Soros: Tea Party activists are being 'used and deceived'

Liberal financier George Soros said in an interview aired Sunday that Tea Party activists are being "used and deceived."

"I think the people in the Tea Party are very decent people, hard-working," he said. "They have been hit by a force that comes from somewhere which they can't fully understand. And they are being misled.

"And they are misled by people who are using it for their selfish purposes, namely to remove regulations and reduce taxation," he continued. "So reduce taxation and regulation. And they are being used and deceived."

Soros also said that President Obama had ceded control of the economic agenda to Republicans.

"President Obama has lost control of the agenda," he said on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS." "The agenda is now in the hands of the Republican Party. And they are going to pursue a very strong effort to cut services by refusing to have any tax increases."

Soros said he believed there is a danger from the GOP pushing spending cuts in a fragile economy.

"Doing this at a time when private demand is not strong enough, when investment by businesses is not strong enough to take up the slack, it creates a slack," he said. "So unemployment, instead of coming down, is likely to remain pretty high."

Soros brushed off comments from conservative commentator Glenn Beck that Soros is a "puppet master."

"By accusing me of doing that, it's kind of -- it makes it rather hard to see that it's really -- he is working for the man who is doing it," Soros said in a dig at Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch.

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