George Soros predicts: Occupy movement to turn violent, riots in the streets
George Soros is the latest to predict imminent social, political, and economic doom
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The Daily Beast — George Soros on the Coming U.S. Class War: ‘The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career.’
or the first time in his 60-year career, Soros, now 81, admits he is not sure what to do. “It’s very hard to know how you can be right, given the damage that was done during the boom years,” Soros says. He won’t discuss his portfolio, lest anyone think he’s talking things down to make a buck. But people who know him well say he advocates making long-term stock picks with solid companies, avoiding gold—“the ultimate bubble”—and, mainly, holding cash.
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“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”
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While Soros, whose new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States: Essays, will be published in early February, is currently focused on Europe, he’s quick to claim that economic and social divisions in the U.S. will deepen, too. He sympathizes with the Occupy movement, which articulates a widespread disillusionment with capitalism that he shares. People “have reason to be frustrated and angry” at the cost of rescuing the banking system, a cost largely borne by taxpayers rather than shareholders or bondholders.
Occupy Wall Street “is an inchoate, leaderless manifestation of protest,” but it will grow. It has “put on the agenda issues that the institutional left has failed to put on the agenda for a quarter of a century.” He reaches for analysis, produced by the political blog ThinkProgress.org, that shows how the Occupy movement has pushed issues of unemployment up the agenda of major news organizations, including MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. It reveals that in one week in July of last year the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on major U.S. TV news networks. By October, mentions of the word “debt” had dropped to 398 over the course of a week, while “occupy” was mentioned 1,278 times, “Wall Street” 2,378 times, and “jobs” 2,738 times. You can’t keep a financier away from his metrics.
As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”
In spite of his warnings of political turmoil in the U.S., he has no plans to engage in politics directly. “I would prefer not to be involved in party politics. It’s only because I felt that the Bush administration was misleading the country that I became involved. I was very hopeful of a new beginning with Obama, and I’ve been somewhat disappointed. I remain a supporter of the Democratic Party, but I’m fully aware of their shortcomings.” Soros believes Obama still has a chance of winning this year’s election. “Obama might surprise the public. …”
In the article, Soros mentions that he predicts riots in the streets of America a few times; and says it’s already started. Looking at the “Occupy” demonstrations in 2011, and the “Tea Party” demonstrations in 2009 and 2010, I’d say he has a good point.
A few things jump out at me in his comments.
Soros seems dismissive of his involvement of politics. Yet, he has been known to back all manner of leftist candidates, both Democrats and Republicans. (Well, I suppose he can honestly say he isn’t into party politics.)
It should be noted that Soros has been involved in planning — even pushing — for a global currency. And it follows that a planned global currency would involve a global government to manage it. After all, despite making a fortune trading in the markets, Soros seems to think that the solution to every social ill is a strong State, and central management.
Incidentally, I don’t understand why Soros comes across (in my opinion) as such a state-supremacist. Perhaps the horrors he saw in Europe when he was young has contributed to a world-view similar to Hobbes — that government needs to be used to prevent mankind from destroying itself? This would be ironic, seeing as Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Fascist Italy were all different heads of the same leviathan (to paraphrase a comment once made by Dietrich Von Hildebrand
There have been concerns expressed by some right-of-center conspiracy theorists that George Soros is interested in taking advantage of the Occupy movement to forward a socialist agenda. Thus, if the Occupy movement does turn violent, it’ll definitely be suggested that Soros instigated it. Whether he did or not. To revisit one of the more striking lines in the article:
… riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully.
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