majority Institute (now defunct), into CAP with Soros money. This is the crowd that gave victory to "beast-man" Arnold Schwarzenegger, courtesy of dirty operations inside the Democratic Party. This is the crowd that brought us the overthrow of President Alberto Fujimori in Peru, funneling $1 million from Soros into the campaign coffers of Fujimori's replacement, Alejandro Toledo, and which helped fund and trigger the latest bloodletting in Bolivia (see article page 44).

In true DLC fashion, Podesta opened the CAP conference on the theme that the Democrats can "do" the occupation of Iraq, the war on terrorism, and democratization better than the Bush Administration. Podesta's only criticism of the Iraq war was that "there was no plan for peace," and the Administration is not paying enough attention to "Iran, Syria, and North Korea," which are worse dangers than Iraq. Keynote speaker Wesley Clark (claiming he was not there as a Presidential candidate because he had been invited before he announced) was ridiculously vague in his criticisms of the Iraq invasion—although, as a retired General, he was obligated to say that the situation in Iraq is now "a guerrilla war." Another panelist, former State Department Africa hand Susan Rice—a Clinton Administration neo-con—changed her tune, calling the United States "an arrogant hegemon" instead of a global leader. But Rice lectured in proper "arrogant hegemon" style, á la Madeleine Albright, on how the United States should deal with "failed states."

Several tedious hours made clear that Cheney was being protected, until LaRouche associates from EIR injected reality. Following a panel that included former Ambassador Joe Wilson, a question by EIR's Lawrence Freeman to Wilson brought the Dick Cheney issue to the table for the first time. "Is it the policy of this organization to not mention Cheney?" Freeman asked. The audience broke out into laughter and applause, and Wilson took the opportunity to say that it is not his policy to leave out Cheney.

Wilson—who had just spoken about how his mission in February 2002 debunked the report of Iraqi purchases of yellowcake uranium from Niger, and how that report had made him the target of an Administration vendetta—said that he has three targets: Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney. The audience was delighted—but, a second speaker, Flynt Leverett, opposed Freeman's question, returning to the "party line" of CAP and the DLC: Bush—not Cheney—is responsible.

Then, during the final panel of the day, one on proliferation on weapons of mass destruction chaired by William J. Perry, EIR's Scott Thompson popped the question on Soros's drug money. Thompson pointed out that the large amounts of money required for terrorists to weaponize or procure WMD had gone unmentioned; and that the primary non-state source was drugs—pointing to the bumper crops of opium and heroin in Afghanistan as one example, and narco-terrorism in Ibero-America as another. In terms of mortalities and cultural degeneration, Thompson said, narcotics themselves were a weapon of mass destruction. Then pointing to George Soros' prominence on the Board of Overseers for the conference, and the role of Soros' money in stopping Peruvian President Fujimori's successful war against the narco-terrorists in Peru, Thompson came to the fact that Soros had given a $10 million subsidy to the CAP, co-sponsor of the Washington event. Finally, noting that Soros, by hard accounting, had given another $10 million to legalize narcotics in the United States, Thompson asked the panelists, "Do you want to rebuild the Democratic Party with drug money?"

No one tried to stop Thompson's question, but no one even tried to answer it. Some young journalists present observed, "You stunned them."

No to Blackmail

For more than a decade, LaRouche has opposed Soros's international operations as genocidal attacks on national sovereignty and the general welfare. On this basis, it is suicide to jump into bed with Soros, who is dangling up to $75 million in front of desperate Democrats, to counter the $100s of millions that Synarchist forces are funneling to Cheney's neo-cons with Bush as their frontman candidate. CAP is only half of Soros' Democrat-wrecking operation. The other piece is a nationwide vote effort called Americans Coming Together (ACT) that puts Soros's hand on the controls of the Democratic Party.

This Summer, Soros gathered a number of Democratic Party leaders to one of his palatial estates in New York, to discuss a $75 million fund to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. At the time, Soros was hosting fundraisers for Howard Dean, then a "dark horse." At the meeting were Steve Rosenthal, a top official in the AFL-CIO, and Ellen Malcolm, the founder of Emily's List, the top source of funds and support for women candidates and issues in the Democratic Party. The result was ACT, which announced itself in August of this year, to "mobiliz[e] voters to defeat George W. Bush and elect progressive candidates all across America." ACT is targetting 17 "battlefield" states critical to winning Democratic Congressional seats.

Fine and good—if you like blackmail. If Soros likes the program, the money will flow; if not, Democrats—especially those in the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt—will be left high and dry. And candidates who are getting Soros' money had better support the legalization of dope.

When Podesta was at the White House—during the height of the Gore coup d'état and impeachment of Clinton—he oversaw some of the worst decisions of the Clinton Administration: the backing off from the policy of a new monetary system (the Clinton September 1998 "CFR speech"); the attack on Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox; and the pardon of organized-crime gangster Marc Rich.

In the Podesta outfit, Soros is creating his own "Democratic" version of George P. Shultz's neo-con "Vulcans," led by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, with Condi Rice as their frontman. The CAP, modeled on the Heritage Foundation, will be the "think-tank" for the Democrats who have been impotent in resisting the Cheney/Ashcroft/neo-con police state operations. It should be especially noted that Ted Kennedy is not among those who attended this Soros fest—though Hillary Clinton did attend and spoke.

Some senior Democratic Party sources have candidly referred to the Soros-backed Center for American Progress scam, and the Wesley Clark Presidential campaign—both staffed to the hilt by ex-Clinton Administration honchos—as little more than a "Hillary for Vice President" move. They warn that Senator Clinton's Presidential ambitions are such that she is prepared to wreck the Party's chances to defeat George Bush in 2004, in order to pave the way for her own nomination as Presidential candidate in 2008.

Opposes the Drug War, Not the Iraq War

LaRouche noted that Kennedy's Oct. 16 Senate speech against the imperial Iraq war was a turning point for the Democratic Party, in a positive direction. Drug pusher Soros and his DLC operatives are making a U-turn away from that shift. But that is not all that Soros is doing. He is purporting to take the lead—with as much as that $75 million—in defeating the Republicans in 17 "battlefield" states, where the races in the House and the Senate in 2000 were extremely close. According to an article in the Nov. 10 issue of the neo-con magazine National Review, Soros pulled together a meeting of top Democratic Party fundraisers to create America Coming Together, to run this election effort, especially since "big money" can no longer be directly funnelled into the Democratic Party. The new ACT group supersedes the DLC front group that Podesta ran called the American Majority Institute.

The second in command at the Podesta outfit is Morton Halperin, who has been the Director of Soros's Open Society Institute (OSI) in Washington. This OSI is still the lead agency for legalizing dope.

If there was any doubt that Soros remains the biggest promoter of dope legalization on the planet, consider the following: From Nov. 5-8, 2003, the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) will be holding its biennial conference in the Meadowlands, New Jersey. The Drug Policy Alliance is the new name for the Lindesmith Center/Drug Policy Foundation, organizations sponsored by Soros and run by Dr. Ethan Nadelmann, the chief dope legalizer at Soros' OSI. The keynote speaker at the opening plenary session of the DPA event will be Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, a director of OSI. Soros is himself on the board of the Drug Policy Alliance. Over the past decade, Soros has poured tens of millions annually into the dope lobby's efforts, from the Drug Policy Foundation/Lindesmith Center to Human Rights Watch, which has backed narco-traffickers throughout Ibero-America.

Last year, the Soros-backed dope legalization lobby attempted to pass a referendum in Nevada, not only legalizing marijuana, but mandating that a state agency be established to grow and distribute pot. The effort, which was defeated by Democratic Gubernatorial candidate and longtime State Sen. Joe Neal (D), in league with LaRouche Democrats, was widely seen as a direct effort by Ibero-American drug traffickers to establish a major beach-head on U.S. soil—using the Soros-bankrolled minions of dope lobbyists as their foot-soldiers.

The fact that it was LaRouche Democrats who defeated Soros and his dope lobby allies in this major initiative, says a great deal about what the stakes are in this year's Democratic Party Presidential primaries. The fight for the soul of the Democratic Party is being waged, and the protagonists are now Lyndon LaRouche and George Soros.