Yeah, Open Society has funded some good stuff. I'm hoping to shake a little money out of them myself, one of these days. But you know, I worked for a left wing magazine for a while that got a fair amount of support from Abbie Rockefeller. It's hard enough keeping an operation like that afloat, you don't say no to whatever help you can get. But it was pretty depressing the knots people would tie themselves into trying to deny there were any conflicts between Abbie Rockefeller and her interests and those of the people we were trying to represent.
Josh
----- Original Message ----- From: "Liza Featherstone" <lfeather32 at erols.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Monday, November 17, 2003 10:57 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Anybody But Bush for Empire
> Soros is personally pretty left of Clinton, judging from his funding
> priorities in the 90s, many of which were intended to clean up the damage
> from Clinton policies (incarceration mania, draconian drug laws, etc).
>
> But many members of Soros's class are very much opposed to Bush and his
> crowd. They tend to feel that capitalism works better when politics are
> moderate, low-conflict and based on rationality rather than ideological
> fervor - many funders are supporting left projects now because they feel
> things are out of "balance" and the right has too much power.
>
> Liza
>
>
>
> > From: "JW Mason" <j.w.mason at earthlink.net>
> > Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> > Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 10:47:23 -0500
> > To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> > Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Anybody But Bush for Empire
> >
> > On Nov 15, 2003, at 9:14 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >
> >> The central tendency of capital is to Soros' right - he's an outlier.
> >> How many other big American capitalists besides Soros think of
> >> themselves as social democrats (which is what his pal Anatole
> >> Kaletsky once told me)? Soros commands lots of respect on Wall Street
> >> as a brilliant speculator, but almost no one shares his politics.
> >
> > Huh. I sort of had the idea that the politics of finance in general were
to
> > the left of capital's central tendency. Not left left, but Clinton left.
For
> > various reasons -- less labor-intensive, less vulnerable to
international
> > competition, less (directly) affected by many forms of regulation. More
> > attuned to the needs of capital as a whole. Some superficial evidence
that
> > this is so from, for instance, comparison of Clinton and Bush's Treasury
> > secretaries. And Wall Street skews Democratic in campaign donations, no?
> >
> > (That's Thomas Ferguson's argument anyway. Maybe he's out of date.)
> >
> > I am (obviously) on your side in the larger debate here. But, I'm a
little
> > uncomfortable with the idea that Soros' politics stem from personal
> > eccentricity rather than his class position.
> >
> > Josh
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
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