Sorosoros

RECOLLECTING THE OPEN SOCIETY OF GEORGE SOROS By David Arthur Walters George Soros ardently embraces liberal democracy, or rather the “open society” ideal, as the road to peace. He associates democracy with economic development, and both of the above with national security, stating that, “we ought to fight terrorism by fostering open societies.” Although his open society instantiated is a liberal democracy, Mr. Soros does not seem to want his idea of an open society to be equated with democracy per se or otherwise exactly defined. He puts a great deal of money where his mouth is, advancing the cause with liberal contributions to grass roots organizations interested in installing open societies in their repressive areas. In The Age of Fallibility , he insists that the idea of an open society is not a political but an epistemological notion, on knowledge based on what we know about knowing. One thing we can know for sure is that our knowledge is, generally speaking, partial and somewhat

  SOROSIAN FALLIBILISM BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS   Pain must always run ahead of pleasure to keep the world rolling. If there were no suffering, there would be no success. People are bound to get hurt if the human race is to progress. But perhaps the suffering can be ameliorated although it cannot be done away with altogether. A better wheel might be invented to advance civilization on its illustrious career, or at least the system we have might be tinkered with by piecemeal engineers, greased by the mechanics, and set upon new rails. In any event we might take comfort in believing that life is just a game, life being the grubstake one has to play with. If the losers do not want to get so badly hurt by the game, then let them change the rules, advised George Soros, the man who broke the Bank of England and who ran the Malaysian and Thai currencies into the ground among other things that reportedly hurt so many people. If he had not won the money games, someone else would have. If someon

    The main legislative intent of the U.S. Congress in passing the $700 billion “bailout” bill on October 3, 2008 was to have the Secretary Treasurer set up of a troubled asset relief program to purchase and quarantine so-called toxic assets of private companies in a government-created asset management company, somewhat similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation that had been partially successful in disposing of troubled real estate assets taken over from liquidated savings-and-loan companies in the 80s: “The Secretary is authorized to establish the Troubled Asset Relief Program (or ‘‘TARP’’) to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, troubled assets from any financial institution, on such terms and conditions as are determined by the Secretary, and in accordance with this Act and the policies and procedures developed and published by the Secretary.” The general purpose of the Act was so broadly written that it did not preclude any other course of action; the Secretar