Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Followup (II): Obsession, Aish, Clarion Fund
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)
In Did Sheldon Adelson Fund Anti-Obama Propaganda DVD?, Richard Silverstein references a recently published NY Times article about Aish. It was entitled Important? If You Are, Torah Study Can Visit and provides circumstantial evidence of the role that Aish and other Jewish Zionist social-networking or religious organizations played in creating conditions for the Wall Street meltdown.
Aish haTorah likes to hang out with rich Jewish ignoramuses (like Sheldon Adelson) of the sort found all over Wall Street or the City of London. Because of Aish's crude simple-minded Zionism it became one of several conduits for spreading around all sorts of Neocon propaganda and racist anti-Muslim anti-Arab incitement, and in 2003 a lot of finance guys and other people more or less associated with Aish were passing around the idea that CDOs were essentially a sort of high yield low risk junk bond, which are normally high yield high risk.
Obviously, the claim is too good to be true, but it had a superficial plausibility. As long as the US economy is growing, housing values are likely to go up, and holders of subprime mortgages will eventually be able to refinance at affordable fixed rate mortgages -- and Neocons, whom Aish staff and many Wall Streeters treated like prophets spreading the word of God, promised a post-Iraq invasion economic boom as Iraqi state assets were privatized.
In contrast to a junk bond, which is generally tied to a single business, a CDO was a bundle of many mortgages, and in theory the possibility of total across-the-board default was extremely unlikely. From the standpoint of middle-level finance guys CDOs were marvelous because they could get rich on brokering deals and receiving fees without actually having to invest.
While there is some fraud associated with the meltdown albeit less than commonly believed, there has been a huge amount of gross fiduciary negligence and irresponsibility as well as possibly conspiracy in the actions of Neocons and Jewish Zionist social organizations in spreading hype about CDOs.
A lot of the money brokers reaped in fees can be reclaimed as fines for civil infractions after extremely long litigation, but far too many would get away with their ill-gotten gains.
Not only would my proposed solution work faster and more effectively to punish the guilty and fix the finance industry than SEC litigation in combination with the Bush bailout, but it does not have the obvious flaw of putting lots of money in the hands of people that have been totally asleep at the financial wheel for the last five years.
Overall, the Wall Street crisis supports my contention in Pre-State Zionism that understanding Jewish history is an absolute necessity in a world where Jews are so important politically and economically.
The NY Times article contains some truly errant nonsense that would be apparent to anyone with a good background in Eastern European Jewish studies. I am saddened that the reporter did not have the knowledge base to challenge the following ridiculous claim.
Rabbi Kenneth Brander, dean of the Center for the Jewish Future at Yeshiva University in New York, said the Aish program reflected a long tradition in Judaism of cooperation between the tribes of ancient Israel known as the Zebulun and the Issachar. "The Zebulun, the tribe of the merchants and business people, provided financially for the tribe of the Issachar," the rabbis and Torah scholars, he said. It is not the first such program to accommodate the wealthiest, either.
In reality, the pattern of alliance between religious "scholars" like the Aish haTorah rabbis and Jewish wealth like Wall Street Jews or Zionist Jewish political economic oligarchs like Adelson was for the most part the norm in E. Europe and provided the Jewish wealthy class with almost total control of Jewish intracommunal and extracommunal politics. (Sounds familiar doesn't it?)
Until the Hasidic Movement developed its own merchant class, it represented in many ways a rebellion of ordinary Jews (proste yidn) against such domination.
Somewhat later Israel Salanter founder of the Musar (Ethics) Movement took a principled stand against the corruption of Jewish religion by Jewish wealth. Unfortunately, his lessons have been almost entirely forgotten by Jews outside of groups like Neturei Karta.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Sholem Aleichem was already working on the short story collection entitled Menahem-Mendl that contained apparently humorous but really quite grim stories presaging today's tragedy of errors on Wall Street.
