Reuters ran a story last week that attempted to paint George Soros and his foundation’s donations as an organizing element of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrations.  As much as this may be red meat to the right, I have to say that the story’s math was thin.

Here’s the equation: Soros’ Open Society Institute gave $3.5 million from 2007-2009 to the Tides Center.  In that same period, Tides gave $26,000 to Adbusters, the group that proclaims to have initiated the Wall Street occupation.

Sure, Soros has been said to be sympathetic to the “cause,” but is he orchestrating the demonstrations?  Probably not.  At least not in a coordinated, marching-order sense.

However, there are some interesting connections.

In the media reform space, which I follow closely, Soros and Tides, among others, have spent over $100 million this past decade funding the efforts of radical groups like Free Press (surprisingly, sitting atop of this pyramid is not George Soros; rather, it’s the Ford Foundation, which has given over $12 million to media reform activists in the last ten years alone).

One name that stands out among the “media reformers” as they’re connected to the OWS movement is Free Press’s Tim Karr.   To be sure, there is a firm connection between Soros and Tides to Karr’s employer.  Since 2003, Free Press has received $1.26 million from Soros’ Open Society Institute; and from 2005-2007, nearly $215,000 from Tides. (more…)

The media reform cabal is at it again.  The same professional Soros-funded astroturfers who brought us Van Jones to demand “media justice” and SaveTheInternet and Net Neutrality have been focused on a new target.  For months now, Free Press, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, Consumers Union, and the New America Foundation have been thwarting the proposed merger of cell phone providers AT&T and T-Mobile, saying the move would raise prices for consumers and cost jobs.  As the deal sits with the FCC, which just this week temporarily halted its review of the proposal, AT&T and T-Mobile have tried to reassure consumers and activists that the merger would lower prices, increase access to service in rural areas and give consumers better choices.  The AFL-CIO, which represents 42,000 AT&T workers through the CWA, agrees with AT&T and T-Mobile.  Ironically, that puts the country’s most powerful labor federation on the opposite side of its progressive media reform allies.

But as these supposed media reformers actively work with community groups and state and federal agencies to oppose corporate interests on behalf of consumers, they fail to divulge their own ties to competitive corporate interests. And now, there are reports that a state commission may also have played a role in helping the competition.

As Amanda Carey has detailed at The Daily Caller, these Net Neutrality advocates have a long history of opposing these very companies, with the support of corporate competitors.

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And as with all Leftist things, the more they know the less they like

On August 11, more than 150 organizations (including 35 TEA Party groups), state legislators and bloggers signed onto a pair of letters urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to give up on their unilateral Internet power grab – the reclassification of the Web under the oppressive 1930s land line telephone regulatory regime, and the implementation of Network Neutrality.

(Full disclosure: As StopNetRegulation.org’s Editor in Chief, I signed on.  As did the President and Vice President of Legal Affairs of the Center for Individual Freedom, the organization that publishes StopNetRegulation.org.)

We became part of a great and growing bipartisan chorus all singing the same song – that the FCC is dramatically overreaching in trying to assert this sweeping new authority.  More than 284 members of the United States Congress – from both Parties – have also signed letters stating the same.

Seventeen minority groups did so as well.  And the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court – led by a Democrat-appointee judge – ruled 3-0 that the FCC isn’t empowered to do what it’s trying to do.

The FCC only has the authority to do what Congress and the President have given it via legislation.  And they have not sanctioned the FCC to regulate the Internet.  The Right understands this.  The Left does not – or chooses to willfully ignore it.

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