At Davos, Soros-funded Group’s President Says Look to Bretton Woods for Economic Advice
Editor’s
Note: the
Bretton Woods II that Ms. Slaughter promoted at Davos was not the conference
that George Soros organized in 2011, to which her New America Foundation had
sent a representative. Ms. Slaughter was referring to a project, also named
Bretton Woods II, of the New America Foundation. This project will culminate in
a SECOND conference named Bretton Woods II in 2016. While these redundantly
named events are separate, their purposes appear similar. An earlier version of
this article did not differentiate between the two. We apologize for any
confusion.
The
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is supposed to be a place where
world leaders solve the world’s economic and social problems. But, for the
president of one Soros-funded group, it’s also a place to make a sales pitch
for her plan to change the global economy. And the name for that plan is
identical to one that Soros pitched back in 2009.
Anne-Marie
Slaughter, president of the New America Foundation, told attendees in Davos
that the answers for many of the economic questions that the world was facing
could be found in Bretton Woods II, an initiative being pushed by her group.
There
was actually an early conference also named Bretton Woods II, and the New
America Foundation sent a representative to it. Soros gave $50 million to the
group that hosted that conference in 2011. The New America Foundation has
received $4,556,875 from Soros since 2001. This is the same Soros who called
capitalism the “main enemy of the open society.”
“There’s an initiative called the Bretton Woods II initiative,”
Slaughter said, “that brings governments, large pension funds, large sovereign
wealth funds, civil society, to pledge to commit one percent of their resources
to invest long term in development financing, in social impact investing and in
civil society support. That’s a kind of leadership. It’s collaborative – it’s
not the person out there in front – it’s collaborative, it’s bringing people
together, and it’s mobilizing multiple sectors for the public good.” According
to the New America Foundation, the Bretton Woods II initiative is not connected
to the original Bretton Woods II conference, despite the similarities in both
name and purpose.
In 2011, the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), a group
that Soros spent $50 million on, hosted the second Bretton
Woods conference. The
executive director of that group was a former managing director at Soros Fund
Management. More than two-thirds of the speakers at that conference had direct
ties to Soros. This is the same George Soros who said that "the main enemy
of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist
threat."
The event brought together "more than 200 academic, business
and government policy thought leaders' to repeat the famed 1944 Bretton Woods
gathering that helped create the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Soros
wanted a new 'multilateral system," or an economic system where America
wasn’t so dominant.
The Soros ties at the conference weren’t a coincidence. On Nov. 4,
2009, Soros wrote an op-ed calling for "a
grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order." He added that his goal was to bring
about "a new Bretton Woods conference, like the one that established the
post-WWII international financial architecture." Only a week before that
op-ed ran, Soros helped to found INET – the very group that hosted the second
Bretton Woods conference less than two years later.
Soros described in the 2009 op-ed that U.S.-China conflict as
"another stark choice between two fundamentally different forms of
organization: international capitalism and state capitalism." He concluded
that "a new multilateral system based on sounder principles must be
invented." As he explained it in 2010, "we
need a global sheriff."
New America senior fellow Barry
Lynn attended the first Bretton
Woods II on behalf of the
foundation. At the time, Steve
Coll was president of the New
America Foundation. Coll is now the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of
Journalism at Columbia University.
— Mike Ciandella is Research Analyst at the Media Research Center. Follow Mike Ciandella on Twitter.
