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"I had no platform," he says today. "So I deliberately [did] the sterling thing to create a platform. Obviously people care about the man who made a lot of money." Since then, "my influence has continued to grow and I do have access to most people I want to have access to."
Soros is now here to help save America from itself. Of all things, he is worried that "excessive individualism," defined by Wall Street's market mentality, has replaced traditional values. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly this year, he warned that the unbridled market is a greater threat to "Open Societies" than totalitarian ideologies. The press torched him. Forbes, which castigated him for dealing with ex-communists, called his thesis "nonsense." Says Soros: "You had a capitalist fool [Steve Forbes, the magazine's owner] combining with the nationalist right--a stupid combination."
Soros' solution to America's problems, sure enough, is to throw money at them. He has committed some $90 million to the U.S., a figure that will grow and grow.
Nothing has caused so much bad blood as the money he has given to drug-law reform. In 1994 he began funding the Lindesmith Center. Its director, Ethan Nadelmann, campaigns for an end to the so-called war on drugs and advocates sweeping drug-policy reforms. Soros has committed at least $15 million to Lindesmith and other groups. Last fall he became a target of the zero-tolerance lobby after contributing $1 million to help pass state referendums in California and Arizona to legalize the medical use of such drugs as marijuana. Critics of the new marijuana laws argued they were stalking horses for legalization. Califano blamed Soros for underwriting crucial television advertising that swayed the voters, claiming, "A moneyed, out-of-state elite mounted a cynical and deceptive campaign to push its hidden agenda to legalize drugs."
Soros insists he supports nothing of the sort. Rather he wants to decriminalize drug use and focus on treatment instead of punishment. Yes, he has inhaled and enjoyed it, but he does not want marijuana legalized. Nevertheless, he says, the unintended consequences of current drug laws are horrendous: "I do want to weaken the drug laws. I think they are unnecessarily severe. The injustice of the thing is outrageous."
Soros did his lightning-rod act again last month, giving $1 million to the Tides Foundation in San Francisco to finance needle exchanges for addicts. More than a third of new AIDS cases are related to contaminated needles. To him, needle exchange is a no-brainer of an issue: it saves lives. Yet federal funding for needle exchanges is still prohibited.
His concern about drug laws led Soros logically to an interest in the criminal-justice system. He established the Center on Crime, Communities and Culture, which this year will give away about $5 million in grants to both service and advocacy organizations. The issue: every year in America some 5.5 million people, or 2% of the population, are in prison, on probation or on parole, a higher percentage than in any other democracy. The cost of a prisoner is enormous: $25,000 a year. The center proposes that alternative, noncustodial sentences be devised.