Jews in the Economy and Finance

Jews and the New Deal: Banking and Money

By FREDERICK TALMADGE

Finance and banking during the New Deal had a significant Jewish role. It was, of course, part of a larger historical context that involved both domestic and international finance capitalism in America, which included (but not limited to) such activities as commercial banking, merchant and investment banking, and the stock market, all fields with important Jewish activity. Like the rest of the New Deal, the Jewish versus gentile share of the activity is complex and not easily reduced to accusations of “Jew Deal.” Though the focus here is on the Jews, the gentiles were still the elite at this point and played many roles that can’t be explored in detail here. One can overstate the Jewish role, however it’s just as easy to understate it as well.

This article will deal with some of the major money and banking events of both the First (1933–34) and Second New Deals (1935–36). Some of the topics, like Henry Morgenthau and Charles Coughlin, appear in both periods, and are not categorizable under either as the nomenclature only applies to administrative policy. Significant economic and financial statutes in the First New Deal are the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, the Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall), the Thomas Amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. The Second New Deal saw the Banking Act of 1935. 

Banking Background

It’s instructive to start with a short history of investment (also called merchant) banking, which became modernized in the nineteenth century and was internationally led by the Rothschilds.[1] The United States was still “a nation of planters and farmers” until the 1830s, and before the Civil War there were relatively few railroads and relatively little need for foreign capital.[2] In the U. S., the first investment bank was the private banking house of Jay Cooke & Company in Philadelphia, established in 1861.[3] Cooke was the chief financier during the Civil War for the Union side, although German-Jews in the U.S. were beneficiaries of a “bonanza” because of their connections to Jewish investors in Germany in funding the Union’s expenditures.[4]

The post-bellum funding for recovery and the massive industrial expansion meant that foreign financial capital was needed, and Cooke assembled a syndicate with two Jewish houses, the Seligman’s in New York and the Rothschilds in Europe, to finance a refunding issue for the remaining Civil War debt (he was challenged by a syndicate involving the rising “House of Morgan,” which was awarded the business). Seligman would also vie with the Morgans on Wall Street in tapping European markets for railroad investors[5], including Jewish banking houses such as Cohen, Seligman, Bischoffsheim, Goldschmidt, Bleichroeder, Wertheim, Erlanger, and Oppenheim. (Seligman’s 1880 death ended one era of Jewish banking leadership in America, followed by the era of Jacob Schiff).[6]

The establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913, modeled after central banks in Europe, was a watershed for managerial power in the United States. Sam Francis says that it “carried forward the incipient fusion of state and economy in the transitional era between bourgeois and managerial capitalism.”[7] The central role played in international finance by Jews secured an invitation to play a role in the Fed’s creation. International banking had been less directly rooted in the United States, and a central bank was difficult to established for a number of reasons including the country’s history of decentralization,[8] constitutional limitations, and because of the bias toward the interests of farmers, who desired to pay back mortgages with cheaper, inflated money.[9] The Federal Reserve system, was the nation’s fourth attempt at central banking, when it was finally inaugurated by elite insiders during Woodrow Wilson’s first term.

It’s well-known in dissident circles that the system was the offspring of the “Aldrich Plan” submitted to Congress in 1911, from a draft proposal at the Jekyll Island Club meeting in 1910. The men who met at Jekyll Island were midwifes of the new central bank and represented the interests of Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb & Co., but the immigrant Jew at the meeting, Paul Moritz Warburg, had the exclusive expertise of the international financier and was able to advise a country traditionally hostile to such institutions.[10]

Warburg was convinced to go public with his previously sketched reforms for the U.S. financial system by associate and friend Edwin R. A. Seligman, son of Joseph Seligman, during a gathering at Seligman’s house. This gathering was right before the Panic of 1907, which was the final stimulus needed to bring Warburg’s ideas to national attention by triggering the National Monetary Commission.[11]

After passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, Warburg was on the founding board of governors of the Federal Reserve (the government part of the system) from 1914 to 1918 and served for two years within that period as a vice-chairman. After 1918, he was on the Advisory Council for much of the 1920s and continued to play a principal role in running it.[12]

Mainstream discussions of the Federal Reserve’s origins allow that American banking interests were represented and that these interests were tied to the private Fed through capital investments in the Bank or through interlocking directorates.[13] But were these interests answerable to larger firms in Europe, so that the banking system which Carroll Quigley described as a “feudal system” (but in his discussion one limited to the United States)[14] was in fact a subsidiary of international finance centered in London around the Rothschilds, who possessed fons honorum privileges to bestow power on others from higher up the global neo-peerage system?[15]

Eustace Mullins thought so and didn’t beat around the bush when approaching history with this hypothesis. As the cover of his book, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy (1954) put it, “Exposing the plot behind the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 … placing the nation’s banking reserves in the hands of the Jewish international bankers.”[16] His related 1952 work The Secrets of the Federal Reserve quotes a source that claims that the writing of the Federal Reserve Act was directed by London banker Alfred Rothschild, a direct descendant of patriarch Mayer Amschel Rothschild through his son Nathan. Mullins further explained that the Rothschilds controlled international finance through their manipulation of gold prices through their London office.[17]

Mullins also claims that the Rothschilds controlled the Morgan interests throughout their career, a relationship first cemented by Baltimore dry-goods merchant (and Morgan patriarch Junius S. Morgan’s sponsor) George Peabody. According to this theory, Peabody, who founded a merchant bank in London in 1836, and whose celebrated and well-documented Fourth of July parties inviting fellow financiers in the City of London were actually espionage operations for Nathan Rothschild to spy on fellow bankers.[18] Furthermore, he claimed that J.P. Morgan in the United States (his father J.S. spent much of his career in England) was an agent for the House of Rothschild, and that a percentage of his profits were claimed by his benefactor and, as a result, his fortune at his death was considerably below that of the other Gilded Age millionaires.[19]

Eustace Mullins also claimed to have found the organizing certificates of the Federal Reserve banks, and he provides charts of its international ownership structure.[20] And, as for Paul Warburg, Robert L. Owen, the Senate sponsor of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (a.k.a. the Glass-Owen Act, the progressive modification of the Aldrich plan), is quoted in Mullin’s book as having made a statement years later that Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., where Paul Warburg had been a founder and partner, was a Rothschild representative in the United States, a viewpoint shared by G. Edward Griffin in his book on the Federal Reserve.[21]

These claims are absent (and implicitly repudiated) in Ron Chernow’s The House of Morgan and Niall Ferguson’s The House of Rothschild, who note that the Rothschilds were only occasional partners with Morgan. Chernow quotes Rothschild agent Belmont as lamenting the “utter want of appreciation of the importance of American business,”[22] while Ferguson writes that the “Rothschild interest in American finance was limited” and that the “Civil War had led … to a permanent decline in the Rothschilds’ transatlantic influence.”[23] Nonetheless, Morgan and other American financiers did cooperate with the Rothschilds in this period, including the refunding issue mentioned above and the rescue of the gold standard during the Cleveland administration of the 1890s.[24]

Of course, there is no doubt that Jewish finance was international. Michael Collins Piper says that, “While the Rothschild family held sway through their banks in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna and Naples, there were also such big names in Jewish finance as Bleichröder in Berlin, Warburg in Hamburg, Oppenheim in Cologne and Speyer in Frankfurt who were also emerging as powerful lords of money who worked in conjunction with one another and with the Rothschilds, competing often to be sure, but all tied together by their Jewish heritage and traditions.”[25] That is, Jewish-owned banking houses had familial and professional links within and across nations, the product of which can be thought of as an organic whole. Furthermore, to invoke the name “Rothschild” in this sense often means the same thing, making it a metonym for what Henry Ford called “International Jewish Finance.”[26] 

Banking in the First New Deal

Paul Warburg would not play any role in the FDR administration, as he died in 1932. His German-born son James, however, was brought into the Roosevelt circle in early 1933 (while he was president of the International Manhattan Co. bank[27]), chosen by brain truster Raymond Moley to be an economic advisor without title or salary after Warburg had turned down undersecretary of the treasury[28] (partly on the strength of the numerous social and business ties between the Roosevelts and Warburgs in America). Author Chernow in The Warburgs called James the “sole Wall Street renegade.”[29]

By the time Roosevelt was elected, the price of goods had fallen catastrophically (64 percent in farm products), and he decided on a multipronged strategy to rescue industry and farmers, the latter trapped in mortgages contracted at higher, pre-crash nominal prices. One option to raise prices was monetary inflation, which could be achieved with greenback printing or by raising the price of gold. An amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act gave Roosevelt the power to do either but Roosevelt chose the gold strategy.

Raising commodity prices by buying gold at successively higher prices was based on the theories of Cornell professor George F. Warren. Warren’s theory was that the price of commodities was always bound with the prices of gold, so to increase one was to increase the other. FDR therefore had Eugene Meyer’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) buy gold at steadily increasing prices. After this brought disappointing results, the gold price was stabilized in 1934 via the Gold Reserve Act.[30]

By that time the paper currency was no longer backed by gold. Warren’s reflation theories did not compel the end of the gold standard—both removing the gold backing from Federal Reserve Notes and circulating minted coins—but Roosevelt abandoned it anyway because it met further administrative goals of credit expansion in the economy.[31] So, by way of successive statutes, by 1933’s end, it became illegal for citizens and private entities (including the Fed) to ‘hoard’ (i.e., possess), export, or contract in gold, ending the standard the nation had been on officially since 1900 and unofficially since 1873. This appeared to be a win against international, deflationary finance; i.e., against “Rothschild finance.”

As far as the history of gold and Jews in America, since the nineteenth century, many leaders of the inflation lobby felt gold to be something adventitious, and it had periodically been associated with Jewry. In the 1890s, the Populists had denounced Grover Cleveland as a tool of Jewish money for striking a deal with the Rothschilds through their American agent August Belmont to save the gold standard. In 1873, the country had been taken off of the bimetallic standard that it had been on since its founding and in doing so had forced deflationary conditions that hurt farmers the most who wanted inflation through silver coinage to pay off mortgage debt. The zenith of this struggle came in the election of 1896, when William Jennings Bryan embraced the Populist formulas in capturing the Democratic Party ticket for U.S. President, losing to William McKinley.[32]

The struggle during the New Deal found inflation proponents among lobbies like the Committee for the Nation. Ihe silverites were chiefly ensconced in the Senate, with many leading Progressives favoring doing something for silver, in the phrase of the day, including Burton Wheeler from Montana and Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma.[33]

If it was a blow to the financial sector, the confiscation and manipulation of gold to raise prices and expand credit had a surprising initial response from Wall St. Given FDR’s experiments with the metal, it was perhaps providential and symbolic for New Deal progressives that “die-hard” gold defender Paul Warburg had died the same year that Roosevelt was elected. Still, his son was among those receptive to abandonment and inflation, conditional on a certain future return to the metal. As a result, James (‘Jimmy’) Warburg was even chosen as one of Roosevelt’s experts on money matters during the Hundred Days.[34] And in those uncertain days, even J.P. Morgan embraced both Roosevelt’s election and his legerdemain with gold in 1933; though there is little doubt that part of this surrender owed to both the ongoing Pecora hearings, which investigated the role of big finance in causing the stock market crash of 1929, and the desperation brought on by the Depression. As for administration bankroller Bernard Baruch, he had as a matter of principle been against inflation, but Schlesinger says that he was the type that hedged his bets, and early in 1933 he craftily used his associate Herbert Bayard Swope to confer with monetary apostates.[35]

In time, however, some of the bankers (like the business community), having rediscovered their pride, would revolt. Warburg was the first, turning on Roosevelt in the summer of 1933, becoming a leading New Deal opponent thereafter. As suggested, the break was over Roosevelt’s decision to abandon gold, nearly agreeing with conservative budget director Lew Douglas’s comment that its abandonment meant the “end of Western Civilization.” Thus, he came back into the Wall Street fold. Chernow also says that Jimmy Warburg was the “true son of a Jewish banking dynasty, for he always favored global coordination and harmony over any naked assertion of national interests.”[36]

The mild and implicit gentile-Jewish wrangling in 1933 over the political and bureaucratic differences in the Department of Agriculture between conservative George Peek and liberal Jerome Frank (seen in Part 1 of this essay[37]) would have an inverted analog in the FDR administration’s approach to monetary policy. In this instance, the Warburgs became the reactionaries that adhered to an international financial order based around gold, while the inflation lobby of the rural West and South (with its residue of Victorian populism) and among some businessmen had a progressive moral order that was set against gold, favoring bimetallism or unbacked greenback printing (expressed in the Thomas Amendment to the AAA).[38] That is, and this is a cardinal takeaway from this study: Jews could be found on both sides of this debate (Morgenthau, discussed below, was not opposed to coming off of gold), so that Jewish activity during the period was characterized less by “conspiracy” than by a general increase in influence.

Warburg was not the only revolting financial baron who had supported FDR. The nation had felt unified by the response to the collective economic struggle during the Hundred Days, but in 1933 some prominent bankers were thought to be behind the Business Plot, the reputed proposed fascist putsch on the FDR government by elements of big business and finance.[39] In short: In late 1934, General Smedley Butler testified at the Congressional McCormack-Dickstein committee that two men, a bond-salesman named Gerald Macguire and a J.P. Morgan executive named Grayson M.P. Murphy had approached him and asked him to deliver a speech to the upcoming American Legion convention in Chicago. The prepared speech was one that announced the evils of taking the nation off of gold.

More seriously, Butler was told in coded language that he might be tasked with marching on Washington with thousands of soldiers to be installed as the nation’s new leader and that Roosevelt would step aside. The establishment of the American Liberty League in 1934, which formed a year after Butler claimed MacGuire asked him to lead the coup, was an anti-New Deal organization that employed some of the same men in the plot and included many of Morgan’s men, such as Morgan’s chief attorney John W. Davis, who had written the pro-gold speech.[40]

What’s interesting for our purposes is that powerful Jews put their support behind the Business Plot, the Liberty League, and other significant pro-business and anti-New Deal organizations, some of whom funded an array of other, anti-communist and antisemitic organizations. John Spivak, a communist journalist for the Marxist-oriented New Masses magazine in the 1930s, explored the byzantine links between financiers and (his definition of) American fascism, giving special attention to the plot against Roosevelt. In the article, one learns, for instance, of the business ties between the interests of the Morgans, Hearsts, Gianninnis, Rockefellers, Duponts, and Kuhn-Loebs. Spivak identifies Morgan as the “ultimate fountain-head of the whole fascist conspiracy of Wall Street” but does not shy away from the conspicuous role of Jews within Spivak’s galaxy of fascist organizations.[41]

So, for example, Judge Joseph Proskauer, on the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Committee, was a director of the American Liberty League while the A.L.L.’s president Jouett Shouse, a gentile, married the daughter of Abraham Lincoln Filene of Filene’s Department Store, whose vice-president was Louis Kirstein, who was also on the Executive Committee of the American Jewish Committee.[42]

According to the communist Spivak, in furthering their class interests as capitalists, the Liberty League and the American Jewish Committee, motivated by the common perception that Jews were communists, were both invested in backstairs dealings with anti-Jewish organizations to fight real or suspected communism, emboldened by the dominance of the left in this period. This was a period when a lot of the press was abuzz with the sentiment that “a Communist is a Jew and a Jew is a Communist”[43] (my next essay will explore this). The former funded the Sentinels of the Republic[44] and the latter, through Lessing Rosenwald, funded Harry A. Jung’s American Vigilance Intelligence Federation. Among other things, Jung had distributed copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[45]

Spivak also claimed that Felix Warburg orchestrated the McCormack-Dickstein Committee investigations from behind the scenes. The Committee’s mandate was to look into both National Socialist and Communist activities, but Spivak claimed that Warburg and the American Jewish Committee had an interest in restricting it to Communism only. That explains the Committee’s merely half-hearted, pro forma investigation into the plot. As a result, Spivak concluded that Jewish class interests could trump their racial interests[46], but I would add that powerful Jews probably felt that they were in a position to manage the situation, not unlike Jewish support for the alleged neo-Nazi Azov Battalion in the ongoing Ukrainian war today. An important point as well is that during this period many Jews were communists (agitating from below) and some Jews were capitalists (influencing from above).[47] 

Henry Morgenthau

The summer of 1933 saw the meeting of leading Western bankers and politicians called the London Economic Conference. It was here that the decision was definitively made by Roosevelt (through his delegation) to practice economic nationalism—that America’s interests would be put above those of the international bankers, whose gold standard had a deflationary tendency and resulted in unstable price levels.

Jews were the advisors for the American delegation—James Warburg was a financial advisor, William Bullitt was an executive officer, and Herbert Feis was chief technical advisor.[48] In fact, it was to these three men that Roosevelt entrusted the entire American preparation for the conference.[49] In trying to avoid offending European sensibilities, Roosevelt (who did not travel to London) initially assented to general agreements with Britain and France for currency stabilization and an eventual return to the gold standard, but in an impudent turnabout borne out of necessity, he ultimately nixed any commitments and finally cabled that the United States would not make pledges to either goal and would to try to inflate their way out of depression. This is when Warburg decided to break relations with Roosevelt, reflecting the sentiments of much of Wall Street as well.[50]

Jimmy Warburg did not want Bernard Baruch to attend the conference because he was, for one, a mere Wall Street speculator, but also because he didn’t want Jewish opponents to see it as an “international Jewish delegation.”[51] Whether or not that was sufficient to dispel the perception of the outsize Jewish presence at the conference, it probably didn’t help Jewry against charges of elite global power that Henry Morgenthau Jr. as treasury secretary would be the nation’s chief advisor of all economic and financial matters, nationally and internationally.[52] Morgenthau would serve in this capacity until July 1945, a few months after Roosevelt’s death, when Truman accepted his resignation over not being allowed to go to the Potsdam Conference, telling Henry Stimson, “I’m not taking any of those jew boys, not Morgenthau, not Baruch” to Potsdam.[53]

Morgenthau’s elevation to Secretary of the Treasury was not based on objective merit. He was the son of the famous lawyer and ambassador to the Ottoman empire Henry Morgenthau Sr. in the Democratic progressive Wilson administration. Many Jews had embraced progressivism and the Democratic Party to further their interests. As Benjamin Ginsberg put it, the process of elite formation between the industrialists and the old-money Americans in the Gilded Age excluded Jews by the end of the nineteenth century, and Jews improved their political fortunes by supporting progressivist candidates, becoming early supporters of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.[54] Morgenthau Sr., like Baruch, had been an influential supporter of Woodrow Wilson’s presidential run in 1912.[55]

The young Morgenthau had wandered irregularly in youth. His poor grades forced him out of Exeter and later Cornell University, which his own son, Henry Morgenthau III, thought due to undiagnosed dyslexia.[56] He decided on becoming a farmer (unusual for a Jew), perhaps in part because he wanted to be free of his father[57] or because he found people “difficult and forbidding.”[58] He focused on dairy farming and apple growing, and biographer Herbert Levy assures the reader that farming for Morgenthau was more than “just bookkeeping entries” (i.e., merely a business), and says his interest was genuine, quoting Morgenthau’s son who said that he “loved nothing better than to ride horseback through the rows of apple trees at all seasons.”[59]

In 1913, Morgenthau, Jr. and Sr., jointly chose to purchase 1,000 acres in Dutchess County, New York, becoming Franklin Roosevelt’s neighbor. This was not long after Roosevelt had won a seat in the New York State Senate in 1910.[60]  Considering their later association, this fate would be judged miraculous if assumed governed by chance, but the more likely explanation is that it was a calculated strategy by the Morgenthaus to associate with probable future influencers in the Democratic Party.[61]

Nonetheless, while Roosevelt entered politics beginning in 1910, Morgenthau cut his teeth on agriculture, which continued through the 1920s. When Roosevelt became governor in 1928, he hired his erstwhile neighbor to direct the Agricultural Advisory Commission, and Morgenthau was now a political insider, gaining the chief financial office in the federal government only five years later.[62]

Levy mentions that Morgenthau “had an innate skill to run a bureaucracy,“ and that he performed it with aplomb under FDR.[63] This is a marriage of two facts, the Progressive idea of the state and the knack Jews have for administration. A Progressive creed for statecraft was summed up by Roosevelt himself during a 1930 campaign speech: “that progressive government by its very terms must be a living and growing thing, that the battle for it is never-ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization.”[64]

The Jews possess managerial talents along with very able strategies for getting to the top (Baruch ran the economy for the final months of the First World War, for example). Thus, Morgenthau as commissioner of the Department of Conservation established a scientific bureau to study land management, created an advisory council of non-partisan experts, restructured the organization, and streamlined its finances.[65]

And as a technocrat he was committed to implementing the policies of the government official whom he served.[66] Morgenthau was devoted enough to Roosevelt and the nascent potential power within the rising ranks of Democrat Progressivism enough to take an unpaid position when chairman of the Agricultural Advisory Commission in Roosevelt’s first term as governor in 1930.[67] This was the beginning of Morgenthau’s union with Roosevelt for the rest of the latter’s life. Morgenthau could be relied on to deliver obedience and would provide funds for campaigns, but Levy writes that the real reason FDR liked Morgenthau was that he possessed the capacity to decode the thoughts and motivations of the sphinxlike Roosevelt.[68]

Morgenthau was more qualified to be Secretary of Agriculture, but Levy says anti-Semitism among farmers prevented this.[69] A Time Magazine article from 1934 noted that Morgenthau Jr. was no financial expert, that he consolidated his power like a dictator at Treasury, that he operated out of loyalty to FDR, and was thought to desire the subordination of the Federal Reserve to the Treasury through personal rule.[70]

Nonetheless, despite his closeness to the true-blue Morgenthau, many sources indicate that Roosevelt was not easily influenced by his advisers; James Warburg says that there was no possible power behind the throne with Roosevelt, who always called the shots in the end.[71] Morgenthau was even the chief target of an occasional and subtle sadism that Roosevelt characteristically displayed in ribbing his subordinates.[72]

Morgenthau got the Treasury job when FDR improvised a legal solution to getting the government to buy gold, one that met with consternation by Undersecretary of Treasury Dean Acheson.[73] Acheson, who was acting Treasury Secretary with a dying William H. Woodin, was forced to resign by Roosevelt. In looking for a replacement, he chose Morgenthau, based on thin qualifications as a financial expert. When Morgenthau got the news, Levy reports that he “broke out in a cold sweat,” knowing little about the “effects of currency flow or banking.”[74]

Prior to his appointment in January of 1934, Roosevelt had been using him as an “unofficial ‘minister without portfolio’—a ‘troubleshooter’” in occasional money matters. Whether connected or not, during the Hundred Days Roosevelt had been informed of George Warren’s theories on Morgenthau’s recommendations and was compelled to use his inflation theories when the midwestern radical Farmers’ Holiday Association threatened a farmers’ strike on Washington. The Association was headed by Milo Reno, who was one of those who would charge in 1935 that the New Deal was a “Jew Deal.”[75]

Since our discussion carries us to only 1936, we will not deal with the issues arising from the war, most notably the Morgenthau Plan, for the destruction of post-World War II Germany for which he is assuredly best remembered. In 1935 and 1936, he would help coordinate international exchange policy, at one point charging Hitler with violating Smoot-Hawley through a currency devaluation, getting new import duties on Germany over the objections of the State Department, impressing the French socialist government of Léon Blum, and allowing Franco-American exchange talks to go ahead.[76] Whether based on economic need or not, these international transactions among Jews could not have escaped the attention of the Hitler government.

Silver  and Father Charles Couglin

Since his opinions tended to follow Roosevelt’s, Morgenthau had helped Roosevelt set the prices each day for gold when Professor Warren’s theories were being experimented with. They both, however, opposed mandatory bimetallism as advocated in the Bryan tradition through the coining of silver, which was in the interest of the rural South and West and was represented by pro-silver senators, such as Key Pittman and Burton Wheeler.[77] Schlesinger writes that, “Gold was the rich man’s metal, the creditor’s metal, the banker’s metal; silver, the poor man’s metal, the debtor’s metal, the worker’s metal—and that had been true ever since the House of Rothschild in Populist folklore had begun a century before to drive silver out of the currencies of the world.”[78]

The Thomas Amendment to the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933 and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 had authorized the Treasury to buy and mint silver, but neither the President nor the Secretary of Treasury had acted. The silver bloc in Congress in early 1934 was as vocal as ever and Roosevelt was forced to compromise, resulting in the Silver Purchase Act of 1934, which required the government to buy and mint silver, though according to Schlesinger it wasn’t the monetary panacea the lobby anticipated.[79]

From a contemporary standpoint, during this period the silver issue as well as anti-Semitism are both associated with Father Charles Coughlin, who had made a name for himself in the 1920s from his Detroit ministry. Roosevelt was being threatened during his first term by the twin demagogic political and cultural surge of Coughlin and Senator Huey Long of Louisiana for the allegiance of the nation.

Coughlin (pronounced “COG-lin”[80]), had a brief row with Roosevelt and Morgenthau in 1934 during the silver debates at a time when “The Radio Priest” was waging warfare against capitalism, particularly its financial sector.[81] To retaliate against Coughlin, “Morgenthau had launched an investigation of silver speculators. … The most interesting feature was the revelation that, while Father Coughlin had been demanding the ‘mobilization of all Christianity against the god of gold,’ his secretary had been prudently investing the funds of the Father’s Radio League of the Little Flower in silver futures.”[82] Betraying the association of gold with Jews, Coughlin responded by saying, “Mr. Henry Morgenthau Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, has completed his clumsy effort to protect the gold advocates, the Federal Reserve bankers and the international bankers of ill-repute” and that silver was a “gentile” metal (Morgenthau himself, as an FDR loyalist and pragmatist, was not against ending gold).[83]

For years Coughlin had preferred to couch his monetary critique in somewhat vague abstractions, frequently denouncing “international bankers” and the “money changers.”[84] It was only after Roosevelt was elected that he began floating the names of specific changers. Alan Brinkley noted that, despite the anti-Semitic impression many people in the early 1930s got from hearing his speeches—when Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Eugene Meyer, and Bernard Baruch were named—gentile banking firms and individuals were cited 50 percent more often by Coughlin from 1933 on, including Andrew Mellon, Odgen Mills, Thomas Lamont, but especially J.P. Morgan. For Coughlin, Morgan was the symbol par excellence of the evil banker.[85] His “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” were Morgan, Mellon, Mills, and Meyer.[86]

Prior to 1938, he only occasionally denounced the Jews as Jews. In an August 1936 convention in Cleveland campaigning for Union Party presidential candidate William Lemke, he said “You appreciate the fact to my dear friends, that, among other things, in the National Union for Social Justice, we are Christian insofar as we believe in Christ’s principle of love your neighbor as yourself, and with that principle, I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not believe in it!”[87] By 1938 he entered a more explicitly anti-Jewish phase, serializing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his newspaper.[88]

Coughlin’s radio program was reaching millions at its peak, but in the later 1930s Coughlin was attacked by the administration, which imposed new regulations on radio broadcasters, which he was able to temporarily work around until America’s entry into the Second World War, which pressured him into permanent silence under the threat of America’s sedition laws.[89]


Monetary Policy and Banking in the Second New Deal

In the second book of his FDR trilogy, The Coming of the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger writes about the end of laissez-faire in the financial sector:

In the twenties, the national monetary policy had been run to a great degree in New York by Benjamin Strong and the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Decisions basic to the nation’s economic future were made not by government officials accountable to the people but by bankers in Manhattan board rooms. In 1933, as a result of Roosevelt’s gold policy—and even more, perhaps, of such reforms as the new banking legislation and the control of margins under the Securities Act—this situation came to an end. The nation asserted its control over its monetary policy. In this process, the financial capital of the United States began to shift from Wall Street to Washington.[90]

The Federal Reserve Board is the government side of the Federal Reserve system, originally created to provide for public oversight as a necessary counterweight to  the influence of bankers.[91] The control by the Federal Reserve banks during the 1920s was so total as to “reduce the public Board in Washington to impotence.”[92] Monetary policy was run by officials of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in cahoots with those in the Bank of England, with the former oftentimes carrying out policy for the latter’s interest.[93] However, once nations were forced off of gold during the financial crisis (Britain in 1931 and the U.S. in 1933), Fed policy increasingly took orders from the White House during 1933–34, and in 1935 the balance of the decision-making was tipped in favor of the government.[94]

The Banking Act of 1935 was the brainchild of Marriner Eccles, a Mormon banker who joined the administration soon after impressing Rexford Tugwell and Roosevelt with the content and the vehemence of his gospel of deficit spending (i.e., Keynesianism) and his desire to reform the banking system to subordinate the Federal Reserve banks to the Federal Reserve Board. He had felt that the Federal Reserve system was run by private concerns with a view to their interest and felt an overhaul was in order for the national interest. To this end, his bill made a number of changes to the Fed including public management of open-market operations (through a Federal Open Market Committee) and a reorganization of Board membership to favor selecting fewer bankers.[95] In 1934, Henry Morgenthau’s assistant Jacob Viner, an influential Jewish economist from the University of Chicago, had chaired a committee to recommend changes that would make the Fed more accountable to the public, but Eccles’s repudiated them as insufficient.[96]

Jimmy Warburg opened the attacks against Eccles’s bill when Virginia Senator Carter Glass opened hearings on it (Glass, who was Eccles’s biggest critic in Congress, had helped author the original Federal Reserve Act in 1913). A momentary split had developed between Eccles and Morgenthau during the debates, with Morgenthau to the left of Eccles, desiring stock ownership of the Federal Reserve banks by the government, based on a casual suggestion by FDR, to which, however, Roosevelt remained non-committal. Morgenthau backed off and after some political wrangling by Glass that proved to be more theater than horse-trading, the bill was passed, essentially originally what Eccles had wanted, which put banking in control of the government.[97]

 

Frankfurter, Brandeis, and the Security Acts

I want to close this first inquiry into Jewish influence in the New Deal—whether the “Jew Deal” charge had merit—with the two men who were most associated with it, Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter. Bernard Baruch and Gerard Swope influenced the First New Deal of the NRA and the AAA. Brandeis and Frankfurter’s influence was predominantly in the Second New Deal, about which much more will be will be said in a future essay.[98]  Still, Brandeis and Frankfurter had an impact during the First New Deal in securities and exchange legislation, in their opinions on the chief recovery statutes, in early legislation written by Frankfurter and his students, or traceable to Frankfurter and Brandeis’s own ideas as progressives.

Known as the “people’s lawyer,” Brandeis, since the Homestead Steel Works strike of 1892, devoted himself to an intensely moralistic social justice posture, fighting for the worker, unions, the consumer, and the citizen against corporate giants and political corruption.[99] He won fame while battling J.P. Morgan in a multi-year struggle over a New Haven Railroad monopoly beginning in 1907, bringing hatred from the Boston WASPs.[100]

Among Progressives, Brandeis had been for protection of the individual against modern corporations through “regulated competition, unhampered enterprise, and economic freedom,”[101] and for decades he had not changed his conviction that “bigness,” whether of business or government, was a danger to the individual’s liberty. His conception of freedom was based on economic liberty within an ideal Jeffersonian republic of smaller businesses, and he opposed the prevailing trend towards large corporate organization, the financial powers of Wall St., and the trusts and holding companies. As the author of the New Freedom strategy of Woodrow Wilson’s campaign, utilizing the power of his characteristic sense of moral superiority, he would insist on the certainty of invoking antitrust legislation to better ensure that ideal republic.[102]

Frankfurter, like Brandeis, was a lawyer who heeded the liberal progressive call to action, after hearing a high-minded speech Brandeis himself gave in 1905 before the Harvard Ethical Society while Frankfurter was a young, idealistic student at its law school.[103] A friend of Frankfurter said that he “collects people”, inveterately networking across his career to help construct the liberal state.[104] In doing so, he would mimic Brandeis in numerous and varied ways, from directly following him as counsel to Florence Kelley’s National Consumer League in the battle over worker rights in Oregon, to being a leader in American Zionism, and all the way to the Supreme Court as a Justice (it’s no wonder then that when Brandeis became a justice in 1916, Frankfurter cemented a “half-brother, half-son” relationship.[105])

Contemporary journalist John Franklin Carter said about the pair that Frankfurter, “more than any other one person is the legal mastermind of the New Deal, although he is in large part only the transmitter of the apostolic succession of Louis D. Brandeis.”[106] Still, though Frankfurter had maintained similar convictions in copying his master’s habits and beliefs as fellow front-line liberals, there was never a complete committal to “Old Isaiah’s” ideological blueprint, which created contributive flexibility.[107] By the time the FDR revolution emerged, Frankfurter had decided to assist the left New Deal planners of the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Recovery Administration, and its “bigness” designs, owing to his not being the ideologue that Brandeis was; he was more pragmatic,[108] much like FDR himself, continuously following the twisting road of history as it revealed itself bit by bit and to strike at opportune moments. And from his professorship at Harvard Law School (and during the early New Deal from Oxford University), he could influence events through his advice and by being a “one-man recruiting agency” for New Deal talent.[109]

As a result, he was involved with the creation of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933; Frankfurter helped draft some of its labor provisions, and after its passage he was Hugh Johnson’s first choice for NRA general counsel.[110] He would also play a lead role in attempting to save the NRA two years later. In 1935, Brandeis voted in the judicial majority against NIRA in the Supreme Court Panama Refining and Schechter cases which struck the law down, after which Brandeis scolded Frankfurter’s proteges Benjamin Cohen and James Corcoran, telling them that the President was living in a “fool’s paradise.”[111] For his own part, Frankfurter predicted it would fail because it wasn’t drafted to satisfy Chief Justice Charles Hughes’s agency requirements for delegation of powers. As a result, Frankfurter insisted on writing better legislation to conform to what the Hughes Court wanted, which would pay dividends for the later New Deal.[112]

Several securities acts were important New Deal monetary policies. While Frankfurter was doing his best to nourish the New Deal from overseas in England (while teaching from the fall of 1933 to the summer semester of 1934), the Pecora Commission in Washington was grilling influential bankers and stockbrokers to get to the bottom of the causes of the crash of 1929.[113] Two statutes that resulted from this inquiry, the Securities Act of 1933 (for new security issues) and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (for secondary market securities), had heavy Jewish input. (The other statute that resulted was Glass-Steagall.)

The Securities Act of 1933, one of the Hundred Days statutes, was in many ways the New Deal sequel to a bill, drafted in 1914 by Texas Congressman Sam Rayburn with Brandeis’s assistance, that gave the Interstate Commerce Commission more control of the issuing of railroad securities.[114] Almost 20 years later and with a revived progressivism, Rayburn led the way in Congress for a proper securities bill. Needing assistance, he appealed to advisor Ray Moley to find someone suited to help draft a proper bill. Moley would turn to Frankfurter. To assist, Frankfurter sent his students, most notably James Landis and the “Gold Dust Twins,” Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin V. Cohen, who were Frankfurter’s most important disciples in the New Deal.[115]

The Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which established the Security and Exchange Commission, was also a very Jewish affair. The first draft of what would be the act was written by Samuel Untermyer before being discarded. Untermyer, Jewish lawyer Max Lowenthal and the Pecora Commission’s chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora, anticipating a request for a stock exchange bill by the government, called on Frankfurter’s star pupil Cohen (also a protégé of Lowenthal’s[116]) to pen a replacement draft. Cohen reunited with Thomas Corcoran (from the earlier Securities Act) with help from Landis, and several months of constant work and testimony (by Corcoran) and battling for the bill in Congress by many congressmen, including Senate Banking Committee chair Duncan Fletcher and Sam Rayburn of Texas in the House, produced the bill.[117]

At this point, Snyder writes that charges of a “Jew Deal” and Communism “cropped up with increasing frequency” by businessmen, writers, and Congress. Frankfurter’s circle came under direct fire by Congressman Frank Britton who charged that the House of Truth in Washington (a quasi-Jewish thinktank) was a breeding ground for subversive and alien ideas.[118] A school superintendent in Gary, Indiana named William A. Wirt also made headlines for alleging that the New Deal was part of a design to communize the United States.[119]

As mentioned, the attacks of 1934 were part of a reenergized business community, no longer pliant as in the heady and desperate Hundred Days. The attacks would resume until Roosevelt regained momentum in 1935. Once Frankfurter was back from Cambridge, Roosevelt requested to see him immediately, as the New Deal was in trouble and would face legal headwinds, that would ultimately need to remediated by the Second New Deal.[120] And the Jews would contain to play a role. The Second New Deal is explored in my next essay.


[1] ”The nineteenth century saw the rise of several prominent banking partnerships such as those created by the Rothschilds, the Barings and the Browns. At this point, investment banking had started to evolve into its modern form, with banks underwriting and selling government bonds.” In “The History of Investment Banking,” International Finance Institute.

See also: Michael Collins Piper, The New Babylon: Those Who Reign Supreme (American Free Press, 2009), 111.

[2] John Moody, The Masters of Capital (Yale University Press, 1919), 9.

[3] Jay Cooke, Wikipedia, last modified September 16, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Cooke

[4] Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 13.

[5] Ibid., 36, 30.

[6] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 64. Joseph Seligman was powerful enough to elicit an invitation by President Grant to become Secretary of the Treasury in 1869, a role that Henry Morgenthau would fill under Roosevelt. See Ginsberg, 59.

[7] Samuel T. Francis, Leviathan and Its Enemies (Washington Summit Publishers, 2016), 375.

[8] Paul Warburg once wrote, in despair of ever launching a central bank, that an “abhorrence of both extremes”—that is, of Washington and of Wall Street—“had led to an almost fanatic conviction” in favor of extreme decentralization. Roger Lowenstein, “The Jewish Story Behind the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank,” Forward (November 29, 2015). https://forward.com/culture/325447/the-man-behind-the-fed/

[9] Verne B. Johnston, “Origins,” Research Department Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (December 30, 1983), 1. Niall Ferguson notes suspicion of big banks in particular. Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets 1798–1848 (Penguin Publishing Group, 1998), 369.

[10] The others were senator Nelson Aldrich, economist A. Piatt Andrews, and bankers Henry P. Davidson, Benjamin Strong, and Frank Vanderlip.

[11] Harold Kellock, “Warburg, the Revolutionist,” The Century Magazine (May, 1915, 81). https://archive.org/details/centurymagazine90newyrich/centurymagazine90newyrich/page/79/mode/1up?q=Warburg.

[12] Paul Warburg, Wikipedia, last modified October 5, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Warburg

[13] For an example, see Arthur Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (Harpers & Brothers, 1954), 44.

[14] Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope (The MacMillan Company, 1966), 530.

[15] This is not to say that scholars don’t discuss transnational links. Ron Chernow, for example, mentions merchant banking interlocking partnerships on an international scale. See Chernow, The House of Morgan, 33.

[16] Eustace Mullins, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy (Common Sense, 1954).

[17] Eustace Mullins, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve (Bankers Research Institute, 1952), 23, 48.

[18] Ibid., 49.

[19] Ibid., 57 (footnote). Mullins would presumably agree that this is what caused Andrew Carnegie to assert, upon receiving news of the elder Morgan’s death, “And to think he was not a rich man.” In Chernow, The House of Morgan, 159.

[20] Mullins, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, 34. He doesn’t give any citation for the claims, but the numbers and detail of the claims would be inspired if a hoax.

[21] Ibid., 17. G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island (American Media, 2010), 5. Griffin claims that Warburg bought his partnership in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. from Rothschild money. In Ibid., 18.

[22] Chernow, The House of Morgan, 40.

[23] Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild: The World’s Banker 1849–1999 (Penguin Publishing Group, 1999), 117–18.

[24] Chernow, The House of Morgan, Ch. 5.

[25] Piper, The New Babylon, 114.

[26] Ibid., 117. For example, Jacob Schiff’s father had worked for the Rothschilds as a broker and the Schiffs and the Warburgs married into the Loeb family of America. “Jacob Schiff,” Wikipedia, last modified August 9, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff

“Paul Warburg,” Wikipedia, last modified October 5, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Warburg

[27] James Warburg, The Long Road Home (Doubleday, 1964), 111.

[28] Ron Chernow, The Warburgs (Random House, 1993), 385. Also in Warburg, The Long Road Home, 112.

[29] Chernow, The Warburgs, 385.

[30] Eugene Meyer was the fifth chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1930 to 1933. Meyer’s financial interests had ties with Baruch’s, and Meyer, like Baruch, was important in the First World War, heading the War Finance Corporation, which became the basis for his Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in 1933. With its capitalization by bankers, the RFC attempted to revive the economy using loans to troubled banks during the banking crisis that began in 1931 with the failure of the large Jewish-owned The Bank of United States in New York, setting off a chain of bank failures until Franklin Roosvelt shut down the banks the week he took office. See: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), 236–238. See also: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), 239, and “Eugene Meyer (financier),” Wikipedia, last modified October 23, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Meyer_(financier).

The Jews were so well connected, that Henry Morgenthau Sr. was asked to represent the stockholders (he refused). His son, of course, would become important in FDR’s administration and was responsible for the Morgenthau Plan for the destruction of Germany after the Second World War. Roosevelt sent governor Herbert Lehman to effect a merger of other failing Jewish-owned banks with the Bank of United States (it failed). Lehman is listed by Schlesinger as having been one of the top donors to Roosevelt for President, behind Morgenthau Sr. See: Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), 280.

[31] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959), 199.

[32] Chernow, The Warburgs, Ch. 5.

[33] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 248–249.

[34] Chernow, The Warburgs, 386.

[35] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 196.

[36] Chernow, 387.

[37] Frederick Talmadge, “The Jews and the First New Deal, 1933–1934,” The Occidental Quarterly 25 (Spring 2025): 63–105.

[38] The two analogous centers were also connected by policy through the emergency. One of Henry Wallace’s strategies at the Department of Agriculture to raise the catastrophically low commodity prices was through inflation, and one method of achieving inflation was through gold price manipulation.

[39] “Business Plot,” Wikipedia, last modified October 22, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

[40] Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), 31.

[41] John L. Spivak, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy, II, New Masses (February 5, 1935), 13.

[42] Ibid., 14.

[43] Ibid., 12.

[44] Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House, 31. Archer claimed that “Its members [included some rich businessmen who] labeled the New Deal ‘Jewish Communism,’” and also that they demanded an American Hitler.

[45] John L. Spivak, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy, I,” New Masses (January 29, 1935), 13. For information on Jung’s activities, see: Ray P. Chase (who represented Minnesota in Congress, 1933–1935), “Ray Chase Seeks to Collaborate with Harry A. Jung, Notorious Extremist Antisemite,” A Campus Divided (1940); source: Minnesota Historical Society, RP Chase, Box 44, Correspondence and Miscellaneous papers, Folder (December, 1940). https://acampusdivided.umn.edu/letter/ray-chase-seeks-to-collaborate-with-harry-a-jung-notorious-extremist-antisemite/

[46] Spivak, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy, II,” 14.

[47] For information on Jews and Communism, see: Kevin MacDonald, “Stalin’s Willing Executioners, Jews as a Hostile Elite in the Soviet Union,” The Occidental Quarterly 5, no. 3 (Fall, 2005): 65–100. http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/SlezkineRev.pdf

[48] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 209.

[49] Ibid., 204.

[50] Roosevelt began to feel that a group set up by Warburg to study the monetary issue was beholden to New York interests. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 237.

[51] Chernow, The Warburgs, 391.

[52] “United States Secretary of the Treasury,” Wikipedia, last modified October 12, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_the_Treasury#Powers_and_functions

[53] Lucinda Franks, Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 52.

[54] Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace, 61–62.

[55] “Henry Morgenthau Sr.,” Wikipedia, last modified October 14, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Morgenthau_Sr.#Political_career

[56] Herbert Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr.: The Remarkable Life of FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury (Skyhorse publishing, 2010), 62.

[57] Ibid., 88.

[58] Ibid., 241.

[59] Ibid., 117.

[60] Ibid., 90.

[61] See Jeff Gates, Guilt by Association (State Street Publications, 2008), 52.

[62] Roosevelt would rely on many Jews as governor, including speechwriter Sam Rosenman and Jessie I. Straus, who was the first leader of the state Temporary Emergency Relief Administration program. See: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wikipedia, last modified October 27, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt#Governor_of_New_York_(1929-1932)

[63] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 187. This was fortunate for him because his farm “sustained huge losses” most of the time. Ibid., 117.

[64] “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” Wikipedia, last modified October 27, 2024, accessed October 29, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt

[65] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 228–230. As another example, consider that Felix Frankfurter gave suggestions for the reorganization of the War Department during World War I. See: Brad Snyder, Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment (W.W. Norton and Company, 2022), 96.

[66] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 117; 241.

[67] Ibid., 228.

[68] Ibid., 200-01.

[69] See: Talmadge, “The Jews and the First New Deal, 1933–1934.”

[70] “The Cabinet: Atlas & His Burden,” Time Magazine (September 17, 1934). https://time.com/archive/6895177/the-cabinet-atlas-his-burden/

To be fair, Warburg pointed out that the previous Secretary, William Woodin, had no financial experience as Treasury Secretary either. It’s worth pointing out that James Warburg was offered the Undersecretary of the Treasury by FDR in 1933, but declined. Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 196.

[71] Warburg, The Long Road Home, 113.

[72] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 537.

[73] FDR’s solution was to create a subordinate agency under the RFC to buy the gold instead of the Treasury (which Acheson said could not buy outside of the statutory price of $20.67 per ounce). The RFC would buy the gold under the condition that the gold would be collateral for the loans the Treasury would make to the RFC which the latter would need to purchase the gold. Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 259–60; Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 238.

[74] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 265.

[75] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 27.

[76] Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 285.

[77] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 248.

[78] Ibid., 248.

[79] Ibid., 257.

[80] Clyde Haberman, “The Father Coughlin Story,” PBS, Exploring Hate (March 9, 2022). https://www.pbs.org/wnet/exploring-hate/2022/03/09/today-in-history-the-father-coughlin-story/

[81] See Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 18–20.

[82] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 251.

[83] Abba Hillel Silver, “Father Coughlin,” Jewish Daily Bulletin (May 6, 1934).

[84] Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 271.

[85] Ibid., 271–272.

[86] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 18.

[87] “Coughlin ‘Challenges’ Jews to Adopt ‘Love Thy Neighbor’ Precept,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency (August 18, 1936), 4 You can watch him say it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2ljscYrxr8.

[88] Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983); see Appendix I for a short essay about Coughlin and the Jews.

[89] “Charles Coughlin,” Wikipedia, last modified October 27, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin#Backlash

[90] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 247.

[91] David C. Wheelock, “Overview: The History of the Federal Reserve,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (September 13, 2021). https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/federal-reserve-history

[92] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 292.

[93] This was not just because the center of international finance was the City of London, but also because it needed America to raise its domestic discount rates to stop Britain’s continual hemorrhaging of its limited gold supplies after it returned to gold in 1926. During the First World War, the belligerents were forced off of gold to fund the conflict; the priority for international financiers after the war was for nations to return to—to “stabilize”on—the gold standard. See Quigley, Tragedy & Hope, 342.

[94] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 301. See also: Levy, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., 278; Wheelock, “Overview: The History of the Federal Reserve.”

[95] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 293–294.

[96] “Banking Act of 1935,” Wikipedia, last modified June 19, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_Act_of_1935#Origin

[97] Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 298–301.

[98] Brandeis and Frankfurter’s contributions are more significant than Swope and Baruch because the agencies they had the most impact on, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Security and Exchange Commission, and the Social Security Act, were not struck down by the courts.

[99] Leonard Baker, Brandeis and Frankfurter: A Dual Biography (Harper & Row, 1984), 35. As an example of his reputation, Brandeis’s contrarian professional crusades led him to be “thoroughly hated by most of the leaders of the bar.” Ibid., 17.

[100] Ibid., 46–47.

[101] Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 20.

[102] Schlesinger, The Crisis of the Old Order, 28–31. Though always opposed to “bigness”, under the real constraints of Wilson’s first term, Brandeis quickly capitulated in order to promote new agencies of government that could be regulated.

[103] Ibid., 40.

[104] Snyder, Democratic Justice, 38.

[105] Ibid., 72.

[106] Carter, The New Dealers (Simon & Schuster, 1934), 317.

[107] “Old Isaiah” was FDR’s nickname for Brandeis.

[108] Snyder, Democratic Justice, 219; 251.

[109] Ibid., 224.

[110] Ibid., 223. Chicago progressive Donald Richberg (a gentile) got the job.

[111] Paul D. Moreno, Moreno, The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 255. His admonition to Cohen and Corcoran over the fate of NIRA had nothing to do with Brandeis being against Roosevelt or to progressivism, which remained undiminished over the decades. As stated, in that case, he merely disagreed with the philosophical approach.

[112] Daniel Ernst, Tocqueville’s Nightmare (Oxford University Press, 2014), 60-61.

[113] Pecora Commission, Wikipedia

[114] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 440. See also Baker, Brandeis and Frankfurter, 283.

[115] Leonard Dinnerstein, “Jews and the New Deal,” American Jewish History 72, no. 4 (June 1983): 461–476, 468. Corcoran was an Irish Catholic.

[116] Max Lowenthal, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Lowenthal#Private_law_practice

[117] Carter, The New Dealers, 156; see also: Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 456–58.

[118] Snyder, Democratic Justice, 237. Frankfurter had been in contact with Cohen and Corcoran over the phone the entire time and displayed the characteristic coolness and excitement for battle.

[119] Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal, 457–460.

[120] Snyder, Democratic Justice, 238.

Israel: A Refuge for Swindlers


Criminal proceeds
recovered from a mass Israeli-run fraud ring by French police, 2020.

“Most of the Jews are thieves.” Thus said the founding father of Israel, David Ben Gurion, when he heard about Jewish soldiers carrying Persian rugs from freshly looted Arab properties during the Arab-Israeli war. If he were around today, I don’t think Ben Gurion would find any reason to radically change his opinion, and he probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Israel has become a hub of international fraud. A recent hit for Netflix is the documentary The Tinder Swindler, which charts the outlandish career of Israeli con artist Shimon Hayut, the son of a rabbi, who manipulated a large number of predominantly Scandinavian women into collectively handing over more than $10 million. Hayut’s modus operandi is that old favorite of Jewish white-collar criminals — the Ponzi scheme, though Hayut inflected it with a romantic twist. Using the alias Simon Leviev on the dating app Tinder, Hayut told his gullible victims that he was the son of Lev Leviev, CEO of one of the world’s largest diamond traders. He would initially lavish the women with gifts and trips on private jets (funded by a previous victim), before introducing the idea that he was under threat from unspecified enemies, that his financial accounts had been inexplicably locked, and that he needed “loans” from the women that he would repay many times over when an “imminent deal” worth many millions was completed. The women were pressured into requesting, and then extending, bank loans in their own names, often until they were as much as $300,000 in debt. Once Hayut had extracted the maximum possible funds from a woman, he would begin using some of it to groom a new victim. Moving from woman to woman, and country to country, Hayut lived a lifestyle of private jets, international travel, caviar, and designer clothes until a Norwegian newspaper finally helped secure his arrest in Greece in 2019 for using a fake passport. He was then sent to Israel, where authorities released him after just five months. He remains a free man in Israel, and appears as wealthy as ever.

While the now-viral Netflix documentary is very interesting and well-made, it does a very poor job of contextualizing and framing Hayut’s behavior. Hayut’s career of fraud is presented solely in terms of the perils of online dating, and, ludicrously, as a kind of feminist revenge tale (despite the fact the women fell into Hayut’s clutches in part through their own thirst for a lavish lifestyle, and the final justice served on Hayut was ridiculously weak to say the least). Very little is made of the fact Hayut began his career in fraud as a teenager, sparking questions of cultural influence, and there is no comment at all on the peculiar manner in which Hayut seemed to target Scandinavian women in particular. But the more egregious oversight is surely that Hayut fits incredibly well into a pattern that is absurdly common — the ubiquity of Israeli con artists of international reach, and their habit of finding a very accommodative justice system in the State of Israel.

An Israeli Specialty

International fraud of all kinds is an Israeli specialty. Israel’s Money Laundering and Terror Financing Prohibition Authority receives frequent requests for information from financial intelligence units in at least 19 countries around the world. The main crimes that are the focal point of these requests are “money laundering, fraud, particularly investment scams, binary options and forex scams, bribery and corruption, forgery and illegal gambling.” If there is a way for someone to be parted from their money, you can be sure there is an Israeli working very hard to accomplish it.

In June 2021, an operation led by German police secured the arrest of ten Jews of various nationalities for operating fake investment sites that defrauded European investors of around $36 million. In a fraud scheme that Europol said was “organized mainly by Israeli nationals,” the criminals operated the fake investment sites Tradorax, Tradervc, Kayafx, Kontofx and Libramarkets. Tradorax used the platform supplied by Israel’s SpotOption, which was charged with fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2021. According to Europol, the Jewish network lured thousands of victims through advertising on social media and search engines. These victims were then encouraged to invest in high-risk options, CFDs or cryptocurrencies. However, according to German police, the money was never actually invested but simply taken by the Jews involved. During raids in several countries, police seized electronic devices, real estate, jewelry, high-end vehicles and approximately $2.4 million in cash.

The case was reminiscent of the story of the Canadian-Israeli Cartu brothers. In May 2020, the Ontario Securities Commission brought civil charges against David, Jonathan, and Joshua Cartu for soliciting Canadians to trade binary options. The trio scammed residents of Ontario alone out of $1.4 million, but the total value of their globally-operated scheme was estimated at $233 million. The brothers live lavishly today in Israel, safe in the knowledge that “Israeli prosecutors have yet to indict a single binary options suspect on charges of fraud.” The Times of Israel points out that the brothers’ story is only part of a much wider scenario in which “hundreds of companies in Israel employed thousands of Israelis who allegedly fleeced billions out of victims worldwide.”

8 Israelis arrested in the Philippines in 2018 for operating a multi-million dollar scam

Five months ago, 26 Israelis were arrested for running a cryptocurrency fraud scheme that targeted US investors. The suspects, known as the ‘Wolves of Tel Aviv,’ were said to be marketing products and investments, without providing returns, and keeping the victims’ money. According to a police statement, “all of the 26 suspects of the alleged fraud are residents of Israel, and the victims all live abroad.” The Israeli news station i24News commented that “Israel has been a major hub of online fraud in recent years.” A month after the arrest of the ‘Wolves of Tel Aviv,’ a further eight Israelis were arrested, including Moshe Hogeg, who owns the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club. Israeli police said the group were detained on suspicion of “of cryptocurrency fraud of as much as hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars.”

A Criminals’ Paradise

A poor history of complying with extradition requests together with generous tax breaks for millionaires has resulted in Israel, and Tel Aviv in particular, being perceived as a criminals’ paradise. Remarking on Israel’s “massive fraudulent online and scam industry” and its potential to “undermine Israel’s economic reputation and stoke anti-Semitism,” the Times of Israel pointed out that a 2008 piece of legislation had acted as a “a nudge and a wink to would-be tax evaders and money launderers worldwide to settle in Israel and launder their money here.” The law grants a 10-year tax exemption on income earned abroad to olim hadashim (new immigrants) as well as toshavim hozrim vatikim (returning residents who have lived abroad for at least 10 years) and other eligible new residents. It also gives a 10-year exemption on reporting earnings abroad to people in these categories. It’s a magnet for Jewish thieves.

Last week, plastic surgeon David Morrow and his wife Linda, dubbed “The Jewish Bonnie and Clyde,” faced the American justice system two years after it was discovered the pair had been operating one of the most extensive and sickening health care frauds in California history. In total, the Morrows are thought to have cost insurance companies between $25 million and $65 million for procedures that were medically unnecessary. According to the Jerusalem Post,

They were active and highly respected members of the Orthodox Jewish communities in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles and Palm Springs and very generous contributors to Jewish causes. … They were arrested in California on charges of cheating health insurance companies of more than “tens of millions of dollars for cosmetic procedures that were not medically necessary,” according to the US Attorney’s Central District of California office of the Department of Justice. Add to that a guilty plea of conspiring to commit mail fraud and filing a false tax return, Dr. Morrow was in huge trouble. He was sentenced in absentia to 20 years in federal prison and had his medical license revoked. In her ruling, Judge Josephine L. Staton noted that Morrow’s “greed knew no bounds,” and that he showed an “utter disregard for patients’ well-being and safety.”

The pair were sentenced in absentia because they quickly liquidated their assets and moved to Israel where they could be among their co-ethnics and not have their wealth probed or questioned. According to locals in Israel, before the FBI finally orchestrated a rare extradition (for Linda — David is still fighting the case from an Israeli prison) “they were very active in the congregation, went to shiurim (classes) and synagogue functions.”

In 2017, the Times of Israel commented on the arrest of “35 individuals for allegedly running a network of scam boiler rooms.” The gang operated secret call centers inside residential apartments in the cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Netanya, defrauding people in Europe and North America with a variety of different scams. One method was the CEO scam, where the fraudsters impersonated senior executives in a European company and persuaded employees to wire money to the Jews’ Israeli bank accounts. Other employees called companies in Europe selling goods and services that never materialized. A government prosecutor worried that “The phenomenon has become a national scourge in both Israel and abroad. It is causing damage to the reputation of the state of Israel as well as to Jews in other countries.” The Times of Israel remarked that many of those arrested were Jews from America and France, and that they were assisted by “thousands of Israelis.”

The most prominent example, of course, is the so-called “sting of the century,” in which over 1 billion euros was stolen via a tax scam between November 2008 and June 2009 from the French government. The theft was carried out by French Jews Arnaud Mimran, Marco Mouly, and Samy Souied from a Tel Aviv office. The trio were assisted by a significant number of co-ethnics, with the Times of Israel reporting that “six of the defendants were tried in absentia and are believed to be living in Israel.” In a May 2016 interview with the Times of Israel, Laurent Combourieu, director of investigations for the the Autoritй des marchйs financiers (AMF), France’s securities authority, said that there is overlap between the French-Israeli citizens who were involved in tax fraud carried out against the French government from Israel, and the perpetrators of the ongoing wave of online trading fraud targeting French speakers. In the past six years, according to the Paris prosecutor, French citizens had lost 4.5 billion euros to online trading and CEO scams, with many of these perpetrated from Israel.

That Israel is a hub for Jewish international criminality is further indicated by a random sampling of the bank accounts of new immigrants who had moved to Israel between 2008–2012, carried out by the Israeli state comptroller. It was found that “one in six were found to have irregular activity that caused the bank to flag them for suspected money laundering.” In 2013, the OECD Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes pressured Israel to cancel the exemption from filing tax returns by new immigrants and veteran returning residents, in an effort to remove what many saw as a clear incentive to international criminality. Israel agreed to change their legislation in May of that year, but almost nine years later it has yet to do so. In the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) issued by the U.S. State Department, Israel is discussed as a “a major money-laundering country.” The report adds that

Israel’s ‘right of return’ citizenship laws mean that criminal figures find it easy to obtain an Israeli passport without meeting long residence requirements. It is not uncommon for criminal figures suspected of money laundering to hold passports in a home country, a third country for business, and Israel.

Some Considerations

Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler argued during a discussion of Zionism that “What [Jews] really are aiming at is to establish a central organization for their international swindling and cheating. As a sovereign State, this cannot be controlled by any of the other States. Therefore it can serve as a refuge for swindlers who have been found out and at the same time a high-school for the training of other swindlers.” All things considered, this is obviously a very prescient comment that has an undeniable ring of truth in light of the facts presented above. Far from being an example of fortune-telling, however, the prediction rests on what would today be regarded as certain anti-Semitic assumptions based on stereotypical traits associated with Jews.

The first of these assumptions is that Jews have a special relationship with, or interest in, money. Assuming an ethnic group has a special relationship with, or interest in, money would obviously lead one to predict a number of things. The group might be, on average, wealthier than other groups. It might produce more billionaires. Its criminality might also be reflected less in violent offences than in those most directly correlated with the acquisition of wealth. By most metrics, Jews are indeed wealthier than other groups. In regards to crime, there is also a clear skewing towards wealth acquisition. In 1971 A. Menachem of the Berkeley School of Criminology published a study in Issues in Criminology titled “Criminality Among Jews: An Overview.”[1] In this study, Menachem argued that ‘the Jewish crime rate tends to be higher than that of non-Jews and other religious groups for white-collar offenses, that is, commercial or commercially related crimes, such as fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, and embezzlement.”

In 1988, Yale University’s Stanton Wheeler published “White-Collar Crimes and Criminals” for the Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. Among Wheeler’s findings were that while Protestants and Catholics were under-represented among white-collar criminals relative to their share of the population, Jews were over-represented to a very large degree (2 percent of the population, 15.2 percent of white-collar convictions). Wheeler states that “It would be a fair summary of our data to say that, demographically speaking, white-collar offenders are predominantly middle-aged white males with an over-representation of Jews.” While Stanton’s statistics are enlightening in themselves, a more detailed picture emerges in David Weisburd’s Yale-published Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts (1991). Here Weisburd informs us that although Jews comprise only around 2 percent of the United States population, they contribute at least 9 percent of lower category white-collar crimes (bank embezzlement, tax fraud and bank fraud), at least 15 percent of moderate category white-collar crimes (mail fraud, false claims, and bribery), and at least 33 percent of high category white-collar crimes (antitrust and securities fraud). Weisburg’s updated data showed that overall, Jews were responsible for an astonishing 23.9 percent of financial crime in America.[2] Given the statistical data, not to mention the well-charted historical trajectory of Jewish financial behavior,[3] the argument that a Jewish predilection for financial misdeeds is a mere “canard” is unsustainable.

Desiring to acquire wealth, and actually acquiring it either legitimately or illegally, are obviously two different things. Jews are equipped for wealth acquisition, including criminal wealth acquisition, through the same background traits that facilitate their efficiency in social and political activism: ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggression.[4]

Ethnocentrism clearly plays a large role in international Jewish scams based in Israel. Many of these large-scale frauds are perpetrated by groups consisting of Americans, Bulgarians, Canadians, Romanians, Italians, and so on, whose only substantial common ground is their shared ethno-religious background. Criminal activity is inherently risky, so the level of trust among individuals from such varied national groups is all the more astonishing. Coupled with the almost exclusive targeting of outgroups (U.S. citizens, Canadians, Europeans, and others), the clannish quality of these Jewish groups drawn from the diaspora and based in Israel emphasizes the strength of Jewish ethnocentrism as a foundational base for Israeli international financial crime. In a further demonstration of Jewish ethnocentrism, or trust in one’s co-ethnics, the flight of many international Israeli swindlers to Israel, or their “disappearance” in the state, suggests a level of comfort and expectation from other Jews. Jews who have defrauded outgroups really do expect the government and state of Israel to be their refuge, and very often, through lenient sentences or lack of investigation, they are proved correct in having that expectation.

Intelligence is also key to the success and perpetuation of Israeli-based international fraud. Many of the schemes discussed above are relatively complex, requiring high levels of understanding of international financial markets, banking practices, legal loopholes, differing national standards and legislation, web and software design, search engine optimization, and all of the skills associated with money laundering. As mentioned above, Israelis are responsible for some of the biggest thefts in the financial history of several nations, often involving government-level fraud. These frauds have been executed thanks to the input of large numbers of highly intelligent and multi-skilled Jews who dedicated themselves to the criminal acquisition of wealth.

This extreme dedication to wealth acquisition is obviously driven by significant psychological intensity. In many cases, the frauds required an extraordinary level of audacity, e.g., involving the impersonation of major CEOs or even government figures. In one such example, in 2019 an Israeli scam operation obtained around $90 million after impersonating French foreign minister Jean-Yves le Drian, calling African heads of state, ambassadors, clergy and business figures, and asking them to help France pay ransom for French citizens abducted by ISIL or other terrorist groups in Syria. The impersonator donned a custom-designed silicone mask of the French minister’s head and spoke to his targets via Skype from an office decorated with the French flag and a portrait of French Prime Minister Emanuel Macron. The four ringleaders were eventually arrested in Netanya, which seems to be second only to Tel Aviv in the number of international scams it has hosted. The French were sufficiently incensed for an Israeli police officer to tell a local judge that ““This is a case with international diplomatic repercussions. This is not an ordinary case but one with great international sensitivities that has caused a diplomatic incident between our two countries.” The Times of Israel laments that “An Internet search for ‘scam’ and ‘Israel’ in French yields hundreds of articles, many of which are accompanied by anti-Semitic slurs in the comments section. … Despite the damage such fraudulent activities are doing to Israel’s reputation, Israeli law enforcement has made very few arrests and prosecuted even fewer suspects in the decade or more since the phenomenon first arose.”

Finally, Israeli international financial crime requires aggression. An interesting aspect of The Tinder Swindler involved the manner in which Shimon Hayut dropped the veil once he realized a particular woman had given him all the money she could or would. Threats and insults were immediate. The fundamental drive behind most of the discussed Jewish International scams is aggressive, involving forms of coercion and manipulation against a backdrop of callous disregard and disdain for the targeted outgroups. These aggressive aspects, of course, only highlight those instances in which some of the ill-gotten proceeds, as in the case of the Morrows for example, generously find their way to Jewish charitable causes — which brings us full circle to ethnocentrism.

The concern shown by the Israeli press, and some government officials, that such activity will lead to an increase in anti-Semitism is based for the most part on the implicit understanding that “anti-Semitic” assumptions about the traits associated with Jews (special interest in money, ethnocentrism, intelligence, psychological intensity, and aggression) have a basis in fact. Such concerns also imply the fear that wider knowledge or discussion of these large-scale frauds based in Israel will undo many decades of propaganda that has convinced outgroups that such assumptions are false or bigoted, and that Israel is a natural friend and ally to Western nations. The reality is that Israel is happy to welcome internationally looted funds into its economy, and cares little for the opinion of other nations. The nation’s founder wouldn’t be surprised.


[1] A. Menachem, “Criminality Among Jews: An Overview,” Issues in Criminality, Volume 6, Issue 2, (Summer 1971), 1-39.

[2] D. Weisburg, Crimes of the Middle Classes: White-Collar Offenders in the Federal Courts (Yale University Press, 1991), 72

[3] For example, across Europe, between 1881 and 1914, Jews were over-represented in bankruptcy, forgery, fraud and libel. See P. Knepper, The Invention of International Crime: A Global Issue in the Making, 1881-1914, (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 80. The trend, of course, went much further back in history.

[4] K. MacDonald, “Background Traits for Jewish Activism,” The Occidental Quarterly: A Journal of Western Thought and Opinion (Summer 2003): 1-37.

Free to Cheat: “Jewish Emancipation” and the Anglo-Jewish Cousinhood, Part 1

Editor’s note: This is a repost of a classic Andrew Joyce article from 2012. Never forget!

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
     Charles Mackay, 1841[1]

Shortly after his election to Parliament in 1830, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), a famous historian and one of Britain’s leading men of letters, took up the cause of removing Jewish “civil disabilities” in Britain. In a succession of speeches, Macaulay was instrumental in pushing the case for permitting Jews to sit in the legislature, and his January 1831 article Civil Disabilities of the Jews had a “significant effect on public opinion.”[2] Professing Jews residing in Britain at that time were unable to take seats in the House of Commons, because prior to sitting in the legislature one was required to declare a Christian oath. In addition, Jews were “excluded from Crown office, from corporations, and from most of the professions, the entrance to which bristled with religious oaths, tests, and declarations.”[3] Even the 1753 Naturalization Act which had granted citizenship to foreign-born Jews had been repealed following widespread popular agitation, and a pervading atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust of Jews generally, and foreign Jews especially.[4] Ursula Henriques states that because of the resolute opposition of the British people to the involvement of Jews in British political life, since their readmission in the 17th century “the Jews had remained quiet.”[5]

However, buoyed by the granting of political emancipation to Protestant Dissenters and Catholics in 1828 and 1829, British Jews began to agitate for their own “emancipation,” and this agitation was augmented and spearheaded to a great extent by Thomas Macauley. Within thirty years the British elite had capitulated; not only had all Christian oaths been abandoned, but six unconverted Jews sat in the House of Commons. Within fifty years, Britain had sixteen Jewish Members of Parliament, and a Jewish Prime Minister who espoused a doctrine of Jewish racial superiority — Benjamin Disraeli; and under Disraeli Britain would pursue a foreign policy dictated to a large extent by what future Prime Minister William Gladstone called “Judaic sympathies.”[6] This foreign policy would include support for the Ottomans who were friendly to Jews and were massacring Christians in Bulgaria. And it would include waging of war on the Boers in a move highly beneficial to Jewish mining operations in South Africa.[7] How and why did such a dramatic change in circumstances occur? And how did the Anglo-Jewish elite repay Britain for its act of ‘justice’?

Let us first return momentarily to Macaulay. An in-depth survey of his life reveals no Jewish ancestry and no clear links to Jews. Son of a Scottish colonial governor and abolitionist, Macaulay seems at first glance to be something of a weak-kneed liberal idealist, and in addition he appears to have had very little knowledge of Jewish history or culture. He saw the Jewish agitation for entry into government as being primarily a religious issue, and perceived Jews as being, in his own words, “victims of intolerance.”[8] Macaulay prided himself on his knowledge of Greek literature,[9] and yet we can but wish he’d spent more time on his Greek philosophy, particularly that of Plato who condemned ” those who practise justice through timidity or stupidity,” and opined that “if justice is not good for the just man, moralists who recommend it as a virtue are perpetrating a fraud.”[10]

However, a complete reading of his 1831 article on Civil Disabilities of the Jews would leave us feeling slightly less antagonistic towards this would-be emancipator, and his article reveals much about the extent and nature of Jewish power and influence in Britain at that time. Macaulay, it seems, viewed emancipation as a means of ‘keeping the Jews in check.’ For example, he insisted that “Jews are not now excluded from political power. They possess it; and as long as they are allowed to accumulate property, they must possess it. The distinction which is sometimes made between civil privileges and political power, is a distinction without a difference. Privileges are power.”[11] Macaulay was also aware of the role of finance as the primary force of Jewish power in Britain. He asked: “What power in civilised society is so great as that of creditor over the debtor? If we take this away from the Jew, we take away from him the security of his property. If we leave it to him, we leave to him a power more despotic by far, than that of the King and all his cabinet.”[12] Macaulay further responds to Christian claims that “it would be impious to let a Jew sit in Parliament” by stating bluntly that “a Jew may make money, and money may make members of Parliament. … [T]he Jew may govern the money market, and the money market may govern the world. … The scrawl of the Jew on the back of a piece of paper may be worth more than the word of three kings, or the national faith of three new American republics.”[13]

Macaulay’s insights into the nature of Jewish power at that time, and his assertions that Jews had already accumulated political power without the aid of the statute books, are quite profound. Yet his reasoning — that permitting Jews into the legislature would somehow offset this power, or make it accountable — seems pitifully naive and poorly thought out. Nonetheless, I wish to take Macaulay’s article as a starting point. What was it in the nature of British Jewry at that time that so alarmed Macaulay, and provoked such a rash response on his part?

The Cousinhood.

We should first bring the Anglo-Jewish elite, referred to by Macaulay, into sharper focus. From the early 19th century until the First World War, English Jewry was ruled by a tightly connected oligarchy. Daniel Gutwein states that this Anglo-Jewish elite comprised some twenty inter-related Ashkenazi and Sephardic families including the houses of Goldsmith, Montagu, Nathan, Cohen, Isaacs, Abrahams, Samuel, and Montefiore.[14] At its head “stood the House of Rothschild.”[15] This network of families had an “exceptionally high degree of consanguinity,” leading to it being termed “The Cousinhood,” and among them “conversion and intermarriage [with non-Jews] was rare.”[16] Todd Endelmann attributes the lack of conversion to the fact that “conversion was not as useful, in general, to English Jews as it was to Jews in Central and Eastern Europe.”[17] The Cousinhood exercised control over the Jewish community through its leadership of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, an organization which would later become one of the chief engines of the move for Jewish emancipation.[18]

The other means through which the Cousinhood maintained control over English Jews was its practice of “systematized philanthropy.” The Cousinhood largely refrained from involvement in Jewish religious life but heavily devoted itself to founding and leading the Anglo-Jewish Association — “the principle arm of Anglo-Jewish political and education aid” to global Jewry.[19] Endelmann notes that these communal institutions “determined the tenor and the agenda of the public side of Jewish life in London.”[20]

To illustrate the extent of blood and financial ties of this network of families, let us consider the following: in 1870, the treasurer of the London Jewish Board of Guardians was Viennese-born Ferdinand de Rothschild (1838–1898). Ferdinand had married his cousin Elvina, who was a niece of the President of the London United Synagogue, Sir Anthony de Rothschild (1810–1876). Meanwhile, the Board of Deputies was at that time headed by Moses Montefiore, whose wife, a daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, was related to Nathan Meyer Rothschild. Nathan Meyer Rothschild’s wife was also a daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, and thus Montefiore was uncle to the aforementioned Anthony de Rothschild. In addition, Anthony was married to a niece of Montefiore, the daughter of Abraham Montefiore and Henrietta Rothschild[21]…et cetera, et cetera. In financial terms, the houses of Rothschild and Montefiore had united in 1824 to form the Alliance Insurance Company, and most of the families were involved in each other’s stock-brokering and banking concerns. Endelmann notes that in these firms “new recruits were drawn exclusively from the ranks of the family.”[22]

Working tightly within this ethnic and familial network, the Cousinhood amassed huge fortunes, and in the years before World War I, despite comprising less than three tenths of 1% of the population, Jews constituted over 20% of non-landed British millionaires.[23] William Rubinstein notes that of these millionaires, all belonged to the Cousinhood.[24] It is worth noting that this wealth was derived exclusively from the fields of “banking, finance, the stock markets and bullion trading.”[25]

By virtue of this incredible level of wealth, the Cousinhood enjoyed a certain degree of political influence. Endelmann provides evidence that the group had “used its economic power to insinuate itself into the different sectors of the political establishment: the political parties, both Houses of Parliament, and even the government.”[26] Endelmann further states that the  Cousinhood’s influence was wielded in the pursuit of “ethnic sympathies, family tradition, and group self-interest,” and it was this influence that so alarmed Thomas Macaulay.[27]

The Move Into Parliament.

By the mid-1830s, English Jews led by the Cousinhood began to press for the removal of Christian oaths in Parliament and this for their ability to enter the legislature. Between 1830 and 1836 no fewer than four Bills were tabled for the removal of Jewish ‘disabilities,’ and all failed to win the support of elected officials. Frustrated that their influence was proving ineffectual, the Cousinhood decided to directly confront Parliament by putting Lionel de Rothschild up as a Liberal candidate for the City of London constituency, and funding him to an extent that almost ensured victory before the campaign even began. Although the Cousinhood had, as Endelmann noted, backed all parties when it was in their interests, they settled on the Liberals because they were broadly supportive of religious liberty. By framing Jewish interests in a religious context, de Rothschild sought to “bring the issue of Jewish emancipation into the broader Liberal agenda of civil and religious liberty, and he was determined that Liberals should adopt Jewish emancipation as a cause.”[28]

De Rothschild came third in the 1847 General Election but won enough votes to take a seat in Parliament. Lord John Russell, then Whig Prime Minister, immediately set about introducing a Jewish Disabilities Bill which would do away with the Christian oath. The Bill was passed in the House of Commons, but resistance proved strong, and it was thrown out by the Lords twice in 1848, and again in 1849. A remarkable but quite unsurprising detail about this time concerns the complicity of Benjamin Disraeli in lobbying members of the opposition party for support of the Bill. The quintessential ‘damp Jew’, Disraeli had been baptized a Christian at age twelve but never ceased to support Jewish ethnic interests, and became notorious for espousing a repugnant Jewish supremacism in his novels Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847). Although a member of the Tory party since 1837 — a party which was ostensibly dedicated to supporting Christianity in the form of the Established Church of England — correspondence in the official Rothschild Archive reveals that Disraeli was actively working “behind the scenes” to generate Tory support for the removal of the Christian oath.[29] Even taking into account Barbara Kaplan’s dubious and ill-evidenced claim that while Disraeli “lauded the Jewish people” (an understatement to say the least) he “claimed that Christianity was the superior religion,”[30] we can only conclude that in acting to undermine the Christian oath, for Disraeli Jewish ethnicity trumped any feeling he may have had towards Christianity. In a letter marked “Private”, Disraeli wrote to de Rothschild in December 1847:

My dear Lionel,

I find that 18 men, now Peers, voted against the Jews in the Commons 1833, & only 11 in their favor! I agree with you, therefore, that we must be cautious in publishing the lists of the divisions, & rather give a précis of them, calling attention only to what is in your favor….Writing to Lord John Manners today, I particularly mentioned the anxiety of the Court that the bill should pass, as this will be conveyed to the Duke of Rutland who is a great Courtier….My friend thinks that a good petition from King’s Lynn would nail Jocelyn’s vote for the second reading.

Ever yours faithfully

D

The diaries of Louise de Rothschild, sister-in-law to Lionel, further reveal that Disraeli had become a regular dining companion with members of the Cousinhood, and that during one evening with the Rothschilds in November 1847, Disraeli had argued that “we [my italics] must ask for our rights and privileges, not for concessions.”[31] This bravado proved ineffectual in the House of Lords, where hereditary, non-elected nobles continued to reject the Jewish Disabilities Bills for another decade. This obstruction was only ended in 1858, when a change in government allowed Disraeli himself to become Leader of the House of Commons, a position which allowed him to secure a measure “allowing each House to make its own rules about the form of oath” — thereby side-stepping the second chamber as well as established British democratic precedent altogether.[32] Lionel took his seat at the end of 1858, and was joined by his brother a year later. By 1865 his son also had a seat in the Commons, and numerous relatives began to follow. Just as in business, politics was a family affair.

Go to Part 2.


[1] C. Mackay, Extradordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London: Bentley, 1841), p.xv.

[2] P. Mendes-Flohr (ed), The Jew in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p.136.

[3] U. Henriques, “The Jewish Emancipation Controversy in Nineteenth-Century Britain” Past and Present (1968) 40 (1): 126-146 (p.126).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] R. Quinault, “Gladstone and Disraeli: A Reappraisal of their Relationship” History (2006) 91 (304): 557-576.

[7] C. Hirschfield, “The Anglo-Boer War and Jewish Culpability” Journal of Contemporary History (1980) 15 (4): 619-631 and A. Saab, “Disraeli, Judaism, and the Eastern Question,” The International History Review (1988) 10 (4): 559-578.

[8] M. Cross (ed) Selections from the Edinburgh Review (London: Longman, 1833), vol. 3 ,pp. 667-75.

[9]  W. Williams (1993). “Reading Greek Like a Man of the World: Macaulay and the Classical Languages” Greece and Rome, 40 (2) , pp 201-216

[10] P. Foot (ed) Theories of Ethics: Oxford Readings in Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p.99.

[11] T. Macaulay, “Civil Disabilities of the Jews” in M. Cross (ed) Selections from the Edinburgh Review (London: Longman, 1833), vol. 3, pp. 667-75.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] D. Gutwein, The Divided Elite: Politics and Anglo-Jewry, 1882-1917 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), p.5.

[15] Ibid.

[16] T. Endelmann, “Communal Solidarity and Family Loyalty Among the Jewish Elite of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies, 28 (3), pp.491-526, p.491 & 495.

[17] Ibid, p.514.

[18] Ibid, p.494.

[19] K. Macdonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (Lincoln: Writers Club Press, 2002), p.151 & T. Endelmann, “Communal Solidarity and Family Loyalty Among the Jewish Elite of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies, 28 (3), p. 495.

[20]Ibid, p.495.

[21] T. Endelmann, “Communal Solidarity and Family Loyalty Among the Jewish Elite of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies, 28 (3), p.496.

[22] T. Endelmann, “Communal Solidarity and Family Loyalty Among the Jewish Elite of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies, 28 (3), p.519.

[23] Ibid, p. 519.

[24] W. Rubinstein, “The Jewish Economic Elite in Britain, 1808-1909,” Jewish Historical Society of England. Available at: http://www.jhse.org/book/export/article/21930.

[25] D. Gutwein, The Divided Elite: Economics, Politics, and Anglo-Jewry, 1882-1917, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992), p.8.

[26] Quoted in Gutwein, The Divided Elite, p.8.

[27] Ibid, p.10.

[28] The Rothschild Archive: Available at: http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ib/?doc=/ib/articles/BW2aJourney.

[29] http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ib/?doc=/ib/articles/BW2bDisraeli

[30] B. Kaplan “Disraeli on Jewish Disabilities: Another Look,” Central States Speech Journal, 30 (2), pp.156-163, (p.158).

[31] Lady de Rothschilds Diary: http://www.rothschildarchive.org/ib/?doc=/ib/articles/BW2bLoudiary.

[32] R. Blake, Disraeli (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966), p.261.

 

A Critical Look at the Polish ‘Pogroms’ of 1914–1920

“Jewish reports tended toward exaggeration.”
William Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920, 173.

“All the methods of malevolent propaganda are a menace from which Poland is a notable sufferer.”
Major General Edgar Jadwin, U.S. Army, 1920

Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920
William W. Hagan
Cambridge University Press, 2018

I recently had the good fortune to read William Hagen’s Cambridge-published Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920, one of the most interesting books I’ve read on Jewish-European relations since John Doyle Klier’s Oxford-published work on the Tsarist pogroms. It’s always refreshing to see scholars of European heritage tackle this subject matter, which has been dominated for too long by Jewish academics offering a one-sided, lachrymose, and propaganda-laden approach. Now eighty years old, Hagen, like Klier before him, has started publishing his most incisive work on the Jews only in the deep twilight of his career. Also echoing Klier’s work on the pogroms, Hagen’s Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland offers an unflinching look at the causes of inter-ethnic friction, often using novel or previously ignored source material, as well as a balanced and careful approach to the true extent of any violence that occurred. The result is a text that doesn’t just attempt to get to the bottom of what exactly happened, but also why it happened. The following essay is a hybrid work involving a partial review of Hagen’s work and some of my own thoughts and research on the subject.

Context

Hagen’s text offers strong support for Kevin MacDonald’s argument in Separation and Its Discontents that anti-Semitism is a reactive phenomenon very closely related to Jewish dominance in certain spheres of public life, especially the economy. In fact, in Separation and Its Discontents MacDonald cites on several occasions Hagen’s only previous work on anti-Semitism, a 1996 prize-winning article published in the Journal of Modern History.[1] The focus on socio-economic factors in both works indicates that Hagen’s understanding of anti-Semitism has been settled for some time.

Hagen’s Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland opens by giving voice to some fascinating Polish contemporaries, opening up an avenue of discussion often closed off in lachrymose Jewish histories which overwhelmingly focus on the putative suffering of the Jews rather than the difficult experiences of those they lived among. One of the more interesting examples is Hagen’s exploration of the works of Jan Słomka, Habsburg Polish mayor of Dzików and author of From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor. Słomka’s memoirs offer insight in the origins of Polish antipathy towards the Jews, and depict Jews as “cynical exploiters of Christian villagers’ weaknesses and ignorance.” (11) Mimicking tactics employed under the Russian tavern system, Jewish merchants in Poland often used alcohol to drag peasants into debt and keep them there. Słomka explained how Jews

would begin from harvest-time to buy up provisions from the farmers, mostly paying them with vodka: and these they would sell during the hunger period at huge profit. They would set things out on market days in sacks; and around these sacks would wander a hungry throng … buying grain in pots or quart measures. (13)

Słomka was a teetotaler and castigated his fellow Poles for the reckless drinking and lack of forethought that allowed them to fall into the hands of Jews who were systematically “bankrupting the emancipated peasantry and foreclosing on their minuscule farms.” In his own town of Dzików, Słomka remarked that most of the land had at one time been in Jewish hands and had only been “bought back with a lot of toil.” The Jews, according to Słomka, “have never wanted to till the soil, they have preferred to live by their wits, to profit by trading in the lands peasants have had to pay for [in compensation for receiving post-emancipation freeholds].” For the Jews, of course, it was a very successful strategy. In the 1860s, Słomka looked on as the prestigious houses ringing the central square of his chief market district, Tarnobrzeg, passed into Jewish hands.[2]

Hagen places Słomka’s concerns in the context of a wider Polish discourse on a slow national dispossession carried out by Jews. Słomka is a particularly interesting writer because he focuses as much on Polish weaknesses as on Jewish strategic competence. Słomka, for example, was irate that rural Poles had neglected to develop a keen acumen in business that would enable them to at least compete with Jews on an ethnic level rather than simply acting as prone or passive victims of unanswered economic exploitation. Słomka was later full of praise when such an answer did materialize, in the form of cooperatives that emerged in the 1880s. Due in part to increased assistance from the priesthood and sympathetic aristocrats, the decade witnessed the creation of a significant number of these ethnically based marketing and retail consortiums that defeated the economic strategy of the Jews, often via boycott, and enabled the supply of “villagers with their purchased necessities at Jewish merchants’ loss.”[3] A side-effect of growing awareness among Poles that they were engaged in a multi-front ethnic competition with Jews prompted some to engage in petty violence and robbery, which Słomka condemned as unhelpful. Słomka believed that “the struggle against Jewish capital was a contest … of morality, self-control, and will power.”[4]

Hagen demonstrates the uniformity of Polish thought on the Jews by comparing the relatively uneducated and rural Słomka’s views with those of the more cosmopolitan academic Franciszek Bujak, author of the 1919 pamphlet “The Jewish Question in Poland.” Like Słomka, Bujak argued that Polish anti-Semitism was largely a result of Jewish socio-economic dominance and the exploitation of the lower classes. In fact, Bujak argued that it was wrong to focus on Polish attitudes at all since

we may speak with more truth about Jewish antipolinism than about Polish antisemitism, which is not an aggressive movement displaying itself in consequent deeds, but merely a psychic reaction against damages suffered by the Polish nation from their [Jews] part. (19)

Bujak posited that Jewish clannishness gave them certain advantages over the trusting Poles, and suggested that the resulting exploitation was worsened by the Jews’ biblically based sense of superiority and adherence to a system of dual morality. When Jews did decide to leave the life of the ghetto-dwelling exploiter they invariably assimilated only “in an intruding way” into Polish society, where they “veered toward radicalism and revolution” as a result of their “inclination towards analysis and criticism.”(19) For Bujak, as for Słomka, the solution to Jewish strategic success was for Poles to heighten their sense of ethnocentrism and ethnic co-operation and engage in a process of ethnic exclusion—a social, political, and economic boycott of the Jews. Bujak viewed the prospect of violence as entailing a moral and strategic failure on the part of the Poles.

The only significant dissent from this prevailing view appears in the writings of the linguist and Slavist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay. Baudouin thought that exclusionary efforts were doomed to failure given the deeply embedded nature of Jewish involvement in Polish life, which extended even to the psychological:

I recognise the Jews’ power, i.e., the power of Jewish tradition’s influence on other human groups’ mentality. For at the base of our thinking, our beliefs about fundamental matters, we encounter a Jewish source [the Old and New Testaments]. We are ourselves but ‘modified’ Jews. Principled ‘mercilessness,’ unforgivingness, readiness to exterminate, raised to ideological level — all this we imbibed from literary monuments [the Christian Bible] of Jewish descent. Thanks to the ‘Judaization’ of our thinking even those who rush forward into wholesale attacks on Jews call themselves servants of him born in Bethlehem and profess Jehova, God of Israel. (25)

Baudouin’s proposed solutions couldn’t have been more representative of extremes. On the one hand he suggested an attempt to smother Jews with love and tolerance in the hope they would become excellent allies of the Polish nation. On the other, he mused about the prospects of “extermination, expulsion, starvation.” His ideas were, however, very much in the minority, and the position of the new Polish state was to tacitly permit the slow exclusion of the Jews from their prior positions of influence while condemning any and all instances of violence.

Violence and Exaggeration

Hagen has an excellent section looking at the slow build-up of verbal and physical provocation between the two populations. Unlike Jewish-authored texts on historical anti-Semitism, Hagen isn’t shy when it comes to including information that shatters the myth of the Jews as the passive and innocent victims of irrational European hatred. One hears about Jews taunting Polish villagers with “the streets are yours, the houses ours” and “the keys to the churches will be ours.” (38) With physical violence being an extremely dangerous strategy for a minority population, such taunts are emblematic of the much more common rhetorical, financial, and otherwise abstract character of historical Jewish aggression. Faced with this aggression, Europeans throughout history have often relied on the ease and simplicity of their numerical superiority in the form of varieties of “physical force” responses ranging from pranks and vandalism to boycotts, small-scale evictions, and mass expulsions. Quite where on this spectrum the events of 1914–20 fall is the primary concern of Hagen’s text.

One of Hagen’s central primary sources for his investigation of anti-Jewish violence in Poland between 1914 and 1920 is a rather dubious 1920 book, Poland and Its Minority Races, produced by Arthur Lehman Goodhart, a Jewish academic and lawyer. The origins of the book lay in a series of protests against “wholesale killing of Jews in Poland” organized by Jewish groups in several American cities in 1919. Although the Polish government denied any such atrocities had taken place, and despite the lack of clear objective evidence, American-Jewish agitation was sufficient for President Wilson to appoint a small commission “to ascertain the facts.” A commission was also sent by Great Britain, in the context of similar protests in London, led by the senior diplomat Sir Horace Rumbold. The American commission was composed of Goodhart and Henry Morgenthau (infamous author of the Morgenthau Plan), and of two non-Jews, the U.S. army officer Edgar Jadwin and his colleague Homer H. Johnson. Although not mentioned in detail by Hagen, the ethnic difference between the Jews Goodhart and Morgenthau on the one hand, and the Anglo-Saxons Jadwin and Johnson on the other, resulted in two different reports (the former more or less affirming atrocity propaganda and the latter emphatically denying, or at least heavily qualifying, it) on the return of the group to the United States, with the National Polish Committee of America even publishing “The Jadwin and Johnson Report” as a separate document entirely.[5] Both the Goodhart text and the document produced by the National Polish Committee are available in complete form from archive.org and can be read in full here and here.

From the outset, Hagen is skeptical of contemporary Jewish accounts that alleged spontaneous mass shootings. He opens the book by making it clear the documentary record has “gaps or blindspots” and “doubtless exaggeration occurred … I have sought out multiple accounts so as to minimise bias.”[6] He later argues that “resentment-laden animosity coloured many such [Jewish] reports, which tended, in an atmosphere heavy with collective paranoia and hysteria, to exaggerate Jewish losses.”[7] He even cites one brief but telling remark from Henry Morgenthau himself, who, although promoting atrocity propaganda admitted once that “there is also no question but that some of the Jewish leaders [in Poland] had exaggerated.”[8]

Patterns of Propaganda

In 1920 the National Polish Committee of America published a statement outlining the origins of atrocity propaganda against Poland:

From the very first moment, when at the beginning of November 1918, Poland regained her independence, day after day, month after month, news of dreadful Jewish pogroms were spread over the whole world. … This news found the more credit because nobody contradicted it. And nobody could contradict it. The Polish Government could not, because there was no Polish Government. … And so the news of dreadful ‘pogroms’ penetrated everywhere, spread systematically via Berlin and Vienna, and by special bureaux in Stockholm and Copenhagen, which from day to day furnished Zionist organisations possessing sufficient means and influence to give it a world-wide publication. And the news was frightful. It told of thousands of Jews not only beaten and robbed, but murdered and burned alive. As these facts were confirmed by “eye-witnesses” it is no wonder they aroused general indignation. And when Mr. Israel Cohen, the Secretary of the London Zionist Organisation, after investigating the matter on the spot published in England papers and at a meeting at Queen’s Hall in London that such atrocities had taken place in Poland in 130 towns, indignation meetings and funereal processions began all over the world.[9]

The Chicago Jewish weekly, The Sentinel, reported on July 23 1920 that:

Polish people are crazy with Jew-hatred and are busily engaged in pogroms. … The outrages perpetrated by old Russia against the Jews are child-play in comparison with the appalling crimes perpetrated by the Polish government and the Polish people against the Jews. … The Polish representatives abroad know that even the Spanish Inquisition has not committed so many crimes against the Jews as Poland is committing now. … Poland, born in crime and sin, will go under in a sea of crime and sin.

Newspapers in America were also flooded with lurid tales penned by local Jews claiming to have first-hand knowledge of what was happening in Poland. One “eye-witness” claimed to have counted 2,300 corpses. A “Charles Golosman” had a letter published in the New York Globe on August 18 1920 in which he writes of “massacres of the Jews by the Polish military” and adds:

A bloody pogrom was organised in my own native town, Bobruisk, with every home pillaged and the women ravaged in the open in broad daylight by the blood-thirsty Polish beasts. My own people may have become victims of some Polish assassin’s hands.

This account of the media origins of the pogrom myth, and in fact everything discussed thus far, is remarkably consistent with Klier’s findings regarding the Russian pogroms of the 1880s. As with agitation against Poland, in the 1880s the West was rocked by massive Jewish protests against “the mass killing of Jews” in the Russian empire, and (mirroring Goodhart’s book) the production of books and pamphlets on Russia’s putative ill treatment of the Jews. This followed, in Russia as in Poland, an increasingly assertive peasantry or lower class that began to act against Jewish economic exploitation through cooperatives or other non-violent methods. Atrocity propaganda may therefore be seen as an attempt to avenge or ameliorate a Jewish loss of influence in a given nation. In both cases, Western governments (Britain in the 1880s, America in 1919) sent official delegations to discover the truth of the situation. In both cases (unanimously in the case of Britain, and with divided opinion in the American group) the resulting reports cast great doubt on the Jewish narrative.

After many years of searching archives and reviewing contemporary reports produced by all sides, Klier concluded that Jewish accounts should be treated with “extreme caution,” that some were “flatly contradicted by the archival record,” and that some claims of pogroms are attached to cities where it is certain “there were no significant pogroms and no fatalities.” Klier noted that while the Jewish atrocity narrative dominated cultural discourse via the power of media, almost no government agency took it seriously once it had been investigated. The British government investigation, published as a “Blue Book,” presented, to use its own words, “an account of events at great variance with that offered by The Times.” The most notable aspect of the British Blue Book is the outright denial of mass rape, a prolific propaganda device. In January 1882, investigator Consul-General Stanley objected to all of the details contained within reports published by The Times, mentioning in particular the unfounded “accounts of the violation of women.” He further stated that his own investigations revealed that there had been no incidences of rape during the Berezovka pogrom, that violence was rare, and that much of the disturbance was restricted to property damage. In relation to property damage in Odessa, Stanley estimated it to be around 20,000 rubles, and rejected outright the Jewish claim that damage amounted to over one million rubles.

Vice-Consul Law, another independent investigator, reported that he had visited Kiev and Odessa, and could only conclude that “I should be disinclined to believe in any stories of women having been outraged in those towns.” Another investigator, Colonel Francis Maude, visited Warsaw and said that he could “not attach any importance” to atrocity reports emanating from that city. At Elizavetgrad, instead of whole streets being razed to the ground, it was discovered that a small hut had lost its roof. Accusations of murderous intent among the masses were simply unfounded and unsubstantiated by the evidence.

What Happened in Poland?

Although clear in its expression of skepticism, a crucial weakness of Hagen’s text is that it shows a willingness to attach some credence to flamboyant and discredited Jewish atrocity narratives about mass killings by mobs of Polish peasants or soldiers, and it doesn’t make full use of compelling counter-narratives such as that produced by Jadwin and Johnson, or by the National Polish Committee of America, a group that very studiously compiled and published a variety of independent reports into events in Poland. (Hagen does cite the NPC report twice in his book but otherwise demonstrates little evidence of having actually read it.) Nor does Hagen’s text incorporate other valuable material, such as testimony from Colonel C.A. Gaskill, the U.S. Army’s Relief Administration worker and technical adviser in Poland between 1919 and 1921. Gaskill and Jay P. Moffatt, Secretary of the American Legation in Warsaw, both testified that Jews had been engaged in sniper activity against Polish troops in several key locations and that Polish officers had actually issued orders against retaliating even when Polish casualties resulted from Jewish attacks.[10] I regard it as imperative that Hagen should have noted somewhere in his book that Jews were active in most of the relevant war zones as guerrilla combatants, particularly during the Polish-Soviet war of 1918̶-1921 in which many Polish Jews were Soviet partisans, and that Jadwin and Johnson concluded their own investigations by arguing that Poland was the victim of an international smear campaign orchestrated via the media:

The coloring, the suppression, and the invention of news, the subornation of newspapers by many different methods, and the poisoning by secret influences of the instruments affecting public opinion, in short all the methods of malevolent propaganda are a menace from which Poland is a notable sufferer. This applies to propaganda both at home and from abroad.[11]

Although Morgenthau and Goodhart were quite happy to repeat lurid tales of mass shootings of civilians, Jadwin and Johnson offered a report that has an entirely different feel and, in their own words, offers “conclusions which differ from those of Mr. Morgenthau.” In terms of details, most official accounts seem to agree that only around 348 Jews could be confirmed as having died from violence in relevant areas between 1914 and 1920, but this is clarified further in the official British report on the violence, written by Sir Horace Rumbold. Rumbold pointed out that even if we accepted this figure of 348, only 18 of these deaths would have occurred on actual Polish territory with the rest occurring in established war zones where civilian casualties among all ethnic and national groups were commonplace.[12] In these war zones, according to Jadwin, some shootings were the result of guerrilla tactics by Jewish civilians known to be sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. In one town, entering Polish soldiers were fired upon from a “certain meeting house in which Jews had congregated,” resulting in the execution of five Jewish men.[13] Captain P. Wright, a member of the British investigating team summed up the circumstances of Jewish deaths as involving not Polish prejudice but “only the expression of a mutual animosity,” and that these “excesses have been so small.”[14]

A very modern parallel to the incorporation of these war zone deaths into atrocity propaganda would be declaring a gunshot fatality a “Covid death” so long as the corpse can produce a positive PCR test. In this case we have an “anti-Semitic murder by Poles” simply because a Jew dies violently anywhere near Poland and under any conditions, including active warfare. Goodhart even includes the testimony of one Jewish mother who reported the “anti-Semitic” death of her son to the American commission even though she admitted her son was a member of the Bolshevik militia:

I tried to explain to her that there was a difference between the case of a man murdered in cold blood and the death of her son who had been shot while fighting for the Bolsheviks. She simply could not understand the difference and kept on repeating “He was such a fine boy.”[15]

Since both the British and American missions concluded that violence against Jews was never endorsed or encouraged by Polish authorities, and thus meant it could not technically be classed as a pogrom, it can be said that an international diplomatic crisis and mass propaganda campaign about “mass killings” in 130 towns involving in some cases mass graves of 2,300 corpses, was provoked by the violent deaths of just 18 Jews over a six-year period. Jadwin, moreover, argued that only five Jewish deaths could be confirmed to have resulted from mob violence “since the establishment of a stable government in the Republic.”[16] Captain Wright explicitly stated that “though pogroms in Krakow were reported, this was not the case,” and that any violence targeting Jews in Polish territory was “small and trivial.”[17]

Motivations

Of course, the campaign was about revenge more generally, and more so in terms of the loss of economic power and influence than the 18 (or 5) deaths. Rumbold himself concluded that violence and antagonism between the groups was probably inevitable given the economic situation of the Jews: “it is only natural that separatism should have manifested itself.” Rumbold noted the relatively recent awareness of the Poles that they could engage in their own ethnically-based economic strategies, and the non-productive nature of the Jewish population, was the real source of animosity: “Competition between the Poles and the Jewish population commenced. … The co-operative movement is becoming very strong and will undoubtedly form an important factor in the development of economic relations in Poland, so that indirectly it will be bound to affect the position of the small Jewish trader.”[18] Jadwin and Johnson were equally insistent that there were economic factors behind any inter-ethnic tension, and they were adamant that religious issues played a negligible role in the development of anti-Jewish attitudes:

We are convinced that religious differences as such play therein a very slight role, and that the Polish nation is disposed to religious tolerance and self-control in religious disagreements. … The relation of the Jew to the eventual political disposition of these territories is still an irritating element. These same problems are to some extent inherent in every other country where the Jewish character and habits develop a racial solidarity, necessarily accompanied by an economic and social intermingling with the other elements of the population.[19]

There are some indications that the atrocity propaganda campaign against Poland was explicitly designed to protect Jewish interests by preventing contested territories from being granted to the Poles (then operating the peasant co-operatives against the Jews) in peace treaties. Goodhart, for example, mentions Jewish leaders in Bialystok who told him that “if Bialystok should be given to the Poles, the Jewish merchants would be ruined, because the Polish boycott would come into force.”[20] Smearing the Polish reputation internationally with accusations of mass murder and mass shootings could thus have been intended to sway the decision of the major international powers in deciding the allocation of disputed territory, potentially preventing Jews from being absorbed into a state where they would be forced to abandon non-productive ethnic economic strategies based on mass exploitation.

Finally, despite enormous economic and religious differences between Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Romania, during the 1930s, it should be noted that all of these countries developed policies in which Jews were excluded from public-sector employment, quotas were placed on Jewish representation in universities and the professions, and government-organized boycotts of Jewish businesses and artisans were staged. From Hagen’s 1996 paper:

[Anti-Semitism was] a broad regional phenomenon rather than . . . [a] set of nationally bounded histories. In this view, modern anti-Semitic ideology and politics in both Germany and Poland figure as pathologies of middle-class formation or, in an alternative formulation, as accompaniments of embourgeoisement in a setting, unlike western and southern Europe, where a relatively large (or very large) and economically very significant urban Jewish population appeared to constitute an impediment to Christian advancement. In both countries, anti-Semitism served to justify assaults on Jewish-owned or Jewish-occupied business enterprises and medical, legal, and other professional practices, as well as bureaucratic positions, which were widely seen to block the path of upward mobility to non-Jewish aspirants to bourgeois respectability and security. In both countries, more or less sporadic anti-Semitic violence fomented by political organizations of the radical right, particularly in the 1930s, elicited considerable popular support or acceptance, reflecting widespread though normally mostly latent hostility to the Jews. . . . Similar policies were also being implemented in Hungary and Romania, the other major homelands of the central European Jews. (Hagen 1996, 360, 361)

Conclusion

The fabricated Polish pogroms of 1914-20 offer a remarkable glimpse into patterns established decades earlier in the Russian empire. The basic pattern appears to be that attempts on the part of a majority population to protect their interests as an ethnic group, especially economically, will result in the utilization of media influence to create a flamboyantly exaggerated atrocity narrative about that state or locality, often involving accusations of mass shootings and mass graves. Because of their entrenchment in popular consciousness via mass communications, these narratives are incredibly difficult to overturn, even with highly critical official government reports. The Russian pogrom myth is an excellent example given that it was repeated during the Polish hoax (The Sentinel: “The outrages perpetrated by old Russia against the Jews are child-play in comparison with the appalling crimes perpetrated by the Polish government and the Polish people against the Jews”). The reality, of course, was that the Russian and Polish ‘atrocities’ were equally baseless and fraudulent. And yet, look hard enough today, and you will certainly see some Jewish Twitter personality inevitably claim a distant relative mass murdered in the Russian pogroms. These are deeply engrained fictions that are internalized by Jews and go some way to generating fear, antipathy, and aggression towards majority White populations who are always said to have the same potential for mass violence.

Atrocity narratives remain an important strategic device, and the tactic is visible even on the small scale in events like Charlottesville. The actual events of Charlottesville are by any consideration, to borrow Captain Wright’s words, “small and trivial,” involving no more petty violence and vandalism than any other major protest of recent years (arguably much less), and one death of ambiguous cause. And yet hasn’t Charlottesville adopted the air of a “Kishinev” in the way it has been transformed, via propaganda, into a kind of pogrom, perpetrated by an angry White mob? Journalist David Greenberg reported on “the siege of a Charlottesville synagogue during the right-wing rampage there in 2017” during an article scaremongering about “America’s Forgotten Pogroms.” But for the presence of modern recording technology, one can easily imagine that tales would have emerged from Charlottesville of all manner of killings and assaults.

As a final note, I should say that we are all perfectly aware of the creeping attempts in all of Europe and the rest of the West to silence any questioning of that ultimate Jewish atrocity narrative. In our attempt to defend the Western position, we could do well to start with the approach of any good defense lawyer — to critique the credibility of the accuser. Looking at the Russian and Polish cases, do we see a record of truth or fabrication? Is there a case for believing such narratives, or asking further questions?

I’ll conclude with remarks made by Rupert Hughes in the New York Times Book Review, July 18 1920:

Has everybody forgotten the procession in New York and in other cities where mourning was worn and dirges were sung for the slaughtered multitudes of the Polish pogroms? Has anyone apologized to Poland for accusing her of rivalling Turkey, in Armenia? I have not seen the apologies.


[1] Hagen, William W. “Before the ‘Final Solution’: Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland.” The Journal of Modern History 68, no. 2 (1996): 351–81. MacDonald cites this work on pages 53 and 55 of the paperback edition of SAID.

[2] Hagen (2018), 14.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 18.

[5] The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 11.

[6] Hagen (2018), xvii.

[7] Ibid, 124.

[8] Ibid, 359.

[9] The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 55.

[10] New York Times, July 2, 1920.

[11] The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 18.

[12] The Reports of the British Mission, included in The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 19.

[13] The Jadwin and Johnson Report, The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 15.

[14] Report of Captain P. Wright in The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 33.

[15] Goodhart, 52.

[16]The Jews in Poland: Official Reports of the American and British Investigating Missions · Volume 1, National Polish Committee of America, 1920, 10.

[17] Ibid, 47.

[18] Ibid, 20.

[19] Ibid, 13 & 17.

[20] Goodhart (1920), 45.

Jews and Vulture Capitalism: A Reprise, Part 2

Go to Part 1.

Jews, Oligarchs, and Russia

Of course white collar crime is one of the standard stereotypes about Jews and money, a description that seems to follow them wherever they go. Apologists for Jews claim that such crime occurs among non-Jews as well. The difference, however, is not only in their greater likelihood among Jews (see here for an academic treatment that addresses the issue — How do I find such obscure sources!), but, more importantly, that Jewish white collar criminals do not face censure within their own communities. Quite the contrary, it seems.

The following story regarding Russia is essential unknown in the Western world. I believe the first I ever heard of it was in a long 2006 blog by Steve Sailer where he wrote about the connection between Jewish networks, Jewish oligarchs, and the massive defrauding of the Russian people. This involved none other than the former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers. It’s a long story, but Harvard paid $26.5 million to settle a suit stemming from various improprieties associated with Harvard professors. As Sailer illustrates, however, it is the Jewish aspect of the entire scandal that stands out. The principals of this scandal were Jews, and they were allegedly protected by fellow Jew, Harvard President Larry Summers. The upshot of the scandal was that the “reform” of the Russian economy “turned out to be one of the great larceny sprees in all history, and the Harvard boys weren’t all merely naive theoreticians.” Indeed, they ended up wealthy and managed to go on to other lucrative and important positions.

And guess what: The New York Times, Washington Post and Financial Times decided that this was not a worthy story. Gosh, why not? In the article, Sailer surmises that it was because of Jewish power, a not unreasonable assumption.

Sailer claims that he had not known about the Jewish identity of the “oligarchs” until he read Yale law professor Amy Chua’s book World on Fire. (When Chua correctly noted that six out of the seven of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs were Jews, her Jewish husband quipped to her, “Just six? So who’s the seventh guy?”) These oligarchs had “paid for Boris Yeltsin’s 1996 re-election in return for the privilege of buying ex-Soviet properties at absurdly low prices (e.g., Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky was put in charge of auctioning off Yukos Oil, which owns about 2% of the world’s oil reserves — he sold it for $159 million to … himself).” Meanwhile, Jews in Russia represented about one percent of the population.

Sailer’s further observations only cast more light on the extent and value of these ethnic connections:

As I’ve said before in the context of exploring how Scooter Libby could serve as a mob lawyer for international gangster Marc Rich on and off for 15 years and then move immediately into the job of chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States, the problem is not that Jews are inherently worse behaved (or better behaved) than any other human group, but that they have achieved for themselves in America in recent years a collective immunity from anything resembling criticism [emphasis added].

Sailer goes on to discuss a number of Jewish reactions to Summers’ removal as Harvard president, ostensibly because of his views on sex differences, that square with what MacDonald has written on Jewish deception and self-deception, including the ability to frame all criticism, no matter how valid, in terms of an anti-Semitic animus. Thus, Harvard professors Alan Dershowitz and Ruth Wisse defended Summers, with Wisse asking, “Was anti-Semitism the driving engine of the coup [against Summers]?” Former lecturer Martin Peretz joined them in the suspicion that Summers’s strong support for Israel played a role in the attack.

Michael Jones adds to the narrative by introducing yet another (((Harvard Professor))), one Jeffrey Sachs, who was tasked with helping nations in economic trouble transition to a modern capitalist economy. In this instance, according to Jones, it unfolded this way:

After orchestrating a coup d’état which deposed Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Soviet Union and invited Sachs to work his Friedmanite magic in Russia. Sachs was put in charge of Yeltsin’s band of Chicago Boys and together they orchestrated a looting expedition the likes of which the world had not seen since the Reformation. By the time it was over, 225,000 state owned companies would be auctioned off at pennies on the dollar of their real value. After Yeltsin opened the Russian economy to their predations, Chicago Boys like Stanley Fisher [it is actually Fischer], who was managing director at the IMF at the time, and Lawrence Summers … rushed in and sank their teeth deeply into the carcass of rich state owned companies…. The oligarchs then teamed up with the Chicago Boys and “stripped the economy of nearly everything of value, moving enormous profits offshore at a rate of $2 billion a month.”

Connecting the obvious dots, Jones concludes that “the looting of Russia was a Jewish operation from start to finish.”

This Russia story blends into an American story because of the Jewish nexus, and one of the best accounts of Jewish financial power — and its relationship to other forms of Jewish power — comes in the writing of  retired professor James Petras. He has penned a series of books starkly exposing “the Zionist Power Configuration” that includes Jewish dominance in Western finance. In particular, his book, Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militants, focuses on this, but he also addresses it in The Power of Israel in the United States, Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power, and Global Depression and Regional Wars: The United States, Latin America and the Middle East.

Here are some of the observations Petras makes: “Jewish families are among the wealthiest families in the United States” and nearly a third of millionaires and billionaires are Jewish. He also points to similar wealth in Canada, where “over 30 percent of the Canadian Stock Market” is in Jewish hands. Alan Greenspan’s tenure as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is also linked to Zionist power, since Greenspan was “a long-time crony of Wall Street financial interests and promoter of major pro-Israeli investment houses.” (Greenspan was succeeded by coreligionist Ben Shalom Bernanke.)

Debunking the “high school textbook version of American politics,” Petras argues that “the people in key positions in financial, corporate and other business institutions establish the parameters within which the politicians, parties and media discuss ideas. These people constitute a ruling class.” Of the two groups cited by Petras — those in control of financial capital and Zioncons — both are so heavily Jewish as to constitute a single “cabal,” a word Petras uses liberally throughout his books.

Also, Wall Street supplies many of the “tried and experienced top leaders” who rotate in and out of Washington. At the top of the hierarchy, Petras finds the big private equity banks and hedge funds. Thus, political leadership descends from Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and others. Goldman Sachs is a historically Jewish firm, Stephen A. Schwarzman is co-founder and current head of the Blackstone Group, while David Rubenstein is co-founder of the Carlyle Group and served in the Carter administration as a domestic policy adviser.

To get just a minor sense of the interconnectedness of Wall Street and Washington Petras is discussing — and to see its heavily Jewish ethnic nexus — note that during the second Clinton Administration, Robert Rubin served as Secretary of the Treasury and was succeeded by a familiar player — Larry Summers. Rubin worked his way to Vice Chairman and Co-Chief Operating Officer of Goldman Sachs prior to becoming the Secretary of the Treasury, and later became the Chairman of Citigroup and co-chairman of the board of directors on the Council on Foreign Relations.

With respect to the Russia angle, Petras also claims that former President Clinton and his economic advisers backed the regimes that allowed the plunder of Russian wealth. Though relegated to an endnote, he names Andrei Shleifer and Jeffrey Sachs as those involved. What is relevant here is the ethnic connections going to the top of American society that validate Petras’s emphasis on the combined power of Zionism, media and financial control.

The next link to this story was entirely fortuitous. I was working on a project entirely unrelated to Jewish influence, but lo and behold, there it was again. For reasons too boring to describe, I was doing research on trade expert Clyde Prestowitz, who came to the world’s attention with his 1988 book Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan to Take the Lead. This was followed by other big books such as Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003), Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East (2005), and The Betrayal of American Prosperity: Free Market Delusions, America’s Decline, and How We Must Compete in the Post-Dollar Era (2010). In particular, the three books written after 2000 concern us.

Prestowitz describes himself as “The product of a middle class, conservative, rock-ribbed Republican, superpatriotic, born again Christian family,” so I’ll take his word for it that he’s not Jewish. A former high-level businessman turned trade official in the Reagan Administration, Prestowitz succeeded in carving out a niche for himself as one of the most insightful commentators on America business and trade. In 1989 he established a think tank, the Economic Strategy Institute (ESI), so I have to assume he’s worldly enough to understand the strictures surrounding talk about Jews, especially when it’s negative.

In one of his books, Prestowitz writes of America that “the vast bulk of working people (who, of course, are also consumers) lost ground. Between 1980 and 2005, U.S. productivity rose 71 percent. Yet real compensation (including benefits of nonsupervisory workers (80 percent of all workers) rose only 4 percent. In the tradable manufacturing sector, productivity rose 131 percent while compensation climbed only 7 percent. This was in stark contrast to the period from 1950 to 1975 when worker compensation rose 88 percent while productivity doubled.”

He locates the reason for this in the fact that the one industry America has promoted over the past thirty years is finance. “It is so striking that I fear we must call it for what it has been — a clear industrial policy to target development of the financial services industry.” He then cites figures for why. In the ten years ending in 2008, “the finance industry spent $1.78 billion on political campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbying.”

Here Prestowitz, perhaps unwittingly, enters into controversial territory when he begins to construct the outlines of a theory that sound suspiciously like the old “anti-Semitic canards” that blame Jews for the ills laid onto “real” Americans (or Germans or whatever). As he writes, “We need to understand that the interests of Wall Street, and therefore much of Washington, have not been and will not be those of Main Street.” (Cue now Tucker Carlson’s recent segment called “Hedge Funds Are Destroying Rural America.”)

The bulk of this argument is made in chapter four of Three Billion New Capitalists, “Goldilocks and Bubbles: The Faith of Efficient Markets.” A staunch critic of free-trade theory as [allegedly] practiced by modern America, Prestowitz lays the blame for America’s loss of prosperity at the feet of “The Three Apostles: Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers.” He notes how in 1989 and 1993, financial instruments that would play a major role in the meltdown of 2008–09 were exempted from government oversight. Greenspan in particular was passionate about getting the government out of the way. “In fact, Greenspan largely halted the Fed’s active oversight of the banking industry.” Joined by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and subsequent Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, “the three mounted an aggressive campaign to halt any efforts to regulate trading of new derivative instruments.”

Further crises erupted, all of which involved “The Three Apostles.” Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund, faced the prospect of losing a staggering $1 trillion dollars that it had borrowed from the largest American banks. “It threatened to freeze world money markets and precipitate a 1929-style crash and perhaps another depression.” Awkwardly, Greenspan, Rubin, and Summers “were in the process of halting a measure that would have put some constraints on the very kind of risky derivatives trading that was bringing LTCM to its knees.” Meanwhile, they continued to discourage the oversight of Brooksley Born, Chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Summers had even phoned her and sharply criticized her actions. This was followed by Greenspan, Rubin and Arthur Levitt of the Securities and Exchange Commission pressuring Congress to straightjacket Born.

More Reason to Trust the Media

This persisted into 2000, as Greenspan continued to insist that Wall Street should be trusted and left to its own devices. “With those assurances, Congress went ahed and stripped the CFTC of responsibility for derivatives, and President Clinton signed the bill into law in December 2000.” Meanwhile, Ms. Born quietly left government service.

A more explicit account of the pressure brought to bear on Born can be found in Kevin MacDonald’s blog Self-Deception and Guruism among Jews, where he writes how psychoanalysis was

perhaps the greatest intellectual fraud of the 20th century — a set of beliefs that explained everything but had only the most tenuous connection to reality and an ideology that empirical research was for bean counters. The same thought crossed my mind while reading Thirteen Bankers, by Simon Johnson and James Kwak. Near the heart of the financial meltdown was the towering self-confidence of Larry Summers, Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan in opposing any regulation on the derivatives market. Summers seems to be pivotal. When Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, proposed that some thought should be given to regulation,  Summers reportedly said “I have thirteen bankers in my office, and they say if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II.” As Johnson and Kwak note (p. 9), we don’t actually know if there were any bankers in Summers’ office; “more likely he came to his own conclusion.” The point is that Summers had an unshakable faith that what he was saying was correct — a faith that was ominously unrelated to empirical reality. Nevertheless, Ms. Born was successfully pushed aside and ultimately a law was enacted  preventing any regulation of the derivatives market.

Prestowitz shows how both Rubin and Summers, upon leaving the government, continued to push reckless paradigms. As vice chairman of CitiGroup, Rubin “emphasized to the bank’s leaders that if they wanted to make more money, they needed to take on more risk by dealing more heavily in derivatives.” For his part, Summers worked for the D. E. Shaw hedge fund, while also teaching at Harvard. More broadly, Prestowitz finds The Three Apostles were joined by others in making what he views as alarmingly poor decisions. One such was the decision to bring China into the World Trade Organization and granting China “permanent most favored nation status in the U.S. market. This will surely come to rank as one of America’s dumbest deals.” For this, he blames President Clinton, but also trade representatives Mickey Kantor and Charlene Barshefsky (both Jewish).

Despite Prestowitz’s disclaimers to the contrary, I’m suspicious when he writes in the space of a few paragraphs about a group of people making what he feels are bad decisions. In the one paragraph that contains Barshefsky’s name, Prestowitz writes of the following other Jews, in this order: Mickey Kantor, Barshefsky, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, NSC China expert Ken Lieberthal, finishing up with Rubin and Summers (Betrayal p.141). A coincidence?

In reading Prestowitz, you’ll see that he writes nothing explicit about ethnicity or undue intrigue when it comes to these Jews. Indeed, he finishes the chapter I just mentioned by writing of the above individuals, “I know all these people. . . I don’t think any of them would do or say something they did not believe was in the best interests of the United States. But they all recommended and made a bad deal that has reduced American influence and power and constrained its future wealth-creating ability.” Could Prestowitz simply be naive? I simply can’t answer that.

Conclusion

Where does this leave us in the winter of 2020? Thus far, we seem to have emerged intact from the chaos of the 2008 mortgage meltdown, though we live in a bizarre world where credit is created through computer key strokes, interest rates can be negative, and old certainties have evaporated.

One thing that is certain, however, is that the men [and a few women] at the top of the American economic pyramid are heavily Jewish. An erudite American citizen writing under the nom de guerre Andrew Hamilton showed us four years ago what real hedge fund managers were doing and who they were:

More often than not the privileged Jews turn around and use the vast wealth they’ve skimmed from the productive sector of the economy to advance anti-White, pro-Jewish, and Left-wing causes, thereby harming America and the world in two ways — economically through callous and shortsighted market operations, and politically through their “philanthropy” and lavish political donations.

Hamilton specifically notes the shocking wealth concentrated in such hands, referring to Forbes Magazine’s recent ranking of the richest hedge fund managers in the United States by estimated personal net worth: “Twenty-four of the 32 names on the list (75%) are Jewish. Of the 10 wealthiest, 8 (80%) are Jewish.” He further adds that “Despite their social and economic power and privilege the names of hedge fund managers are virtually unknown even to educated and informed people, never mind the general public.” To some degree, we can thank Hollywood for this ignorance.

In its archives, TOO has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to detailed stories documenting Jewish financial power and misbehavior. See, for instance

John Q. Publius, Hedging their Bets (Who Really Decides Elections)

Andrew Joyce, Philip Green, Jewish Criminality, and the Cost of Economic Parasitism, Part 1: The Wider Context of Jewish White Collar Crime  and Part 2

James Wald, Putting Shylock to Shame: The Moneylender Portrayed as Hero and Lenin’s Willing Industrialist: The Saga of Armand Hammer Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 & Part 5

John Graham and Kevin MacDonald, Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic?

Yes, there is an embarrassment of riches on this topic, so there is no excuse for so few gentile Westerners to know the score. It’s not a pretty story, but burying one’s head in the sand (and watching nothing but sportsball all year long) is inexcusable. This is a war, so we must know our adversary and his tactics. As Bain Dewitt wrote in Counter-Currents, “Jews … have been openly making memewar on Whites since before the birth of Christ and so have a good understanding of what is going on.” Time for us to catch up, lads.

Wrapping things up here, I refuse to attempt to make any predictions about what economic turns we may see in the short or the long term, for even insiders have repeatedly embarrassed themselves in this pursuit. I would just say that we should continue to focus on what Jewish players in the arenas discussed in this and other TOO articles are doing; keep your eyes on the ball. After all, in his great work on money, E. Michael Jones concludes that “Banking is magic that works,” and, as we have seen, Jews continue to be highly active in the upper echelons of banking and money management.

“Banking is magic that works.” I think that’s a fascinating insight phrased in a sublime way. It really speaks to where we are today in the world.

Thinking about the future is daunting, so I’ll defer to a Jewish writer I’ve long admired — James Howard Kunstler. In my experience, he has long played the fascinating role of revealing what some of his fellow Jews are up to but he will never name them as Jews. No worries, since we Jew-wise gentiles can easily read between his lines.

Every New Year, Kunstler pontificates on the state of the world, and for 2017 he referenced much of what I just wrote about above. Here’s what he gave us in “Forecast 2017: The Wheels Finally Come Off.” Going back to the late 70s, he asserts that Fed was guilty of manipulating the money supply, which has “proven to be fatally mischievous.” Fed officials had become “magicians using occult mathematical models and formulas — to cast spells capable of controlling the macro economy the way wizards are thought to control external reality.”

Around the year 2000

the system wobbled again and the viziers of the Fed ramped up their magical operations, led by the Grand Vizier (or “Maestro”) Alan Greenspan, who worked the control rods of interest rates as though the financial system were a great nuclear powered pipe organ that could be revved up and tamped down by a wondrous Fed control panel. This period of Fed spell-casting was characterized by ever more systemically complex finance, growing systemic fragility, pervasive institutionalized accounting fraud, and ever-greater bubbles and busts. Deregulation, especially the 1998 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, sealed America’s financial fate.

Debt was the meat-and-potatoes of the Fed’s wizardry, but the “secret sauce” of Fed magic was fraud [my emphasis], in the form of market interventions, manipulations, regulatory negligence, and just plain systematic lying about the numbers that defined the economy. It amounted to nationalized financial racketeering. Under the consecutive Grand Vizierships of Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, control fraud (using official authority to cover up misconduct) was perfected by banking executives, eventuating in the mortgage securities fiasco of 2008, which took down the housing market and the economy. … The regulators looked the other way, on orders from their bosses. Unlike the earlier Savings and Loan bank crisis of the late 1980s, none of the leading bank officer perps went to jail. The damage of the 2008 crash was epic and never repaired, only papered over with more debt, more deceit, and more racketeering.

The supposed remedy, the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, was a cover for continued pervasive fraud and the institutional “capture” of government by the banking industry and its handmaidens, really a fascist melding of banking and government, a swindle machine in which anything goes and nothing matters. The frauds have only been rechanneled since 2008 into college loans, car loans, corporate stock buyback monkey business, currency arbitrage shenanigans, private equity asset-stripping, and the gigantic black box of derivatives trading.

Am I the only one fascinated by Kunstler’s choice of words here: “a fascist melding of banking and government, a swindle machine in which anything goes and nothing matters”? Fascist? Really?

At every point, isn’t Kunstler really talking about his fellow Jews, particularly his E. Michael Jones-esque conclusion that “the secret sauce” of Fed magic was fraud?” That’s quite a claim, but is there a better description of what the Fed has been doing for the last dozen years and more? If he is right, where does that leave us — and the world? I have no idea, but I’ve got a pretty good idea how the tunes goes — and the lyrics have much to tell us about Jewish behavior. How soon again will we all be humming that tune?

Jews and Vulture Capitalism: A Reprise, Part 1

I recently wrote a long movie review (sort of) that focused on Wall Street stories that airbrush Jews out of the picture and instead create the impression that plain old goy males are responsible for all kinds of financial nastiness when dealing with sums over, say, a hundred million dollars (and MUCH more). The review came as Part 1 & Part 2. In the review, I emphasized the plots of popular Hollywood movies and deliberately downplayed detailed accounts of Jewish financial manipulation in institutions in Lower Manhattan, reasoning that many of today’s readers would relate more to celluloid imagery than drier non-fiction.

Today I’ll do that drier writing and perform yeoman’s work in describing instances of Jewish financial chicanery far more thoroughly, relying primarily on TOO writers such as Andrew Joyce and myself, though I will bring in a few outsiders to burnish our tale by using their more mainstream credentials.

I’ll begin with a few exciting quotes about our topic before descending into a routine rendition of Jewish perfidy when it comes to large financial scandals. Recall the title of Joyce’s dangerous title last December: “Vulture Capitalism is Jewish Capitalism.” In that essay, Joyce employed provocative phrases, accusing Jewish firms such as Paul Singer’s Elliot Associates of being one of the “cabals of exploitative financiers” possessing a “scavenging and parasitic nature” vis-a-vis gentile host nations. “Jewish enterprise — exploitative, inorganic” — results in “all forms of financial exploitation and white collar crime. The Talmud, whether actively studied or culturally absorbed, is their code of ethics and their curriculum in regards to fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement, usury, and financial exploitation. Vulture capitalism is Jewish capitalism.” I daresay we are here teetering on the brink of introducing age-old canards regarding Jews and money. But are they true?


A Certain Cephalopod Encircling an Unnamed Planet

Before attempting to answer that question either way, it is unavoidable that I once again trot out Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi’s timeless quip in The Great American Bubble Machine as he described the 2008 market meltdown:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. 

And with that, we get down to the dirty business of recounting seminal instances of, well, dirty business. Or maybe it’s an historical account of the transfer of wealth from various groups to Jews. Or a biological account of energy moving to one specific colony of living organisms from elsewhere. The phenomenon can be approached in many ways.

To give this essay a suitably serious tone, we begin with the Bible, where the twin themes of Jewish resource acquisition and deceit will be familiar. In A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, Kevin MacDonald describes the process:

The biblical stories of sojourning by the patriarchs among foreigners are very prominently featured in Genesis. Typically there is an emphasis on deception and exploitation of the host population, after which the Jews leave a despoiled host population, having increased their own wealth and reproductive success. Indeed, immediately after the creation story and the genealogy of Abraham, Genesis presents an account of Abraham’s sojourn in Egypt. Abraham goes to Egypt to escape a famine with his barren wife Sarah, and they agree to deceive the pharaoh into thinking that Sarah is his sister, so that the pharaoh takes her as a concubine. As a result of this transaction, Abraham receives great wealth . . . .

Far from being a unique story, it portrays a pattern, with MacDonald concluding, “Like the others, the Egyptian sojourn begins with deception and ends with the Israelites obtaining great treasure and increasing their numbers.”

The most famous Biblical story of deceit is the story of Exodus, where Joseph helps his relatives enter by telling them to deny being shepherds because the Egyptians dislike shepherds. The Israelites reside in Egypt and are successful: “And Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt . . . and they got them possessions therein, and were fruitful, and multiplied exceedingly” (Gen. 47:27).

From biblical times, we jump ahead to the modern era, for Jews seemed to be in a kind of hibernation until their emancipation in Europe. With that emancipation came a resumption of the biblical trend toward obtaining great treasure and increasing their numbers. How they did this often contravened prevailing Christian norms, however, as attested to by two prominent gentile writers outside the realm of TOO or related enterprises.

These eminent writers and thinkers are Paul Johnson, a conservative British writer, and Albert Lindemann, a Harvard Ph.D. and retired historian who has written dispassionately on Jews for many years. Johnson caught my attention years ago when I somehow came across his book Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties. I was a young man then, grappling with a humanities education that left me feeling major parts of life’s stories had been left out. Given the prevailing reign of liberal thought (which was, of course, only to get far worse) I found Johnson’s contrarian conservative views refreshing, but it was his emphasis on Jewish “rationalization” of the modern world, especially in economic matters, that truly caught my attention. I can still recall the ongoing frustration I had while reading his book, principally because he would not call Jews out for bad behavior.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. What Johnson did was start by saying how much Jews had contributed to the modern world, then switch to a long, detailed list of behaviors that violated Western laws and customs. I remember wondering how he got away with that. After filling pages with shocking exposés of such conduct, he’d then close by saying how grateful we should be to Jews for “rationalizing” previously outmoded methods and beliefs. A few years later he wrote A History of the Jews, which is pretty much an expanded version of the Jewish parts of Modern Times. A History is a great reference book to have, though.

Johnson set the stage by documenting the rise of the Jews throughout Europe in the modern period:

Jews dominated the Amsterdam stock exchange, where they held large quantities of stock from both the West and East India Companies, and were the first to run a large-scale trade in securities. In London they set the same pattern a generation later in the 1690s. . . . In due course, Jews helped to create the New York stock exchange in 1792. . . . Expelled Jews went to the Americas as the earliest traders. They set up factories. In St Thomas, for instance, they became the first large-scale plantation-owners [and slave owners]. . . . Jews and marranos were particularly active in settling Brazil . . . they owned most of the sugar plantations [and their slaves]. They controlled the trade in precious and semi-precious stones. Jews expelled from Brazil in 1654 helped to create the sugar industry in Barbados and Jamaica.

Next, he shared how some gentiles reacted: In 1781 Prussian official Christian Wilhelm von Dohm published a tract claiming, in Johnson’s paraphrase, “The Jews had ‘an exaggerated tendency [to seek] gain in every way, a love of usury.’ These ‘defects’ were aggravated ‘by their self-imposed segregation. . . .’ From these followed ‘the breaking of the laws of the state restricting trade, the import and export of prohibited wares, the forgery of money and precious metals.’” In short, von Dohm described traditional Jewish communities as far more resembling a mafia-like group engaged in organized crime than what we think of as a religious community.

Continuing, Johnson wrote,

Throughout the twentieth century, American Jews continued to take the fullest advantage of the opportunities America opened to them, to attend universities, to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, professional men and women of all kinds, politicians and public servants, as well as to thrive in finance and business as they always had. They were particularly strong in the private enterprise sector, in press, publishing, broadcasting and entertainment, and in intellectual life generally. There were certain fields, such as the writing of fiction, where they were dominant. But they were numerous and successful everywhere.

This success, however, did not always come honorably, or at least that is what legions of gentiles have long claimed. Johnson described how Jewish involvement in financial scandals certainly became a prominent theme of modern anti-Semitism. As he wrote, “The Union Générale scandal in 1882, the Comptoire d’Escompte scandal in 1889 — both involving Jews — were merely curtain-raisers” to a far more massive and complex crime, the Panama Canal scandal, ‘an immense labyrinth of financial manipulation and fraud, with [Jewish] Baron Jacques de Reinach right at the middle of it.’” (Reinach committed suicide because of the scandal.) Wikipedia tells us that

Close to half a billion francs were lost and members of the French government had taken bribes to keep quiet about the Panama Canal Company’s financial troubles in what is regarded as the largest monetary corruption scandal of the 19th century. . . . Some 800,000 French people, including 15,000 single women, had lost their investments in the stocks, and founder shares of the Panama Canal Company, to the considerable sum of approximately 1.8 billion gold Francs. From the nine stock issues, the Panama Canal Company received 1.2 billion gold Francs, 960 million of which were invested in Panama, a large amount having been pocketed by financiers and politicians.

For once, Wiki includes the Jewish angle, writing that “The scandal showed, in Arendt’s view, that the middlemen between the business sector and the state were almost exclusively Jews, thus helping to pave the road for the Dreyfus Affair.”

Albert Lindemann chronicled similar episodes, particularly in his highly respected Esau’s Tear: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews. In the book he noted that during the 19th century in Eastern Europe there were also persistent complaints about Jewish perjury to help other Jews commit fraud and other crimes. For example, in Russia a neutral observer noted that judges “unanimously declared that not a single lawsuit, criminal or civil, can be properly conducted if the interests of the Jews are involved.” Writing in 1914, American sociologist Edward A. Ross similarly commented on Jewish immigrants to America that “The authorities complain that the East European Hebrews feel no reverence for law as such and are willing to break any ordinance they find in their way. … In the North End of Boston ‘the readiness of the Jews to commit perjury has passed into a proverb.’”

Lindemann echoed Johnson’s description of the rise of Jewish power paired with Jewish involvement in major financial scandals. In Germany, Jews “were heavily involved in the get-rich-quick enterprises” of the period of rapid urbanization and industrialization of the 1860s and 70s. “Many highly visible Jews made fortunes in dubious ways . . . Probably the most notorious of these newly rich speculators was Hirsch Strousberg, a Jew involved in Romanian railroad stocks. He was hardly unique in his exploits, but as Peter Pulzer has written, ‘the . . . difference between his and other men’s frauds was that his was more impudent and involved more money.’”

Like Johnson, Lindemann delved back into the nineteenth century, writing that

In the summer of 1873 the stock markets in New York and Vienna collapsed. By the autumn of that year Germany’s industrial overexpansion and the reckless proliferation of stock companies came to a halt. Jews were closely associated in the popular mind with the stock exchange. Widely accepted images of them as sharp and dishonest businessmen made it all but inevitable that public indignation over the stock market crash would be directed at them. Many small investors, themselves drawn to the prospect of easy gain, lost their savings through fraudulent stocks of questionable business practices in which Jews were frequently involved. 

Also like Johnson, Lindemann believed that accusations of fraud against many European Jews were not based on mere fantasy. With respect to the Panama Canal scandal of 1888–1892, for instance, Lindemann wrote:

Investigation into the activities of the Panama Company revealed widespread bribery of parliamentary officials to assure support of loans to continue work on the Panama Canal, work that had been slowed by endless technical and administrative difficulties. Here was a modern project that involved large sums of French capital and threatened national prestige. The intermediaries between the Panama Company and parliament were almost exclusively Jews, with German names and backgrounds, some of whom tried to blackmail one another . . . .

Thousands of small investors lost their savings in the Panama fiasco. . . . A trial in 1893 was widely believed to be a white-wash. The accused escaped punishment through bribery and behind-the-scenes machinations, or so it was widely believed. The Panama scandal seemed almost designed to confirm the long-standing charges of the French right that the republic was in the clutches of corrupt Jews who were bringing dishonor and disaster to France. 

In many cases, the Jewish nexus of the financial scandal involved the idea that Jews implicated in financial scandals were being protected by other highly placed Jews. Lindemann: “The belief of anti-Semites in France about Jewish secretiveness was based on a real secretiveness of some highly placed and influential Jews. What anti-Semites suspected was not so much pure fantasy as a malicious if plausible exaggeration, since solid facts were hard to come by.” This secretiveness among prominent Jews is another example of the operation of the Talmudic Law of the Moser (which forbids informing on other Jews) and once again shows that illegal and unethical behavior is sanctioned within the Jewish community. The only crime would be to inform on other Jews.

Not surprisingly, however, the best contemporary discussion of Jewish financial power over the last two centuries comes from E. Michael Jones, publisher of Culture Wars and author of the 1200-page Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (2008). He outdid himself by releasing in 2014 an even longer book called Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Labor and Usury. Naturally, because usury was a key topic, Jews are a primary topic of discussion.

Jones’ star is clearly rising, principally due to his presence on the Internet. Like TOO’s Kevin MacDonald, Jones ceaselessly appears in podcasts and is catholic in his willingness to appear on a wide range of shows.

With respect to Barren Metal, I will begin my consideration of Jews and usury from Chapter 64, “Napoleon Emancipates the Jews.” Previously, Jones had described many gentile financiers, but from Chapter 64 onward the pronounced Jewish role crescendoes to the point that, were the book divided in two and the second book to begin with Chapter 64, the sub-title would have to change to “Jews, Capitalism, and Usury.”

A main theme of Barren Metal is that “Capitalism is state-sponsored usury.” This is hardly a new idea, since German writer Werner Sombart explored the concept in depth in Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911). Jones describes Sombart’s idea thus: “capitalism is the philosophical and political sanctification of usury. Because money-lending, according to Sombart, is ‘one of the most important roots of capitalism,’ capitalism ‘derived its most important characteristics from money-lending.’”

Particularly with the rise of Protestantism in parts of Europe, usury lashed to state power altered the age-old economic foundation of the continent and Britain. In turn, this elicited the rise of modern anti-Semitism in Europe. For instance, Jones points to Wilhelm Marr, “the patriarch of anti-Semitism” (interestingly, three of Marr’s four wives were Jewesses), whose racial animus toward Jews may have masked an economic cause, which was usury. Marr wrote:

The burning question of our day in our Parliaments . . . is usury. . . . The political correctness of our Judified society helps it to sail by the reef which is the usury question, and as a result poor folk from every class become the victims of the Usurers and their corrupt German assistants, who are only too happy to earn 20 to 30 percent per month off of the misery of the poor. . . . In the meantime the cancer of usury continues to eat away at the social fabric, and the animosity against the Jews grows by the hour . . . so that an explosion can no longer be avoided.

In short, “This looting is, of course, to no avail because no force on earth can keep up with compound interest, which is the heart of usury.”

The climax of Barren Metal comes toward the end of the book in the chapter on the Vatican-approved periodical Civiltà Cattolica that in 1890 forthrightly addressed the Jewish Question. Far more than in modern America, enormous financial scandals in Europe of the era were directly and openly linked to Jews. In 1882, for example, the Union Generale bank collapsed and Jews were explicitly blamed for it. Its former head, for one, fumed that the Jewish financial power of the day was “not content with the billions which had come into its coffers for fifty years . . . not content with the monopoly which it exercises on nine-tenths at least of all Europe’s financial affairs.” This power, the man claimed, had “set out to destroy the Union Generale.”

In response to this collapse, famed writer Emile Zola published a novel in which a fictional young Catholic banker seethed at Jewish deceit. The Catholic character

is overwhelmed with an “inextinguishable hatred” for “that accursed race which no longer has its own country, no longer has its own prince, which lives parasitically in the home of nations, feigning to obey the law but in reality only obeying its own God of theft, of blood, of anger .  .  . fulfilling everywhere its mission of ferocious conquest, to lie in wait for its prey, suck the blood out of everyone, [and] grow fat on the life of others.”

While Zola employed fiction to make his point, Civiltà Cattolica used reason, facts and argumentation to chronicle how the Jews were able to foist their immoral ways (according to Christian mores) onto European society, and “the main way that the Jews achieved their hegemony over Christian societies was through ‘their insatiable appetite for enriching themselves via usury.’” The verdict? “The source of Jewish power is usury.”

From this central fact rolled well-known consequences:

Once having acquired absolute civil liberty and equality in every sphere with Christians and the nations, the dam which previously had held back the Hebrews was opened for them, and in a short time, like a devastating torrent, they penetrated and cunningly took over everything: gold, trade, the stock market, the highest appointments in political administrations, in the army, and in diplomacy; public education, the press, everything fell into their hands or into the hands of those who were inevitably depending upon them.

With control of gold came control of Christian society, particularly through the public press and academia, since “journalism and public education are like the two wings that carry the Israelite dragon, so that it might corrupt and plunder all over Europe.”

In the same chapter on Civiltà Cattolica, Jones discusses how the writings of one German, Father Georg Ratzinger, informed discussions in the Vatican periodical. As the name suggests, Fr. Ratzinger was indeed related to Joseph Ratzinger (his great-nephew), who became Pope Benedict XVI. The elder Ratzinger pointed directly to Jewish usury as the bane of Christian culture, which, when left unchecked, resulted in the enslavement of the surrounding Gentiles. Previously, of course, traditional Christianity forbade usury, meaning that the popes thus “deprived [Jews] of their ability to occupy the choke points in the culture.”

Ratzinger insisted it was foolish to abandon these tried and true Christian practices because Jews learned from their Talmud that “cheating the goyim was a virtue.” Linking free trade, capitalism and Jewish methods of conducting business, Ratzinger concluded that it was “to be expected that the Jews, who with centuries of practice became skilled in the deceptions of economic warfare and acquired the arts of exploitation to perfection, would take center stage under the regime of free competition.” It was not knowledge or ability, in Ratzinger’s opinion, that “makes the Jew rich and admired in society” but, rather, “deception and exploitation of others.”

Of course Ratzinger did not think Gentiles were totally blameless in these cultural and economic wars, for at a time “when Jews stand by even their own criminal element, we see Christian politicians and legislators betraying their own Christian faith on a daily basis and vying with each other to see who has the privilege of harnessing himself to the triumphal car of the Jews. In Parliament,” Ratzinger wrote, “no Jew need defend another Jew when their Christian lackeys do that for them.” (I wonder if there was a contemporary German term meaning “cuckservative.”)

Civiltà Cattolica is a treasure, as valuable now as it must have been over a century ago. I strongly encourage every serious TOO reader to familiarize himself with this tract, which can be found here.

Another fascinating topic Jones covers concerns the relationship between landed English gentry and Jewish moneylenders. “Stated in its simplest terms, the Jewish Problem involved the inverse relationship between debt and political sovereignty.” This antagonism toward growing Jewish power was common among the British aristocracy as well as politicians. The 1891 Labour Leader, for example, denounced the money-lending Rothschild family as a

blood-sucking crew [which] has been the main cause of untold mischief and misery in Europe during the present century, and has piled up prodigious wealth chiefly through fomenting wars between the States which ought never to have quarreled. Wherever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumors of war circulate and men’s minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity, you may be sure that a hook-nosed Rothschild is at his games somewhere near the region of the disturbance.

An exemplar of this was the extended Churchill family, which fell into the clutches of Jewish moneylenders. Randolph, father of Winston and born in 1849, grew up in an era in which “spectacular bankruptcies” would plague aristocrats for much of the century. Much of this suffering was, of course, brought on by shameless profligacy among landed aristocrats, and Jones offers the Churchills as an example of this blight. Randolph—and in turn Winston—were very much in this mold, and fell straight into the hands of Jewish moneylenders, with profound consequences for Britain and all of Christendom by the time of Winston’s terms as Prime Minister.

As far back as 1874, the Churchill family was forced to sell wide swaths of land along with livestock  to Baron Rothschild in order to settle a serious debt. Randolph, who had grown up amidst rich Jews with opulent tastes, made the mistake of thinking that he could indulge such a lifestyle without the necessary funds to back it. What he didn’t understand was that “he was on the wrong side of compound interest and they [his Jewish friends] on the right side.”

What followed was predictable. Randolph eventually contracted syphilis and lost large sums of money while gambling in Monte Carlo. In this instance, a Rothschild came to his rescue—but at a price. “The Jews who were supporting Randolph’s syphilitic fantasies and the extravagant lifestyle that went along with it . . . [were] willing to write off 70,000 pounds in bad debt because [Natty Rothschild] needed a friend in high places who would share Cabinet secrets that could be turned into hard financial gains.” Finally, consider this unsettling conclusion: In time, “the British Empire would become an essentially Jewish enterprise over the course of the 19th century.” By the end of the century, Jones concludes, “The British Empire had become one huge, Jewish usury machine, administered by impecunious, extravagant, perennially indebted, morally depraved agents like Randolph Churchill.”

Since Jones saw a reason to largely skirt over events from the 1890 publication of Civiltà Cattolica until the late 1940s, I’ll do the same. The founding of the Federal Reserve, for instance, is covered in a scant eight pages, the Depression is not much more than a footnote, and The Second World War is ignored. Jones resumes his tale with the rise of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who was instrumental in creating the Chicago School of economics. Being helpful, Jones translates this development as: “The Jewish usurers’ Utopia which Milton Friedman promoted under the name of Chicago School economics was the mirror image of Communism, another Jewish Utopia, because both claimed that if their programs were implemented heaven on earth would follow.” Naturally, these claims were insincere (or could have been part self-deception) and Friedman’s advocacy of transferring public works projects into private hands, therefore, “was another looting operation.”

These assets that were the product of years of investment of public money and labor should, in Friedman’s view, “be transferred into private hands, on principle.” This public to “private” wealth transfer will soon be the focus of another discussion about Jews and money later in this essay.

First, however, I’ll mention in passing the subject of Jones’ Chapter 98, the leveraged buy-outs of the 1980s. Professor Benjamin Ginsberg was hardly alone in noticing that Jermome Kohlberg, Jr., Harry Kravis and many others involved in these buy-outs were Jews. As always, Jones does not disappoint in his ability to summarize this trend: “The concentration of the nation’s wealth in the hands of a few avaricious Jews has led to corruption of both discourse and culture.”

This era was the focus of my recent essay, Vulture Capitalism, Jews — and Hollywood, where I showed how Jewry hides in plain sight their ongoing looting of gentile wealth by creating blockbuster movies which feature no Jews, instead casting famous gentile actors as financial malefactors. (See Part 1 & Part 2 here.) Thus, I’ll pass over this important era in order to focus on another looting operation that is still almost invisible to the world’s public. This operation is the one a mostly Jewish cast imposed on a newly freed Russia that was ripe for exploitation at the hands of Jews “skilled in the deceptions of economic warfare.”

Go to Part 2.

Hedging their Bets (Who Really Decides Elections)

If you like your healthcare provider/free speech/immigration policy/country you can keep it!

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” a quote often attributed to, appropriately enough, Benjamin Disraeli. The salad days of Joe Wilson yelling, “You lie!” at Barack Obama seem so long ago, but here we are with a steady diet of more Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi. Alas, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Or do they? Was the grass greener or was I? Certainly Emma Lazarus’s sonnet wasn’t a beacon for the world’s wretched refuse when the West was won and two fratricidal World Wars were still on the horizon. But the rough beast was already slouching toward Bethlehem, and by the time Donald J. Trump was clamoring to see Barack Hussein Obama’s birth certificate the beast had been born and grown to adulthood.

In any case, it was a republic and we couldn’t keep it; instead, Jewish hedge fund managers and plutocrats decide under what guise the neo-liberal machine will continue to operate, for it is in fact all window dressing. The reasons may vary—cheap labor, ready votes, “social justice,” climate change, anti-white animus, etc.—but the end result is no border and no representation, regardless of the rhetoric. The ruling class is beyond redemption, and nothing short of a replacement of the kind they envision for us will suffice to save any semblance of an America worth saving. Perhaps it is a Balkanized future or an entire Western Hemisphere that looks like Brazil, but prognostication is not the order of the day, nor is this a post-mortem, but rather an outlining of the kabuki theater that passes for politics in America and a look at its stage managers.

Using the figures for individual donors’ campaign contributions to federal candidates, parties, political action committees (PACs), 527 organizations, and Carey committees as reported by the Center for Responsive Politics for the 2018 election, we see that six of the top seven donors were Jews: Sheldon Adelson, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, S. Donald Sussman, Jim Simons, and George Soros. The Jewish Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group was also in the top ten. Number ten on that list, Fred Eychaner, is not Jewish, but as The Times of Israel reported in late October 2012:

Eychaner has given $1.5 million to the Priorities USA Action super PAC. He’s also given more than $60,000 to the president’s re-election committees, and he’s listed as a major “bundler” for Obama, having raised at least $500,000 for the president. Eychaner, a gay-rights activist, also has donated millions to other nonprofit groups, including more than $1 million to the progressive EMILY’s List organization.[1]

The reader will be familiar with the Jewish character of EMILY’s List from my The Way Life Should Be? series.

More wealthy Jews abound in the top one hundred donors to political campaigns in 2018: Deborah Simon (#14), Bernie Marcus (#18), Dustin Moskovitz (#19), Joshua Bekenstein (#20), Jeff Yass (#21), Paul Singer ($25), Seth Klarman (#26), Amy Goldman-Fowler (#28), and Henry Laufer (#29). Sixteen of the top thirty donors to political campaigns in 2018 were Jewish. If you continue down the list, you’ll continue to see Jews well-represented, including Herbert Sandler, Haim Saban, Irwin Jacobs, Les Wexner, Alexander Soros, Steven A. Cohen, Bernard Schwartz, Sim Daniel Abraham, Richard Rosenthal, Stephen Mandel, Henry Goldberg, Irving Moskowitz, Steven Spielberg, Ronald Lauder, Michael Sacks, David Bonderman, Dan Loeb, and Andrea Soros-Colombel.

When Bernie Sanders talks about the 1%, this is who he’s talking about, and there are a whole lot of his co-ethno-religionists. Despite the tough talk, it appears Sanders doesn’t walk the walk—per the Center for Responsive Politics, we discover that he has received huge campaign contributions in this election cycle from the likes of PACs representing and/or individuals affiliated with: Alphabet Inc., Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Kaiser Permanente, UC Berkeley, Boeing, IBM, UPS, the City of New York, and the Army, Navy, Air Force, and the US Department of Defense. In fact, his donor list is pretty much interchangeable with the rest of his “competition.”

For billionaire Jews like Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, backing candidates is apparently not enough anymore, or maybe their grip on power is becoming more tenuous. Whatever the reason, the Wonderful Wizards are moving to center stage for all of America to see. Having made a killing as a hedge fund manager, Tom Steyer now has his sights on the presidency, and has spent nearly $48 million of his own money at press time on his bid. He doesn’t need much in the way of campaign donations, but his donors do prove illustrative: Bain Capital (Joshua Bekenstein from the above list is co-chair and the Jewish Jonathan Lavine is CIO), Hellman & Friedman (a San Francisco-based private equity firm where Steyer was a partner, founded by two Jews—Warren Hellman, former president of Lehman Brothers and Tully Friedman, former managing director of Salomon Brothers), Stanford University (where Steyer received his MBA), MRB Capital (the venture capital firm of Hellman & Friedman senior advisor Matthew R. Barger, who, like Steyer, also received his MBA from Stanford and who, like Hellman, also worked for Lehman Brothers prior to joining Hellman’s firm), Pisces, Inc. (described on their LinkedIn page as “an outsourcing/offshoring company” based out of San Francisco), and Twitter. Of particular note and showing what a ludicrous sham the whole thing is, Steyer’s second-largest donor is Farallon Capital, the very firm he founded. Steyer also worked as a risk arbitrage trader under the Jewish Robert Rubin at Goldman Sachs and in Morgan Stanley’s corporate mergers and acquisitions department, in addition to Hellman & Friedman, before founding Farallon Capital, named the largest hedge fund in the world in 2005. Rubin is on the advisory council of The Hamilton Project (along with Lawrence Summers, David M. Rubenstein, Penny Pritzker, Sheryl Sandberg, Peter Orszag of Lazard, Tom Steyer—all Jews—and other major Establishment figures), is Chairman Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a member of the Africa Progress Panel (APP). Rubin is a real piece of work:

In January 1995, one year after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and immediately after Rubin was sworn in as Secretary of Treasury, Mexico was suffering through a financial crisis that threatened to result in it defaulting on its foreign obligations. President Bill Clinton, with the advice of Secretary Rubin and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan,[2] provided $20 billion in US loan guarantees to the Mexican government through the Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF). In 1997 and 1998, Treasury Secretary Rubin, Deputy Secretary Lawrence Summers,[3] and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan worked with the International Monetary Fund and others to promote U.S. policy in response to financial crises in Russian, Asian, and Latin American financial markets…As Clinton’s two-term Secretary of the Treasury, Rubin sharply opposed any regulation of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and other so-called “derivative” financial instruments which—despite having already created havoc for companies such as Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greetings, and disastrous consequences in 1994 for Orange County, California with its $1.5 billion default and subsequent bankruptcy—were nevertheless becoming the chief engine of profitability for Rubin’s former employer Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. Rubin sparked controversy in 2001 when he contacted an acquaintance at the U.S. Treasury Department and asked if the department could convince bond-rating agencies not to downgrade the corporate debt of Enron, a debtor of Citigroup…Journalist Robert Scheer claims that the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act was a key factor in the 2008 financial crisis. Enacted just after the 1930s Great Depression, the Glass–Steagall Act separated commercial and investment banking…Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers steered through the 1999 repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act (1933)…It allowed the banks to develop and sell the mortgage-backed instruments that became a principal factor in the financial collapse. In September 2011, the UK Independent Commission on Banking released a report in which it recommended a separation of investment and retail banking to prevent a repeat of the 2008 crisis…In December 2008, investors filed a lawsuit contending that Citigroup executives, including Rubin, sold shares at inflated prices while concealing the firm’s risks….Writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb noted that Rubin “collected more than $120 million in compensation from Citibank in the decade preceding the banking crash of 2008. When the bank, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check—he invoked uncertainty as an excuse.”…In January 2014, Secretary Rubin joined former Senator Olympia Snowe, former Education Secretary Donna Shalala, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Henry Cisneros, Gregory Page the Chair of Cargill, and Al Sommer, [4] the Dean Emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health as members of the U.S. Climate Risk Committee.[5]

We know the purposes of this emphasis on “climate change.” What we are looking at is the “corporate stranglehold on democracy” that Steyer is supposedly fighting, a rich irony considering. Exemplified here is the neo-liberal establishment at work, operating with impunity, and with obvious and significant in-group preferential treatment and networking as regards Jews. It does not, unfortunately, end there.

George Shultz, who was Co-Chair with Tom Steyer on the No to Prop. 23 campaign and was close friends with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, was honored at the opening of the Limmud FSU conference for Russian-speaking Jews in November 2017 “for never giving up on Soviet Jews” as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State with “a leather-bound Book of Psalms from Julius Berman, president of the Claims Conference (which facilitates German government compensation to Holocaust survivors), and another on behalf of Limmud FSU.” In the face of declining support for Israel among Democrat voters, Henry Cisneros joined a number of other Democrat politicians and donors such as Kyrsten Sinema, Bob Menendez, and major party donor, Managing Director at JP Morgan Securities, and former AIPAC staffer Todd Richman in forming the group The Democratic Majority for Israel because if there’s one thing America needs, it’s more pro-Israel lobbying groups!

Michael Bloomberg was also a donor to long-time Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. Once again returning to the Center for Responsive Politics, we discover that Snowe’s other major donors included PACs representing and/or individuals affiliated with: Verrill Dana, Bernstein Shur, Goldman Sachs, Planned Parenthood, Women’s Pro-Israel National PAC, Sallie Mae, Pingree Associates, Northrop Grumman, Corning, WarnerMedia Group, Unum, the American Medical Association, Verizon, the Blackstone Group, MBNA Corp., AT&T, the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, New York Life Insurance, ExxonMobil, International Paper, McDonald’s, United Technologies, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, American Airlines, Raytheon, Boston Capital, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, IDEXX, Aflac, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Aetna, AVI Foodsystems, TD Bank, Bank of America, MetLife, Comcast, Home Depot, FedEx, O’Hara Corporation, Deloitte, the Carlyle Group, Walmart, CVS, and iHeartCommunications, Inc.

Donna Shalala is described by Jackson Richman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel thusly:

Donna Shalala, 77, is no stranger to politics or the relationship between the United States and Israel. She served as Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bill Clinton, where she traveled to Israel and helped researchers there obtain grants from the National Institutes of Health, in addition to assisting with other initiatives inside the Jewish state. She then went into the private sector: serving as University of Miami president for 14 years and president of the Clinton Foundation for two years. Shalala, endorsed by the Jewish Democratic Council of America, defeated Maria Elvira Salazar in the midterm elections to replace the retiring Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. [6]

Shalala herself states:

I’ve been a friend of Israel for a long time. I’ve been working with the universities within the health-care system for a long time. I first went to Israel to be on Mayor Teddy Kollek’s Jerusalem Committee to help plan the city of Jerusalem when I was a young urbanist, a young academic, teaching at Columbia [University]. And I have honorary degrees from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the University of Haifa and from Ben-Gurion University [of the Negev]… I actually worked with Israeli health officials to guarantee the Weizmann Institute [of Science] scientists the opportunity to apply for NIH grants among other things. I worked with women leaders in Israel on health-care issues. I went in and out of Israel four times when I was secretary…Most recently, the University of Miami has helped develop the cancer centers in Israel. Our faculty worked closely with their counterparts in Israel, particularly on cancer interests…[People] should know there’s an Arab American with longstanding support of Israel who’s just been elected in South Florida. [7]

Lazard, Ltd., based out of Bermuda for tax reasons, naturally, is also a major donor to Steyer. Lazard’s Chairman and CEO is Kenneth M. Jacobs, another Stanford MBA who is on the Board for the Brookings Institution and is a former member of the Steering Committee for the Bilderberg Group. A number of influential people have worked for Lazard, including both Jews and their functionaries: Marcus AgiusRobert AgostinelliTim CollinsDisque DeaneMina GerowinSir Philip HamptonHugh Kindersley, Sebastian KulczykSteven LangmanJean-Marie MessierArchie NormanNelson ObusGary ParrMark PincusGerald RosenfeldNathaniel RothschildBernard SelzJohann RupertLars KroijerJaime Bermúdez MerizaldeRon BloomRobert Henry Brand, Robert Fred EllsworthVernon E. Jordan Jr.Paul KeatingRobert Kindersley, Anne LauvergeonLord MandelsonHenrique de Campos MeirellesAndrew MitchellPeter R. OrszagVincent S. PérezRodrigo de RatoJenny SanfordSimon Sebag MontefioreLindsay TannerAndrés VelascoAntonio WeissBill WhiteFrank G. ZarbBožidar ĐelićNgozi Okonjo-Iweala, and William D. Cohan. Lazard was founded as Lazard Freres & Co. by three Jewish brothers—Alexandre, Lazare, and Simon:

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the firm evolved into three “Houses of Lazard” in the United States, France, and England, separately managed but allied. The Lazard partners advised clients on financial matters and built a cross-border network of high-level relationships in business and government. Noted financial advisor George Blumenthal rose to prominence as the head of the U.S. branch of Lazard Frères and was a partner of Lazard Frères in France. In the economic boom following World War II, the American operations of Lazard expanded significantly under the leadership of the financier André Meyer. Meyer and Lazard partner Felix Rohatyn have been credited with virtually inventing the modern mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market…In 1977, as the health of Meyer began to deteriorate, the firm came to be controlled by Michel David-Weill. Under his leadership, the three houses of Lazard were formally united in 2000 as Lazard LLC. In 2002, David-Weill hired Bruce Wasserstein to be CEO…Following Wasserstein’s sudden death in 2009, Lazard’s Board of Directors elected Kenneth M. Jacobs Chairman and CEO.[8]

Blumenthal, Meyer, Rohatyn, David-Weill, Wasserstein, and Jacobs are all Jewish, by the way. Blumenthal first arrived in the United States on behalf of the dynastic Jewish banking family the Speyers, and “with J. P. Morgan the elder, he was one of five bankers whose $65,000,000 gold loans saved Grover Cleveland from giving up specie payments in 1896.”[9] At Lazard, André Meyer created SOVAC (Societé pour la Vente à Crédit d’Automobiles), a finance company that in the late-1920s introduced the concept of automobile financing for consumers, ensuring Lazard Frères would become a significant force in consumer credit as well as in product leasing. Meyer and two colleagues would also represent Lazard on the Board of Directors of Citroën.[10] He was also very close with former US President Lyndon B. Johnson, often serving in an unofficial advisory capacity during Johnson’s time in office. In addition to being on the Board of Overseers of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a major refugee re-settlement agency run by the Jewish David Miliband, son of Marxist sociologist Ralph Miliband, Rohatyn:

Joined the New York office of the investment bank Lazard Frères under André Meyer. He was made partner in the firm in 1961 and later became managing director. While at Lazard he brokered numerous, major mergers and acquisitions, notably on behalf of International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), where he became a director in 1966. He also served on the boards of the Englehard Mineral and Chemical Corporation, Howmet Turbine Component Corporation, Owens-Illinois Inc., and Pfizer Inc. He served on the Board of the New York Stock Exchange from 1968 to 1972…In 1996, the Clinton administration put forward his candidacy for the post of Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve…According to The New York Times, in the 1990s, Rohatyn described derivatives as “financial hydrogen bombs, built on personal computers by 26-year-olds with M.B.A.s.” In 2006 Rohatyn joined Lehman Brothers as a senior advisor to chairman, Dick Fuld.[11] On January 27, 2010, Rohatyn announced his return to Lazard as Special Advisor to the Chairman and CEO, after a short role at Rothschild. Rohatyn was United States Ambassador to France from 1997–2000 during the second Clinton Administration…As ambassador, he also organized the French-American Business Council (FABC), a 40-member council of U.S. and French corporate chief executives that met annually, with meetings held alternately in the United States and France. FABC meetings included President Clinton, President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin, as well as U.S. cabinet secretaries and French government ministers and meetings continued during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Nicolas Sarkozy[12]…[His son] Nicolas Rohatyn is CEO and Chief Investment Officer at The Rohatyn Group, an investment firm specializing in emerging markets, following a 19-year career at J.P. Morgan.[13]

David-Weill’s father, Pierre, was a partner and former Chairman of Lazard Frères; his grandfather, David, was a partner, and his great-grandfather, Alexandre Weill also worked at Lazard Frères, founded by his cousins. David-Weill hired both Bruce Wasserstein and the Jewish “deal-maker” Steven Rattner, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a previous member of the Brookings Institution’s Board. Wasserstein’s private equity firm Wasserstein & Co. specialized in the acquisitions of media. Wasserstein’s fourth wife was Angela Chao, sister of Mitch McConnell’s wife Elaine Chao. Rahm Emanuel[14] was hired on at Wasserstein’s firm Wasserstein Perella & Co. in the late 1990s despite not having an MBA or any prior experience working in finance before being appointed to the Freddie Mac Board of Directors in 2000, a brief tenure that was plagued by scandal. Rattner:

[Rattner] was hired in Washington, D.C., as a news clerk to James Reston, New York Times columnist and former executive editor. After a year, he moved to New York as a reporter to cover business, energy, and urban affairs; there he became friends with colleague Paul Goldberger[15]…At the unusually young age of 27, he became the paper’s chief Washington economic correspondent. He became close friends with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.[16].…At the end of 1982, Rattner left The New York Times and was recruited by Roger Altman[17] to join the investment bank Lehman Brothers as an associate. After Lehman was sold to American Express in 1984, he followed his boss Eric Gleacher and several colleagues to Morgan Stanley, where he founded the firm’s communications group. In 1989, after Morgan Stanley filed for an initial public offering, he joined Lazard as a general partner and completed various deals for large media conglomerates such as Viacom and Comcast. Alongside Felix Rohatyn, Rattner became Lazard’s top rainmaker in the 1990s. Michel David-Weill named him the firm’s deputy chairman and deputy chief executive in 1997. In March 2000, Rattner and three Lazard partners, including Joshua Steiner,[18] left the firm and founded the Quadrangle Group. They initially focused on investing a $1 billion media-focused private equity fund. Early investors in Quadrangle included Sulzberger, Mort Zuckerman,[19] and Merrill Lynch. Headquartered in the Seagram Building,[20] Quadrangle grew to manage more than $6 billion across several business lines, including private equity, distressed securities, and hedge funds. The firm also hosted an annual gathering for media executives called Foursquare, where speakers included Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg.[21]…In 2005, Quadrangle made payments to private placement agent Hank Morris[22] to help Quadrangle raise money for its second buyout fund. Morris had come highly recommended to Rattner from U.S. Senator Charles Schumer.[23] Morris was also the chief political advisor to Alan Hevesi,[24] the New York State Comptroller and manager of the New York State Common Retirement Fund (CRF), which invests in many private equity funds. Morris told Rattner he could increase the size of the CRF investment in Quadrangle’s second buyout fund. Rattner agreed to pay Morris a placement fee of 1.1% of any investments greater than $25 million from the CRF…In 2009, Quadrangle and a dozen other investment firms, including the Carlyle Group, were investigated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for their hiring of Morris. The SEC viewed the payments as “kickbacks” in order to receive investments from the CRF since Morris was also a consultant to Hevesi. Quadrangle paid $7 million in April 2010 to settle the SEC investigation, and Rattner personally settled in November for $6.2 million without admitting or denying any wrongdoing…In 2008, the firm’s asset management division announced it had been selected to invest the personal assets of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg…Rattner’s close friend.[25]

Do you see how all this works? This is how a decadent ruling class operates—governing for its own benefit and, for the preponderance of Jews, that of its tribe. Political affiliation is basically irrelevant in such a context, as we will see with presidential candidate Johnny-come-lately Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, who may be running as a Democrat, but is bi-partisan in his support for his co-ethno-religionists and those who will do their bidding. Control is essential. As Karl Evers-Hillstrom writes:

Bloomberg, who made his billions as the founder and CEO of financial services firm Bloomberg L.P., has slammed aggressive regulation of the financial sector… Bloomberg’s contributions ebb and flow as the political tides shift…Following the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, Bloomberg took advantage of his newfound ability to give unlimited sums to super PACs. His Independence USA PAC shelled out millions to back Bloomberg’s preferred Republicans and Democrats, and spent roughly 90 percent or more of its money backing winning candidates every cycle since 2014. In 2018, the group spent all of its $38 million backing Democrats and opposing Republicans. It helped kick out key Democratic targets such as former Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) and Pete Sessions (R-Texas) with multi-million dollar ad buys. Bloomberg’s other major group, Everytown for Gun Safety, was also successful at kicking Republicans out of Congress. The group spent $4.2 million backing Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.), a gun control activist, and helped gun control groups outspend gun rights organizations on independent expenditures for the first time in 2018. The Bloomberg-funded group was also instrumental in helping Democrats turn Virginia blue this week. Also during the midterms, Bloomberg poured $20 million into Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC arm for Senate Democrats. He added another $5 million to the League of Conservation Voters.[26]

Notable Democrats who’ve received funds from Bloomberg in recent years include Cory Booker and Kamala Harris. Interestingly, Bloomberg has never donated to Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders. Naturally, though, people like Jerrold Nadler, Chuck Schumer, and Joe Lieberman have also received Bloomberg’s largesse. What could possibly unite them?

Rhetorically, Sanders and Warren are very much opposed to the Bloomberg/Steyer modus operandi, but as mentioned near the beginning of this piece, their donors are virtually the same as every other major Democratic candidate. Surely there is some in-group tension here regarding Wall Street and venture (vulture) capitalism, but all indications are that it will probably prove either minor or altogether irrelevant. Sanders may have been a True Believer at one time, but he has clearly been co-opted. Big tech and the major multi-nationals appear to be off-limits completely. It remains to be seen how or if Bloomberg is able to explain his way out of his support for “stop-and-frisk” while mayor of New York to the Woke Golems.

On the other side of the aisle, the Center for Responsive Politics informs us that Bloomberg has donated to the Republican National Committee, the Republican Party of Massachusetts, New Jersey Republican State Committee, New York Republican Federal Campaign Committee, and the New York Republican County Committee, as well as current Maine Senator Susan Collins, former Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, Mitt Romney, Orrin Hatch, John McCain, George Bush, George W. Bush, and Rudy Giuliani. He donated $250,000 to Mississippi Conservatives in 2014 and in that same year, donated another $250,000 to West Main Street Values, a single-candidate super-PAC in support of Lindsey Graham. The following year, while Graham was gearing up for a presidential bid of his own, as Ben Kamisar reported in late July 2015:

Of the total [$2.9 million raised since March], $200,000 came from a super-PAC that supported Graham’s Senate bid, West Main Street Values PAC Inc….Ronald Perelman,[27] the billionaire investor that’s a member of Graham’s national finance team, also gave a half-million. Access Industries, a holding company that owns Warner Music Group and others, also donated that same sum…General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt gave $25,000 to the group, as did Boston philanthropist Theodore Cutler.[28] Graham appeared at a fundraiser for the group in March, which was co-chaired by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson. Adelson doesn’t appear to have given to the super-PAC directly, but another co-chair, former American Enterprise Institute board member Roger Hertog,[29] donated $100,000 a week after the event.[30] 

Access Industries is owned by the Jewish Len Blavatnik. “So you see, my dear Coningsby,” the Jewish Benjamin Disraeli wrote in his novel Coningsby,[31] “that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” It is my goal—and if I may be so bold as to speak for others, that of the other writers at the Occidental Observer and other dissident voices I’m sure—to shoulder our way into the conversation and show plainly the architects of this modern horror show. With any luck, figures like Steyer and Bloomberg will continue to drop the mask and show the public who they really are, making our job that much easier. To combat the pernicious agenda of the globalist establishment, we must first understand it. We must know the what’s, the when’s, the where’s, the who’s, the why’s, and the how’s and proceed accordingly.


[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-donors-prominent-in-presidential-campaign-contributions/

[2] Jewish.

[3] Jewish.

[4] Jewish.

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rubin

[6] https://www.sun-sentinel.com/florida-jewish-journal/fl-jj-shalala-decades-israel-congress-20181219-story.html

[7] Ibid.

[8] https://www.wikizero.com/en/Lazard

[9] https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,790199,00.html

[10] https://www.wikizero.com/en/Andr%C3%A9_Meyer

[11] Jewish.

[12] Jewish ancestry.

[13] https://www.wikizero.com/en/Felix_Rohatyn

[14] Jewish.

[15] Jewish. “You know, I remember when I was young hearing my grandfather ask, apropos of almost anything—‘So, is it good or bad for the Jews?’”

[16] Jewish.

[17] Jewish.

[18] Jewish.

[19] Jewish.

[20] It was designed as the headquarters for what became the Seagram Company with the active interest of Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of Samuel Bronfman who acquired Joseph E. Seagram & Sons in 1928. Much of the family’s initial fortune was gained from bootlegging. The Bronfmans are Jewish and are immensely powerful and influential from their legacy of having owned and grown the Seagram Company into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise with diverse holdings. The building is owned by the Jewish Aby Rosen’s RFR Holdings.

[21] Jewish.

[22] “A top New York political consultant who went to prison for masterminding a massive state pension fund scandal has won parole, officials said Tuesday. Hank Morris, the longtime political guru to disgraced state Controller Alan Hevesi, is scheduled to be released no later than June 3 from the Hudson Correctional Facility and be under community supervision until Feb. 18, 2015. ‘I’d say that he’s very happy,’ said Morris lawyer Orlee Goldfeld. ‘It’s been a long time coming.’” https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/digraced-ex-controller-hevesi-aide-corruption-free-article-1.1325828

[23] Jewish.

[24] Jewish.

[25] https://www.wikizero.com/en/Steven_Rattner

[26] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/11/bloomberg-enters-presidential-primary/

[27] Jewish.

[28] Jewish.

[29] Jewish.

[30] https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/fundraising/249802-graham-super-pac-raises-nearly-3m

[31] “Coningsby, or The New Generation is an English political novel by Benjamin Disraeli, published in 1844. It is rumored to be based on Nathan Mayer Rothschild. According to Disraeli’s biographer, Robert Blake, the character of Sidonia is a cross between Lionel de Rothschild and Disraeli himself.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coningsby_(novel)