Who's afraid of George Soros?

That's the title of a less than insightful three-pager in the Insight section of the Sunday Star today. (not to be confused with a story by the same title in the Times of Israel from a few months ago, which pretty much plowed the same ground.)

According to Emily Tamkin, a lot of your up-and-coming populist despots in Eastern Europe are deathly scared of George Soros. They're anti-Semitic of course, as populists tend to be. It's just a thing with those populists.

The take in Israel is a little more nuanced. The Likudniks and everyone to the right of them (and shocking though it may be to fathom, Likud are now "moderates" in the Israeli political spectrum) consider Soros one of the greatest anti-Semites of our time!

So who is George Soros? Anti-Semite extraordinaire or victim of antisemitism?

That's why I think the Star might have done us more of a service if they introduced us to the guy first. Nevermind who's afraid of George Soros... who IS George Soros?

When I google that out here at Falling Downs I get about 14 million responses in .85 seconds. You probably get more in less time if your working from an urban area. And what do you find there?

Well, it looks to me like about thirteen and a half million of those sites (not that I actually looked at that many) belong to hard-core conspiracy types who are hot on the trail of the New World Order; ya, the Illuminati and all that shit.

OH MY GOD THE JEWS ARE TAKING OVER!!!

Of course they are...

Here's why I have grave reservations about George Soros, and it's got nothing to do with his ethnicity. The Open Society shtick sounds good on the face of it. Who's not for open societies? Open societies are a beautiful thing!

But what does it mean? Open to who and to what? What I find profoundly disconcerting is that time and time again Soros "philanthropy" aligns itself seamlessly with the National Endowment for Democracy and similar US government sponsored and funded "Non Government Organizations."

That's always been a bit of a mind-fuck for me; how the hell are you an NGO when you get all your funding from the US government?

But anyway, the fact that Soros and the US State Department have had many joint ventures across decades should be a giant red flag, at least to my way of thinking.

Then there's the question of how Soros makes his money. He's widely touted as one of the world's most successful investors. There are investors and there are investors. Some invest in socially positive initiatives that do more than enrich the investor. Other investors are out to loot and pillage and the public good be damned. (Which reminds me; when is somebody going to write a book about Gerry Schwartz's investment adventure in Husky Injection Molding?)

What kind of investor is George Soros? The kind who makes billions in the most sophisticated currency speculation schemes imaginable. And he's really really good at it!

Alas, that does not quite bring the same suite of benefits to humanity as, say, being a really really good brain surgeon or scientist or school-teacher. But it does keep George rolling in billions, which he can then dole out to "democracy activists" in various states where he could conceivably, some day, find himself betting against the currency of that sovereign state in order to make even more billions!

But that's just my theory.

If you've got a better one, let me know.

Hostess Brands latest victim of vulture capitalism

Hostess Brands, the maker of a whole lot of stuff that's nearly as iconically American as apple pie, filed for bankruptcy protection today.

The news stories offer the usual sad tale of this poor corporation being unable to cope with the oppressive demands of their unionized workforce, who demand the usual twentieth century dog-and-pony carnival of pensions and a living wage.

Welcome to the twenty-first century, union ingrates! Corporations are people too! Every penny of pension that goes into your pocket after a lifetime of Twinky making is a penny straight out of the pockets of that corporation.

Not only that, but it's a penny out of the pockets of the flesh-and-blood hedge-funders who have had a lock on this company since it last emerged from bankruptcy in 2009.

The prime owner of Hostess since then has been an outfit called Ripplewood Holdings. That's an outfit whose biggest shareholder is a guy named Tim Collins. Tim Collins learned his craft running the New York office of a hedge fund called Onex, whose motto is "adding value by screwing workers".

And it works! It made Onex chief Gerry Schwartz a billionaire!

Collins has a couple of other hedge fund players in on the action now. They've all lent each other money at exhorbitant interest rates to "invest" in Hostess. Once all the Twinky profits have paid off the hedge funds there's nothing left to meet the company's pension obligations. Then of course it's big headlines in the business pages about how rich pensions and plush union agreements have driven an iconic American brand into bankruptcy.

Rarely will the business pages mention that the unions took major concessions to get Hostess out of bankruptcy the last time around. But there's still a bit of meat on those bones. The hedge fund vultures will pick the carcass clean this time.

There's too much good stuff at Hostess to let it fade quietly into the sunset. These hedge fund guys know the value of a brand. Look for the union contracts to be stripped, the pension obligations shed, and the vultures to walk away with billions.