Jews in the Economy and Finance

Jews and Moneylending: A Contemporary Case File, Part 1 of 3

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“Interest on debts grows without rain.”-Yiddish Proverb

Some things never change, and one of these things seems to be the Jewish connection to usury. During a recent conversation with a good friend who now finds himself at the sharp end of the financial downturn, he mentioned having been forced to turn to the ‘services” of what has become known as a “payday loan” company. The relatively small, short-term, unsecured loans offered by these companies, to those struggling to hold onto the socio-economic ladder, very often come with eye-watering rates of interest. As the conversation continued, my friend despondently informed me that because of the rate of interest on his current loan, when the end of the month came he was in all likelihood going to be facing the prospect of paying off his loan only to have to immediately take out another.

He was trapped. Looking at this younger man, who also has a baby on the way, I offered to cover the totality of the interest on this particular loan on one condition: that he avoids at all costs taking out another loan. He gratefully accepted my offer, but I couldn’t help but feel that it won’t be long before the allure of quick (but expensive) cash begins to tug at him once more.

Cicero once remarked on “how large an income is thrift,” and I would also echo the sentiment that thrift is a matter of character more than of economics. But more immediately pressing to me in this case was the fact that although my young friend believed he was dealing with a fairly small-scale operation, with a “down-home” feel, he was in fact becoming ensnared in an international web that thrives and feeds on people just like him — the hard-working but economically weak victims of “the system.” The small storefront instant loan operations in your hometown, or the comforting names of the seemingly small-scale online lender, are simply the extremities of this web. Sitting at the feast table of this feeding frenzy on the working poor are a large number of businessmen who hail from an ethnic community which has a long, rich, and unbroken history in precisely this line of work. Regardless of those screeching cries of ‘stereotype,” this history is a well-documented one, and with the publication of this article I hope it will be documented better still. Moreover, I might add, despite the obfuscations of those with obvious bias, this particular tribe has more often than not engaged in this trade out of choice. After all, unlike crops which require toil, sweat, rootedness and, yes, rain, interest grows simply and incessantly with the tick of the clock. Read more

Tory funding scandal explodes in the UK: The ethnic angle

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It is not very surprising that rich people use secret Swiss bank accounts to hide their fortunes from the taxman.  Nevertheless the political implications of the biggest bank leak in history at HSBC ensure that it will ricochet around the world for some time to come.

The accounts of over 100,000 wealthy clients have been opened to scrutiny by a whistle blower and show that the Swiss branch of Britain’s biggest bank was dealing not only in industrial-scale tax evasion but, apparently, money laundering as well. While holding a Swiss bank account is not illegal, hiding income from the taxman is, and traditionally that is the only reason someone would have a Swiss account  — unless they worked in that country.

All kinds of wealthy flotsam have bobbed up — Middle Eastern royalty, hedge fund owners, politicians, industrialists, Belgian blood diamond smugglers, Israeli arms dealers, African dictators, fashion designers, international models, entertainers and many more. Fresh revelations are revealed practically every day.

The fallout has been biggest in Britain where the ruling Conservative elite has ended up with egg on its face after seven of its largest donors were exposed as beneficiaries of HSBC’s Swiss tax arrangements. The Tories received £5 million from those HSBC Suisse account holders. Read more

“The Wolf of Wall Street” — the Movie

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As we recently saw with my review of Jordan Belfort’s bestseller The Wolf of Wall Street, there are many pronounced Jewish themes in the memoir. Frankly, I’d never noticed the book, but this year I did get the DVD of the film based on the book, and that alerted me.

Begin with this howler: As the diminutive Jewish stock fraudster Jordan Belfort, director Martin Scorsese chose none other than six-foot-tall, (sometimes) blond-haired Leonardo DiCaprio. This has to go down as one of the most egregious miscastings in Hollywood history.

Why did it happen?

I will argue that this is a classic case of Hollywood deceiving the public, and I have plenty of evidence for this.

In the film, at exactly five minutes into the story — just after DiCaprio’s character has snorted cocaine with a hundred dollar bill and done a little trick by making us think “this shit” (cocaine) will make you invincible, when it fact he means the money he is using as a straw — he launches into a speech as he enters his busy trading floor:

See, money doesn’t just buy you a better life — better food, better cars, better pussy — it also makes you a better person. You can give generously to the church, or political party of your choice. Save the fuckin’ spotted owl with money.  [emphasis added]

“To the church.” In his memoir from which the film springs, Belfort is refreshingly forthright that he is Jewish — and that all but one close associate is Jewish — as are the majority of his traders. Now in the film — which “happened” to open on Christmas Day 2013 — we are informed that rich people like DiCaprio’s Belfort can give “to the church,” not synagogue or ADL or Jewish think tank. It is this kind of subtle deception that would, in my view, prevent the vast, vast majority of Gentile viewers from understanding that these financial criminals are Jewish. Read more

“The Wolf of Wall Street” — the Book

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How many times have you heard about financial crimes and frauds perpetrated by people who happen to be Jewish? How many times have you heard about the association of Jews and Wall Street? For most TOO readers, these themes should be amply familiar.

Now let’s consider yet another instance of the above. Just before the economic meltdown of 2008, an important book about Wall Street appeared and became a bestseller. It was stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s first book about his crimes called The Wolf of Wall Street and was published in 2007 by major publisher Bantam Dell, a division of Random House.

Let’s allow an official overview to set up the tale:

By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170 foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids who waited for him at home and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called … “Wolf of Wall Street.” In the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent — the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down.

Refreshingly, throughout the book Belfort openly and explicitly notes his marked Jewish identity and that of all of his close co-conspirators. It amounts to a fascinating look at the inner workings of a corrupt Jewish financial organization — and Belfort succeeds magnificently in narrating the rollicking affair. No wonder one newspaper called it “A cross between Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Scorsese’s GoodFellas. The comparison to Wolfe is apt, but rather than Scorsese’s GoodFellas, Belfort’s tale should be compared to Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas because it shares the same non-stop extreme adventure and use of mind-altering drugs. Read more

Free to Cheat: “Jewish Emancipation” and the Anglo-Jewish Cousinhood, Part 2

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The Cousinhood on the World Stage.

In 1847, London’s Jewish community had produced a statement for public consumption stressing that the election of Lionel de Rothschild would represent nothing more than the election of another politician who would work for “the welfare of the nation, and the prosperity of his country.”[33] However, later actions by members of the Cousinhood who had taken places in the legislature and in government would provide cause for pondering precisely which nation was being referred to. David Feldman has revealed that entry into the legislature facilitated greater Jewish involvement in the administration of the British Empire, and that the Cousinhood was involved in a succession of financial and political scandals which had at their root “family and religious connections,” “the pursuit of profit,” and attempts to “influence colonial affairs when it deemed [global] Jewish interests were at stake.”[34]

By 1900, through a process of ethnic and familial networking, the Cousinhood had secured many of the most significant administrative positions in the Empire. Feldman notes that the Nathan family alone had by that date secured the positions of Governor of the Gold Coast, Hong Kong and Natal, Attorney-General and Chief Justice in Trinidad, Private Secretary to the Viceroy of India, Officiating Chief Secretary to the Governor of Eastern Bengal and Assam,  and Postmaster-General of Bengal.[35] In Parliament, Lionel Abrahams was Permanent Assistant Under-Secretary at the India Office, working under his cousin Edwin Montagu who was then Parliamentary Under-Secretary for India.[36] Read more

Free to Cheat: “Jewish Emancipation” and the Anglo-Jewish Cousinhood, Part 1

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“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

                           Charles Mackay, 1841[1]

Shortly after his election to Parliament in 1830, Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), a famous historian and one of Britain’s leading men of letters, took up the cause of removing Jewish “civil disabilities” in Britain. In a succession of speeches, Macaulay was instrumental in pushing the case for permitting Jews to sit in the legislature, and his January 1831 article Civil Disabilities of the Jews had a “significant effect on public opinion.”[2] Professing Jews residing in Britain at that time were unable to take seats in the House of Commons, because prior to sitting in the legislature one was required to declare a Christian oath. In addition, Jews were “excluded from Crown office, from corporations, and from most of the professions, the entrance to which bristled with religious oaths, tests, and declarations.”[3] Even the 1753 Naturalization Act which had granted citizenship to foreign-born Jews had been repealed following widespread popular agitation, and a pervading atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust of Jews generally, and foreign Jews especially.[4] Ursula Henriques states that because of the resolute opposition of the British people to the involvement of Jews in British political life, since their readmission in the 17th century “the Jews had remained quiet.”[5]

However, buoyed by the granting of political emancipation to Protestant Dissenters and Catholics in 1828 and 1829, British Jews began to agitate for their own “emancipation,” and this agitation was augmented and spearheaded to a great extent by Thomas Macauley. Within thirty years the British elite had capitulated; not only had all Christian oaths been abandoned, but six unconverted Jews sat in the House of Commons. Within fifty years, Britain had sixteen Jewish Members of Parliament, and a Jewish Prime Minister who espoused a doctrine of Jewish racial superiority — Benjamin Disraeli; and under Disraeli Britain would pursue a foreign policy dictated to a large extent by what future Prime Minister William Gladstone called “Judaic sympathies.”[6] This foreign policy would include support for the Ottomans who were friendly to Jews and were massacring Christians in Bulgaria. And it would include waging of war on the Boers in a move highly beneficial to Jewish mining operations in South Africa.[7] How and why did such a dramatic change in circumstances occur? And how did the Anglo-Jewish elite repay Britain for its act of ‘justice’? Read more

Johan Galtung on Jews

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Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung is a prominent Norwegian academic, the founder of the field of peace studies and author of more than 100 books and more than 1000 scholarly papers. He has also been officially labeled an anti-Semite as a result of recent statements, at least some of which are sensible.

Galtung believes that historical anti-Semitism is based at least partly on Jewish behavior: On the rise of anti-Jewish attitudes in Germany during the 1920s,  he says that it was “not unproblematic that Jews had key niches in a society humiliated by defeat at Versailles.”

He distinguishes between predicting anti-Jewish behavior and justifying it: “In no way, absolutely no way, does this justify the atrocities. But it created anti-Semitism that could have been predicted.” In the same way, he argues that medieval pogroms were motivated by the role of Jews in usury: “The Jews played a role in demanding payment from indebted peasants.”

This of course violates the dogma that all anti-Jewish attitudes and behavior are completely irrational—the result of things like Christian religious ideology or individual psychopathology—rather than reality-based conflicts of interest. In the modern world, Galtung claims that “the Jews control U.S. media, and divert for the sake of Israel.”

“Six Jewish companies control 96% of the media,” wrote Galtung. He included the names of journalists, publishers, TV networks, and movie studios, that he claims are controlled by Jews. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch was also included on the list. “He’s not Jewish, but many of the people under him are,” wrote Galtung, in reference to Murdoch. “Many of them are fanatically pro-Israel,” he pointed out. Immediately following these claims, Galtung wrote that “seventy percent of the professors at the 20 most important American universities are Jewish.” Galtung bases his doctrine on an article written by William Luther Pierce, founder of the “National Alliance,” a white supremacist organization.

In a later article defending his position, Galtung provides some great quotes, as from Ruth Wisse of Harvard: “to young Jewish journalists, that they should not ‘see themselves as seekers after wisdom and truth, but as part of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (13/02/12).”

The  issue of the loyalty of American Jews is a canard?? Read more