George Soros: The Bubble of American Supremacy

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It is generally agreed that September 11, 2001, changed the course of history. But we must ask ourselves why that should be so. How could a single event, even one involving 3,000 civilian casualties, have such a far-reaching effect? The answer lies not so much in the event itself as in the way the United States, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, responded to it.

Admittedly, the terrorist attack was historic in its own right. Hijacking fully fueled airliners and using them as suicide bombs was an audacious idea, and its execution could not have been more spectacular. The destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center made a symbolic statement that reverberated around the world, and the fact that people could watch the event on their television sets endowed it with an emotional impact that no terrorist act had ever achieved before. The aim of terrorism is to terrorize, and the attack of September 11 fully accomplished this objective.

Even so, September 11 could not have changed the course of history to the extent that it has if President Bush had not responded to it the way he did. He declared war on terrorism, and under that guise implemented a radical foreign-policy agenda whose underlying principles predated the tragedy. Those principles can be summed up as follows: International relations are relations of power, not law; power prevails and law legitimizes what prevails. The United States is unquestionably the dominant power in the post-Cold War world; it is therefore in a position to impose its views, interests, and values. The world would benefit from adopting those values, because the American model has demonstrated its superiority. The Clinton and first Bush Administrations failed to use the full potential of American power. This must be corrected; the United States must find a way to assert its supremacy in the world.

This foreign policy is part of a comprehensive ideology customarily referred to as neoconservatism, though I prefer to describe it as a crude form of social Darwinism. I call it crude because it ignores the role of cooperation in the survival of the fittest, and puts all the emphasis on competition. In economic matters the competition is between firms; in international relations it is between states. In economic matters social Darwinism takes the form of market fundamentalism; in international relations it is now leading to the pursuit of American supremacy.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/12/soros.htm

what some billionare has decided to tell me about what my best interests may be.

In economic matters the competition is between firms; in international relations it is between states. In economic matters social Darwinism takes the form of market fundamentalism; in international relations it is now leading to the pursuit of American supremacy.

Gee, how'd you make your billions, George? Did you "cooperate" with the rivals you ran out of business and bankrupted?

The supremacist ideology of the Bush Administration stands in opposition to the principles of an open society, which recognize that people have different views and that nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. The supremacist ideology postulates that just because we are stronger than others, we know better and have right on our side.

How about adding "richer than others" to that list?

Soro's is our friend, I care what he has to say about Bush's America

You may consider Soros your friend, but I put him right there on par with the rest of PNAC bunch.
Soros is not a noble man, he made many people suffer through his rough financial policies. It is the survival of the fittest and he is a predator looking for the skin of the weak.
Many political anyalist admit that just recently Soros was behind Georgian coup. The uncertainty with political power in Georgia may lead to civil war there.

the Trilateralists or Neoliberalists are afraid of is bumbling power grabbers like Bush pissing off the exploited class. The Trilats like to quitely exploit the less advantaged countries and Bush running around attacking countries pre-emptively is not conducive to quiet subjugation.

The people shooting contractors in Iraq know who their enemy is, does the US know who its enemy is?

Great thinking.

The war on terrorism as pursued by the Bush Administration cannot be won. On the contrary, it may bring about a permanent state of war. Terrorists will never disappear. They will continue to provide a pretext for the pursuit of American supremacy. That pursuit, in turn, will continue to generate resistance. Further, by turning the hunt for terrorists into a war, we are bound to create innocent victims. The more innocent victims there are, the greater the resentment and the better the chances that some victims will turn into perpetrators.

The terrorist threat must be seen in proper perspective. Terrorism is not new. It was an important factor in nineteenth-century Russia, and it had a great influence on the character of the czarist regime, enhancing the importance of secret police and justifying authoritarianism. More recently several European countries—Italy, Germany, Great Britain—had to contend with terrorist gangs, and it took those countries a decade or more to root them out. But those countries did not live under the spell of terrorism during all that time. Granted, using hijacked planes for suicide attacks is something new, and so is the prospect of terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. To come to terms with these threats will take some adjustment; but the threats cannot be allowed to dominate our existence. Exaggerating them will only make them worse. The most powerful country on earth cannot afford to be consumed by fear. To make the war on terrorism the centerpiece of our national strategy is an abdication of our responsibility as the leading nation in the world. Moreover, by allowing terrorism to become our principal preoccupation, we are playing into the terrorists' hands. They are setting our priorities.

said basically the same thing about an endless war recently in an interview on Bill Moyers' Now:

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BRANCACCIO: Sometimes, though, this right/left division can be confusing. There are different kinds of left and different kinds of right. I was reading one of your columns recently. You were talking about those neo-conservatives.

And you were critical of the neo-conservative view. You defined it this way. Your quote is, "The problem is that such total global American military dominance would require a huge federal bureaucracy. And even worse," you write, "it would require an essentially permanent state of war abroad as well as a climate of fear at home — leading to ever-increasing levels of government power." Is that your broader concern here?

BARR: It is very much a concern. We've seen this in other societies around the world. Other countries around the world where in order to bolster a particular regime or a particular government over either a short or long period of time, you not necessarily conjure up but you either conjure up or focus on an external enemy.

And people in any state are always willing to rally around the flag and rally around their government if they're presented by the government with a situation that the government says threatens our national survival and overlook a lot of what the government is doing domestically simply because their attention is focused on an assertion of national security concerns abroad. That is now in this country a very real concern on the part of a lot of us.

And I would hope that the administration would listen to these concerns and work with those of us that have concerns rather than sort of just circling the wagons, hunkering down and saying, "No, we're not gonna listen to any dissent. As a matter of fact, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and propose more powers."

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript242_full.html

....his piece in The Atlantic is long on rhetoric and short on substance. Frankly, I was not impressed. It's really not too tough to find hard issues for which the right-wing deserves to be blasted. Soros doesn't seem to have bothered to really try. That spiel of his was half-assed. Any one of us could've done better.