Self-proclaimed socialist and presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders presents himself as a warrior battling the wealthiest one percent, especially investment bankers and billionaires.
Breitbart News has found, however, that Sanders’ economic policies have been molded in part by experts with deep ties to top one-percenter and billionaire George Soros.
In 2011, Sanders convened what he referred to as an “expert advisory panel” to help draft legislation for Federal Reserve reform in the wake of a damning top-to-bottom Congressional audit of the U.S. central banking system.
Sanders’ panel of experts was stacked with economists tied to Soros. One prominent member advocates a “new economic order” no longer dominated by the U.S., while another is the leading proponent of the “shock therapy” economic doctrine of radical economic transformation deployed at times to detriment in Eastern Europe.
Last July, Sanders convened another panel of economists to advise the Senate on the Greek and international debt crises. The panel consisted of many of the same Soros-tied experts.
New Global Economic Order
Sanders’ 2011 panel on Federal Reserve reform included Nobel Prize-winning Columbia University economics professor Joseph Stiglitz, a proponent of substantial government regulation of the economy.
Stiglitz has been involved in numerous projects with Soros and serves on the boards of numerous Soros organizations, including the billionaire’s signature Open Society Foundation.
Stiglitz conducted teach-ins at Occupy Wall Street, which was reportedly launched by the Soros-funded Adbusters magazine.
It is instructive to note that Sanders is backed by a coalition calling itself “People for Bernie,” which states it consists of “veteran grassroots organizers of Occupy Wall Street, and are joined by many energized brothers and sisters we have met along the way.”
Stiglitz, meanwhile, also served in President Bill Clinton’s administration as a member of the presidential cabinet of advisers and chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He was credited with helping to define an economic philosophy referred to as the “third way,” which holds that business and government should be “partners,” while recognizing that government intervention cannot always correct the limitations of financial markets.
Discover the Networks criticized the theory thusly: “In short, Big Business would own the economy (as under capitalism), while Big Government would run it (as under socialism). Corporations would be persuaded to comply with government directives through subsidies, tax breaks, customized legislation, and other special privileges.”
On Sept. 17, 2010, Stiglitz delivered a lecture to the Swiss and Global Asset Management group accompanied by a Power Point presentation – reviewed in full by Breitbart News – calling for a “New Global Economic Order” in which the world is “no longer dominated by one ‘superpower.’”
Stiglitz has criticized President Obama as being “too conservative” to assert a progressive economic vision, and “too afraid to take the bold kind of action that President Roosevelt took” during the Great Depression, MSNBC reported.
‘Shock treatment’
Stiglitz is an active member on the board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, or INET, an organization that seeks nothing less than to remake the global economy. INET was founded with a $25 million five-year donation from Soros.
In April 2011, Stiglitz was featured at INET’s annual summit, which takes place at the same hotel that hosted the 1944 Bretton Woods economic conference, which sought to reconstruct the post-World War II international monetary system.
Other INET members served on Sanders’ 2011 economic advisory panel, including the keynote speaker at the 2011 Bretton Woods conference, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs.
Sachs serves on the INET board and is associated with Soros and Stiglitz.
Sachs famously coined the “shock therapy” economic doctrine, which he helped to deploy internationally in countries including Bolivia and Poland.
Critics charge that Sachs’ doctrine led to economic turmoil in some countries where it was deployed.
The Wilson Center argued:
A side effect of shock therapy in Russia and in Latin America has been to weaken legal institutions by degrading the powers of the legislature and extending the use of executive decrees. This serves to de-legitimize state power, erode the democratic basis of state authority, undermine the fiscal capacities of the state, and, thus destabilize the political system over the long term.
In every case since 1985, when it was first employed in Bolivia, shock therapy has caused either major constitutional changes or declarations of states of emergency that suspended normal democratic procedures, where it resembles more of a revolutionary than a legal process. It can fundamentally alter the nature of the political system in new democracies.
Sachs was the narrator of a 2009 audio book entitled “George Soros and Joseph Stiglitz – America: How They See Us.”
Stiglitz has other Soros ties that trace back to Sanders’ economic panel. Stiglitz served as the chair of the U.N.’s Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, a commission that included other Soros-tied economists, such as Robert Johnson.
Johnson was on Sanders’ economic panel and served as the managing director of Soros Fund Management. Johnson sits on the boards of the Soros-funded Economic Policy Institute, or EPI, and the Institute for America’s Future.
Also on the board of the Soros-financed EPI is former Boston University law professor Jane D’Arista, who served on Sanders’ economic panel.
Aside from Stiglitz, Sachs, Johnson and D’Arista, other Soros-tied economists on Sanders’ 2011 panel of experts included:
- Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute.
- Nomi Prins, a senior fellow at the Soros-funded Demos, a progressive think tank where President Obama’s controversial former “green” jobs czar, Van Jones, has served as a long-time fellow and is currently a board member.
- Dean Baker, co-director of the Soros-funded Center for Economic and Policy Research and former senior economist at the Soros-financed Economic Policy Institute.
Meanwhile, last July, Sanders convened a panel of three economists to discuss the Greek debt crisis. Stiglitz was on the panel, which assembled at the Hart Senate Office Building.
War on billionaires
The great irony of Soros’ ties to Sanders is that the presidential candidate’s stated economic policies would target the billionaire’s wealth. Sanders’ presidential campaign focuses on income inequality. He has set his sights on the likes of the uber-wealthy billionaire Koch brothers while failing to mention that what he calls the “billionaire class” also includes progressive funders like Soros and Bill Gates.
Bernie’s recipe to fix “economic inequality” is to force multi-millionaires and multinational corporations to pay their “fair share” in taxes by removing tax loopholes and tax breaks that benefit only them, in addition to raising tax rates for the “rich.” These tax reforms, he claims, would allow for expansion of “social safety net programs.”
Sanders explained his plan last April: A constitutional amendment to limit corporate campaign donations; legislation that would end off-shore tax havens where corporations “stash” their money and profits; do away with corporate tax breaks; break up Wall Street firms that are “too powerful to be reformed”; lift the cap on the amount of earnings subject to taxes for a retirement fund; and enact a progressive estate tax to increase estate tax rates on the top three-tenths of one percent of Americans who inherit more than $3.5 million” while “eliminating loopholes that have allowed the wealthiest Americans to avoid billions in taxes.”
With research by Brenda J. Elliott.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
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