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New York Times Spins Black Murders Into Excuse to Ban Homeschooling

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Homeschooling is widely feared by the multicultural establishment because it is seen as a way for “racist” whites to shield their children from liberal indoctrination.  But arguments against it are difficult to make.  With few exceptions, most Americans consider the right to raise children as one sees fit as inviolable.

Meanwhile, never-ending examples of black pathology and criminality are deemed by the same multicultural establishment as mere aberrations, not indicative of any racial pattern worth considering.  If anything, it is some failure of the white “system” to address “underlying needs” that is responsible.

In a recent act of dizzying spin, the New York Times has found a way to advance both these agendas in a single story.

In Washington, D.C., a black mother has been charged with the murder of her four children, whose bodies were found recently in a state of advanced decomposition.  A monstrous act that finds more frequent expression among America’s inner-city black populations?  No, guess again.

An excuse to ban homeschooling.

Nowhere in the story by reporter Jane Gross is there support for the contention that the mother was in fact homeschooling her children.  It remains to be seen how she came to this conclusion.  Did the mother fill out an application for withdrawal from the school system? Appear on homeschooling support lists?  Purchase homeschooling curricula?  Gross does not say.

But assuming even a trace level of credibility to the idea that the woman, Benita M. Jacks, was “homeschooling” her children, rather than simply withdrawing them (or letting them withdraw), the connection between this overwhelming white, suburban or rural practice and the grisly murders in Washington, D.C. is simply fantastic. Ms. Jacks reportedly said she killed her children because they were possessed by demons.

So why not a story about mental illness, then?  No, it’s homeschooling in reporter Gross’s sights.  She lines up an impressive array of “experts” to wax on that “officials” are all of a sudden unable to monitor children in the evil and shadowy practice of homeschooling.  It is rather like a story following the “Twinkie defense” to murder quoting nutritionist after nutritionist warning that unless we ban sugar, murder in America will run rampant.  The reporter’s agenda could not be clearer.

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As a cosmopolitan journalist for the New York Times (and presumably Jewish), Jane Gross has probably never met a homeschooled child or homeschooling family, imagining them all to be cross-burning white Kentuckians in desperate need of “surveillance” by liberal-minded “authorities” who will subject them to presentations on the Holocaust and posters of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez.

The natural result of this episode and its spin by the New York Times is that a practice of whites will become discredited, and the behavior of blacks excused.  It is yet another example of the way in which the dominant media not only ignores the legitimate interests of whites, it actively campaigns against them.

Kind Words of ‘Conservatives’ for Obama

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Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post tracks what he describes as the “conservative” press singing the praises of Sen. Barack Obama, winner of the Iowa caucuses.

His first example?  A gushing quote from David Brooks, whom Kurtz calls the “conservative New York Times columnist.”  Yet Brooks, who like Kurtz is Jewish, is not, by the record of his writings, remotely conservative.  If anything, he counts as an occasionally thoughtful moderate, which tells you something about the ideological spectrum calibration of the New York Times.

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Meanwhile, the power of Kurtz to boost his co-ethnic Brooks, both of whom in turn boost Obama, illuminates the ability of the Jewish network to steer America’s political ship in its direction by defining the boundaries of “left” and “right”.  Surprise!  Both flanks are covered by Jews.

For additional nausea, scroll through the comments of the others selected by Kurtz, like Bill Bennett declaring that Obama “appeals to the better angels of all our natures.”  In other words, if you’re not getting goose bumps about Obama, you’re a racist.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

Bernie Madoff’s Jewishness

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The Bernie Madoff scandal is endlessly fascinating. As the media has emphasized, many of his victims were Jews and Jewish organizations. Madoff’s behavior violated a cardinal rule of Jewish business ethics which is based on trust within the group. Indeed, a New York Times article commenting on effects in the real estate industry noted that

the outsize impact on the industry may have resulted largely because Mr. Madoff … managed his funds much the way that real estate leaders [i.e., Jews]have operated successfully for decades: He provided little information and demanded a lot of trust.

“You have a lot of wealthy people who made a lot of money on handshakes,” said Mark S. Weiss, a commercial real estate broker at Newmark Knight Frank, where several brokers had invested heavily with Mr. Madoff. There was “something about this person, pedigree and reputation that inspired trust,” he said.

And the main thing about Madoff’s pedigree that inspired trust among his fellow Jews was simply that he is Jewish. He  traveled in all the best Jewish circles:  on the board of Yeshiva University, a major donator to Jewish and Israeli charities, hobnobbing at Jewish country clubs, and living in upscale Jewish ghettos on Long Island, Palm Beach, and the upper eastside of Manhattan.

The Madoff scandal is a textbook example of how ethnic networks operate — and their pitfalls.  In traditional Jewish society, like other middlemen groups, business relationships are based on the assumption that one can trust one’s co-ethnic. Indeed, Janet Landa notes that this was one of the reasons for the success of middlemen minority groups, such as the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia:Close ethnic bonds lower the costs of doing business because there is greater trust within the ethnic group than between ethnic groups. This was certainly true in traditional Jewish society, where a handshake with a co-ethnic was enough to seal the deal, but business with outsiders was undertaken with much less trust.

The Madoff story from the beginning was presented by the media as a Jewish story. This almost certainly is because Madoff got his start among Jewish investors and because some of his victims were Jews. It was not because Madoff was Jewish.

Consider Michael Milken, the notorious 1980s junk bond king, who pled guilty to securities and reporting violations and was sentenced to ten years in prison. (He served less than two years — and is now asking George W. Bush for a pardon.) In that case, the mere mention of Milken and his cronies with all those Jewish names was enough to ignite a major uproar complete with accusations of anti-Semitism. Jewish activist Alan Dershowitz was center stage, even purchasing a full page ad in the New York Times (at a cost of $450,000) and ads in three other newspapers.

To get an idea of  how innocuous the references to Jews were during the Milken scandal, the following is the offending paragraph from a review of James B. Stewart’s Den of Thieves by Michael M. Thomas in the New York Times Book Review:  

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.

Merely a listing of Jewish names was sufficient to bring down the wrath of the Jewish activists.

But Madoff’s Jewishness is front and center in this scandal. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times ran articles within a day of each other with statements from various Jewish luminaries reaffirming Jewish ethics and recounting the sense of betrayal Jews felt because Jews were among the victims.

However, the Jews-as-victims angle is at least a double edged sword. As in the Milken case, the default  strategy is to proscribe any mention that a person like Madoff, who feeds into all the negative Jewish stereotypes, is Jewish. Indeed, some voices within the Jewish community are bemoaning the fact that Madoff’s Jewishness is so central to the media coverage. For example, in a letter to theNew York Times, David A. Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee wrote, “Yes, he is Jewish. We get it. But was this relevant to his being arrested for cheating investors, or so key to his evolution as a businessman that it needed to be hammered home again and again?”

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I strongly suspect that the answer to Harris’s question is ‘yes’. For one thing, Madoff seems to have personified the sort of guru I wrote about in The Culture of Critique:  Someone with a great deal of personal charisma and a following that can only be described as adulatory. Madoff “was a legend in his social and financial circles, a giant; like a rock-star in that world, that financial realm. His clients thought he was a genius. People literally begged him to take their money.”

Like the movements described in The Culture of Critique, Madoff’s scheme began within the Jewish community and then spread like a virus to the surrounding society. The analogy with a Jewish intellectual guru like Freud is striking (including the fact that both may be labeled charlatans). Like all of Madoff’s original investors, all of the original psychoanalysts were Jews. Like Madoff, Freud was idolized by Jews generally. Historian Dennis B. Klein notes that Jews “treated [Freud] as if he were ‘a God-fearing Chief Rabbi,’ or ‘a national hero.’ ” And, as noted above, Madoff was a pillar of the Jewish community. There is more than one way to become a pillar of the Jewish community, but without doubt the main one is to be a major donor to Jewish causes, and Madoff certainly fit that profile.

Madoff got his start as a macher (big shot) within the Jewish community, but he certainly went well beyond that. Just as Freud recruited non-Jews like Ernest Jones to front the psychoanalytic movement, Madoff formed relationships with  non-Jews who operated feeder funds that attracted largely non-Jewish money.  Indeed, the New York Times notes that “if the wealthy Jewish world he occupied was his launch pad, the wealthy promoters he cultivated at Fairfield Greenwich were his booster rocket.”

The Fairfield Sentry fund, headed by Walter Noel (who is not Jewish),  was the largest feeder fund for Madoff, with a total value of $7.5 billion before the collapse — a sum that dwarfs the reported losses from individual Jews and from Jewish charities. 95% of its money was from foreign investors, mostly from Europe. And the bulk of the rest of the major losers were European and Asian banks.

Another large conduit for non-Jewish money from Europe was Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet whose Access International Advisors lost $1.4 billion. Mr. de la Villehuchet committed suicide because of guilt over his role in losing so much of other people’s money:  “If you ruin your friends, your clients, you have to face the consequences,” as his brother framed it. I can’t help quoting the New York Times on Mr. Villehuchet’s death because his suicide seems to be the only shred of nobility in all of this.

Mr. de la Villehuchet’s attitude appears to be rare. So far, the leading players in Mr. Madoff’s case have maintained a stony silence, studiously avoiding apologies or statements of responsibility.

Mr. Madoff’s sons have said nothing about how they could have worked at their father’s firm for decades without noticing that the money he supposedly managed did not exist. The accountants and regulators who were supposed to protect investors have not explained their failure to do so. And the hedge funds that invested tens of billions of dollars with Mr. Madoff despite obvious red flags have said the fraud was his fault, not theirs.

Assigning the precise role of Jewishess in this scandal will take some time. As in all Ponzi schemes, the early investors are the winners, and in this case we know that Jews were the early investors and that at least some of them made money overall. (Editorial note, January 27, 2009: Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, originally invested $40 million with Madoff, and claimed that they lost $90 when the fund collapsed. They recently announced that they withdrew $130 million since 1989 from this account. In addition, they also had profits of $50 million from another account with Madoff.) (However, there is legal precedent for the winners being required to forfeit their gains, at least from the last 6 years, so some of these ill-gotten gains may be forfeited.) And we know that the really big money came from non-Jews who invested later in the scheme. (See James Murray’s TOO article.)

We are still unclear on the role of Jewishness in the lax oversight of the fund. We do know that Jonathan Sokobin, whose job was to monitor market risks for the SEC, did not respond to the critique of Madoff made by Harry Marcopolos, a former employee of a firm that competed with Madoff. We also know that Madoff boasted that his niece, who was a compliance officer for Madoff’s firm, had married a former SEC regulator. And we know that in 2006 Madoff sailed through an examination by the SEC based on Markopolos’s allegations, being required only to register with the SEC as an investment advisor.

An adequate account would be based on interviews of all the participants in the oversight process in order to shed light on their motivation. These motivations may range from unconscious biases in favor of Madoff because of ethnic ties to active collusion.

Biases resulting from Madoff’s status as a macher in the Jewish community are a likely possibility. It would be a bit like having a Jewish psychologist in charge of deciding the scientific status of Freud. The psychologist might consciously attempt to be objective, but the status of Freud as a Jewish folk hero might well get in the way of an unbiased appraisal. It is like questioning the truthfulness of God. In the end, that may be what we are dealing with here.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.
KevinMacDonald.net

Bernie Madoff’s Ethno-Nepotistic Ponzi Scheme

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Haaretz has run an article claiming that anti-Semites will jump on Madoff’s $56 billion fraud against Jewish investors to besmirch the good name of Jews. Some Jews have proclaimed Madoff’s fraud to be a new Kristallnacht. The Jewish Journal connects Madoff to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Some Jews eveninsist that “Christmas came early” for anti-Semites because of the collapse of the Madoff scheme, implying that some Jews think that Christmas is a holiday of pure hatred toward Jews. Perhaps.

However, the demographics of the Madoff scheme deserve some ethnic analysis: Was this really a story about how a Jewish turncoat victimizes Jewish-millionaire Holocaust survivors, leading to gloating among anti-Semites at Christmastime? Or … could it be that the dirty little secret of the Madoff scheme that Jews are desperate to conceal is that Jews were not the victims but rather the beneficiaries of the scheme?

First, it is important to realize that Jews lost only a relatively small amount of the money in Madoff’s fraud scheme. As the New York Times shows, those who invested early and withdrew profits — many of them presumably Jews — did not lose a penny but rather profited rather grandly.

Second, a quick glance at the table in the December 17, 2008 Wall Street Journal (reproduced below) makes clear that of the top 30 investors in the fund, only 2 are Jewish, and relatively small investors at that. Granted, the list is incomplete. It omits, for the sake of respect I suppose, the $37 million reportedly lost by Elie Wiesel and his foundation (modestly named after himself). (As an aside, it should be noted that Wiesel, the Holocaust promoter and Jewish moralizer, is absolutely indifferent to the extermination of the Palestinians.)

Although many other versions of this table have appeared (and many major investors who lost will try to keep their identity secret), it is worth noting that the identifiable Jewish share of monies lost through Madoff in this compilation of victims is precisely 2.31%. While this omits the Jewish petty-millionaires who were the mainstay of Madoff’s scheme for decades, even if there are 1000 Jewish petty-millionaires, the Jewish share of the Ponzi scheme is surely less than 5%. And since the best compilation so far argues for only 2.31% of the victims being Jewish, are the crocodile tears of Jewish columnists for the Jewish millionaire-victims really appropriate? One is reminded of the Jewish book on the Katyn Forest Massacre, in which 20,000 Polish Catholics and a few   identified Jews were slaughtered: Of course, that book, written by a Jew, focuses only on the few Jewish victims. The non-Jewish victims are simply meaningless. Then and now.

There are many articles about Jewish petty-millionaries who have lived on their profits from Madoff for years or decades of retirement (10–20% a year in payouts). (See here, here, and here.) These articles make the structure of this Ponzi scheme immediately clear. That there was something wrong was certainly clear to many investors; they just did not know what was wrong. Anecdotally, many Jewish investors thought they were buying into a long-lived insider trading scam. Does the fact that some of Madoff’s early Jewish investors always believed that their “profits” were derived from financial crimes make them more or less sympathetic? 

Madoff is described as having spent decades building a carefully structured Ponzi scheme (which large European investors note was one of the American investments highest rated for return and being risk-free for decades by the SEC and rating services). Yet, Madoff’s scheme was something else and something more: It was, in fact an Ethno-Nepotistic-Ponzi scheme, a Ponzi scheme where most of the payouts were to the investors of the same ethnicity as the conspirators.

And here is how it worked:

In the first period (perhaps two decades), beginning in the 1960s, Madoff ran a carefully structured Ponzi scheme, possibly beginning when he really could not get the returns he thought he could get by legitimate means. But once started, there was no turning back. Madoff’s genius (linked to guaranteed super-safe investment ratings from the rating agencies) was to have the larger investors reinvest a lot of their imaginary “profits”, while using their money to keep the scheme going. Madoff carefully structured his scheme and limited the number of investors. (He was notorious for refusing to accept all potential investors—many relate how they begged him for years before he allowed them to invest; many joined his country clubs just to stalk him. And I suspect he required a high rate of reinvestment). Madoff was therefore able to meet the payouts he promised since so much of the imaginary “profits” were simply reinvested and because bigger non-Jewish investors were brought in to keep the scheme going.

If investors could be held to 1% a month payoffs (and this was a typical rate of payoffs), it would take 8 years, 4 months before a given investor would use up their own money in “profit” payouts. If Madoff could convince an investor to take only 0.5% a month in payouts (or less: many Jewish charities appear to have taken such lower rates of “profit” payouts), Madoff would have 16 years, 8 months before he would have to use someone else’s money to maintain the stream of “profit” payouts. These modest, if impossibly consistent returns, differentiate Madoff from normal Ponzi schemes that pay out big early on but crash and burn within a year or two. Madoff built his scheme to run for decades. These long term horizons — on the order of a decade or so — required that Madoff restructure his scheme periodically.

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The first decade or two saw Madoff operate real money-making securities services and begin to collect his portfolio of million-dollar investors. At the beginning of this period he built an innovative, heavily computerized and successful financial services business. On top of this real and profitable business, he slowly started building a portfolio of unsophisticated Jewish investors, many of whom placed their life savings with him. These are the Jewish petty-millionaire ($1–3 million) investors everyone has been crying about in the newspapers. Many of them drew substantial cash payoffs for decades — payouts that were often multiples of what they invested.

Towards the end of this period, Jewish-Zionist charities and Jewish-segregated schools came into the system, but few were as large as $10 million, and all can be presumed to have profited from Madoff’s fraud. For example, Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization, was one charity that came in at this time: Its initial $7 million investment in 1988 would be supplemented by $33 million over the next decade until 1998. By including paper profits, Hadassah would ultimately claim to have lost $90 million with Madoff; that is: 7 + 33 = 90.

It is actually worse than this, since Hadassah may have actually lost nothing at all.A quick and dirty estimate of Hadassah “profits” suggests that if Hadassah had averaged $23.5 million in 1988–1998 and left all its “profits” with Madoff, there should have been about $64 million in their account, not $40 million in 1998 as reported, suggesting that Hadassah could have drawn as much as $24 million in “profits” in the first decade. Similarly, if Hadassah had started 1998 with $40 million as they report, 1% per month would yield $110 million, not $90 million as they report now, suggesting that Hadassah withdrew as much as another $20 million in the second decade with Madoff. Hadassah could have withdrawn as much as $44 million from the $40 million they invested with Madoff, and this would mean that Hadassah’s losses are not the $40 million actually invested, or the $90 million as they now claim, but rather no more than zero.

(Incidentally, some newspapers are so terrified of Jews that they will not even print the word “Zionist” unless it is in the address of a letter to the editor from an imperious Zionist organization: The cringing, terrorized Seattle Post-Intelligencerwill only call Hadassah, which is officially “The Women’s Zionist Organization of America,” “a Jewish women’s charity.”)

Interestingly, Madoff was so immune from regulatory oversight that he would not even be correctly registered as an investment firm until 2006, when SEC investigators were credibly informed that Madoff had committed numerous violations but settled for asking him to please, please, please register his firm in an appropriate manner… after it had been operating outside the law for over 40 years!!!! (Madoff would marry off a daughter, Shana, to one of the investigators in that 2006 inquiry.)

The second decade or so began with the need for investors at least in the $10 million range, since the costs of the scheme kept growing. By the end of the decade he apparently needed investors in the $50 million range. This phase saw the development of the “feeder” system, in which investment companies — often Jewish-controlled — marketed Madoff’s services to larger, non-Jewish investors, worldwide. For example, in the mid-1990s, Jacob Ezra Merkin, from one of the most distinguished rabbinical families in world Judaism, president of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York, head of the investment committee for the UJA-Federation of New York, and manager of Ascot Partners, brought in Elie Wiesel’s Foundation for Humanity. Four of the five largest “losers” in the Madoff scheme are feeder operators who lost essentially nothing of their own: Fairfield Greenwich Advisors, Tremont Capital Management, Ascot Partners, and Access International Advisors brought in other investors and lost their money for them. The end of this period came in 1999–2000: The result was that, as recently as 1999, Madoff rejected an investment by Jeffrey R. Gural, chairman of Newmark Knight Frank because he could not invest at least $20 million. By 1999, $20 million was too trivial a sum to bother with at this point in Madoff’s scheme. Madoff was entering the third and final stage of his scheme, and it required globalization and much, much larger investors.

The last decade saw bigger and bigger investors, like European banks, Arab institutional investors, a Korean pension, maybe a Saudi prince, etc., who put in hundreds of millions or billions and got nothing at all back, or very little. The costs of the scheme kept growing. This period was the heyday of the feeder system: Fairfield Greenwich Advisors, Tremont Capital Management, Ascot Partners, and Access International Advisors were bringing in billions now, and almost none of it was from Jews. The investment by Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which placed $400 million with Madoff in 2005, is typical of the third and final period. It was large, it was non-Jewish, it was used to pay early Jewish investors, and was unusual only in the fact that Abu Dhabi Investment Authority got cold feet and pulled out $268 million in redemptions in 2005 and 2006. Bank Medici of Austria became a sub-feeder collecting monies from smaller investors in New York, Vienna, Gibraltar, Zurich and Milan, through its hedge funds in the United States and Luxembourg: Its investors were happy with 7% a year.

And the money still poured into the hands of Jewish “investors”, including the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, and the Jewish retired petty-millionaires of Florida, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Minnesota, etc. Year after year, they received their “profits”, extracted from unknowing, duped investors from Singapore to Dublin, from Spain to South Korea.

So, it is clear that there were at least three categories of investors:

(1) The core Jewish petty-millionaire investors, who made a lot of money for decades, living richly on their “profits” from Madoff’s fund. As the New York Times admits, many made a lot of money.

(2) More recent Jewish charities who agreed to reinvest a lot of their “profits”, like Wiesel’s loot from the Holocaust-trade: These investors got good payoffs but reinvested most of it. These people could have lost a little, but if they were really greedy they were easily suckered into big, consistent reinvestments, accumulating only large imaginary paper “profits.” In this cohort of investors, actual loses are entirely correlated with excessive greed: If they let their “profits” accumulate without payouts, they could have lost everything.

(3) The non-Jews, like Banco Santander, HSBC Holdings PLC, Royal Bank of Scotland, BNP Paribas, etc., who invested large amounts of money recently and who probably got nothing or next to nothing from Madoff. These investors now know that all their money disappeared into the hands of groups (1) and (2) and Madoff and his buddies. (Incidentally, Madoff and his family made a lot of money: One family investment firm alone had $160 million in assets until it was seized last week.)

There never was a group (4) because the market melted down and Madoff could not find people big enough to fund the next generation of the scam. (Although he did reportedly scam a Saudi Prince for $3 billion.) In fact, one finds Jeffrey Tucker, a feeder partner in Fairfield Greenwich Group complaining, in an article in HedgeWorld in November 2007, that Chinese and Thai investors are stupid and unsophisticated because they will not provide money to Madoff. When investors sought $7 billion in redemptions in November 2008, the end was near.

A careful reader will note that there were real winners. We will call them the Jews, since they were Jews, This group would ultimately have large losses of imaginary paper “profits.” And there were big losers. Let’s call them the Goys or the Suckers, since they are non-Jews. Of course, the difference between these groups is their ethnicity. It is worth noting that the Wall Street Journal and theNew York Times, and the mass media in general, see this as a fraud that essentially affected only Jews. As we have seen, this is the exact opposite of the truth. Jews were winners, and non-Jews were losers.

To repeat: in Madoff’s scheme, Jews were winners, and non-Jews were losers. It was not just a Ponzi scheme, it was a Ponzi scheme structured around a massive transfer of wealth to one’s own ethnic group, a kind of previously undescribed Ethno-Nepotistic-Ponzi scheme.

Finally, this suggests that the real reason why Haaretz and Abe Foxman are so hysterical about the Madoff scandal and its possible effect of increasing anti-semitism is not because they fear irrational goyim who are overly eager to paint all Jews with the traits of Bernie Madoff. It is that there simply were very few real Jewish victims and quite a few non-Jewish victims: The so-called Jewish victims actually made money. And they made millions and millions and millions.

James Murray is the pen name of an academic sociologist.

Appendix 1: Wall Street Journal List of Madoff’s Victims.

[There are many omissions from this Wall Street Journal list, like that of Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust profits foundation with $37 million in exposure. And the Lapin foundation that was simply vaporized last week.]

* Indicates Jewish investors.

Table 1: “Madoff’s Victims: A List of Reported Victims and Their Exposure”, in Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2008. p. A14.

(Victims For Whom No Exposure Amount Is Available Are Not Shown.)

Fairfield Greenwich Advisors (investment management firm): $7500 million.

Tremont Capital Management (fund of funds run by Tremont Group Holdings): $3300 million.

Banco Santander SA (Spanish bank): $2870 million.

Ascot Partners (hedge fund frounded by GMAC chief J. Ezra Merkin): $1800 million.

Access International Advisors (New York investment firm): $1400 million.

Fortis Bank Nederland NV (Dutch bank): $1350 million.

Union Bancaire Privee (Swiss bank): $1000 million.

HSBC Holdings PLC (British bank): $1000 million.

Natixis SA (French investment bank): $560 million.

*Carl Shapiro (former chairman Kay Windsor Inc.): $550 million.

Royal Bank of Scotland (British Bank): $492.76 million.

BNP Paribas (French Bank): $431.17 million.

BBVA (Spanish bank): $369,57 million.

Man Group PLC (British hedge fund): $360 million.

Reichmuth & Co. (Swiss private bank): $327 million.

Nomura Holdings Ltd. (Japanese brokerage house): $303 million.

Maxam Capital Management Inc. (fund of funds based in Dairen, Conn.): $280 million.

EIM SA (European investment manager with $11 billion in assets): $230 million.

Aozora Bank Ltd. (Japan bank in which Cerebus Capital owns majority stake): $137 million.

AXA (French insurer): $123 million.

UniCredit SA (Italian bank): $92.39 million.

Nordea Bank AB (Swedish bank): $59.13 million.

Hyposwiss (Swiss private bank owned by St. Galler Kantonalbank): $50 million.

Banque Bendict Hoetsch & Cie SA (Swiss private bank): $48.8 million.

City of Fairfield-Connecticut (town pension fund): $42 million.

Bramdean Alternatives (asset manager): $31.2 million.

*Haredi Insurance Investments & Financial Services Ltd. (Israeli insurer): $14.2 million.

Societe Generale (French bank): $12.32 million.

Groupama SA (French insurer): $12.32 million.

Credit Agricola SA (French bank): $12.32 million.

Richard Spring (individual investor): $11 million.

RAB Capital (hedge fund): $10 million.

Banco Populare (Italian bank): $9.86 million.

Korea Teachers Pension (Korean pension fund): $9.1 million.

*Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles (Jewish charity manager): $6.4 million.

Neue Privat Bank (Swiss bank): $5 million.

*Clal Insurance Enterprise Holdings Ltd. (Israeli financial services): $3.1 million.

Mediobanca SpA (via its unit Compagnie Monegasque de Banque): $671000.

Why Inherited Racial Difference Is the Most Frightening Topic Going

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No concept threatens the state religion of diversity more than innate group difference.  Take the wattage generated by every political controversy in the United States – abortion, war, homosexuality – add it up and multiply by ten.  You still wouldn’t have anything close to the shock power of the idea that racial and ethnic groups – and sexes – think and behave differently not entirely because of “culture” but partly, or largely, DNA.

Try bringing this up at a backyard cookout in the suburbs or cocktail party in Manhattan and see how quickly the comfort zone evaporates.

It is a bracing thought, to be sure.  Those who broach it lose their jobs.  Sam Francis and Kevin Lamb (both dismissed from nominally conservative publications) are just two examples from a very long list.  Harvard President Lawrence Summers was in a state of perpetual contrition since his suggestion that men and women think differently, and ultimately stepped down, to the satisfaction of the thought police on the faculty.  His replacement is  a woman.  More recently, James Watson, the co-discoverer of the “double helix” of DNA, was fired from his position at the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory for observing that African blacks have a lower inherited IQ than whites.

The visual I imagine when the innate-difference idea intrudes is Edvard Munch’s famous painting, “The Scream.” No!  It can’t be!

It has been more than a decade since Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wrote The Bell Curve, which laid out the data on racial IQ differences, and how they are, in all likelihood, mostly inherited.  To those who came to accept that information, the impenetrable resistance to the findings by the rest of the world is baffling.  The statistics are so irrefutable – and so observable at work in the world – yet so determinedly ignored in the officially-sanctioned discussions of the issues.  It’s like a society-wide remake of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

The New York Times ran a series of tantalizing stories on the topic of race and IQ that revolved around the Watson controversy (and William Saletan’s pro-inherited-difference-but-with-some-retractions series in Slate) The climax thus far is an op-ed piece titled “All Brains Are the Same Color”, by Richard E. Nisbett (Dec. 9, 2007).  The very title of the article suggested the childish silliness of denying these differences: one imagines a tearful child asking his parent about where her doggy will go upon death, and the response: “All Dogs Go to Heaven.”

The letters that followed a week later cheered Professor Nisbett, predictably, though one writer was not so sure:  “As heartening as I found Richard E. Nisbett’s arguments against a correlation between race and intelligence, I find it difficult to overlook the fact that one of the world’s most eminent scientists, James D. Watson, recently lost his job for taking the opposite position.  Under such circumstances, essays like Professor Nisbett’s take on the air of dogma.  One is left to wonder what researchers might find or say if their careers and reputations weren’t threatened by academic McCarthyism.” (Joshua P. Hill, New London, Conn., New York Times, Dec. 10, 2007).

Indeed.  But there are reasons for the screaming, hyperventilating and proper ladies fainting away over this issue that might be escaping our attention.  And not all of them have to do with being a pig-headed liberal or stubborn ethnic partisan (though these are clearly powerful forces).

What follows are other reasons I’ve identified as looming in the mental background, perhaps subconsciously.  Those hoping to understand the tensions of the now-multiracial West — and the tensions involved in merely trying to discuss the same — should consider them.

1.  Group Difference Calls Free Will Into Question

Few are made happy by the idea that anything but pure free will determines our earthly destinies.  With limited exceptions, the Western world since the Enlightenment has cultivated the idea that anyone can be anything.  Rousseau’s blank slate is an example.

We nurse a chipper confidence that all boys — and girls — could grow up to be president.  (We seem not to notice that in the United States, it helps if your father — and maybe soon, your husband – was president.)  It is comforting to think that all of us — no matter who our parents were or where we were born — have a perfectly equal shot at success, in any field.  We’re all just smiling, spinning Mary Tyler Moores, knowing we might just make it after all.  What sexist pig would deny Mary her tryout for offensive tackle with the Vikings?

The idea of inherited differences — individual and group — kills that buzz.  The thought that genetics might play any part in the unfolding of our life path can be profoundly depressing.  If our achievements are ultimately limited by those little biochemical software programs known as genes, why bother getting out of bed?

Group difference is even worse.  Who wants to be on the comparatively less-able teams?  And if your capabilities are greater than that of the average member of your group, your frustration would be considerable.  You’d prefer, as the mantra goes, to be judged as an individual.

But genetic limits can have depressing implications for everyone — even members of more-able groups — because of the mere suggestion that there are such limits for us at all.

So, we avoid these ideas altogether.  Like the people of Lake Wobegone, we are all above average.

2.  Group Difference Calls Modern Theology Into Question

I don’t pretend for a minute to be a theologian.  But my layman’s sense of modern religion gives me the following impressions.

If we’re all equal before God, the thinking goes (and I like the proposition myself), we must be equal in every other way.  An undercurrent of many modern theologies seems to be the idea that however big and powerful we are here on earth, when we die, our souls shrink to uniform size.

Our “soul cubes,” if you will, are all 2 inches by 2 inches by 2 inches.  Up in heaven, they’re all neatly stacked on a big cloud bank, with new additions daily.  Same size, same density, same color (the Methodists have it as beige, Episcopalians insist it’s light blue).  The only one “superior” is God.

Presidential aspirant Mitt Romney broke down in tears on “Meet the Press” about the Mormons’ acceptance of blacks into his church:

Said Romney:

It’s very deep and fundamental in my life and my most core beliefs that all people are children of God. My faith has always told me that. My faith has also always told me that in the eyes of God, every individual was merited the fullest degree of happiness in the hereafter and I had no question that African Americans and blacks generally would have every right and every benefit in the hereafter that anyone else had and that God is no respecter of persons.

Discussing difference, then, can be made out as sacrilege.  Acknowledge that your group is smarter than the other group, and you’ve committed more than a political gaffe. You’ve committed a sin.

3.  Even If You Suspect Group Difference, Keep Mum About It —  It Keeps the Peace

We do all need to get along — or at least try.  I mean this in the sense of immediate individual survival, not a La Raza suggestion that Americans and illegals  “get along” by us granting them amnesty.

We all find ourselves where we do in life, and even as we work toward something different, coexisting with the players in our daily lives by imagining to be their equal helps make existence palatable.  Even those convinced of their own individual superiority rarely lord it on grounds that they inherited it.  I don’t know of too many clubs where the members don’t think of themselves as “just us guys” or “just us gals” in a spirit of camaraderie.  Even the hierarchical U.S. military benefits from this attitude, alongside quick salutes for commanding officers.

Also, a belief that all of humanity is inherently equal is comforting in a hedge-your-bet sort of way.  Varying levels of success can be attributed to hard work or luck.  No need to be a dark determinist about anything.  And if you find yourself in trouble, you’d only feel that much more foolish if you’d previously announced your inherent superiority.

These three sentiments, however flawed, serve human needs.  And it isn’t complete lunacy.  They’re coping mechanisms, really, and they work in societies where individual differences are slight to medium.  In fact, robust ignorance of difference can have practical value.  If you need to raise an army, setting the height minimum too high could cost you decent fighters — even if taller conscripts are in fact better.

But this otherwise-commendable ignorance of differences breaks down and backfires in societies where the differences are pronounced.  Hand a man a weapon he’s too short to handle properly, and you may have a disaster on your hands.

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Yes, it’s often the little white lies that help us get along —  until the lies become too big to ignore. Unfortunately, that’s where we stand now. Thanks in a large measure to unchecked immigration to the West, we’ve entered the territory of big lies.  We aren’t all blending together in a beautiful mosaic.  Newer groups are simply proposing to replace older groups.  The lies aren’t smoothing the path for an otherwise healthy society, they’re crippling the American majority from thinking and talking about defending a preferred way of life.

Yet we continue to think that we can bring democracy to the world, make women indistinguishable from men, and raise the Third World to the level of the First by buying a red hoodie from the Gap.  Among the unexamined reasons for the Iraq war, the notion of “human fungibility” helped it along, as if Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds would come together for some aw-shucks New England town meetings upon the fall of Saddam Hussein.  Ditto for the open border with Mexico — just insist on enough “assimilation,” and the Hispanic influx will be undetectable. They’re all just people, right?

It would all be funny if it weren’t causing so much death, confusion, misery, and waste.

The opposition will say:  recognizing human difference leads to slavery and concentration camps. Maybe.  Or rudeness, arrogance and hurt feelings.  Probably.  But that is hardly justification for careening toward the opposite extreme. And this is especially so since the lack of discussion of these issues prevents being able to use them in the vital struggle to defend the legitimate ethnic interests of whites. Hurt feelings are a small price to pay.

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Most of all, group differences remain.  They are vividly, palpably, undeniably real.  Races are different.  Ethnicities do cluster and compete with each for limited territory, resources and power.  Men are not women, and vice versa.  We weren’t all meant to live in the same square mile.

Human societies are flexible, but not unbreakable.  The world has survived many mistaken ideas and ideologies, though often, as with communism, they were accompanied by heavy casualties.  The rigid egalitarianism now shackling our thoughts and policies is the latest, and it must be broken soon.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

Charlene Morisseau: The Legal World’s Answer to Jayson Blair

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Unless you follow the legal press, you probably missed the employment odyssey of one Charlene Morisseau, formerly an attorney for DLA Piper, one of America’s biggest law firms.

Ms. Morisseau, who is black, filed a federal lawsuit charging racial discrimination after being fired from the firm.  Her lawsuit was dismissed earlier this month for reasons, as other bloggers have noted, that only served to validate the firm’s decision to fire her.  After firing her lawyers and stepping in to act as her own attorney, Ms. Morisseau, a graduate of Harvard Law School, blew filing deadlines, made frivolous motions and obstructed her deposition (according to the judge), and in an act of bewildering incompetence, styled one of her filings to place her case in the United States Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit (her case was still in district court).

The details are found in a story by Anthony Lin of the New York Law Journal.

Note that this story, rich in irony and damning for affirmative action, appears nowhere in the mainstream press.  Beyond that, bloggers at overlawyered.com and abovethelaw.net picked up on it.

It will be easy for defenders of affirmative action to dismiss the tale of Ms. Morisseau:  she was an aberration, the firm was trying to do the right thing by hiring her, she may have problems in her life unrelated to her race, and so on.  But a Google search on Ms. Morisseau reveals that she is precisely the type of person big law firms today clamor for.

In 1998, she was the recipient of a “Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship,” which from the looks of it appears to be restricted to non-whites.

(Its website says that only “New Americans” are eligible, defined as “an individual who (1) is a resident alien; i.e., holds a Green Card, or, (2) has been naturalized as a U.S. citizen, or (3) is the child of two parents who are both naturalized citizens.” So, presumably, Ms. Morisseau falls into one of these three categories, in addition to being black.  Doubly oppressed, then, or triply, if her gender holds her back.)

Here she is at Harvard, where, as president of the Black Law Students’ Association, she protested the Amadou Diallo verdict, explaining that her brother was “bruised” by the police.

Here she is in the Harvard Law Review, presumably discussing the terrible calamities befalling minorities in the United States:

And according to the New York Law Journal article, Ms. Morisseau worked for a death-penalty defense group called the Southern Center for Human Rights, whom she’s also suing for discrimination.  Incredibly, her supervisor there, Steven B. Bright, submitted an affidavit to New York bar officials stating that she “appears unable to separate reality and fantasy” and described “vicious attacks” and “false allegations of outrageous conduct” she had made against many of the Center’s lawyers and staff, all while “making virtually no contribution to the Center’s work in the eight months she was here.”

“All this reflects very poorly on the professional qualifications of Morisseau to practice law,” Bright said in the affidavit, according to the NYLJ article.

All of which, in a rational society, would raise the question of why DLA Piper hired her to begin with, assuming they bothered to pick up the phone and speak to her former supervisor.  Or how, exactly, Ms. Morisseau got into Harvard in the first place.  But in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of race in America, of course, the normal rules don’t apply.

Remember Jayson Blair, the black New York Times reporter fired for making up stories?  Like Ms. Morisseau, he was a young black person ensconced in one of America’s most powerful and prestigious institutions through affirmative action, but in the end, his incompetence simply could not be ignored, even by the liberals who championed him and probably made every conceivable excuse for him.

As with Mr. Blair’s ascension to the Times, Ms. Morisseau almost certainly got into Harvard — and Harvard Law — partly on the strength of her status as a black (and immigrant) woman.  Likewise with DLA Piper.  The powerful indicators of her incompetence and boorishness were totally ignored.  Probably, nobody at DLA Piper was even looking for them.  They saw “black” and “Harvard”, and that was all they needed.

In many ways, although the firm prevailed in its lawsuit, it got exactly what it deserved (it may have had to pay for its legal defense costs, and certainly had to expend the time and effort needed to participate in the defense).  Think of how many deserving white would-be associates were passed over so that DLA Piper could trumpet its employment of Ms. Morisseau.  Not to “do the right thing,” if you will, but to impress its corporate clients and look good for the liberal press and the New York elites.

You might think DLA Piper clients would be angry to learn that the firm they’ve entrusted to handle their matters for hundreds of dollars an hour makes its hiring decisions for reasons of political correctness instead of competence.  But many big American companies, like Wal-Mart, are actually demanding that their law firms push aside white attorneys in favor of “lawyers of color” — or be fired if they don’t.  One attorney questions whether this is legal, noting “Not only may a law firm be liable for discrimination, but so may be the individual employees and partners at the law firm that participated in the discriminatory decisions,”

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The maddening injustice here is that any number of deserving whites are blocked from America’s big law firms and prestigious newspapers so that the likes of Mr. Blair and Ms. Morisseau can wallow where they don’t belong.  But you will never hear their stories reported.  You rarely seem them file lawsuits to vindicate their rights.  Morris Dees is not going to take up their cause (but will attack whoever does).  They are America’s unheard, unseen victims.

The absurd tale of Ms. Morisseau is also a reflection of the great frictions caused by our society’s attempt to make blacks and whites equal through forcible manipulations.  As an obvious starting point, blacks and whites are not, in general, “equal”:  the IQ differences are well-known, and beyond that there are behavior differences, as noted by Richard Lynn.

Lynn observes that blacks as a group have higher levels of psychopathic personality, and the behavior patterns of Mr. Blair and Ms. Morisseau are consistent with that (if this word seems too strong, ask most big-firm associates what type of personality it would take to order a partner out of an office). As Judge Kaplan noted, “She was a confrontational, stubborn, and insubordinate employee in an environment in which professional personal relations, flexibility and a willingness to accept supervision were essential.”

Ms. Morisseau’s story may well be forgotten as just another crazy chapter in American law.  But it is more than that.  It is part of an undeniable pattern of the failure of races to co-exist in the same society on the assumption that they are perfect equals.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

Media Watch – The New York Times Magazine: A Conversation Among Us Jews

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The New York Times Magazine, the New York Times’ Sunday slick-page offering, is easily one of the higher-quality publications in America, with in-depth treatments of cutting-edge issues in medicine, science, foreign policy, politics and our sociological landscape.  But as with much of America’s elite media, there is a disproportionate representation of the Jewish community, its interests and organizations.  This is best illustrated by focusing not on a single story, but an entire recent issue:

From start to finish, the August 12, 2007 issue is revealing.  Two of eight letters to the editor come from Laura Winkler Stein of New Jersey and Marc Rosenblatt of Brooklyn — a comparatively low number compared to past letters pages, some of which have featured two letters from writers both named “Cohen,” for instance.

In the “Questions For” feature at the beginning of the magazine by Deborah Solomon, actor Jonah Hill of the new Superbad movie, tells Ms. Solomon, “I’m a nice Jewish boy.”  His bar mitvah, he relates, was “amazing” and “magical” and carried the theme “Jonah Goes Platinum.”

Prominent neocon William Safire delivers his by-now familiar “On Language” column, which critiques the intricacies of the English language.

In “The Ethicist” feature, we hear from “ethics expert” Randy Cohen, a former comedy writer, who finds it relevant to work in a reference to American slavery in his answer to a question from an American upset about Singaporean justice.  Cohen in the past has enjoyed lecturing readers about the evils of “racism,” though I have not yet seen him address the ethics of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

The cover piece, on marriage counseling, is penned by one Laurie Abraham, and writer Joshua Yaffa gives an interesting article on the clarity of road signs.  In what even many Jews might chuckle at for approaching parody, Paul Greenberg tells us about Alaskan salmon fishing.

The magazine’s last-page feature, “Lives”, gives us a cozy tale by Joel Schwartzberg about moving back home at age 37.  It’s heavy on his Jewish identity and warm anecdotes of the Jewish family.

“So what?” you might say.  Jews are smart folks and good writers.  It’s no surprise they’d are disproportionately represented, especially in a New York City paper.  How many whites from Iowa read The New York Times Magazine, much less write letters to its editor?

Yet it matters, on at least two levels.  On one, it’s a simple sign of cultural displacement.  The Saturday Evening Post, with its own reflection of white majority mores, has long been replaced.  The loss of this voice, this presence, is itself significant, in the same way that many Jews find an abandoned synagogue in Poland to be significant.  Yes — you see there? Our people used to be here.  And now we are not.  The difference is that Jews ask themselves, “and shouldn’t we return?”  Whites have not, in the main, stopped to even ponder their own displacement, much less consider its implications or focus their minds on coming back.

So it’s worth pointing out that The New York Times Magazine, a part of the nation’s “newspaper of record”, has today become a virtual closed conversation among Jews on Jewish interests.  The thoughts, feelings, desires and dislikes of the American majority have been “disappeared”, which is perhaps worse than mocked or pilloried.

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On another level, predominant media influence matters because media influences policy.  How shall we approach illegal immigration, foreign policy?  The preferences of major Jewish organizations on these issues are well-known, and not coincidentally, have, for the most part, been enacted.  Yet the Jewish preferences are often not those of white Americans, as can be seen from numerous public opinion surveys.  Mass illegal immigration is not the preference of American whites.  Our policy toward Israel and the Middle East also cries out for re-examination if the United States is to extricate itself from the current morass.  So again, it matters.

The predominant influence of Jewish interests in the media simply does not represent the interests of the American majority.  Facing this reality is a necessary first step.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.