Jews in the Economy and Finance

Jews and Vulture Capitalism: A Reprise, Part 2

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Go to Part 1.

Jews, Oligarchs, and Russia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Reason to Trust the Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Around the year 2000

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

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

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

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

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

Jews and Vulture Capitalism: A Reprise, Part 1

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

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

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


A Certain Cephalopod Encircling an Unnamed Planet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuing, Johnson wrote,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From this central fact rolled well-known consequences:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 2.

Hedging their Bets (Who Really Decides Elections)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shalala herself states:

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

Lazard, Ltd., based out of Bermuda for tax reasons, naturally, is also a major donor to Steyer. Lazard’s Chairman and CEO is Kenneth M. Jacobs, another Stanford MBA who is on the Board for the Brookings Institution and is a former member of the Steering Committee for the Bilderberg Group. A number of influential people have worked for Lazard, including both Jews and their functionaries: Marcus Agius, Robert Agostinelli, Tim Collins, Disque Deane, Mina Gerowin, Sir Philip Hampton, Hugh Kindersley, Sebastian Kulczyk, Steven Langman, Jean-Marie Messier, Archie Norman, Nelson Obus, Gary Parr, Mark Pincus, Gerald Rosenfeld, Nathaniel Rothschild, Bernard Selz, Johann Rupert, Lars Kroijer, Jaime Bermúdez Merizalde, Ron Bloom, Robert Henry Brand, Robert Fred Ellsworth, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Paul Keating, Robert Kindersley, Anne Lauvergeon, Lord Mandelson, Henrique de Campos Meirelles, Andrew Mitchell, Peter R. Orszag, Vincent S. Pérez, Rodrigo de Rato, Jenny Sanford, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Lindsay Tanner, Andrés Velasco, Antonio Weiss, Bill White, Frank G. Zarb, Božidar Đelić, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and William D. Cohan. Lazard was founded as Lazard Freres & Co. by three Jewish brothers—Alexandre, Lazare, and Simon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

[2] Jewish.

[3] Jewish.

[4] Jewish.

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

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

[7] Ibid.

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

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

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

[11] Jewish.

[12] Jewish ancestry.

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

[14] Jewish.

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

[16] Jewish.

[17] Jewish.

[18] Jewish.

[19] Jewish.

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

[21] Jewish.

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

[23] Jewish.

[24] Jewish.

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

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

[27] Jewish.

[28] Jewish.

[29] Jewish.

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

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

 

 

Vulture Capitalism is Jewish Capitalism

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“If man will strike, strike through the mask!”
Ahab, Moby Dick

It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson’s recent attack on the activities of Paul Singer’s vulture fund, Elliot Associates, a group I first profiled four years ago. In many respects, it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like Singer’s escaped major media attention prior to this, especially when one considers how extraordinarily harmful and exploitative they are. Many countries are now in very significant debt to groups like Elliot Associates and, as Tucker’s segment very starkly illustrated, their reach has now extended into the very heart of small-town America. Shining a spotlight on the spread of this virus is definitely welcome. I strongly believe, however, that the problem presented by these cabals of exploitative financiers will only be solved if their true nature is fully discerned. Thus far, the descriptive terminology employed in discussing their activities has revolved only around the scavenging and parasitic nature of their activities. Elliot Associates have therefore been described as a quintessential example of a “vulture fund” practicing “vulture capitalism.” But these funds aren’t run by carrion birds. They are operated almost exclusively by Jews. In the following essay, I want us to examine the largest and most influential “vulture funds,” to assess their leadership, ethos, financial practices, and how they disseminate their dubiously acquired wealth. I want us to set aside colorful metaphors. I want us to strike through the mask.


Who Are The Vultures?

It is commonly agreed that the most significant global vulture funds are Elliot Management, Cerberus, FG Hemisphere, Autonomy Capital, Baupost Group, Canyon Capital Advisors, Monarch Alternative Capital, GoldenTree Asset Management, Aurelius Capital Management, OakTree Capital, Fundamental Advisors, and Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP. The names of these groups are very interesting, being either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or rural/pastoral origins (note the prevalence of oak, trees, parks, canyons, monarchs, or the use of names like Aurelius and Elliot). This is the same tactic employed by the Jew Jordan Belfort, the “Wolf of Wall Street,” who operated multiple major frauds under the business name Stratton Oakmont.

These names are masks. They are designed to cultivate trust and obscure the real background of the various groupings of financiers. None of these groups have Anglo-Saxon or venerable origins. None are based in rural idylls. All of the vulture funds named above were founded by, and continue to be operated by, ethnocentric, globalist, urban-dwelling Jews. A quick review of each of their websites reveals their founders and central figures to be:

  • Elliot Management — Paul Singer, Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel
  • Cerberus — Stephen Feinberg, Lee Millstein, Jeffrey Lomasky, Seth Plattus, Joshua Weintraub, Daniel Wolf, David Teitelbaum
  • FG Hemisphere — Peter Grossman
  • Autonomy Capital — Derek Goodman
  • Baupost Group — Seth Klarman, Jordan Baruch, Isaac Auerbach
  • Canyon Capital Advisors — Joshua Friedman, Mitchell Julis
  • Monarch Alternative Capital — Andrew Herenstein, Michael Weinstock
  • GoldenTree Asset Management — Steven Tananbaum, Steven Shapiro
  • Aurelius Capital Management — Mark Brodsky, Samuel Rubin, Eleazer Klein, Jason Kaplan
  • OakTree Capital — Howard Marks, Bruce Karsh, Jay Wintrob, John Frank, Sheldon Stone
  • Fundamental Advisors — Laurence Gottlieb, Jonathan Stern
  • Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP — Josh Birnbaum, Sam Alcoff

The fact that all of these vulture funds, widely acknowledged as the most influential and predatory, are owned and operated by Jews is remarkable in itself, especially in a contemporary context in which we are constantly bombarded with the suggestion that Jews don’t have a special relationship with money or usury, and that any such idea is an example of ignorant prejudice. Equally remarkable, however, is the fact that Jewish representation saturates the board level of these companies also, suggesting that their beginnings and methods of internal promotion and operation rely heavily on ethnic-communal origins, and religious and social cohesion more generally. As such, these Jewish funds provide an excellent opportunity to examine their financial and political activities as expressions of Jewishness, and can thus be placed in the broader framework of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the long historical trajectory of Jewish-European relations.

How They Feed

In May 2018, Puerto Rico declared a form of municipal bankruptcy after falling into more than $74.8 billion in debt, of which more than $34 billion is interest and fees. The debt was owed to all of the Jewish capitalists named above, with the exception of Stephen Feinberg’s Cerberus group. In order to commence payments, the government had instituted a policy of fiscal austerity, closing schools and raising utility bills, but when Hurricane Maria hit the island in September 2017, Puerto Rico was forced to stop transfers to their Jewish creditors. This provoked an aggressive attempt by the Jewish funds to seize assets from an island suffering from an 80% power outage, with the addition of further interest and fees. Protests broke out in several US cities calling for the debt to be forgiven. After a quick stop in Puerto Rico in late 2018, Donald Trump pandered to this sentiment when he told Fox News, “They owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street, and we’re going to have to wipe that out.” But Trump’s statement, like all of Trump’s statements, had no substance. The following day, the director of the White House budget office, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters: “I think what you heard the president say is that Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt problem.” In other words, Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to pay its Jews.

Trump’s reversal is hardly surprising, given that the President is considered extremely friendly to Jewish financial power. When he referred to “your friends on Wall Street” he really meant his friends on Wall Street. One of his closest allies is Stephen Feinberg, founder and CEO of Cerberus, a war-profiteering vulture fund that has now accumulated more than $1.5 billion in Irish debt, leaving the country prone to a “wave of home repossessions” on a scale not seen since the Jewish mortgage traders behind Quicken Loans (Daniel Gilbert) and Ameriquest (Roland Arnall) made thousands of Americans homeless. Feinberg has also been associated with mass evictions in Spain, causing a collective of Barcelona anarchists to label him a “Jewish mega parasite” in charge of the “world’s vilest vulture fund.” In May 2018, Trump made Feinberg chair of his Intelligence Advisory Board, and one of the reasons for Trump’s sluggish retreat from Afghanistan has been the fact Feinberg’s DynCorp has enjoyed years of lucrative government defense contracts training Afghan police and providing ancillary services to the military.

But Trump’s association with Jewish vultures goes far beyond Feinberg. A recent piece in the New York Post declared “Orthodox Jews are opening up their wallets for Trump in 2020.” This is a predictable outcome of the period 2016 to 2020, an era that could be neatly characterised as How Jews learned to stop worrying and love the Don. Jewish financiers are opening their wallets for Trump because it is now clear he utterly failed to fulfil promises on mass immigration to White America, while pledging his commitment to Zionism and to socially destructive Jewish side projects like the promotion of homosexuality. These actions, coupled with his commuting of Hasidic meatpacking boss Sholom Rubashkin‘s 27-year-sentence for bank fraud and money laundering in 2017, have sent a message to Jewish finance that Trump is someone they can do business with. Since these globalist exploiters are essentially politically amorphous, knowing no loyalty but that to their own tribe and its interests, there is significant drift of Jewish mega-money between the Democratic and Republican parties. The New York Post reports, for example, that when Trump attended a $25,000-per-couple luncheon in November at a Midtown hotel, where 400 moneyed Jews raised at least $4 million for the America First [!] SuperPAC, the luncheon organiser Kelly Sadler, told reporters, “We screened all of the people in attendance, and we were surprised to see how many have given before to Democrats, but never a Republican. People were standing up on their chairs chanting … eight more years.” The reality, of course, is that these people are not Democrats or Republicans, but Jews, willing to push their money in whatever direction the wind of Jewish interests is blowing.

The collapse of Puerto Rico under Jewish debt and elite courting of Jewish financial predators is certainly nothing new. Congo, Zambia, Liberia, Argentina, Peru, Panama, Ecuador, Vietnam, Poland, and Ireland are just some of the countries that have slipped fatefully into the hands of the Jews listed above, and these same people are now closely watching Greece and India. The methodology used to acquire such leverage is as simple as it is ruthless. On its most basic level, “vulture capitalism” is really just a combination of the continued intense relationship between Jews and usury and Jewish involvement in medieval tax farming. On the older practice, Salo Baron writes in Economic History of the Jews that Jewish speculators would pay a lump sum to the treasury before mercilessly turning on the peasantry to obtain “considerable surpluses … if need be, by ruthless methods.”[1] The activities of the Jewish vulture funds are essentially the same speculation in debt, except here the trade in usury is carried out on a global scale with the feudal peasants of old now replaced with entire nations. Wealthy Jews pool resources, purchase debts, add astronomical fees and interests, and when the inevitable default occurs they engage in aggressive legal activity to seize assets, bringing waves of jobs losses and home repossessions.

This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both the Belgian and UK governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish firms from using their court systems to sue for distressed debt owed by poor nations. Tucker Carlson, commenting on Paul Singer’s predation and the ruin of the town of Sidney, Nebraska, has said:

It couldn’t be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United States? The short answer: Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our political process. Singer himself was the second largest donor to the Republican Party in 2016. He’s given millions to a super-PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never have heard of Paul Singer — which tells you a lot in itself — but in Washington, he’s rock-star famous. And that is why he is almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate than your average fireman, just in case you were still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh yeah, it is.

Aside from direct political donations, these Jewish financiers also escape scrutiny by hiding behind a mask of simplistic anti-socialist rhetoric that is common in the American Right, especially the older, Christian, and pro-Zionist demographic. Rod Dreher, in a commentary on Carlson’s piece at the American Conservative, points out that Singer gave a speech in May 2019 attacking the “rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party.” Singer continued, “They call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing press rather than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers.” Dreher comments: “The productive efforts of businesspeople and workers”? The gall of that man, after what he did to the people of Sidney.”

What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn’t even any recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on a perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his co-ethnics who believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and who ultimately believe they have a right to be “showered by free stuff promised by politicians.” Singer places himself in an infantile paradigm meant to entertain the goyim, that of Free Enterprise vs Socialism, but, as Carlson points out, “this is not the free enterprise that we all learned about.” That’s because it’s Jewish enterprise — exploitative, inorganic, and attached to socio-political goals that have nothing to do with individual freedom and private property. This might not be the free enterprise Carlson learned about, but it’s clearly the free enterprise Jews learn about — as illustrated in their extraordinary over-representation in all forms of financial exploitation and white collar crime. The Talmud, whether actively studied or culturally absorbed, is their code of ethics and their curriculum in regards to fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement, usury, and financial exploitation. Vulture capitalism is Jewish capitalism.

Whom They Feed

Singer’s duplicity is a perfect example of the way in which Jewish finance postures as conservative while conserving nothing. Indeed, Jewish capitalism may be regarded as the root cause of the rise of Conservative Inc., a form or shadow of right wing politics reduced solely to fiscal concerns that are ultimately, in themselves, harmful to the interests of the majority of those who stupidly support them. The spirit of Jewish capitalism, ultimately, can be discerned not in insincere bleating about socialism and business, intended merely to entertain semi-educated Zio-patriots, but in the manner in which the Jewish vulture funds disseminate the proceeds of their parasitism. Real vultures are weak, so will gorge at a carcass and regurgitate food to feed their young. So then, who sits in the nests of the vulture funds, awaiting the regurgitated remains of troubled nations?

Boston-based Seth Klarman (net worth $1.5 billion), who like Paul Singer has declared “free enterprise has been good for me,” is a rapacious debt exploiter who was integral to the financial collapse of Puerto Rico, where he hid much of activities behind a series of shell companies. Investigative journalists eventually discovered that Klarman’s Baupost group was behind much of the aggressive legal action intended to squeeze the decimated island for bond payments. It’s clear that the Jews involved in these companies are very much aware that what they are doing is wrong, and they are careful to avoid too much reputational damage, whether to themselves individually or to their ethnic group. Puerto Rican journalists, investigating the debt trail to Klarman, recall trying to follow one of the shell companies (Decagon) to Baupost via a shell company lawyer (and yet another Jew) named Jeffrey Katz:

Returning to the Ropes & Gray thread, we identified several attorneys who had worked with the Baupost Group, and one, Jeffrey Katz, who – in addition to having worked directly with Baupost – seemed to describe a particularly close and longstanding relationship with a firm fitting Baupost’s profile on his experience page. … I called Katz and he picked up, to my surprise. I identified myself, as well as my affiliation with the Public Accountability Initiative, and asked if he was the right person to talk to about Decagon Holdings and Baupost. He paused, started to respond, and then evidently thought better of it and said that he was actually in a meeting, and that I would need to call back (apparently, this high-powered lawyer picks up calls from strange numbers when he is in important meetings). As he was telling me to call back, I asked him again if he was the right person to talk to about Decagon, and that I wouldn’t call back if he wasn’t, and he seemed to get even more flustered. At that point he started talking too much, about how he was a lawyer and has clients, how I must think I’m onto some kind of big scoop, and how there was a person standing right in front of him – literally, standing right in front of him – while I rudely insisted on keeping him on the line.

One of the reasons for such secrecy is the intensive Jewish philanthropy engaged in by Klarman under his Klarman Family Foundation. While Puerto Rican schools are being closed, and pensions and health provisions slashed, Klarman is regurgitating the proceeds of massive debt speculation to his “areas of focus” which prominently includes “Supporting the global Jewish community and Israel.” While plundering the treasuries of the crippled nations of the goyim, Klarman and his co-ethnic associates have committed themselves to “improving the quality of life and access to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that they may benefit from the country’s prosperity.” Among those in Klarman’s nest, their beaks agape for Puerto Rican debt interest, are the American Jewish Committee, Boston’s Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Honeymoon Israel Foundation, Israel-America Academic Exchange, and the Israel Project. Klarman, like Singer, has also been an enthusiastic proponent of liberalising attitudes to homosexuality, donating $1 million to a Republican super PAC aimed at supporting pro-gay marriage GOP candidates in 2014 (Singer donated $1.75 million). Klarman, who also contributes to candidates who support immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, has said “The right to gay marriage is the largest remaining civil rights issue of our time. I work one-on-one with individual Republicans to try to get them to realize they are being Neanderthals on this issue.”

Steven Tananbaum’s GoldenTree Asset Management has also fed well on Puerto Rico, owning $2.5 billion of the island’s debt. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research has commented:

Steven Tananbaum, GoldenTree’s chief investment officer, told a business conference in September (after Hurricane Irma, but before Hurricane Maria) that he continued to view Puerto Rican bonds as an attractive investment. GoldenTree is spearheading a group of COFINA bondholders that collectively holds about $3.3 billion in bonds. But with Puerto Rico facing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and lacking enough funds to even begin to pay back its massive debt load, these vulture funds are relying on their ability to convince politicians and the courts to make them whole. The COFINA bondholder group has spent $610,000 to lobby Congress over the last two years, while GoldenTree itself made $64,000 in political contributions to federal candidates in the 2016 cycle. For vulture funds like GoldenTree, the destruction of Puerto Rico is yet another opportunity for exorbitant profits.

Whom does Tananbaum feed with these profits? A brief glance at the spending of the Lisa and Steven Tananbaum Charitable Trust reveals a relatively short list of beneficiaries including United Jewish Appeal Foundation, American Friends of Israel Museum, Jewish Community Center, to be among the most generously funded, with sizeable donations also going to museums specialising in the display of degenerate and demoralising art.

Following the collapse in Irish asset values in 2008, Jewish vulture funds including OakTree Capital swooped on mortgagee debt to seize tens of thousands of Irish homes, shopping malls, and utilities (Steve Feinberg’s Cerberus took control of public waste disposal). In 2011, Ireland emerged as a hotspot for distressed property assets, after its bad banks began selling loans that had once been held by struggling financial institutions. These loans were quickly purchased at knockdown prices by Jewish fund managers, who then aggressively sought the eviction of residents in order to sell them for a fast profit. Michael Byrne, a researcher at the School of Social Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland’s largest university, comments: “The aggressive strategies used by vulture funds lead to human tragedies.” One homeowner, Anna Flynn recalls how her mortgage fell into the hands of Mars Capital, an affiliate of Oaktree Capital, owned and operated by the Los Angeles-based Jews Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. They were “very, very difficult to deal with,” said Flynn, a mother of four. “All [Mars] wanted was for me to leave the house; they didn’t want a solution [to ensure I could retain my home].”

When Bruce Karsh isn’t making Irish people homeless, whom does he feed with his profits? A brief glance at the spending of the Karsh Family Foundation reveals millions of dollars of donations to the Jewish Federation, Jewish Community Center, and the United Jewish Fund.

Paul Singer, his son Gordin, and their Elliot Associates colleagues Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel, have a foothold in almost every country, and have a stake in every company you’re likely to be familiar with, from book stores to dollar stores. With the profits of exploitation, they fund campaigns for homosexuality and mass migration, boost Zionist politics, invest millions in security for Jews, and promote wars for Israel. Singer is a Republican, and is on the Board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is a former board member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like the Middle East Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and is among the largest funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was also connected to the pro-Iraq War advocacy group Freedom’s Watch. Another key Singer project was the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that was founded in 2009 by several high-profile Jewish neoconservative figures to promote militaristic U.S. policies in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and which received its seed money from Singer.

Although Singer was initially anti-Trump, and although Trump once attacked Singer for his pro-immigration politics (“Paul Singer represents amnesty and he represents illegal immigration pouring into the country”), Trump is now essentially funded by three Jews—Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250 million in pro-Trump political money. In return, they want war with Iran. Employees of Elliott Management were one of the main sources of funding for the 2014 candidacy of the Senate’s most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a “retaliatory strike” against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers. These exploitative Jewish financiers have been clear that they expect a war with Iran, and they are lobbying hard and preparing to call in their pound of flesh. As one political commentator put it, “These donors have made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect a return on their investment in Trump’s GOP.”

The same pattern is witnessed again and again, illustrating the stark reality that the prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to an overwhelming degree on the predations of the most successful and ruthless Jewish financial parasites. This is not conjecture, exaggeration, or hyperbole. This is simply a matter of striking through the mask, looking at the heads of the world’s most predatory financial funds, and following the direction of regurgitated profits.

Make no mistake, these cabals are everywhere and growing. They could be ignored when they preyed on distant small nations, but their intention was always to come for you too. They are now on your doorstep. The working people of Sidney, Nebraska probably had no idea what a vulture fund was until their factories closed and their homes were taken. These funds will move onto the next town. And the next. And another after that. They won’t be stopped through blunt support of “free enterprise,” and they won’t be stopped by simply calling them “vulture capitalists.”

Strike through the mask!

[1] S. Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7.

Reply to Danya Ruttenberg on Jews and Usury

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I must object to Danya Ruttenberg’s recent Twitter thread on Jewish usury. The thread appears to have been prompted by a mailer sent out by Connecticut GOP State Senate candidate Ed Charamut, which shows Jewish opponent Matt Lesser clutching a fistful of cash. Criticism from Jews was almost immediate, with familiar claims that the piece played into “harmful anti-Semitic stereotypes” of Jews as greedy, exploitative, and untrustworthy. Charamut initially attempted to defend his use of the image and accused Lesser of “using the Democrat playbook of identity politics to hide from his record.” He insisted the image was only illustrating his belief that Lesser would vote to increase taxes and more government spending.

Unfortunately, but predictably, Charamut quickly caved and has now issued a groveling apology for his campaign flier, pleading: “It is clear now that the imagery could be interpreted as anti-Semitic, and for that we deeply apologize as hate speech of any kind does not belong in our society and especially not in our politics.” He then apologized specifically to Lesser, the Jewish community and “anyone who found the mailer to be anything other then a depiction of policy differences between the two candidates.” Lesser himself has claimed the pamphlet employs imagery used to depict Jewish people going back hundreds of years.”

At issue here is the fact it’s now basically forbidden, or considered highly suspect, to negatively discuss or depict the subject of Jews and money in any context — even if you object to the fiscal policies of your Jewish political opponent. Supporting this soft censorship is a quite distinctive Jewish historical narrative that is really nothing more than a tapestry of politicized myths. These myths act as something like a cultural-psychological shield, deployed instinctively, along with a special vocabulary (“trope!”, “canard!”, “stereotype!”), by strongly-identified Jews against all incoming criticisms.

Danya Ruttenberg is one such strongly identified Jew, and her Twitter thread in response to the Charamut-Lesser incident is a classic example of the cultural-psychological shield. Normally these deployments are so commonplace and predicable that they merit little comment. Ruttenberg’s statement, however, has achieved almost 2500 retweets and over 3000 likes in a little over 48 hours. Some response, I feel, is required.

Ruttenberg is apparently a rabbi and feminist author and has been named one of The Jewish Week‘s “36 Under 36” in 2010 (36 most influential leaders under age 36), and was also named one of the top 50 most influential women rabbis by The Jewish Daily Forward. In certain respects she is far from Orthodox, but she is a very strongly identified leftist Jew and exemplifies, in many respects, trends and attitudes in Diaspora Judaism. Her unabashed feminism, ‘anti-racism,’ and leftism has contributed to a certain appeal outside Judaism, and she enjoys a Twitter following of over 43,000. It was for this not insignificant audience that she attempted to contextualize the Charamut-Lesser incident with an apologetic narrative on Jews and usury. Why she focused specifically on the issue of usury in response to the incident is unclear (Lesser is not a moneylender and he is not depicted or referenced in relation to debt in the Charamut flier), unless one assumes that on some level Ruttenberg acknowledges the fact that Jews have, in the past and present, maintained what can only be termed a special or extraordinary relationship with money. As such, Ruttenberg deploys the classic Jewish apologetic narrative attempting to explain this relationship, and begins, in erroneous but predictable fashion, with Jewish moneylenders in medieval Europe.

The first problem with Ruttenberg’s narrative is that she begins with Jewish moneylending in medieval Europe. This is part of a strategy I have elsewhere described as a “cropped timeline explanation.” Essentially, when confronted with the question of why Jews have generated such animosity in history, across such a broad geographical area, and amidst such a variety of religious cultures, Jews resort to a process of historical gerrymandering. To accept the full breadth and weight of the historical context leaves Jewish behaviour as the only logical explanation for anti-Semitism.  Since this is culturally, religiously, and psychologically unacceptable to Jews, they have long resorted to simply ignoring vast swathes of evidence. This most often involves beginning and ending their explanation for anti-Jewish animosity with a timeline most befitting the meme of innocent Jewish victimhood and predatory European Christianity. As such, all Jewish explanations of anti-Semitism essentially begin with medieval Christendom, and omit or downplay any historical evidence of Jewish behaviour and anti-Jewish cultural currents outside this time frame, or the historical narratives that may follow from it. This process will be described in more detail below, but it should suffice to state here that the special relationship between Jews and money preceded medieval Christianity.

It is a matter of clear historical record that the special relationship between Jews and money preceded medieval Christianity. Jews have settled among European host populations since ancient times. The oldest communities were in the urban centers of the Mediterranean, and a list of Jewish colonies in this area can be found in the First Book of Maccabees. In the early Roman empire clusters of Jews could be found as far north as Lyon, Bonn and Cologne.[1] The economic nature of these communities was uniform, and similar to those in the East. Even prior to the Talmudic era, c.300–500 A.D., Jews had developed a strong interest and aptitude in commerce and banking. From its origins, the Jewish involvement in these spheres was regarded by host populations as malevolent and exploitative. In one of the earliest examples, a papyrus dated to 41 A.D., an Alexandrian merchant warns a friend to “beware of the Jews.”[2] During the fourth century, Alexandria witnessed a number of anti-Jewish riots, almost all of them provoked by accusations of economic exploitation.

In other words, Jewish economic activity was deemed highly problematic by host populations at least one thousand years before Ruttenberg begins her cropped timeline explanation for the “trope” of Jews and usury — an economic activity that had not only condemned as unethical by Christian theologians, but by Aristotle and large numbers of Greek and Roman legislators.

Between the fifth and tenth centuries, Jewish trading posts took hold across Europe, from Cadiz and Toledo to the Baltic, Poland, and Ukraine. This extensive network afforded the Jews an almost total monopoly in the exchange of currency and information. Islamic and Christian civilizations during this period were bitterly opposed and traders from either faction were reluctant to carry goods into rival territory. Jews, enjoying relative tolerance from both civilizations, were able to carry goods from the Middle East into Europe, where Carolingian elites were particularly fond of purchasing luxury goods from Arab lands via Jewish merchants. Similarly, Jews were strategically positioned to overcome the legal obstacles of both civilizations to usury, an economic area they had refined almost to an art form in Babylon — as evidenced in the very large amount of commentary on moneylending in the Babylonian Talmud.

During the Carolingian Dynasty (c. 714 – c.877), the Jewish population of Northwestern Europe evolved from a scattering of individual international traders to growing communities of local traders. The shift to local trade enabled the Jews to acquire an influential middleman role in European society, to which they added widespread engagement in credit operations. On this foundation of growing economic influence, the later Carolingian period also witnessed the development of the first symbiotic relationships between Jewish finance and European elites. This granted significant privileges and protections to Jews, who soon acquired elite status themselves. One of the first examples of such a relationship emerged in the 810s, when Agobard (c.779–840), the Archbishop of Lyon attempted to restrict the financial activities of Jews in his locality, and was confronted with royal power. Perhaps even more so than when Muslims invaded Spain in 711, when “the Jews helped them overrun it,”[3] the silencing of Agobard may be regarded as the birth of the Jews as a hostile elite in European society. Certainly it was the first major political victory for the taboo on claims regarding Jewish influence.

Encouraged by the successes of financial-political pioneers like those in Lyon, significant numbers of Jews from southern Europe began a steady northern migration. The point here is that Jews were not pre-existing in large numbers in northern and western Europe and merely moved into moneylending due to a prohibition on other occupations or the owning of land. It was not a case, as Ruttenberg argues, of it being “convenient for local authorities to permit Jews to work in trades that were repugnant to Christians.” Rather, Jews moved to medieval Europe specifically in order to engage in moneylending and the lucrative trade of goods on credit at interest. Many gathered in the Rhine basin, forming the nucleus of what would later come to be known as ‘Ashkenazi’ Jewry.

Expansion from there was rapid. A colony of Jewish financiers reached England in 1070, following on the heels of the Norman Conquest four years earlier. B. Lionel Abrahams used vast quantities of archival evidence in his 1894 Arnold Prize-winning article on “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290,” and was able to conclude on the basis of this evidence that when the Jews first settled in England “they brought with them money, but no skill in any occupation except lending it out at interest.”[4] Another article states that there is no evidence, among this abundant literature, “to suppose that the English Jews of this period got their living in any considerable numbers in any other art or craft. … It is therefore probable that the capital with which the community started in the country was very considerable.”[5] Headquartered in London, the Jews of England mirrored their counterparts elsewhere on the continent in that they became “a tightly knit class of financiers. From the start they managed to associate closely with the kings in their operations, turning over to the royalty the notes of defaulting debtors in return for a share of the sums due. They were the ‘king’s men,’ vassals of a special kind, since they were the chief source of their suzerain’s revenues.”[6] The foundation of the Jewish relationship with European elites was thus a general confluence of financial and political ambitions. The primary victims would be the European masses.

The curious thing here is that Ruttenberg explains in her next two tweets that moneylending was very attractive to Jews, and explains that cash was more portable than land and that usury was very profitable. So, taken together, her first four tweets amount to the argument that Jews were mercilessly forced against their best intentions into an occupation that they found wildly convenient, profitable, and powerful. Quite the silver lining. Setting aside the possibility that Ruttenberg is simply a liar, there is clearly an issue of self-deception at play here in the denial of the well-established fact that Jews enjoyed moneylending and deliberately developed their demographic and cultural presence in Europe at the nexus of the financial and the political.

Of course, Ruttenberg can’t help but end with a return to the lachrymose narrative of Jewish victimhood. These Jews, forced to become wealthy and powerful via loans, were taxed at “jaw-droppingly high rates” and their way of life was “tied to anti-Jewish oppression.”

In reply, for most of the medieval period Jews weren’t subject to high levels of taxation. Elman, having examined the medieval taxation rolls of England, writes that “apart from the quasi-regular and normal legal sources of income, which the English as much as the Jews were required to pay, the king claimed from a Jews a number of occasional contributions, especially loans and tallages [i.e., taxes levied by a medieval lord on dependents]. In the thirteenth century, which is the vital period for our purpose, the loans were insignificant in number and amount [emphasis added].”[7] Further, there “is no evidence of the levy of any collective tallage upon them until the year 1168, and then the number did not exceed 5,000 marks.”[8] When the tallages were brought in, they only applied to land that Jews had seized in lieu of the unpaid loans of the barons — high taxation in these instances were just a fiscal sleight-of-hand to allow Jews to seize land on the forfeited loans of the barons and then pass them to the Crown as part of the overall deal underpinning their settlement. Further, Jews were excused from Crown taxes[9] and unlike the Christian population, in their movement around the country transacting business Jews were “free of all tolls and dues.”[10]

On the matter of “anti-Jewish oppression,” the Jewish penetration of European society was a risky venture but one that Jewish populations evidently felt was worth the gamble. No Jews were ever forced to settle in a European country, but still they came and still they expanded. They were aware that as non-Christians and as masters of debt they would generate hostility in the general population. Indeed, these considerations formed an important aspect of their bargaining for charters — agreements drawn up between Jews and European elites that laid down the terms of residence, levels of protection, and financial rewards that would make it worthwhile for Jews to settle. For example, in 1084, Jews were given a defensive wall around their settlement quarter in the Rhineland town of Speyer in fulfillment of promises made in their charter.[11] Some of the oldest houses still standing in England were originally built on the orders of Jews, their longevity owing to the fact that Jews possessed the wealth to build homes with a generous use of stone for security.[12] The Jewish move into Europe was thus predicated upon an understanding that Jews would be hated but untouchable, reviled but rich, merciless but unaccountable.

Compare Benzion Netanyahu’s comment:

It was primarily because of the functions of the Jews as the king’s revenue gatherers in the urban areas that the cities saw the Jews as the monarch’s agents, who treated them as objects of massive exploitation. By serving as they did the interests of the kings, the Jews seemed to be working against the interests of the cities; and thus we touch again on the phenomenon we have referred to: the fundamental conflict between the kings and their people—a conflict not limited to financial matters, but one that embraced all spheres of government that had a bearing on the people’s life. It was in part thanks to this conflict of interests that the Jews could survive the harsh climate of the Middle Ages, and it is hard to believe that they did not discern it when they came to resettle in Christian Europe. Indeed, their requests, since the days of the Carolingians, for assurances of protection before they settled in a place show (a) that they realized that the kings’ positions on many issues differed from those of the common people and (b) that the kings were prepared, for the sake of their interests, to make common cause with the “alien” Jews against the clear wishes of their Christian subjects. In a sense, therefore, the Jews’ agreements with the kings in the Middle Ages resembled the understandings they had reached with foreign conquerors in the ancient world. (Netanyahu 1995, The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain, 71–72)

Perhaps the most egregious falsehood in Ruttenberg’s tweet thread is her claim that “only a small subset of Jews were pushed into moneylending.” First, it should by now be clear that Jews were not “pushed” into moneylending. Second, the numbers engaged in moneylending were not “a small subset.” One historian has pointed out that there is no evidence, among the abundant literature on medieval English Jewry, “to suppose that the English Jews of this period got their living in any considerable numbers in any other art or craft. … It is therefore probable that the capital with which the community started in the country was very considerable.”[13] In the thousands upon thousands of pages of documents we have on this community (the residential data, the taxation information, the details of their personal accounts etc.), we don’t find a professionally diverse and dispersed population, but instead a close-knit, inter-related, and extremely well-organized group of money-lenders and financiers.

Ruttenberg’s claim that only a small subset of Jews were engaged in moneylending and her claim that Jews were treated differently from “Christian bankers” are actually linked in more ways than one. Some excellent research has recently been carried out on the context of Jewish expulsions in medieval Europe (and the expulsions of usurers more generally) by Harvard’s Rowan William Dorin. Dorin’s 2015 PhD thesis, Banishing Usury: The Expulsion of Foreign Moneylenders in Medieval Europe, 1200–1450, is viewable here and is well worth the read, particularly his chapter on the background to the expulsions of Jews. In May 2016, Dorin published a development of the ideas in a chapter in Law and History Review, “‘Once the Jews have been Expelled:’ Intent and Interpretation in late Medieval Canon Law.”[14] The major conclusions of Dorin’s meticulous work are that Jews were nothing more than a small and often incidental fraction of the overall expulsions of moneylenders from various areas of medieval Europe,and that most banishments targeted “Christians hailing from northern Italy. (PhD thesis, 3)” The expulsion of Jews from various European locations is revealed not as an expression of irrational anti-Semitism, but as a result of essentially judicial arguments that stressed the need for unanimous policies concerning usury. As Dorin notes, “one of the few constants of medieval papal attitudes towards the Jews had been a strong resistance to their expulsion.” (2016, 337).

This only began to change when usury, rather than Jews qua Jews, came under papal consideration. Early medieval usury legislation such as Usuranum voraginem was promulgated in response to the increasing presence of Christian moneylenders from northern Italy in the cities and territories of northern Europe, and it was on these Christian moneylenders that its sanctions fell (denial of lodging and expulsion within 3 months). Over time, however, both secular and ecclesiastical figures grappled with the wording of the legislation, which did not mention Christians specifically. Over time, a consensus grew that usury, whether Christian or Jewish, was a grave social ill, and the historical papal aversion of the expulsion of Jews was overturned. The majority of expulsions of Jews occurred not because of the deeds of a “small subset” of Jews, but because usurers of all descriptions were being expelled and Jewish communities were based almost exclusively on the trade in loans. They simply had to be removed in toto. This is only the briefest summary of Dorin’s work, and it really has to be read in full to be appreciated. It is, however, a powerful rejoinder from a Harvard PhD historian and medieval legal specialist to the pop pseudo-history advanced by Rabbi Ruttenberg and eagerly absorbed by those who really don’t know any better.

The latter part of Ruttenberg’s tweet depicted above really says it all in terms of the circular nature of the Jewish defensive narrative.[“You caught that the reason Jews were pushed into this in the first place was also a result of anti-Jewish oppression, yes? Got it? Good”] Ruttenberg basically engages in the familiar Jewish tactic of explaining every negative Jewish behaviour (that is, when any is admitted to) by pointing to oppression. “You oppressed us, so we did A.” “But why did we oppress you?” “Because we also did B.” But why did you do B?” “Because you oppressed us.” “But why did we oppress you in that instance?” “Because we also did C.” Ad infinitum.

Just in case anyone isn’t fully convinced by Ruttenberg’s thread, she wheels out some psychoanalytic jargon for her conclusion. The “trope” of the greedy, crooked Jew merely serves as the “scapegoat for other stresses and complexities in society.” I personally find it quite funny that one of these stresses and complexities remains household debt. I finally it equally strange that, despite it being two centuries since Jews achieved full political and economic “emancipation,” they are still utterly prolific as moneylenders and financiers. The founder and CEO of Avant Credit, one of America’s fastest growing online providers of consumer loans, is Al Goldstein. Goldstein is also behind  SpringCoin, CashNetUSA, Dollars Direct, Enova International, Quick Quid, Pounds to Pocket, and On Stride Financial. Goldstein owns more than 10,000 properties foreclosed on Americans during the financial crash, an event in which his co-ethnics at Quicken Loans (Daniel Gilbert) and Roland Arnall (Ameriquest), played a major role. San Francisco-based moneylending operation LendUp, which has recently been forced to pay $6.33 million in refunds and fines for violating consumer finance laws. is operated by Sasha Orloff and Jacob Rosenberg. Chicago-based PLS Financial is owned and operated by Dan and Bob Wolfberg.

Jeffrey Weiss is the Jewish head of DFC Global Corp, which operates Money Mart, The Money Shop, PayDay UK, and PayDay Express. The head of EZCorp is the Jewish Australian Phillip Cohen. Among its American assets, Cohen’s EZCorp has a portfolio which includes EZ Pawn, Pawn Plus, Value Pawn and Jewelry, Premier Pawn and Jewelry, USA Pawn and Jewelry Company, Easy Cash Solutions, Jerry’s Pawn Shop, and CashMax Payday Loans. Internationally, it also owns Cash Amigo in Mexico, as well as the Cash Converters International Brand. EZ Corp has joined the U.K. feeding frenzy by offering the online payday lending “service” Cash Genie. As well as coming under criticism for charging annual interest rates of 2,986% on its loans, Cash Genie has been forced to repay money to its customers after the Financial Conduct Authority found that the company applied unauthorized charges to customer accounts and permitted customers to become indebted far beyond their means.

In the UK, Mr Lender advertizes its services under the motto “Your Friend Until Payday.” But who is Mr Lender? The founder and owner of the company is Adam Freeman, a member of the South West Essex and Settlement Reform Synagogue who was also selected for the U.K.’s version of The Apprentice. Even with new laws and restrictions, Mr Lender still charges 1,269.6% APR on his loans. Not very friendly.

But by far the most notorious “domestic” online moneylender in Britain is Wonga. It was the astonishing 5,853% rate on Wonga’s annual loans that finally prompted the British government to begin closing the loopholes which permitted the moneylender’s feeding frenzy on the British people. Wonga, which still charges annual interest rates of 1,509%, was founded by two South African Jews, Errol Damelin and Jonty Hurwitz. Both operated the company via the Virgin Islands in order to avoid paying tax. They were, however, very generous donors to Jewish causes like Jewish Care.

According to his Wikipedia entry, Damelin “grew up in a Jewish family where he attended the University of Cape Town. Following his graduation in 1992 he immigrated to Israel. He began his career working as a corporate finance banker at an Israeli bank that later merged into Israel Discount Bank.” He founded Wonga in 2007, with the company soon attracting criticism for “fraud and the exploitation of the most vulnerable in society.” Among the company’s practices was the forging of legal letters in order to terrorize customers into paying ever higher fees. Because such practices are completely illegal the company was later subject to a criminal investigation. Like a rat deserting a sinking ship, Damelin stepped down from his leadership at Wonga (retaining shares) just two weeks before the company was due to be hit with new regulations from the Financial Conduct Authority as well as a $4 million compensation demand. Wonga had yet to pay thousands of customers when it went bust in August 2018. Errol Damelin has since waded into obscurity while Hurwitz has reinvented himself as a creator of degenerate art that is then sold at inflated prices by the Jewish art-fad dictators, the Saatchi brothers. He calls this piece “Immigrant.” You couldn’t make it up.

I have to finish with the one true sentence from Ruttenberg’s thread — the first. “Everything old is still ongoing, I guess.”

I couldn’t put it better.

[1] P. Johnson, A History of the Jews (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p.171.

[2] S. Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1976), p.22.

[3] Ibid, p.177.

[4] B. L. Abrahams, “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290” Jewish Quarterly Review, 7:1 (1894), 75-100 (p.76).

[5] “The Jews of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 15:1 (1902), 5-22 (p.10).

[6] L. Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume 1: From the Time of Christ to the Court Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p.78.

[7] P. Elman, “The Economic Causes of the Expulsion of the Jews in 1290” The Economic History Review, 7:2(1937) 145-154 (p.145).

[8] “The Jews of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 15:1 (1902), 5-22 (p.10).

[9] Ibid, p.11.

[10] B. L. Abrahams, “The Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290” Jewish Quarterly Review, 7:1 (1894), 75-100 (p.84).

[11] Johnson, A History of the Jews, p.205.

[12] Ibid, p.208.

[13] “The Jews of England in the Thirteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly Review, 15:1 (1902), 5-22 (p.10).

[14] R. W. Dorin, “‘Once the Jews have been Expelled:’ Intent and Interpretation in late Medieval Canon Law.” Law and History Review, May 2016, Vol. 34, No. 2., 335-362.

E. Michael Jones on Jews and Usury, Part 2

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

Famed writer Emile Zola also published a novel at the time in which a fictional young Catholic banker seethed at Jewish deceit. The character, Zola writes,

is overwhelmed with an “inextinguishable hatred” for “that accursed race which no longer has its own country, no longer has its own prince, which lives parasitically in the home of nations, feigning to obey the law but in reality only obeying its own God of theft, of blood, of anger .  .  . fulfilling everywhere its mission of ferocious conquest, to lie in wait for its prey, suck the blood out of everyone, [and] grow fat on the life of others.” (1169)

(See my column “Culture of Deceit” for more on such European scandals of the day.)

The Catholic periodical Civiltà Cattolica traced Jewish influence back to the French Revolution, employing Abbe Augustin Barruel’s Memoirs Illustrating the History of Freemasonry in its description of Jewish financial power. The argument, in short, is that the French Revolution allowed the emancipation of the Jews, who were then able to foist their immoral ways (according to Christian mores) onto European society, and “the main way that the Jews achieved their hegemony over Christian societies was through ‘their insatiable appetite for enriching themselves via usury’” (1178). The verdict? “The source of Jewish power is usury.”

From this central fact rolled well-known consequences:

Once having acquired absolute civil liberty and equality in every sphere with Christians and the nations, the dam which previously had held back the Hebrews was opened for them, and in a short time, like a devastating torrent, they penetrated and cunningly took over everything: gold, trade, the stock market, the highest appointments in political administrations, in the army, and in diplomacy; public education, the press, everything fell into their hands or into the hands of those who were inevitably depending upon them. (1179)

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

How little things have changed in our own day. Read more

E. Michael Jones on Jews and Usury, Part 1

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I find it charming when I read or hear of current Alt Right writers who tell us that they came to the Jewish Question “three years ago” or that “Five years ago I was a flaming liberal,” which implies that they had no idea there was a Jewish Question.

Don’t get me wrong  —  I’m pleased when anyone at any time finally realizes there is a Jewish Question. I believe it is the central issue of our times and I welcome all the company we can get.

In contrast, I discovered the Jewish Question on my own before I had even graduated from college in the mid-1980s. For me, it was simply a process of observation. While for over two decades after that I fought conventional wisdom on the topic and had to struggle mightily to realize that most Jewish writers had little interest in the “truth” regarding real Jews and their behavior, I gradually grasped some hard-earned insights into the situation, which I routinely try to share here on TOO and in the print journal TOQ.

Today I aim to praise one of the four modern American scholars who have had a major influence on my thinking when it comes to Jews. These men are Albert Lindemann (Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews ), John Murray Cuddihy (The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle With Modernity), our own Kevin MacDonald, and Catholic firebrand E. Michael Jones.

Today’s column discusses E. Michael Jones and his vast writing on Jews. I’ve written about Jones at least twice for the Occidental crowd, first here on TOO in late 2008 and after that in a book review in The Occidental Quarterly. The book in question was his magisterial The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, a book which absolutely should be on serious people’s shelves along with CofC.

To introduce possible new TOO readers to Dr. Jones, I’ll crib from my intro to the 2008 TOO entry:

Anyone who has followed the writing career of Catholic iconoclast E. Michael Jones will likely agree that his writings on Jews over the last half decade have been little short of incendiary. Thus the Internet site Fringe Watch claims that Jones “represents one of the foremost proponents of ‘religious’ anti-Semitism in Catholic circles.”

Jones’ major vehicle for airing his views on Jews is his magazine Culture Wars, which in recent years has run cover stories such as “Judaizing: Then and Now,” “The Converso Problem: Then and Now,” “Shylock Comes to Notre Dame,” and “Too Many Yarmulkes: Abortion and the Ethnic Double Standard.” He then packaged these arguments in a monumental book called The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (2008).

Read more