MoveOn.org Gets Discount Rate For ‘Betray Us’ Advocacy Ad

RightinNYC · 09-24-07, 04:28 PM

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Originally Posted by Gibberish

Soros himself didn't donate $23 million. His fund group did, which receives donations from many people.

Soros himself donated roughly $100,855. Indivs search

Yes, it's true that when you search OpenSecrets, it says that Soros personally only donated $100k in that cycle. However, OpenSecrets doesn't account for anything other than hard donations and some specific types of soft donations. Donations to things like ACT, Moveon, ACORN, etc. are NOT covered in that list.

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Soros gave $3 million to the Center for American Progress, committed $5 million to MoveOn, while he and his friend Peter Lewis each gave America Coming Together $10 million. (All were groups that worked to support Democrats in the 2004 election.)

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Soros was not a large donor to US political causes until the U.S. presidential election, 2004, but according to the Center for Responsive Politics, during the 2003-2004 election cycle, Soros donated $23,581,000 to various 527 Groups dedicated to defeating President Bush.

George Soros - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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In July 2003, Soros kick-started a network of nonprofit political organizations with an $18.5 million contribution. ``George was violent on this before a Democratic candidate was even chosen,'' says Byron Wien, senior investment strategist at Morgan Stanley and a close friend of Soros's. ``It was anybody but Bush.''

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Soros has also given $2.5 million to MoveOn.org, a six-year-old group that uses the Internet to rally 2 million anti-Bush activists.

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Among those who've coordinated their giving to 527s with Soros are Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Corp., an insurer in Mayfield Village, Ohio, and Robert Glaser, chief executive officer of RealNetworks Inc. in Seattle. Lewis has contributed $14 million and Glaser $995,000.

Bloomberg.com: News & Commentary

Soros as an individual gave $23 million+ in the 03-04 election cycle alone. Counting the money he funneled in from his friends, that easily doubles.

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I mis-read. They donated roughly $30 million, not $150 million. I re-track my comparison to both entities donating roughly the same amount to their respected parties.

What tens of thousands combined to donate? Were the Exxon totals donated collected from employee's or taken from profits? I don't see it stated either way. When I see Exxon-Mobil or Chevron-Texaco donating it seems most logical to me that their Senior Executive team or Board of Directors made the decision, not the employee's.

The way OpenSecrets calculates the donations by industry is by taking all people who list specific companies as their employers (as you have to when making a donation) and sort them that way. So, if 5,000 microsoft employees each donate $1000, it shows up on OpenSecrets as $5,000,000 from Microsoft, even though it's actually 5,000 smaller donations made by individual employees.

As a result, the $25 million (not $30 million) that the "oil and gas industry" donated during the 03-04 election cycle was actually the compilation of donations from tens of thousands of individuals who happened to list an oil company as their employee. It's worth noting that of the $25 million, over $5 million went to democrats.

Industry Totals: Oil & Gas

My point in bringing this all up is to highlight the fact that there's a huge difference between thousands of individuals in an industry donating millions of dollars to one ideology more than the other and one individual donating tens of millions of dollars to found interest groups on his side. That individual, by virtue of his position, wields a much greater influence over those organizations and by proxy, the people they influence, than any individual oil rig worker.

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Soros Fund Management is not the donations from a single individual.
Soros Fund Management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I know, but that's not relevant to the point here. The 23 million in question came directly from him.