George Soros group pledges $300m to US economic security and civil liberties | George Soros
For decades, Open Society Foundations We have worked to advance justice and human rights in Africa, the Middle East, and trouble spots around the world. But OSF’s latest major investment is aimed at a crisis closer to home.
Organization founded Tuesday by billionaire philanthropist George Soros The company, headquartered in New York, announced that it will spend $300 million to increase economic security and defend civil liberties in the United States.
The stark commitment comes 16 months into Donald Trump’s second term as president, with millions of Americans suffering from an economic crisis and activists warning of an extraordinary attack on the rule of law.
“We firmly believe that civil society is essential and should remain on the playing field,” he said Lale IspahaniUS managing director at OSF. “Unfortunately, we’ve had experiences in other countries where civil society has been targeted by autocratic governments. It’s important that we’re still getting funding in many parts of the world and that we’re very in touch with each other because of what’s going on in the United States.”.”
Soros has donated more than $32 billion of his personal fortune to causes around the world. He is also a longtime Democratic donor and the right’s favorite bogeyman. Attacks frequently rely on anti-Semitic tropes and frame Soros, a Jewish survivor of the Nazi occupation of Hungary, as a “globalist” puppet master.
Asked whether the foundation was prepared for the inevitable backlash accusing Soros of interfering with US democracy, Ispahani was unimpressed: “We fully expect that. We would expect nothing less.”
“But at the same time, we will not be intimidated and remain silent. We think the work we do has never been more important. It is even more important where democracy is under attack, rights are rolled back and peaceful dissent is criminalized. We expect it, we are prepared for it, and we will continue to do so.”
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For decades, reformers often operated in silos, focusing their energies either directly on democratic rights or solely on economic justice. OSF’s new initiative is designed to eliminate these barriers.
Ispahani explained: “What’s new, different and perhaps most different about this is that it is a united and focused effort. We want to fund this integrated strategy to improve our democracy by modernizing our rights and freedoms and reorganizing our economy, which are two sides of the same coin, because when one suffers, inevitably the other suffers.”
The approach builds on a long tradition, from Franklin Roosevelt to Martin Luther King Jr., of tying freedom to livelihood. “This idea isn’t necessarily new, because proponents of the civil rights movement and the Roosevelt-era New Deal understood that these things went hand in hand. We absolutely need a new social contract today,” Ispahani added.
The urgency stems from what OSF perceives as an alarming reversal of basic protections led by the right-wing majority on the high court. According to Ispahani, the 1950s and 1960s produced historic achievements that transformed U.S. society, but now the situation is changing rapidly.
“It is abundantly clear to us today that these rights, including the right to protest, civil liberties, and voting rights, have been rolled back, and the Supreme Court’s recent decisions have gutted very important protections of the civil rights era,” he said. “We had the Supreme Court put the nail in the coffin of the widely respected Voting Rights Act with its recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, thus returning us to this pre-60s era in the world.”
To combat this, OSF advocates expanding the civil rights paradigm to counter modern threats, from ensuring voters’ right to choose their preferred representatives to combating new forms of discrimination resulting from algorithmic and technology-driven biases.
OSF has already committed $20 million this year to assist frontline organizations with strategic litigation, nonprofit sector defense, and efforts to pursue government corruption. Among them is the Roosevelt Institute. whose “good life” agenda focuses on dignity and affordability; Groundwork Collaborative think tank; National Women’s Law Center; and state-level groups like Living United for Change in Arizona.
The other main pillar of the 300 million dollar investment is economic security. Even in the richest country in the world, the child poverty rate is 14.3%, which is estimated to affect approximately 10.4 million children. The top 20% of households now hold more than half of all national income. Ispahani argues that the current system has failed.
“Why don’t we have moral and material rights that resonate across constituencies?” he said. “The right to a good job with fair wages and safe working conditions is not a controversial issue.
“The right to stable and affordable housing is probably very popular. The right to accessible and affordable child care is probably very popular, too. The right to health care and bodily autonomy is the same. The right to safe communities free from violence is the same. And the right to economic mobility and opportunity is the same, regardless of background.”
