The enormous bailout of Wall Street continues to reverberate. By all accounts, part of the dynamic was that public sentiment changed after the enormous drop in the stock market on Monday (Sept. 29) along with dire warnings about the consequences of not passing a bailout. The market then rose in anticipation that a bill would be passed, but when a much enlarged bill was finally passed on Friday, the message from all quarters was that the US was in for a long, deep recession despite the huge infusion of cash. As this is being written, the stock market is again posting huge losses because of fears that the financial meltdown is spreading to Europe.

It would be surprising indeed if such a result didn’t lead to anger and frustration. People have seen their property values plummet and their retirement accounts shrink dramatically. Many face the prospect of losing their job or earning substantially less. Some analysts have argued that even with the rescue plan we still face a financial Armageddon.

It’s natural under such circumstances to seek someone to blame — especially because this is a man-made disaster rather than a part of the normal business cycle. Conservatives have focused their ire on the pressure that the Democrats in Congress (e.g., Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, Maxine Waters) brought to bear on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower lending standards for minorities.Steve Sailer has shown that Karl Rove and the Bush administration were into it up to their eyeballs in an attempt to wring a few Latino votes.

The problem with these analyses is not that they are false. The problem is that these partisan perspectives in the end read like politically correct dogma if one leaves out righteous indignation directed at Wall Street itself. Wall Street, after all, is where so much of that bad paper ended up — the bad paper that they weren’t able to unload to others for huge fees before the collapse. Indeed, quite a few financial analysts paint the following picture which is based on a report that appeared on National Public Radio. (See here for an audio version and here for a transcript):

Because of the growth of the global economy, there was a huge pile of money looking for investment vehicles. The vast US mortgage market was an attractive source of relatively high returns compared to US Treasury bonds, so Wall Street developed mortgage-backed securities to tap into this market. There was a huge demand for these securities — so much so that Wall Street didn’t want the party to end when there were no more available mortgages that had been created by traditional credit standards. This led to lowering standards for lending and “financial alchemy” whereby Wall Street created ever more exotic investment vehicles (such as collateralized debt obligations) able to tap into this vast pool of money.

The beauty of the scheme was that everyone was making money hand over fist —  illegal immigrants with no financial assets, real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and the great Wall Street financial firms. Normal homeowners were delighted  because their  homes were going up in value and they were able to refinance their homes and get cash to buy nice stuff.

But none of it could happen without the people at the top of this food chain — Wall Street — coming up with the investment vehicles able to channel this toxic paper to tap into this global pile of money and certifying via credit rating agencies that these products were sound investments. Wall Street was also involved in lobbying and pressuring Congress on issues regarding de-regulation of the financial markets.

Once one accepts that Wall Street itself bears a considerable portion of the blame for this disaster, then it gets interesting.  Much of the debate about the bailout in the media framed the issue as a conflict between “Main Street” and Wall Street. As noted in a previous column, Main Street is basically a code word for middle class whites. And the sticky point is that, as also noted in that editorial, Wall Street is heavily Jewish.

We at The Occidental Observer do not want to prejudge the extent of Jewish involvement in the present situation. This is a complex story whose full details are still emerging. We intend to continue to post articles and commentary on this issue as further information becomes available.

We are not the only ones who have noticed that this dichotomy has overtones of classic anti-Jewish themes. The ADL is concerned about “a dramatic upsurge” in anti-Jewish messages on internet discussion boards devoted to finance and the economy in reaction to the huge bailout of Wall Street. The ADL press release is predictable in its attempt to characterize such outbursts as irrational hatred against Jews: Abe Foxman complains darkly that in times of economic downturns, “The age-old canards [the ADL’s favorite word is ‘canard’] about Jews and money are always just beneath the surface.”

Admittedly, the comments compiled by the ADL tend to be one-liners without any attempt to develop an argument: “[Jews] run Wall Street so they should be to blame. There is at my count roughly 1500 of them that should be in the penitentiary. Not a single one will suffer.”  Another wrote about the Jews that “They love money nothing else, no faith or religion can be so heartless to their victims.” This is about what one can expect to find on public message boards.

The problem is that we all know that there is more than a grain of truth to the claim that Jews run Wall Street, just as there is more than a grain of truth to the claim that Jews run Hollywood. In fact, as we previously pointed out, Benjamin Ginsberg, a prominent social scientist, noted during the 1990s that 50% of Wall Street executives were Jewish.

Nevertheless, the immediate reaction of the ADL is to attempt to stifle any such comments and simply label them as “anti-Semitism.” They applaud attempts to remove these statements as they appear, but complain that “the rate at which new posts are arriving prevents [monitors] from removing all of the objectionable material before it is widely read.”

Such heavy-handed attempts to squelch discussion of Jewish influence can be seen on a wide range of issues, most notably the role of the Israel Lobby in influencing US foreign policy in the Middle East. When John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt published their work on the Israel Lobby, organizations like the ADL were quick to condemn them as anti-Semites and compared their writing to classic anti-Jewish themes in writings like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But the bottom line is that there is no attempt to soberly and rationally determine the real extent of Jewish involvement in this disaster. The  entire topic of Jewish involvement in the financial system is taboo. It is not surprising that the police-state tactics favored by the ADL fuel the flames of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories when all attempts to raise the issue of Jewish influence in the financial system or other areas of American life are met with powerful efforts to enforce silence.

The situation is similar to a previous financial scandal — the one involving Michael Milken, the notorious 1980s junk bond king. As a 1989 National Review article noted, Milken “is Jewish, as were many of his partners and peers. (Indeed, about the only sympathy he has gotten is from those who see his prosecution as an instance of anti-Semitism.)”

Much of the discussion of the Jewish role in this financial scandal centered around the book Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart. Jewish activist Alan Dershowitz called Den of Thieves an “anti-Semitic screed” and attacked a review by Michael M. Thomas in the New York Times Book Review because of his “gratuitous descriptions by religious stereotypes.”  Thomas’s review contained the following passage:

James B. Stewart . . . charts the way through a virtual solar system of peculation, past planets large and small, from a metaphorical Mercury representing the penny-ante takings of Dennis B. Levine’s small fry, past the middling ($10 million in inside-trading profits) Mars of Mr. Levine himself, along the multiple rings of Saturn — Ivan F. Boesky, his confederate Martin A. Siegel of Kidder, Peabody, and Mr. Siegel’s confederate Robert Freeman of Goldman, Sachs — and finally back to great Jupiter: Michael R. Milken, the greedy billion-dollar junk-bond kingdom in which some of the nation’s greatest names in industry and finance would find themselves entrapped and corrupted.

Sounds like a Jewish cabal to us. Thomas later noted that “If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in street crimes are black, that’s an interesting sociological observation. If I point out that nine out of 10 people involved in securities indictments are Jewish, that is an anti-Semitic slur. I cannot sort out the difference. . . .”

Dershowitz pulled out all the stops in this particular campaign — even purc[adrotate group=”1″]hasing a full page ad in the New York Times (at a cost of $450,000) and ads in three other newspapers.

The difference between the current  crisis and the Den of Thieves debacle is that the consequences to the financial system of the current Wall Street disaster are far greater and they are far more likely to have a negative effect on pretty much everyone. When a new version of Den of Thieves describes in detail the Jewish involvement in the current catastrophe, perhaps not even Alan Dershowitz or the ADL will be able to keep the lid on the bottle.

There are other signs of anxiety about accusations of Jewish responsibility for the current financial meltdown. Tim Rutten, who often writes on Jewish issues for the Los  Angeles Times (see here, here, and here), clearly has his  antennae up for overtones of anti-Jewish rhetoric in the current discussion. In a column titled “Mean St. replaces Main St.,” Rutten disputes the Main St. versus Wall St. dichotomy, stating that it has

become a kind of shorthand. Main Street translates as small and rural, virtuous and without guile. Wall Street means urban, greedy and devious. Palin invoked it Thursday, when she proudly labeled herself a “Main Streeter.” So did Joe Biden, in recalling his hardscrabble Scranton roots and the talk at his local Wilmington diner.

The obvious political implication of all this historical symbolism — and that’s really what it is, at this point — is that essentially decent Main Street will prosper if only it is liberated from the oppression of fundamentally venal Wall Street. The problem is that no one is willing to admit honestly that there’s no way to punish Wall Street without punishing everybody else.

Rutten may be right that “there’s no way to punish Wall Street without punishing everybody else.” But that is hardly an argument for forgetting about the very real differences between Wall Street and Main Street.

For people like Rutten, the Main St./Wall St. rhetoric is a short step to populist outrage against Wall Street. It’s an “Us versus Them” kind of thinking that must be squelched at all costs. His column narrowly construes Main St. as people living in rural areas, when it is obvious that, as I have noted previously, the term is a code word for the white middle class. And he conjures Wall St. out of existence by arguing that financial markets are truly national and not centered in Wall St. Nice try. But it’s rather transparently lame.

This latest disaster may well have some very far-reaching effects on political rhetoric about Jews in the US, at least in the absence of a truly Draconian campaign that effectively keeps such rhetoric seething beneath the surface. And given that the financial crisis is now global, keeping Jewish involvement out of the public mind may be more difficult than ever given that many countries do not have the very powerful infrastructure of Jewish activism and media influence present in the US. In the age of the internet, the task of the ADL and activists like Alan Dershowitz is infinitely more  difficult.

Stay tuned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has been a renewed interest recently in a 2002 article by Paul Craig Roberts, actually the first of two (here is the second), drawing attention to a rather frightening phenomenon at Harvard University: the effort by a professor, Noel Ignatiev, and his journal, Race Traitor, to promote the “cultural and psychological genocide of whites.”

Now that’s an odd choice of words—guaranteed to draw attention to himself and his ideas. Was he in any way also promoting the slaughter or liquidation of whites, as some of his adversaries have suggested? Ignatiev says no. In his words,

We frequently get letters accusing us of being “racists,” just like the KKK, and have even been called a “hate group.” …

Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc….

Ignatiev et al. have developed a story that goes as follows: A bunch of very bad people got together and created a category called “white” to which they belong but people with different colored skin can’t belong. Then they made laws that favored people in the white category, they colluded with other whites to dominate the economic and political process, and they invented baseless scientific theories in which whiteness had its roots in real biological differences.  

All Ignatiev’s written material that we’ve seen carries the same odd message with the same extreme wording. He talks about the supposed privileges white people have just because they are in the white category, even though we all know that the only racial privileges in the US are affirmative action laws and various subterfuges that favor non-whites at the expense of whites. These practices result in blacks being overrepresented in high status jobs if one controls for IQ and test scores. And it even results in people like Ward Churchill exaggerating their non-whiteness in order to become beneficiaries of this largesse.

Ignative writes darkly and dramatically of “abolishing the white race,” “genocide of whites,” etc. When pressed, he emphasizes that that he doesn’t really mean killing people who call themselves white. He only wants to destroy the concept of whiteness.

So he’s off the hook, right?

I don’t think so. Try this analogy. We all know that blacks and Jews have a far stronger sense of their racial/ethnic identity and interests than whites. Consider voting: Around 90% of blacks and 80% of Jews vote Democrat. So does that mean that we can say we are in favor of abolishing the black race? Does that mean that we can say we are in favor of the genocide of Jews? And when the forces of political correctness descend upon us for making such statements, can we make everyone happy just by saying that all we meant is that blacks and Jews shouldn’t identify so strongly with their group that they do things like vote the same way. I think not.

Perhaps even Harvard, that bastion of anti-white political correctness, was bothered by Ignatiev’s rhetoric. Ignatiev left Harvard and is now peddling his poison at Massachusetts College of Art. Ignatiev must have felt right at home at Harvard since Harvard is notorious for discriminating against non-Jewish whites: While giving special preferences to blacks and Latinos, only 35% of Harvard students are non-Jewish whites — around half their representation in the population.

Beyond his outrageous rhetoric designed to call attention to himself, it seems to us that Ignatiev is engaging in a clever subterfuge, worthy of the best Talmudic slight-of-hand. The trick involves first adhering to the PC notion that “races” are only “social constructs” as opposed to being creatures whose biology, psychology and culture are inextricably entangled. Coupled with this notion is the other thread running through the ideology of this son of Russian Jewish immigrants, a legacy of his communist days, is an extreme egalitarianism that brooks no social hierarchy, at least one in which “whites” are at the top.

All this has allowed him and his protégés to vent their hatred for whites without being accused of doing so. Their hatred assumes a surface legitimacy because the hated “whites” are just a “social construct.” It’s not really about killing people, so where’s the beef? The “genocide” of whites is not about homicide or suicide; it’s only about getting white people to stop thinking that they are white.

Our interpretation is that Ignatiev’s views are nothing more than ethnic competition. As a leftist Jew, he is part of a long tradition that has opposed white interests and identity — the culture of critique that has become the culture of Western suicide. And like so many  strongly identified Jews, his hatred for the people and culture of the West comes shining through.

Notice that if Ignatiev were sincerely opposed to ethnic competition, he would have criticized all sorts of peoples and individuals around the world for thinking of themselves as belonging to a racial/ethnic category. After all, what’s left when there is no more category of whiteness? There will still be people with white skin who can trace their genetic ancestry to Europe but who have lost all sense of belonging to a racial category. And there will still be people who categorize themselves as Jews and blacks and Asians and various subdivisions of Asians. These people will continue to have a sense of racial/ethnic identity and they will continue to act on the basis of this identity. Only whites will be left without an identity and hence without weapons in the racial/ethnic struggle. Why doesn’t he campaign to get rid of these other categories?

And when only whites are left without an identity and hence without weapons in the racial/ethnic struggle, it doesn’t take much imagination to suppose that actual genocide of whites is the next step.

And yes, there is a hard biological reality to racial and ethnic differences. The theory that these are nothing but a social construct is itself a social construct — a social construct in the service of ethnic competition of people like Ignatiev who advance them.

What is so striking in the recent intellectual history of the West is that people like Ignatiev, who doubtless have a strong sense of their own ethnic identity and interests, have managed to pathologize any sense of ethnic identity and interests among Europeans and European-derived peoples — and no one else.

Ignatiev is just another Jewish intellectual in a long line that stretches back to Franz Boas, the Frankfurt School, and myriad others who now dominate the culture of Western suicide. He may call himself a race traitor, but there is every reason to believe that he has a sense of allegiance to his own people and the long history of hostility to the people and culture of the West that is so typical of highly committed Jews. For him, being a race traitor comes easily and naturally; it’s the mother’s milk of socialization as a Jew.

So do read Paul Craig Roberts first essay beginning below, and his second, and ask yourself where cultural critique leaves off and de facto support for, say, blacks murdering whites begins?

Harvard Hates the White Race?

By Paul Craig Roberts

vdare.com, September 4, 2002

Is the multicultural campaign really about diversity? Or is it about stamping out Western civilization and the “white race” itself?

College students will tell you that a university education today is a guilt trip for whites. The purpose is to prevent whites from appreciating and absorbing their own culture and to make it difficult for whites to resist the unreasonable demands (quotas, reparations, etc.) from “people of color.”

To the questions, “who am I, what am I,” the white university graduate answers: “a racist, sexist, homophobic oppressor.”

Neither parents, trustees, alumni, nor the public are aware of the anti-white propaganda that masquerades as education. When someone who is aware tells them, they think the person is exaggerating in order to make a point.

Now comes Harvard educated Noel Ignatiev, an academic at Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research. Dr. Ignatiev is the founder of a journal, Race Traitor, which has as its motto, “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

The journal’s purpose is ‘to abolish the white race.’

At the least, Dr. Ignatiev intends cultural and psychological genocide for whites. It is unclear whether physical extermination is part of the program. A statement by the editors on the web site says that the new abolitionists

“do not limit themselves to socially acceptable means of protest, but reject in advance no means of attaining their goal.” [more]

[Part II, titled “Mugabe Or Harvard: Who Hates Whites More?”, is here.]