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In March, the Small Business Administration gave a $234,548 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) "loan" to George Soros's East-West Management Institute (EWMI).
The official description of the transaction is "to aid small businesses in maintaining workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic", but federal grants and contracts to EWMI (its primary source of revenue) rose from $9,185,194 in FY 2019 to $14,859,293 in 2020. EWMI previously received a $226,179 PPP loan in May of 2020. As a supposedly small business struggling through the pandemic, EWMI enjoys office space at 575 Madison Avenue in New York City and 1101 Connecticut Ave NW in Washington, DC.
In November 2018, Judicial Watch published a special report, "The Financial and Staffing Nexus Between the Open Society Foundations and the United States Government." The 28-page report is scrupulously documented with 154 footnotes citing to primary source records. A key take-away from the report concerning the activities of EWMI is that the organization manages projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a nominally independent component of the U.S. State Department.
For those interested, EWMI maintains a web page with documentation concerning their non-profit status and their financial statements. You can also view their self-described "Donors and Partners" who, evidently, were not able or willing to "loan" money to EWMI for paycheck protection. The list of donors and partners is quite remarkable -- from the World Bank to Romania's Justice Ministry, among many others. It makes one wonder why American taxpayers had to cover the PPP "loan." It reminds one of Senator William Proxmire's (D-WI) "Golden Fleece Award" for squandering the American public's money.
Granted, with the Biden administration and Congressional "leadership" meeting last month week to discuss a $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill (officially known as the American Jobs Plan) -- it seems a little tough to get excited about a "loan" of $234,548. The exact dollars and cents total, however, is not the point.
We need to ask ourselves how "the system" -- our government -- facilitates this sort of racket without checks or oversight. Harvard University can be publicly shamed into returning COVID relief money, but a Soros group gets a pass? Why the disparity of treatment and accountability?
What is the rationale? "Just the way business is done?" "Don't ask questions or you'll be accused of some bias?" "Hey, it's the 'New Normal,' get used to it!" Maybe the worst reaction for the post-Trump era is, "Who cares?"
Rest assured, there are hundreds of millions of Americans that care deeply. In American political lore, President Richard Nixon coined the phrase "silent majority" during a speech in November 1969. He aimed to identify and motivate the large mass of Americans dominated in the media by a vocal minority.
Today, the Nixon model seems quaint. America's silent majority now is overshadowed by rabidly partisan major news media outlets, and the far-more-vocal minority who dominate social media platforms. It is an exponential shift in favor of the self-appointed "elites" -- and away from ordinary Americans trying to make a living, pay their mortgage and get their kids educated during COVID lockdowns. Those Americans would be repulsed at the idea EWMI getting a PPP "loan," assuming they even knew about it -- 99.9% probably had no idea.
Think about it: a Soros-backed operation that manages a big chunk of the State Department's international development operations, pretending it is like any other American "small business," was seeking paycheck protection subsidies because of COVID. It is an insult. It is grotesque.
They get away with it because political operators on the Left are, it seems, creatures of big government. They are comfortable operating in that environment and in the organs of the state. They know how to work the various systems, get into the programs, make the paperwork fly and direct the taxpayer subsidies.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal on October 17, 2017, George Soros transferred $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations. EWMI is part of the greater Soros operation. Why are American taxpayers subsidizing any part of his operations?
Chris Farrell is Director of Investigations at Judicial Watch and Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.
