A Tale of Two Rich Guys, Haim Saban and Charles T. Munger

A Sacramento Bee op-ed by Dan Morain points out that the motives for all the money going into a California ballot proposition on redistricting are hidden from the public. The two men couldn’t be more different. Haim Saban, the billionaire media tycoon, wants the politicians to redraw boundaries so that the Congressional seat of Howard Berman, a Jewish politician who is strongly pro-Israel  is protected from the ever expanding Latino population. As Morain notes, Saban’s only motivation in life is to advance the cause of the Jewish state, famously telling the New York Times “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

It’s interesting that activist Jews are now worried that there will be fewer Jewish politicians with the rise of the same minorities that Jewish activist organizations have been so eager to populate the country with. Organizations like the ADL have expressed concerned that new ethnic blocs will not be appropriately sympathetic to Jewish causes such as Israel. Their solution is not to try to stem the tide of non-White immigration but to make political alliances with the new arrivals and, as indicated by Saban’s actions, skew the political process in a way where Jewish political assets (particularly money) will still be effective.

Charles T. Munger is a completely different story. Munger, a Stanford physicist,  is also very wealthy, his wealth stemming from his father’s partnership with Warren Buffet. Munger wants a citizen’s panel to draw the redistricting lines in the hopes that politics will be less partisan — a position that sounds like high-minded idealism. As a Republican, he may well want more  Republicans, but as Morain notes, he is almost certainly wrong about that. If he really wanted to have more Republicans elected, he should have invested his money in anti-immigration efforts. No matter how California is redistricted, Latinos and other minorities are going to continue to increase in political power while Whites are increasingly dispossessed.

So Munger is tilting at windmills while Saban is helping his people. There is a great deal of wealth controlled by people like Munger, but in general its wasted on things like this. As I noted in an earlier blog:

One of the biggest problems for European-Americans is that wealthy non-Jews seem far more interested in funding the opera or getting their name on a building at the local university than in helping their people. A good example is the Chandler family who formerly owned the L. A. Times. They had no interest in the media, and the company is now controlled by Sam Zell, who is Jewish. The family remains wealthy but in general seems to be involved in finding fun and interesting ways to spend their time (one of them flies around the world to attend the opera; another is into building outsize model trains) rather than influencing the world.

Munger is more politically involved than the Chandlers, but his efforts are absolutely useless in really achieving anything remotely beneficial to Republicans — or, more importantly, White Californians.