It's Soros the Bushwhacker

BILLIONAIRE financier George Soros is a man with many missions - most important of which this year is to ensure that George W Bush is not re-elected as President of the United States come November. Estimated to have a personal net worth of $7bn (£3.9bn), Soros is using a small percentage of that fortune - about $15m so far - to help the crusade against another Bush victory.

In the big picture of US Presidential campaign finance, $15m is significant though not eye-popping. Bush is well on the way to raising $200m, to be spent mainly on TV advertising. Democratic candidate John Kerry's war chest won't be much smaller. It is how Soros is giving his money that is creating a fuss.

He has not donated directly to the Kerry team, as that would be illegal given America's complex campaign financing rules, under which individuals are allowed to donate a maximum $2000.

Instead, he has funded at least two organisations sympathetic to the Democrats' cause. These operate independently of the Kerry bandwagon but there are allegations from Republicans that they are all co-operating to make sure there is no overlap when it comes to spending TV advertising dollars.

One beneficiary of the Soros largesse is America Coming Together, which received $10m to set up operations in battleground states, where no clear winner can be predicted, to register new voters and ensure those people get to the polls in November. Another $2.5m went to MoveOn.org, an online community that claims 1.7m members and disseminates an anti-Bush doctrine.

The fact that Soros is able to circumvent 'soft money' regulations has infuriated Republicans and they are going to the courts to try to stop him. Announcing a series of manoeuvres to try to persuade a Federal judge to issue an injunction, preventing the groups from spending Soros' money, Bush campaign counsel Ben Ginsberg claimed that Kerry is 'the largest beneficiary of illegal soft money from wealthy special interests since Watergate and the campaign finance reforms that were put in place at that time'.

Soros isn't worried. He is a long-time proponent of campaign finance reform and says his contributions are within the letter of the law, although he does believe the laws will be changed after this election.

He claims his millions help level the playing field between Bush's businessman buddies, who are banding together to bring in packages of donations amounting to between $100,000 and $200,000, and the traditional middle-class, shallow-pocketed supporters of the Democrats. Soros' vehement anti-Bush stance is wildly out of step with many in Wall Street, who are digging into their own pockets to help re-elect the President. An analysis of business groups backing Bush shows that financial organisations lead the way with collective donations of nearly $15m, more than twice the amount of the second largest sector, healthcare.

The big question, however, is why Soros has developed such a passion to defeat Bush, whose pro-business policies - on the surface - should fit in with the financier's views. Soros has articulated his derision of the President's policies several times, criticising him on economic and socio-political grounds.

Taxing times

On the economic front, he says the Bush tax cuts have failed to deliver jobs - more than 1.8m have been lost since the President came to office.

Soros says that tax cuts have failed to create enough jobs in the Unied States to offset the number that have moved to other countries.

'By restoring taxation of the rich, that is people with over $300,000 of income, you could reduce the deficit and that would give you more room for engaging in programmes that create jobs,' Soros recently told an audience at a Californian university. Days later at a university in Dublin, he said the budget deficit, estimated this year to be at least $521 billion, was unsustainable.

'I don't think it can be maintained in the longer term. I don't think, actually, it can be maintained even in the shorter term,' he said. Soros is, however, most venomous about the Bush Administration's record on democracy. He told his California audience that he has devoted his life to promoting democracy around the world and Bush is 'destroying my business'. He lambasts the President for curtailing democracy in the US and internationally while talking of promoting freedom and democracy.

'When President Bush says, as he does frequently, that freedom will prevail, he means America will prevail. In a free and open society, people are supposed to decide for themselves what they mean by freedom and democracy, and not simply follow America's lead,' he wrote recently.

'The contradiction is especially apparent in the case of Iraq, and the occupation of Iraq has brought the issue home.

'We came as liberators, bringing freedom and democracy, but that is not how we are perceived by a large part of the population. It is ironic that the government of the most successful open society in the world should have fallen into the hands of people who ignore the first principles of open society.

'At home, Attorney General John Ashcroft has used the war on terrorism to curtail civil liberties. Abroad, the United States is trying to impose its views and interests through the use of military force. The invasion of Iraq was the first practical application of the Bush doctrine and it has turned out to be counterproductive. A chasm has opened between America and the rest of the world.'

Soros has a passion for an 'open society' that no doubt comes from his earliest memories of being a Jew in Budapest during the Nazi and Russian occupations. He left the Hungarian capital in 1947 for England and the London School of Economics, moving to America in 1956.

After making his fortune, initially in currency trading, he founded The Open Society Institute, which is now the hub of a group of charitable foundations and organisations in more than 50 countries. The OSI distributes $475m annually to support education, media, public health and human and women's rights, as well as social, legal and economic reform.

Soros founded the OSI to help former eastern European communist countries in their transition to democracies, but it now also has operations in Africa, the Americas and Asia. As witnessed the other day, Soros is not always welcome in eastern Europe. On the day the Republicans went to court in the US to stop his political donations, two students attacked him in Kiev, dousing him with a glue-like liquid. They were protesting that Soros might be fomenting political unrest in the Ukraine, but he later explained he was in the country to buy the public transportation system, Kievskii Metropoliten.

He then said he would make travel free and claimed he would make 'a fortune' selling advertising on the system. So, even though Soros has said he is totally focused on defeating Bush this year, he cannot forget business. After all, his Quantum Endowment hedge fund, which had $8.3bn in assets as of 31 December, lagged the market last year with a gain of only 15%.

Soros is often asked how much he will spend to beat Bush. He once famously told the Washington Post he might trade his $7bn fortune to unseat him. 'I have to confess I got a little bit carried away in that interview,' he said recently.