http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5715
The Occidental Observer
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. 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 http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5216 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.
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.”
http://theoccidentalobserver.com/articles/Editorial-BailoutII.html#bailout