Jews and Vulture Capitalism: A Reprise, Part 2
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?