On Friday the astonishing news broke that the estate of Jeffrey M. Picower had agreed to cough up $7.2 billion to the liquidator of the Bernard Madoff fraud and the Federal Government. (See Zachary A. Goldfarb, “Madoff investor’s widow to return money,” The Washington Post, Dec. 18, 2010.)
This news was astonishing because the amount — including a $2.2 Million payment to the Feds — was said to be “the largest single forfeiture in American judicial history.” It represents a considerable 35% of the amount thought to have been paid into the Madoff Ponzi scheme, raising the prospect of material compensation to some of the victims. And also because the Picower lawyer had been freely telling the press earlier this year he expected to settle for only $2 billion. All apparently was not well on the Picower legal front in 2010.
What was not astonishing was the rush to present what was in fact proof that Picower was a huge looter of the Madoff victims as evidence of noblesse oblige on the part of his widow, and to cover up what actually happened. CNN reports that
Picower withdrew $7.8 billion from Madoff’s investment firm since the 1970s, even though he only deposited $619 million, according to the trustee.
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In our essay “Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?,” Kevin MacDonald and I asserted
- The Madoff affair was an immense transfer of wealth to Jews from non-Jews (often European).
- The SEC was amply informed of the fraudulent nature of the operation, but was afraid to act for fear of the Jewish Establishment.
- Several Jewish families besides the Madoffs were tremendous winners from the fraud, but that their complicity would never be appropriately exposed.
This last point is now proving true. The Washington Post reports fulsome praise:
“Barbara Picower has done the right thing,” said Preet Bharara, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, who is investigating Madoff accomplices.
and allows Picower’s widow (Jeffrey Picower himself had the good taste to die in October 2009) to strike a saintly pose:
“We will return every penny received from almost 35 years of investing with Bernard Madoff,” Picower said in a statement.
“I am deeply saddened by the tragic impact it continues to have on the lives of its victims. It is my hope that this settlement will ease that suffering.”
(Why did it take Barbara Picower two years to reach this conclusion?)
Contemptibly, Trustee Irving Picard folded, saying
that while he had earlier suspected that Jeffry Picower “might have or should have known of Mr. Madoff’s fraud,” he had concluded that “there is no basis to pursue the complaint.”
This involves an incredible recantation of the facts laid out in his May 2009 suit, summarized by Propublica:
Although Madoff ostensibly produced eerily consistent 10–12 percent annual returns for his clients, the returns he provided Picower were otherworldly:
- In 14 instances between 1996 and 2007, a group of Picower trading accounts experienced annual returns of more than 100 percent. On 25 occasions, the annual return exceeded 50 percent. During this same period, the biggest annual gain in either the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P 500 was 31 percent, for the S&P in 1997. The S&P 500′s annual average for that period was slightly under 9 percent.
- The annual rate of return for two of Picower’s regular trading accounts in the four years between 1996 and 1999 ranged from about 120 percent to more than 550 percent annually.
- In 1999, one account earned 950 percent.
(Subsequently Propublica raised its estimate of the Picower take to an apparently accurate $7.2 billion.)
There was worse. Erin Arvedlund’s book recounts (pp. 236-7):
Finally, Picower even went so far as to ask for fake trades to be made in one of his accounts – dated back to before the account was even open… In April 2006, Picower opened a sixth account, Decision Inc #6, with a wire transfer of $125 million…
By the end of April…Picower’s account showed a value of $164 million – a gain of $39 million, or a return of more than 30 percent, in less than two weeks trading. The reason for this massive gain [was] fifty-seven purported purchases of securities between January 10 and January 24, 2006, almost three months before the account was opened or funded.
The Wall Street Journal’s account, “Widow to Return $7.2 Billion” by Michael Rothfeld and Chad Bray (Dec. 18, 2009), reports Picard as saying “we have arrived at a business solution instead.” The article quotes Mrs. Picower crowing:
I am absolutely confident that my husband Jeffry was in no way complicit in Madoff’s fraud and want to underscore the fact that neither the Trustee nor the U.S. Attorney has charged him with any illegal conduct.
In reality, even after parting with $7.2 Billion, the Picowers have benefited hugely from their Madoff relationship. Jeffrey Picower was not a vegetating retiree but an extremely active investor. The WSJ reports:
On Friday, Mrs. Picower’s representatives shared a letter they had solicited from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., dated Tuesday, in which a managing director, Eric S. Lane, said that Jeffry Picower had been a “valued client” of the bank’s investment division for three decades in an account for a charitable foundation he ran. He generated returns of more than $2 billion “through primarily self-directed investments,” the letter said.
The Financial Times account, “Picower Left Legacy of Praise and Scrutiny” by Justin Baer, Kara Scannell and Shannon Bond (Dec. 17 2010), reveals Picower
gained renown in the 1980s as the largest individual investor in Mr Boesky’s biggest arbitrage fund, according to Den of Thieves, James B Stewart’s account of the Wall Street scandals involving Mr Boesky and Michael Milken.
Reid Nagle, Mr Boesky’s chief financial officer, considered Picower “one of the most mysterious” investors, according to the book.
“Nagle had no idea where Picower’s money came from”…
At the time of his death, Picower’s Goldman account held $4.5bn in unrealised gains, including $2.2bn in Apple stock.
The Trustee in this settlement has permitted the Picower estate to keep the fruits of a huge interest-free margin loan to this apparently very astute investor, as well as tolerated the pretence of innocence.
There are a large number of Madoff victims who unknowingly became beneficiaries of the fraud, because the passage of time and the effect of the alleged compounding of the accounts allowed them to withdraw more than they invested. To these the Trustee has been merciless. As example has been Hadassah. The Jerusalem Post has reported
Hadassah: The Women’s Zionist Organization of America will pay back $45 million of the money it made in the Bernard Madoff scam; it was announced on Thursday…
The organization, which began investing with Bernard Madoff Securities in 1988 with a $7 million gift, deposited a total of $40 million in its Madoff accounts, and by April 2007 had withdrawn $137 million. The last account statement showed approximately $90 million at the time the fraud was discovered. (“Hadassah to pay back $45 million of Madoff gains,” Dec. 10, 2010)
The Picower estate is being allowed to masquerade as one of these unfortunates.
Somewhat overshadowed by the Picower development has been the news that the Carl Shapiro family settled with the Trustee. (See “Carl Shapiro, family agree to return $625m in Madoff funds” (Boston.com, Dec. 7, 2010).
This transforms the image of the 97-year old Shapiro, who has cut a great figure as a Massachusetts philanthropist for 40 years. Formerly he has appeared as one of Madoff’s most piquant victims, grubstaking the young Madoff’s brokerage career with a $100,000 account in 1960 (Kirtzman, p. 43) and putting $250 million back into the firm at Madoff’s urgent request in the closing days, bringing the family exposure up to $545 Million (Arvedlund, p. 264) .
But the fact that the Shapiros were forced to disgorge $625 mm of funds from other accounts suggests the Trustee had something deadly on them. “Carl Shapiro Could Still Go To Jail Over Madoff Ponzi” by Nathan Vardi, in Forbes (Dec. 7, 2010) claims this is in excess of Shapiro and his wife’s net worth — which I doubt — but suggests the massive scale of the transfers. I also doubt we will see prosecutions, with the easy excuses of age and charitable activity to hand.
Vardi intelligently notes that
there has been some evidence that Madoff relied on a core group of investors who provided Madoff with cash in key moments during the multi-decade Ponzi scheme to solve liquidity issues. There has been speculation that those investors received special treatment with higher returns.
This explains why the large beneficiaries had any investment in Madoff, previously a puzzling point. Shapiro’s last $250 million could well have been an attempt to preserve the oasis.
Bernie Madoff was not a lone wolf. In fact, to coin a phrase, the fraud appears to have been a Jewish conspiracy. One which, on the evidence of the Picower settlement, the authorities continue to have no intention of investigating.
The Joys of Jihad: Islamentable, Isatrocious, Isbetrayal
Nordics versus Implicit Jews in "The Switch"
When Heidi went to Heaven 
From my viewpoint it looks horribly like every bank and every regulator, investment house in the US is about as straight as a corkscrew! Good grief, 950% Returns!! Barbarous, swindling Jews, like maggots, in every nook and cranny, infesting everything. Who in their right mind would put so much a penny into America knowing the hook nosed shysters will find some way to get their avaricious claws on it? It seems to me America today is a mirror of Weimar Germany. Is there a solution? If there is one I don’t see it. Perhaps after the economic collapse a good old fashioned Military Coup, followed by the mother of all pogroms.
We are so screwed! This could only happen with the complicity of greedy gentiles. Wait till the paycheck prostitutes with their shiny badges show up to “take you in for questioning.” Anything could happen and it won’t be long. Like Zbig said, “For the first time in history the world is awake,” something like that. Fascists only know one direction and that is “forwarrrrd march”.
Given the outrageous returns, the overwhelming majority of Jews caught up with Madoff had to know full well their investments weren’t on the up and up, and were probably proud of that fact (“Gee, aren’t us Jewish networks so clever, coining money for one another at the expense of the integrity of the goyim’s system, and laughing all the way to the bank.’)
But the Madoff ponzie scheme was simply a petite version of the Fed’s ponzi scheme, which is also overwhelmingly run by Jews for the benefit of Jewry and its self-serving agenda, and their scumball Left-Right partners.
No wonder so many Jews live with one foot in Israel and one in America — they realize they’ll need some place to go when it all finally unravels as it always has before. Hopefully a lot of their goy partners in crime will convert and go with them; the moral and ethical IQ of the U.S. would double overnight.
Chris,
The following is an observation by a famous former much misunderstood 1930′s German Political figure and decorated WW1 Corporal:
‘”For while the Zionists try to make the rest of the world believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn’t even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organization for their international world swindle, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.”
He is spinning in his grave like a Catherine wheel, screaming, ‘Don’t say we didn’t warn you!!’
@ Floda,
My take is, Israel identifies itself as “the collective Jew,” and would be identified as such whether it stipulated this or not. Israel can’t hide what it is (for example, a group of state-backed Israeli rabbis recently came out advocating institutional racism against Arabs, and one said “racism originated in the Torah.”) Therefore, the Jewish “nation” will eventually be identified by the world as the self-serving Jewish supremacists that they are and always have been, whether residing in Israel or the diaspora.
This means they will eventually be held accountable for their crimes against humanity instead of being able to disappear into the woodwork as they have heretofore (e.g. the Jewish Bolsheviks and Trotskyites who became the Jewish neolibs and neocons, but now correctly being identified as “Israel firsters,” with an increasing pariah status to match that of their state.)
“But the Madoff ponzie scheme was simply a petite version of the Fed’s ponzi scheme, which is also overwhelmingly run by Jews for the benefit of Jewry and its self-serving agenda, and their scumball Left-Right partners.”
Exactly! Read “The Case Against the Fed” by Rothbard. Should be read by all nationalists. I know, I know, he’s a jew. Get over it and read it.
A “Jewish conspiracy” that victimized mainly (though not exclusively) other Jews–rrrright!
You’ll dine out on Madoff a long time, while Enron and its brownouts-for-profit is dropped down the memory hole, but Markopolis pegged it right when he called Madoff’s ponzi an “affinity scam”.
Caleb,
You have not read our original essay carefully enough. We pointed out:
“…the first thing to grasp about the Madoff phenomenon is that it was a large scale transfer of wealth from non-Jews to Jews. This is because of the shift in the Ponzi scheme funding basis at the beginning of the 1990s. The big professional fund raisers (and consequently the biggest creditors) entered then or later: Fairfield-Greenwich ($7.9B), Banco Santander ($3B), Banco Medici ($2.1B), Access International ($1.4B), Tremont/Rye/Kingate ($5.8B) and others. Arvedlund (142) reports these outfits in aggregate were owed some $20 Billion; because of their comparatively late entry and accelerating contributions, a much higher proportion of this loss would represent real cash invested.”
I agree that if the SEC had shut down Madoff at the same time they shut down his then primary feeder fund, the firm of Avellino & Bienes, in 1992, the situation would have been a classic affinity fraud. But they did not. So for almost 20 years, and increasingly, Madoff was taking in money from professional “Funds of Funds” drawing mainly from non-Jewish sources, often European.
So the very large number of middle-class Jewish families who supplied the capital for the first decades of Madoff’s activities continued to live extremely well (albeit unwittingly) off his fraud – notwithstanding their ultimately ghastly fate.
Quite apart from the apparent “unindicted co-conspirators” of which the Picowar and Shapiro families were only two.
Under pain of aniti-semitizm I felt that BMadoff did not ‘work’ alone. Thanks for exposing his collaborators.
Question remains who and why finally got courage to expose the scam. Because small J inverstor got jewed??? Or because Israel did not got it proper share???
Some post above bemoans “I see no solution to this rip-off”. I donot think that ethnic massacre or “mother pogrom” is necessary. (Pogroms are as much exaggeration as the Hollllycaust). Hydrogen bomb would not be created without availability of pencills – it shows the MIGHT of written word.
I see two peacefull means of solving this problem:
1) Investing in to historical Holocaust Revisionism based on hard science e.g. wartime aerial photography and absence of mass graves on the ground
2) allowing emigration of 250.000 of Soviet Jews from Israel to the West or USA (instead of accepting SpAms (latin americans). Soviet Jews hate life in Israel and dream about emigrating WEst. Once 20% of them move out childish Arabs will pronounce TOTAL VICTORY and will stop molesting the other Jews like they did not molest them at all during Otoman Empire.
Things are getting interesting folks: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/18/gordon-duff-gov-jesse-ventura-proves-911-cover-up-will-americas-government-fall/
I’ll restrict my comment to just one of many contemptible aspects of this article, the SEC.
“The SEC was amply informed of the fraudulent nature of the operation, but was afraid to act for fear of the Jewish Establishment.”
The SEC is just a poor scared little puppy.
The savings and loan scandal, the junk bond scandal, Madoff.
As a regulatory agency the SEC is a repeated total failure and waste of taxpayer’s money. It should be abolished and every employee fired and/or prosecuted. Obviously all the SEC is good for is shuffling paperwork, watching porn online, and chasing down small time cheats. We need a complete do-over, it’s too steeped in corruption to rehabilitate.
The SEC is not afraid of the “jewish establishment” because they’re part of it. The SEC, like Wall Street, the FED, the IRS and every other governement regulatory agency is stacked from the floor to the ceiling with criminal complicit jews.
At least now the criminals are being identified as jews. At the time of the savings and loan and junk bond scandals I don’t remember reading a single word about jews.
Markopolis shows his fear in the testimony. I recall he said he feared for his life, heading to NYC SEC headquarters from Boston. He repeatedly warned the SEC of Madoff’s fraud and they did nothing about it.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/283836-1
“The SEC is not afraid of the “jewish establishment” because they’re part of it. ”
Correctamundo. Who is the current head of the SEC? Answer: Mary Shapiro who’s grandfather is the same Carl Shapiro cited in this article as an immense beneficiary of the fraud.
Oy, ain’t that kosher.
I’d say “Next time make the ovens larger”, but that would lend credence to another fraud that they even existed.
Floda, FYI Hitler was not a corporal he was a Gefreiter, which has no equivalent in the British army, the US army rank ‘private first-class’ is similar to Gefreiter.
Caleb, did the Enron money go to pro white groups in the way Madoff ‘s fraud benefited pro Jewish groups ?
Very sick indeed ..
Well, one of Madoff’s sons just lynched himself. That’s a start.
So many people who are otherwise aware of how jews operate still claim to this day how Madoff is an example of jews screwing other jews.
I still hear this nonsense “Madoff screwed his own people”
repeated over and over on internet radio and blogsites.
Thanks. Now I have a link to post in the comments. I doubt a single jew lost a penny. It looks like they all made millions or billions.
Compassionate Fascist:”Well, one of Madoff’s sons just lynched himself. That’s a start.”
CF, I’d bet some homeless guy “they” were able to drug and then have cremated is the individual now in the urn or whose ashes were scattered. It wouldn’t be surprising if Bernie’s kid is in Haifa right now having a big laugh over the whole thing.
Then again, he could have been starting to crack under the minuscule pressure or he became tired of seeing his pop get all the blame while knowing better, and maybe he told someone he had decided to say things he really shouldn’t. So the tribe bumped him off. But legit suicide? Doubtful.
NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THAT ANNE FRANKS DAD WAS A KNOWN SWINDLER,,THAT’S WHY THEY WERE HIDING ,,FROM GERMAN POLICE,THEN NATZI’S.
If… the following quote from the Talmud is accurate, then it should perhaps be expected that many generations of Jews have been exonerated by their God in financial transactions with the Goyim. This illegal activity is sanctioned by their religion.
“That the Jewish nation is the only nation selected by God, while all the remaining ones are
contemptible and hateful.
That all property of other nations belongs to the Jewish nation, which consequently is entitled to
seize upon it without any scruples. An orthodox Jew is not bound to observe principles of
morality towards people of other tribes. He may act contrary to morality, if profitable to himself
or to Jews in general.
A Jew may rob a Goy, he may cheat him over a bill, which should not be perceived by him,
otherwise the name of God would become dishonoured.”
Schulchan Aruch, Choszen Hamiszpat, 348
http://www.rense.com/general86/talmd.htm
You might have noticed another similar case recently:-
Jews Keep $45 Million Stolen By Madoff [ 10 December 2010 ] – http://www.jta.org/news/article/2010/12/09/2742111/hadassah-to-pay-back-45-million-of-madoff-gains
Of course the Jewish Telegraphic Agency presented it differently, telling us that they were paying 50% back rather than keeping the other half.
With great respect, Mike, what you say is not the correct arithmetic. The $90Mm Hadassah thought they had at the end was meaningless – so was the $65 billion Madoff’s investors as a whole believed they had. It was just Madoff fiction.
The Trustee has taken the position that what matters is what sum of what the investor paid in – $40Mm in the Hadassah case – and what they withdrew, which was $137Mm by September 2007. On his reckoning Hadassah was a net beneficiary to the tune of $97 mm. Why he settled with this opulent organization for only $45 Mm is a question, but it was money from outside the Madoff relationship. In essence, Hadassah went from thinking they had $90Mm to paying $45 mm from other funds. Very painful.
Viewed in this light, the Picower settlement is utterly outrageous. The Picower family is parting only with money demonstrably withdrawn from Madoff. They are paying nothing in consideration of the money this active investor made with the Madoff capital he accessed, and unlike Hadassah, nothing at all from independently-sourced funds.
For illiquid retirees applying the Trustee’s arithmetic is murderous.
Incidentally, Sheryl Weinstein, the Hadassah CFO who introduced Madoff to the Foundation and subsequently became his mistress, has a richly informative book in “Madoff’s Other Secret”. Amongst other things, she reveals (or asserts) that Madoff has a very small penis. Hell hath no fury!
Harry Markopolis is not an ideal figure. He has a regrettable tendency toward self-promotion as anyone picking up the book he wrote can see. There is not a particle of evidence to substantiate his claim that his life ever was in danger. This may go some way to explain why it took so long for the SEC to take his warnings seriously.
OF COURSE a great many Jewish organizations and individuals, some famous ones like that headed by Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel included, lost many millions. Madoff stole from Jewish charities. He didn’t contribute to them.
Some others profited at the start. That is the nature of a Ponzi scheme, or a chain letter. It is when word of these initial profits gets around that the real swindle can start.
So easy to be wise in retrospect! That Picower “must have known” that Madoff was running a Ponzi or otherwise gaming the system is an easy claim to make. [Some apparently concluded he was "front running", using inside information to buy or sell in advance of major moves, but no one suspected an outright fraud.]
Yes, the scheme fed on itself when the European money came in, connected with some venerable names in banking, each clamoring to get in on the “profits” ahead of its competitors and with a bigger investment. Not that this makes Madoff any less guilty, or contemptible.
In our essay “Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic” we noted the strange hostility and rudeness evinced to Markoplos by Senator Schumer (at the Senate banking Committee hearing), and David Becker, the General Counsel of the SEC (at a supposedly friendly briefing of Chairman Mary Schapiro about the Markopolos experience) – and for that matter the whole tenor of author Andrew Kirtzman’s account:
“Evaluating Andrew Kirtzman’s Madoff book “Betrayal” purely subjectively, one would think Harry Markopolos was the villain.”
We relate this to the famous late 1970s blacklisting of actor Cliff Robertson following his (inadvertent) exposure of Hollywood executive David Begelman‘s embezzlements: a pattern of
“unrestrained rage against someone deemed to have caused damage to a community member — quite regardless of the ethical facts.”
Caleb’s disingenuous attacks on Markopolos seem cut from the same cloth. Harry Markopolos’ interest in compensation and credit for his discoveries were absolutely normal for a Wall Street animal, coming from a habitat were the selfless and self-effacing do not survive. What other type does the SEC ever deal with? In any case, even if he had two heads and was colored green, the contents of his presentations – especially the devastating 2005 memorandum “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud” – were absolutely compelling and should have stood on their own merits.
Considering the amounts of money involved and the international aspects of Madoff’s activity – which he well knew – Markopolos’ fears of violence seem quite reasonable.
Yes, Ponzi schemes need apparently successful initial investors. But having a few insiders drawing out in secret in cash several times their alleged investment – which is what Picower, Carl Shapiro and evidently others did – contributed nothing to the viability of the operation and is a completely separate matter.
Caleb writes “no one suspected an outright fraud”. That is precisely what Markopolos told everyone he could reach for several years. And as we note David Harris of the American Jewish Committee has said
“…the Madoff name had come up here in the AJC’s investment committee some months ago when someone suggested we ought to explore investing … with Madoff. And the chairman of our investment committee actually said, “No, I think it’s a Ponzi scheme.” He actually used those words to the ten or fifteen people in the meeting.”
Need to try harder, Caleb
What? Again the accusation that Sen. Schumer was “rude” to Markopolos during his Sept., 2009 testimony before the Senate Banking Subcommittee. No one else seems to have remarked this “rudeness” but judge for yourself. Mr. Markopolos’ testimony begins around 1hr 50 on the podcast:
http://banking.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Hearing&Hearing_ID=7b38b6a3-f381-4673-b12c-f9e4037b0a3f.
Some people apparently find Sen. Schumer’s New York accent “rude”, or perhaps his way of looking at distant objects or people over the top of his reading spectacles instead of whipping them off each time.
Senator Schumer’s main rudeness, of course, consisted in confining Markopolos to only a few minutes of time in the almost three-hour Senate Banking Committee afternoon session. He preferred the maunderings of two very defensive SEC bureaucrats to the insights of a manifestly highly intelligent and extremely well informed man who had spent several years focused on Madoff. As we noted in “Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?”
“Schumer …ran the session so that Markopolos would be able to speak as little as possible. This became so extreme that the lawyer Markopolos had brought “started handing me cards urging me, ‘Jump in whenever you can’” (Markopolos, 262).
…”No One Would Listen” makes it clear he treated Markopolos with rudely dismissive curtness. Why deprive this genuine public hero of his moment in the sun?”
Whether one thinks Schumer subjectively rude depends, I suppose, on one’s view of New York manners (not just Jewish New York manners, alas!). But is notable from the podcast that he referred to Markopolos by surname only in the beginning of the session–in contrast to his address to the SEC men – and only changed after Senator Merkley paid a graceful tribute to Markopolos thanking him for his courage.
Schumer, of course, was juggling two live pieces of ordnance, one a grenade and the other a nuclear bomb. The first, that he himself had called the SEC on Madoff’s behalf during their last and most extensive investigation, had only come to light when Inspector General H. David Kotz, conducting the SEC post-mortem, had asked Markopolos about it. (Outrageously, Kotz failed to mention the matter at all in his published report, seriously undermining the integrity of that document in my view.) The second, massively more dangerous, arose from the question Schumer himself asked of the SEC’s failure to respond to the (several) tip-offs it had had:
“How the heck did this happen?…all you had to do was have an IQ of about 100 and even a semi desire to find out what happened…you didn’t have to turn over every stone” (at 1 hour, 39 minutes, 45 seconds).
Kevin MacDonald and I maintain that the answer to this was that the SEC was afraid of the power of the Jewish ruling class. Of which Senator Schumer, with his muzzling of Harry Markopolos and his non-appearance in the Kotz report, is a prime specimen.
I am certain there is complete agreement between Kevin MacDonald and “John Graham”. Tell me more about this “Jewish ruling class”. Are all Jews members and conversely, is membership confined to Jews? For that, how do you define “Jews”? Is it biological–something one is born in–environmental, a matter of upbringing, a question of religious practice? Or some other definition.
No doubt Mr. Markopolos was peeved at not having an opportunity to further plug and promote his own financial services business before a national audience. The business is styled “Markopolos”. Sen. Schumer’s referring to the witness that way was something of a private joke.
Sen. Schumer is not a perfect person, either. He has accepted considerable sums in campaign contributions from the banking industry which his committee is charged with regulating. However, he did not run interference for Bernie Madoff. Not the Senator himself but a member of his staff called the SEC to ask whether Madoff was under investigation. This query was made on behalf of several Madoff investors, the majority of whom unsurprisingly reside in Sen. Schumer’s State of New York. These investors did indeed harbor doubts about the steady returns they were receiving from the Madoff fund regardless of market conditions just as you contend they should have. That the SEC’s inspection found no wrongdoing is embarrassing but recall that, uniquely, two floors below where the Ponzi was carried out (or maybe it was two floors above), Madoff was carrying on a legitimate and moderately profitable trade as a broker-dealer.
Very interesting, Caleb. Can you document your Schumer story? Accounts are very hard to find.
How do you account for Kotz not even mentioning the Schumer/SEC call in his 447 page report? Surely it warranted being noted?
Isn’t it obvious?
The SEC, a federal agency of enormous power and resources, is afraid of being “exterminated” by Chuck Schumer. [Although Sen. Schumer is an honors graduate of Harvard Law School, his father worked as an exterminator in Brooklyn, NY.]
Or, perhaps, Inspector General Kotz does not attach quite the sinister meaning to the call that you do, or that Harry Markopolos purports to. How is it relevant to the scheme Madoff devised?
No verifiable source for your Schumer story, Caleb? Does not look good.
The Kotz report http://www.sec.gov/news/studies/2009/oig-509.pdf spent 121 pages on the SEC 2006 investigation of Madoff, which was triggered by several direct allegations that it was a Ponzi scheme and incredibly gave the operation a clean bill of health. All kinds of hypotheses for this disaster are considered, and some rejected. Not mentioning the Schumer call – which Markopolos only knew about because Kotz told him – if only to belittle its importance, is not susceptible of any respectable explanation. Kotz spent 19 pages evaluating the courtship of Madoff’s niece by a middle level SEC officer!
Markopolos in his book goes out of his way to exonerate Schumer. This is probably wrong.
Well, H. David Kotz is a Jew too. So of course his investigation into Madoff’s ponzi fund turned up nothing. What did you expect? Kotz was just protecting his fellow tribe member, just like Chuck Schumer was.
http://www2.pictures.gi.zimbio.com/House+Financial+Services+Cmte+Holds+Hearing+ArnZhfEfHuWl.jpg
Oops, never mind. I misunderstood what the Kotz report was about.
“Well, H. David Kotz is a Jew too.”
How do you know that? I have never read it anywhere.
If he is, then his report presents a real problem for conspiracy buffs, **nicht wahr**?
H. David Kotz is Jewish. See
http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/H._David_Kotz
His father, Samuel Kotz, a noted statistician, died last year:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.obituaries/browse_thread/thread/7a2575326db0ac48
“a member of Young Israel Shomrai Emunah synagogue in Silver Spring.”
Got to do better than this, Caleb! We can read you know!
Thanks, guy!
Now, if **I** had posted not one but **two** such distinguished biographies folks might accuse me of being biased in favor of Jews.