Ethnicity and the bailout: Wall Street and the Democratic Party

We are beginning to grasp the ethnic fault lines involved in the credit meltdown. Steve Sailerwas the first to point out that the push for greater minority home ownership was an important ingredient in lowering standards for lending. The result was that non-Asian minorities were more likely to get sub-prime loans with higher costs and with less documentation, and they have been more likely to default on these loans. Pretty much everyone — Republicans and Democrats —were involved in this.

The second part of the ethnic fault line is evident in a recent column by James P. Pinkerton. Pinkerton notes a curious alliance between Democrats and Wall Street in backing the Bush Administration bailout plan originally developed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, formerly of Goldman-Sachs. One might suppose that the Democrats would be highly critical of a plan that would benefit  Wall Street — except that Wall street is solidly Democrat and a major source of money for the Democratic Party. Instead, it’s the Republicans who represent Main Street that are creating opposition for the plan.

The Democrats are emerging as the new party of the rich, the party of Wall Street, the party that champions financiers at the expense of producers. For years now, the most affluent precincts in the country—mostly on the two coasts—have been solidly Democratic. And in 2008, the polls show that upper-income voters mostly support Barack Obama. And Obama, of course, guided by the likes of Robert Rubin, has been quietly supportive of the deal.  …

So it’s understandable that the Democrats would want to take care of “their” people at the top. That’s the revised Democratic model: The same old socialism for the poor, of course, in the form of the bureaucratic welfare state, and a new kind of socialism for the rich, in the form of this bailout.

In addition, the Democrats have some sordid secrets to protect—and Paulson & Co. are helping them keep hidden. Much of the overall financial crisis can be traced back to bad mortgages made to unqualified buyers at the behest of Democratic poverty advocates; it was a neat arrangement, poor Democrats got houses, as rich Democrats got richer by manipulating the financial paper.

Pinkerton is too polite or too desirous to maintain his position in the mainstream media to note the obvious: Wall Street is heavily Jewish and Main Street is basically a code word for white Middle America. The most affluent precincts in the country are solidly Democratic and strongly Jewish. As is well known, they provide the lion’s share of the funding for the Democratic Party. Indeed in the mid-1990s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab estimated that Jews provide 50% of the funding for the Democratic Party and Benjamin Ginsberg noted that 50% of Wall Street executives were Jewish.

That percentage is doubtless greater now because of the large increase in Jewish wealth with the  expansion of the financial sector of the American economy (see below) and the lessening political and financial clout of unions. The precincts on the East and West coasts that are wealthy, pro-Obama, and strongly Jewish are two of the main centers of Jewish power: Wall Street and Hollywood. At this point, investment firms have given about 50% more to Obama than McCain, while entertainment firms have given over 5 times as much to Obama as McCain.

And that doesn’t include individual giving. A recent Hollywood bash that raised $9,000,000 for Obama included a $28,500 per plate dinner. Guests were serenaded by  (who else?) Barbra Streisand, an icon of the Jewish left.

These political fault lines will only become more starkly obvious as we move into the future. As noted in a previous column, the current election is shaping up to be a watershed event in the polarization of American politics. The Democratic Party is dominated by minority identity politics — not only among the blacks and Latinos who support it because of affirmative action and poverty programs, but also because the elite that is bankrolling it is predominantly Jewish with an ethnic agenda of its own.

The role of Jewish identity politics is particularly striking. This pattern of Jewish voting and Jewish financial support makes no sense except in terms of Jewish identity politics. As the old cliché has it, “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” Jews vote with blacks even though blacks are the most conspicuously anti-Jewish constituency in the US. If past elections are any guide, around 75% of Jewish voters will vote for Obama in this election.

Fundamentally, Jewish identity politics is based on hostility to the white Christian majority of the  United States. This hostility spans the Jewish political spectrum, from the far left to the neoconservative right.

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This alliance between non-white minorities with great and ever-increasing electoral clout and Jewish financial and media elites is a deadly combination to the white Christian majority of the United States, especially given that white Christians will no longer be the majority in a few years. The ultimate folly is to voluntarily cede political power to hostile groups with long-standing historical grudges.

Pinkerton’s other point should also be underlined: the Democrats are “the party of Wall Street, the party that champions financiers at the expense of producers.”

White Middle America has been steadily marginalized as they have watched their jobs shipped overseas combined with a massive invasion of non-whites that has destroyed the labor market for less educated whites while increasing ethnic competition in education with the arrival of large numbers of Asians.

As Kevin Phillips has pointed out, the economic expansions of the current Bush administration and to a lesser extent the Clinton administration have not benefited the middle class. Previous expansions have sometimes left out the poor, but they have always benefited the middle class.

Instead,  since the 1990s, economic expansions have benefited the financial elite — the heart and soul of the Democratic Party and a major source of Jewish financial power. Financial services and complex financial products have assumed an ever larger percentage of the American economy, while manufacturing has steadily declined to the point where their relative percentages of the American economy have reversed.

And the entire pyramid is erected on a house of cards. Phillips writes:

My summation is that American financial capitalism, at a pivotal period in the nation’s history, cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling U.S. credit-market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence.

Phillips concludes with a quotation from British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, made in 1904 to a gathering of his country’s financiers: “Granted that you are the clearinghouse of the world, [but] are you entirely beyond anxiety as to the permanence of your great position? . . . Banking is not the creator of our prosperity but is the creation of it. It is not the cause of our wealth, but it is the consequence of our wealth.”

Excellent points. White Americans are now being asked to bail out Wall Street at a time when the divisions between Wall Street and Main Street have never been greater.