Is Soros Funding An Agitprop Protest Movement to Destabilize Poland’s New Democratically Elected Government? Matthew Tyrmand
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/05/19/is-soros-funding-an-agitprop-protest-movement-to-destabilize-polands-new-democratically-elected-government/
On October 25th the Polish people decisively elected a new government delivering the largest popular mandate in modern Polish history (the post-1989 period) to the right of center Law & Justice party (PiS- Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc).
This election was a stunning rebuke of the last ruling party, Civic Platform (PO- Platforma Obywatelska), which was founded by the current head of the European Council Donald Tusk, and their junior coalition partner PSL (the Marxist farmers party).
This ejection from power was galvanized by the widespread acceptance of their brazen years of corruption as well as their loudly telegraphed desire for deeper European Union (EU) integration, which was wholly unappealing to the mass of Poles on the ground. The debate reached fever pitch ahead of the parliamentary elections over the migrant crisis and the Brussels mandated migrant quotas being foisted on sovereign nations. Poles overwhelmingly rejected this at the ballot box.
This election also marked the first time that the Polish electorate rejected the mainstream political parties that had direct legacy ties to communism (with the tangential exception of the aforementioned Marxist farmers who always manage to steal just enough votes to breach the 5 per cent threshold that gets them funded out of the treasury).
It also came on the heels of the May Presidential election where a former European Parliamentarian –Andrzej Duda from Krakow – affiliated with Law & Justice, beat incumbent Civic Platform President Bronislaw Komorowski to capture the Executive Branch and pave the way for October’s electoral rout.
After the election a protest movement rose up called KOD- the Committee for Defense of Democracy (Komitet Obrony Demokracji). It claimed to be non-partisan and apolitical and was headed by a far left social activist in the Obama-community-agitator-mold named Mateusz Kijowski. In a fitting example of symbolism, this political activist and social organizer was (and still is) in well documented arrears on his child support.
KOD was started in November and Polish mainstream media outlets (many of which are led by personal friends of the main figures from the last government as well as being recipients of public treasury largesse from their friends in this government- often unconstitutionally so), lined up behind it from the beginning as they drastically inflated the numbers of its early protest turnouts while simultaneously downplaying turnout at the counter rallies in support of the freshly elected government.
Moreover, none of those in this pliant media cabal that have brazenly sided with this anti-government movement have reported at any point on Kijowski’s checkered legal past financial criminality.
Despite making the claim from the beginning of being apolitical, KOD protests are filled with the flags, figures, and supporters of every one of the leftist opposition parties. Rather than a movement to defend Poland’s democracy, KOD appears to be an offensive move by the vanquished looter elite that is engaging in one last ditch effort to fight to retain spoils system privilege.
This post-communist cabal is leveraging its Western media connections for maximum effect while also aligning along a leftist political philosophy and a highly Eurocentric “development” agenda (the biggest bribes come out of Brussels).
Political factions present at KOD protests include Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO) whose current party head, Grzegorz Schetyna, frequently attends and speaks at rallies. Former education minister, now affiliated with PO, Roman Giertych also has been seen at KOD events jumping around.
KOD events attract the “best and the brightest”. Giertych is a hostile opponent of free speech and, as a lawyer, had been the go to point man to lead defamation suits on behalf of PO politicians when they were criticized publicly by opposition journalists (disclosure: I was threatened with a defamation suit by Giertych on behalf of the scandal-plagued former foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski after writing about Sikorski’s looting of the treasury in paying his friends and their kids).
Giertych was also caught on tape engaging in a blackmail scheme of prominent Polish businessmen. Demagogic far-left political journalist Tomasz Lis has also led rallies and marches under the KOD banner.
Another political party leader seen at all of these “apolitical” KOD events is Ryszard Petru. Petru is the progenitor of a new political party called NowoczesnaPL (ModernPL).
Petru is an ally (and former student) of former finance minister and vocal PO supporter Leszek Balcerowicz and is a former financial sector economist and consultant who publicly and loudly told Poles to swap their consumer mortgages into Swiss Francs even as he was doing the opposite (cross currency swaps generate high margin banking fees quickly and easily with no risk to the intermediary).
He suggests that he is an economic liberal and free marketer but for years has demonstrated the hallmark characteristics of a classic crony capitalist (even had the last government subsidizing his book publishing). When he finally entered politics this past cycle running for the Polish Parliament (the Sejm) his biggest endorsement was delivered by Brussels’ most socialist apparatchik Guy Verhofstadt.
There are two main issues KOD has seized upon in their initial months to justify the evidence of their necessity and in the promotion of their narrative that democracy is under attack in Poland.
The first is a media law passed by the new government that gave control over the hiring and firing of employees of the public media to the government, which is the entity that pays their paychecks.
This was widely spun by mainstream Polish and Western press as an assault on a free media and an act of forceful censorship. But this issue of the media law was all but put to rest when Prime Minister Beata Szydlo faced down a European Parliament inquisition in Strasbourg in January and successfully pointed out to the hostile body that the controls the Polish government are exercising over public media are the same as in many other EU member nations.
Ironically this is the same EU that is trying to manipulate their own internal rules to allow Turkey to join the union despite the Turkish President’s (Recep Erdogan) frequent arrest and imprisonment of journalists critical of him and his burgeoning dictatorship.
This is also the same body laden with German parliamentary bureaucrats (Schulz, Oettinger) that claim Poland is engaged in censorship even as a comedian was just arrested and prosecuted for satirizing Erdogan in their home nation.
Angela Merkel was caught on tape telling Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that they need to work together to actively censor anti-immigrant Facebook posts, and in the very same Germany, crimes committed by Muslim migrants, refugees, and immigrants are going unreported by design (such as in Cologne over New Year’s Eve) so as not to offend the politically correct sensibilities of the elite class that does not have to live with the decisions they wrought.
The other issue that KOD has coalesced around to suggest Polish democracy is under attack and their necessity well demonstrated has been over the Constitutional Tribunal. The Tribunal functions as a supreme court and rules on whether legislation is constitutional or not. Three weeks before the elections in October (which was looking exceedingly likely to be a loss for the ruling party) Civic Platform attempted to stack the bench by illegally appointing three new judges to replace three sitting ones before their terms were up.
This Tribunal is also, not surprisingly by statute, supposed to be an apolitical body but under the last government 14 of 15 sitting justices were Civic Platform loyalists. Including ex-communist Chief Justice Andrzej Rzeplinski, who former Prime Minister Leszek Miller, another “ex” communist, accused of “acting like a politician.”
After President Duda refused to swear in the illegally appointed judges, the Law and Justice Party having won the legislature in October and being sworn in the second week of November, appointed their own picks and began to reform the Tribunal which is what catalyzed KOD’s launch.
It is important to note that the tribunal was an unreformed vestige of communist times that was launched in 1986 under the rule of the Soviet designated dictator of Poland, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, to act as a symbol of Westernization duringglasnost and perestroika.
But as clearly evidenced by the actions of Rzeplinski, and many of the court’s decisions, including the blocking of the Lustration Law introduced by Law & Justice the last time they led in 2005-7 (which would have made transparent the names and records of all those who collaborated in the crimes of the pre-1989 Communist regime) and the approval of the nationalization of the private sector segment of the pension system (OFE- in order to give PO a freed up sovereign balance sheet allowing them to borrow and spend more ahead of these recent elections), this body served more as “kangaroo court” and a “Potemkin Village” of jurisprudence that allowed criminality to fester during the post-communist times and thus was clearly in need of major reform.
The mainstream Western and Polish media have consistently failed to mention these points in the coverage of the Tribunal reform. By omitting this stacking of the benchbefore the election they color the coverage as an attack on judicial independence.
This narrative is spun vocally by media figures like Anne Applebaum who writes for theWashington Post and is also married to the aforementioned, scandal-plagued former Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski of Civic Platform. Sikorski and Applebaum are also close friends of influential globalist media personalities such as Fareed Zakaria of CNN, Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post, Ed Lucas of the Economist, and many others who have helped them convey this coercive “fascist coup” narrative.
This same collusive media regularly inflate KOD’s protest attendance numbers, take KOD’s own communicated figures as a fait accompli, or take the attendance figure from other biased and KOD-aligned individuals.
On May 7th KOD held their first protest of the Spring season and claimed 240,000 people attended in Warsaw. This was confirmed by the Mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz Waltz who is a leading figure in Civic Platform and is currently embroiled in her own corruption scandal regarding sweetheart real estate deals. The police in the meantime say the protest had 45,000 people in attendance. But the BBC, in a recent interview with “free market” banking cabal shill Ryszard Petru, also plastered the 240,000 number on the screen despite having no proof of such scale.
All of these political cross currents lead most Polish citizens to question who is financing KOD and what their real motives are in providing this financing.
It has been widely rumored that KOD is being funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations with the goal of destabilizing the democratically elected right of center Polish government.
The shift to the right the Polish government undertook by popular mandate frightens the globalist elites who are looking to centralize power in Europe via Brussels (just as Obama’s Washington is doing the same in the U.S., as all governments are colluding via the United Nations, and in the large cap private sector and financial complex Davos and other elite conclaves serve this same function).
The healthy euroscepticism demonstrated by the Polish citizenry, especially as it pertains to the migrant quotas, is antithetical to everything Open Society Foundations works toward (which is what they term the construction of an “Open Society” as in one that is borderless and more easily given over to technocratic control by the capitals of political and economic power).
In Warsaw OSF openly funds the Stefan Batory Foundation which Soros himself started in 1988 with the goal of moving Poland more toward the integrated European sphere and away from Moscow or independent sovereignty.
We know from those on the ground in Warsaw that the foundation is present when KOD is present and they share the same goals, philosophy, political sympathies, and people.
KOD is also supremely well organized for such a “grassroots” movement that sprang up ostensibly “organically.” KOD has been active in exercising an information campaign that suggests the breadth of the movement is much bigger than it is.
By being social media savvy and deeply engaged in building a network of Facebook and Twitter accounts geographically segmented across cities and countries it is made to appear like a truly global movement. It’s most assuredly not.
KOD has recently begun giving speeches on campuses. A recent one at Stanford University was flagrantly lacking substance and the willingness of the organizers to mock those who disagreed with what was presented or suggested that their fact patterns were incomplete was indicative.
They attempted to suggest to the students that the movement has wide penetration by showing their “activists” holding KOD signs and flags in random cities and countries and outside Polish consulates and embassies all over the world.
During the time of President Duda’s first official visit to Washington, KOD sent Kijowski and a contingent of activists for “high powered meetings” to the U.S. at the same time predicated on what was claimed to be invitations from politicians and NGOs. But upon a modicum of deeper investigation it turned out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors. I found that a highly touted scheduled meeting at Washington, D.C.-based Freedom House, which was ostensibly the main reason for the trip, was a non-event and the invitation was extended as a “courtesy”. But this did beg the question- who paid for all their activists travel?
What remains to be answered definitively is whether or not George Soros and Open Society Foundations are funding a highly politicized opposition movement in order to weaken the democratically elected new Polish government despite an overwhelming and unprecedented popular mandate. Open Society Foundations (the head organization and its numerous affiliate organizations) purportedly place a high value on “accountability” and “transparency” as seen in their mission statements and statements of organizational values.
With this in mind, James O’Keefe, founder and head of Project Veritas and I (disclosure: I am a member of Project Veritas’ Board of Directors) set out to see if we could not find out anything more. As Project Veritas so often does when holding targets of investigation up to their own proclaimed values (in the case of Soros’ Foundations; the values of accountability and transparency) it is hoped that truth can be exposed and honest debate catalyzed.
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