Editorial
Now comes the anger

October 6, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dershowitz pulled out all the stops in this particular campaign — even
purchasing a full page ad in the New York Times (at a cost of
$450,000) and ads in three other newspapers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stay tuned.

Permanent URL:http://www.theoccidentalobserver.com...les/Editorial-
BailoutII.html

"LOVE Europe HATE the EU" wrote
As this is being written, the stock market is again posting
huge losses because of fears that the financial
meltdown is spreading to Europe.





The markets are declining in value because investors have opened their eyes
to see that the underlying assets ain't worth what people told them they was
worth. Meaning, the DOW will settle in around 8,000 something, maybe after
some volatility well below that amount and/or well above that amount. Then
it'll begin it's slow climb up.

Stocks, houses, etc have been way over valued for years now. It grew to
much to quickly, and will fall to much to quickly. 20 years ago it was
hovering around 2100. 20 years before that it was around 950. 20 years
from now it'll be up to.....much higher than today most likely.





--
Paul A. Thomas, CPA
Watkinsville, Georgia