Tag Archives: economy

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Symptoms of Hostility

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In “Greenspan to testify on immigration” Steve Sailer wrote:

The Open Boarders (sic) crowd isn’t even trying to make sense these days, are they?

My comment got lost/filtered:

In identifying them, “Genocidal Immigrationists” comes closer to the truth. For example, with that understanding of their intent, their nonsense makes perfect sense.

When something doesn’t make sense it’s often because you’re view is distorted or incomplete. But sometimes it’s willful. Sailer himself likes to call attention to and ridicule this kind of willful ignorance, categorizing his observations under “political correctness makes you stupid“.

Recognizing that many of the wealthy, intelligent, educated, and well-informed progressivist globalist administrators of the world actively perpetrate genocide and many more acquiesce to and abet it is apparently something Sailer finds too dangerous to permit his commentariat to try and deride or dispute.

Then again, maybe Blogger just dropped my comment.

– – –

There has been no substantial criticism of Genocidal Immigrationists, though the accusation is quite explicit. Beside the relatively light volume of visitors here I attribute this mainly to the accusation’s validity. At best the most ardent supporters of mass immigration simply don’t care who suffers the consequences, and at worst they intend them. Their justification usually hinges on claims that immigration is profitable overall. When they respond to those who object it is only to smear us as losers, haters, or some combination of the two – another sign of their bad faith and ill will.

I learned only recently from a post at Majority Rights titled ‘La Loi’ de Frédéric Bastiat that there’s an old name for the mendacity I had long noticed genocidal immigrationists indulging in, particularly those of the economist persuasion. It’s called the Broken Window Fallacy, which is the idea that any economic activity whatsoever is more desirable than none. For example, when our genocidalist administrators permit thousands of aliens to flood into our countries to the point that they overload our schools, hospitals, courts, prisons, housing, utilities and roads we shouldn’t see that as bad. No, it’s a wonderful boon. We’re so very lucky because it means lots of jobs and increases the globalist economist’s holiest of holies, the Gross Domestic Product. Never mind that the lives and efforts of some of our finest men and women end up flowing down a rat hole or into aiding those who hate us.

Globalism is in essence a world-scale pyramid scheme. It can only exist because the kind of economic wisdom contained in Bastiat’s essay What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen has for too long not been seen.

– – –

In their initial responses to the Swine Flu various globalist mouthpieces again reveal their genocidal motivations, falling over themselves as they have not to calm the public, or to announce measures that would slow or blunt the impact of the outbreak. No. Instead their first reactions have been to announce loudly and clearly that closing borders and restricting travel would most definitely NOT happen – and that only xenophobes and nativist loser-haters who would think such measures might help. Of course if your main concern is continuing to flood the West with third worlders, then an outbreak of infectious disease isn’t important to you except as a threat to trade and travel.

Here’s one typical example from Monday:

Swine Flu Border Closures are Political, WHO Says

Travel restrictions under consideration by the U.S. to prevent the spread of a new flu virus may be influenced by politics more than science, the World Health Organization’s chief said today.

WHO doesn’t recommend closing borders or restricting the movement of people or goods, Margaret Chan, director-general of the United Nations agency told leaders from health groups around the world in a conference call today. The disease, which may have caused more than 100 deaths and sickened more than 1,000 people, has spread too far and would be impossible to contain by closing borders, she said.

“By definition, pandemic influenza will move around the world,” Chan said in the call today. “Does that mean we are going to close every country? Does that mean we are going to bring the world’s economy to a standstill?

“We know from past experience that transmission of influenza or the spread of new influenza disease would not be stopped by closing borders and would not be stopped by restricting movement of people or goods,” Chan said.

Note the numerous hysterical exaggerations. “Impossible to contain”, “every country”, “bring the world’s economy to a standstill”. Note also the inversion in the headline. It is WHO who is driven by politics more than science. The fact is that the rate and extent of the spread of an epidemic is directly related to the frequency and intimacy of contact among people. Reducing interaction slows the rate of infection, stretching it over time, reducing the severity of the impact (so all the cops, firefighters, doctors, and nurses aren’t sick at once) and making it more likely medicine can be produced and distributed.

I don’t think a world-class executive like Chan or her advisors fail to understand this. Instead it seems they are motivated by different priorities that override any such understanding.

Travel to Asia plunged during in the 2002-2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory disease, or SARS.

SARS, which killed 770 people, reduced passenger air traffic 19 percent in Asia and 8.2 percent worldwide. Malaysia shut its borders to travelers from China and Hong Kong, and other countries instituted health checks at airports and borders. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discouraged travel to some affected countries and said it might screen travelers in a bird flu epidemic.

“When we talk about travel advisories, we cannot think of the old days when we were dealing with SARS,” Chan said today. “It’s a totally different ballgame now.”

Calling 2002-2003 “the old days” and claiming the SARS outbreak is “totally different” is a transparently lame attempt to deny that closing borders and reducing travel might help. “Who cares how many people die”, seems to be the thinking.

– – –

Contrast the current reaction with the reaction of the US government in 1976 to a single death from Swine Flu. Advisors feared a pandemic because “[t]he virus isolated at Fort Dix is antigenically related to the influenza virus which has been implicated as the cause of the 1918-1919 pandemic which killed 450,000—more than 400 out of every 100,000 Americans”:

Then President Ford, on the same March 24, 1976, only one day after his surprise loss to Ronald Reagan in the North Carolina Republican presidential primary, announced on national television his recommendation to the American public for a crash nation-wide influenza vaccination program to include “every man, woman and child.” Congress responded promptly to the president’s call for funds (appropriations were voted by the Senate April 9, by the House April 12, and signed into law April 15, 1976). Vaccine was produced, field tested, and evaluated in April, May and June. There were problems with producing the vaccine. Nevertheless, between October 1 and December 16, 1976, the U.S. Public Health Service, through state and local public health department “public sector providers,” rapidly spread out among the citizenry to successfully vaccinate 85% of 40 million voluntary vaccinees in 10 weeks (the other 15% of the 40 million voluntary vaccinees received their vaccinations from “private sector providers”).

It seems we’re heading for something closer to a repeat of 1918 than 1976.

– – –

This morning I was listening to NPR and was quite surprised to hear the commentator declare that the common thread in the outbreak so far was a connection to Mexico.

A minute later they mentioned that the israeli health minister found the word swine offensive to jews and muslims and suggested calling it mexican flu instead, which offended mexicans. That made me laugh quite a bit, though I sobered up when I realized it’s only a matter of time before the selfless advocates for all “people of color” decide to call it White flu and blame blue-eyed people for engineering it. Nobody will care if that causes us any offense.

– – –

In “Swine flu” Sailer writes:

Some people are puzzled as to how human, pig, and bird strains of the flu have mixed together, but if you have spent any time in rural Mexico the answer is obvious: these creatures all live together in close quarters.

Commenter El Caudillo quotes this and suggests a more accurate term would be mestizo flu. I didn’t bother testing if Sailer would permit a comment suggesting genocidal globalist flu is even more accurate. Ben Tillman said as much in a subtle way:

It’s the evolution of virulence through horizontal transmission. Immigration policy is designed to foster such increased virulence.

Indeed, that’s the science of it. Obviously the politics are instead driven by what is financially and biologically profitable for the mendacious few at the tip of the pyramid. The rest of us be damned.

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Moral Hazard

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View From the Top – Part 1, January 29 2009:

Mort Zuckerman, co-founder and chairman of Boston Properties, talks to Chrystia Freeland, US managing editor, and the economic crisis, the credit crunch and what government intervention should look like.

At about 3:20:

Zuckerman: …some how or another the federal govt is going to have to join in some way with guaranteeing bank loans. Not the full amount but let’s just say that commercial banks would make loans for 10 or 15 or 20…

Freeland: Guarantee new loans?

Z: New loans, not old loans. Because we must find a way to start credit flowing in the economy again or else we stand a chance of a real bust. So some how or another we have to get the government involved.

F: Wouldn’t that impose a risk of moral hazard? Isn’t that sort of Fanny Freddization all over again…

Z: Moral hazard, ideology, these are the things we can no longer think about – when you’re talking about saving the system. I wouldn’t care if we save the system by violating concerns about moral hazard or ideology.

F: If the govt has to intervene even more deeply in the financial system how much extra money do you think it’s going to end up spending on that?

Z: Well I saw where Larry Summers estimated that it would take somewhere between a trillion and a half dollars and three trillion dollars just in a sense to refloat the financial system. I think that’s a very good range. If anything I would come out near the top end of the range.

F: Of government money?

Z: Or government credit.

F: And do you think the American people, the American political system, is prepared to sign off on that amount of money?

Z: I think when they see what the alternatives are I think they’ll be prepared to do that.

At about 6:45:

Z: …because without that confidence nothing will work. No matter what this is a consumer led economy. 72% of our economy is based on consumption. If the consumer holds back and pulls back – which he or she can do – people can live very well with alot of what they already have other than food and drink and fuel.

F: No one needs to buy a new a car this year, no one needs to buy a new TV set.

Z: Right. A lot of people can live – it’s the TV programming that needs to be changed not the TV set. And I’ll tell ya, this is going to be an extraordinary year in American public life no matter who is in the Congress and who is in the White House.

View From the Top – Part 2, January 29 2009 begins:

F: You’re also a publisher. How is the print publishing business doing?

Z: Well the print publishing business is an oxymoron. It is no longer a business. It is an advertising driven business and the advertisers have driven elsewhere.

Zuckerman goes on to claim that almost every major newspaper is losing money, but that he didn’t get into the business to make money, he’s just addicted to journalism.

At about 8:05:

F: Has the Madoff affair had a particular impact on the American jewish community?

Z: Well I suppose on some level it is, the fact is that what he did was completely against jewish values, against not only the way jews contribute to a community in human terms but in financial terms – he robbed alot of charities of the funds which they are contributing to…

F: Specifically actually jewish charities that he was involved in.

Z: Yeah, alot of jewish charities, yes. My charity isn’t specifically a jewish charity – I mean I support cancer research, and scholarships, and things like that, but having said that, but you know as I said Ponzi, last time I checked, was an Italian and he was the person who gave the name to this kind of thing and it doesn’t mean that all Italians are involved in this. So the fact that he happens to be jewish, he’s also a sociopath, and that was the dominant feature of this man, who was willing to damage all sorts of people almost without remorse.

Freeland would seem to disagree. She’s concerned about the particular impact on jews, and specifically actually jewish charities.

It’s easy to imagine Madoff, at least up until December 2008, was thinking about his private pyramid scheme along the same lines Zuckerman is still thinking about the larger consumer-based economy: moral hazard, ideology, these are the things we can no longer think about – when you’re talking about saving the system.

Jewish charities. Keep people spending. Save the system. This is how jews really contribute to a community in financial terms.

Ponzi, last time I checked, was a piker compared to Madoff. From here on Madoff should be the person who gives the name to this kind of thing. As Zuckerman should readily agree, nobody will think that means all jews are involved.

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The Jewish Bond

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We start with some facts as recovered from many sources sprinkled across the philo-semitic media. My emphasis.

‘All Just One Big Lie’
Bernard Madoff was a Wall Street whiz with a golden reputation. Investors, including Jewish charities, entrusted him with billions. It’s gone.

It may be the largest fraud in the history of Wall Street, authorities said. Madoff is charged with stealing as much as $50 billion, in part to cover a pattern of massive losses, even as he cultivated a reputation as a financial mastermind and prominent philanthropist.

Madoff’s investors included a number of prominent hedge funds and the firm of Fred Wilpon, the owner of the New York Mets. Several may have sustained billions of dollars in losses.

But the damage appears to be deepest in the small world of Jewish philanthropy, where Madoff was a leading figure. The North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System said it lost $5 million. The Julian J. Levitt Foundation, based in Texas and focused on Jewish causes, lost about $6 million. Yeshiva University, a New York institution where Madoff served on the board, said it was examining how much money it invested with his firm.

Madoff’s own $19 million foundation, which gave to a range of New York and Jewish causes, also was wiped out.

Madoff’s alleged $50 billion fraud hits other investors

“Madoff’s investors included captains of industry, corporations — some of which are publicly traded — that used Madoff almost as a high-yielding cash management account, endowments, universities, foundations and, importantly, many high-profile funds of funds,” said Douglas Kass, who heads hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management.

“It appears that at least $15 billion of wealth, much of which was concentrated in southern Florida and New York City, has gone to ‘money heaven,'” he said.

Federal agents arrested Madoff at his apartment on Thursday after prosecutors said he told senior employees that his money management operations were “all just one big lie” and “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme.”

One woman said that when she called the firm’s offices on Thursday she was told it was “business as usual.”

Another investor groused, “Business as usual? Of course it’s business as usual. We’re getting screwed left and right.”

“I expect to get back zero,” said Floridian Susan Leavitt, who invested through Madoff. “When he tells the feds he has $200 million to $300 million left out of billions, what can you expect?”

Madoff said “there is no innocent explanation” for his activities, and that he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there,” according to the federal complaint.

Prosecutors also accused Madoff of wanting to distribute as much as $300 million to employees, family members and friends before turning himself in.

Charged with one count of securities fraud, he faces up to 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed separate civil charges.

Madoff is a member of Nasdaq OMX Group Inc’s nominating committee. His firm has said it is a market-maker for about 350 Nasdaq stocks.

He is also chairman of London-based Madoff Securities International Ltd, whose chief executive, Stephen Raven, said the firm was “not in any way part of” the New York-based market-maker.

Fund Fraud Hits Big Names

Details emerged Friday of how Mr. Madoff ran the alleged scam, fostering a veneer of exclusivity and creating an A-list of investors that became his most powerful marketing tool. From New York and Florida to Minnesota and Texas, the money manager became an insider’s choice among well-heeled investors seeking steady returns. By hiring unofficial agents, tapping into elite country clubs and creating “invitation only” policies for investors, he recruited a steady stream of new clients.

During golf-course and cocktail-party banter, Mr. Madoff’s name frequently surfaced as a money manager who could consistently deliver high returns. Older, Jewish investors called Mr. Madoff ” ‘the Jewish bond,’ ” says Ken Phillips, head of a Boulder, Colo., investment firm. “It paid 8% to 12%, every year, no matter what.”

One of the largest clusters of Madoff investors was in Florida, where losses could be substantial. Mr. Madoff relied on a network of friends, family and business colleagues to attract investors. According to investors and agents, some of these agents were paid commissions for harvesting investors. Others had separate, lucrative business relationships with Mr. Madoff.

“If you were eating lunch at the club or golfing, everyone was always talking about how Madoff was making them all this money,” one investor says. “Everyone wanted to sign up.”

Jeff Fischer, a top divorce attorney in Palm Beach, says many of his clients were also Mr. Madoff’s clients. “Every big divorce that came through my office had portfolio positions with Madoff,” he says.

Two of his investors said that among his clients, Mr. Madoff was considered a money-management legend; they would joke that if Mr. Madoff was a fraud, he’d take down half the world with him.

Mr. Madoff’s main go-between in Palm Beach was Robert Jaffe, say several investors. Mr. Jaffe is the son-in-law of Carl Shapiro, the founder and former chairman of apparel company Kay Windsor Inc. and an early investor and close friend of Mr. Madoff’s. Mr. Jaffe, a philanthropist in Palm Beach, attracted many investors from the Palm Beach Country Club in Palm Beach, Fla.

“He was a low-key guy,” Ms. Manzke says. “He would say, ‘Look, I’m a market-maker, and I don’t want anyone to know I’m running money.’ It was always for select people. He was always closed, he wasn’t taking new money.”

The federal complaints against Mr. Madoff allege his fraudulent activities came through a secretive private wealth-management wing of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the investment firm he founded in 1960. On Wall Street, his company was perhaps better known for its operations in market-making — the business of serving as a middleman between buyers and sellers — and proprietary trading.

Through those higher-profile parts of his operation, Mr. Madoff was a pioneer in trading New York Stock Exchange shares away from the exchange. He is a past chairman of the board of directors of the Nasdaq Stock Market as well as a member of the board of governors of the National Association of Securities Dealers and a member of numerous committees of the organization, according to his firm’s Web site.

Mr. Madoff owns a home in Roslyn, N.Y., records show, and an elaborate beachfront home and grounds in Montauk on Long Island.

Mr. Madoff and his wife live in an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where property records list individual apartments valued at more than $5 million. One property database estimated the 2008 market value of Mr. Madoff’s two-floor unit to be roughly $9 million. For years he has served as president of the building’s co-op board, according to a tenant.

Madoff’s arrest in billion-dollar fraud case shocks Palm Beach investors

Bernard Madoff didn’t accept money from just anyone. Clients ideally had to have at least $10 million to open an account with his New York investment firm.

While such wealthy people don’t turn up just anywhere, the Palm Beach Country Club provided enough to make Madoff’s membership in the predominantly Jewish club worthwhile.

Investing with Madoff also was attractive because the returns were so high, Rampell said. Even in recent years, when other securities tanked, returns were as high as 11 percent to 15 percent, he said.

“There is no innocent explanation,” Madoff told FBI agents, according to court documents. He told the agents he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there,” that he was “broke” and that he expected to go to jail.

The only bright spot for investors is that they may be able to get tax refunds if the investment returns were bogus, Rampell said. But, he acknowledged, that would be little compensation, either financially or psychologically, for those who knew him at the country club.

The auto industry may have to grovel for government money, but “bright spots” magically appear for the members of Madoff’s network.

Madoff Investors May Be Protected By Government
Judge Says Those Duped Need Aid Under The Securites Investor Protection Act

Meanwhile, a federal judge on Monday threw a lifesaver to investors who may have been duped, saying they need the protection of a special government reserve fund set up to help investors at failed brokerage firms.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton ordered that clients of Madoff’s private investment business seek relief under a federal statute created to rescue cheated investors. Stanton also ordered that business be liquidated under the jurisdiction of a bankruptcy court and named attorney Irvin H. Picard as trustee to oversee that process.

Stanton signed the order after the Securities Investor Protection Corporation asked that steps be taken to protect investors in the scheme, which has ensnared several major banks and prominent figures as victims and could result in as much as $50 billion in losses.

Congress created the SIPC in 1970 to protect investors when a brokerage firm fails and cash and securities are missing from accounts. Funds can be used to satisfy the remaining claims of each customer up to a maximum of $500,000. The figure includes a maximum of up to $100,000 on claims for cash.

SIPC President Stephen Harbeck said in a statement that the fund’s task will be harder than in other bankruptcies because of the size of the misappropriation and the condition of the defunct firm’s records.

Harbeck said it would be unlikely that the trustee can transfer the firm’s customer accounts to a solvent brokerage firm. He added that it was impossible at this point to determine what share each investor might hold in any remaining assets.

From its inception through December 2007, the SIPC has advanced $507 million and made possible the recovery of $15.7 billion in assets for an estimated 626,000 investors, the fund said on its web site.

If the SIPC bails out the Madoff scheme “investors” it will amount to roughly the sum total the SIPC has paid out over its entire 38 year lifetime. Sure, that’s reasonable. Ben Bernanke will just have to print another $15B.

Sailer’s Bernie Madoff as an “affinity scam” is noteworthy mainly for its comments, including:

up yours new yawk said…

What’s interesting about this Madoff scandal is the growing list of liberals and neoconservatives who felt that involvement with charities that work to keep the Jewish bloodlines clean are respectable enterprises to be involved with.

How many Jews are castigating whites for the slightest hint of racial identity and then at the same time funding various “keep it Jewish” charities?

And links in the comments, including I Knew Bernie Madoff Was Cheating, That’s Why I Invested with Him:

So why did these smart and skeptical investors keep investing? They, like many Madoff investors, assumed Madoff was somehow illegally trading on information from his market-making business for their benefit.

Auster writes in Catalog of believers:

Here is a story from today’s New York Post that names many of Bernard Madoff’s clients along with how much they lost. It seems that virtually 100 percent of his believers/followers/marks were Jews and Jewish organizations, and many of them believed in him so much that they had given 100 percent of their investment capital to him.

And from Madoff discussion:

Mark P. writes:

I’m still amazed that a handful of Jews managed to amass $50 billion…

It’s like some kind of…overclass…

(wink) (wink)

He links a video of a round table discussion featuring Madoff discussing his business in October 2007, Bernie Madoff on the modern stock market. Watch this video and note the similarity to the financial bullshit shoveled on your TV every evening. The jargon. The confidence. “We make money by taking risks.” Risk? What risk? When these brainiacs get in trouble their cronies in government put taxpayers on the hook to bail them out.

One thing that could be revealed by this scandal, but probably won’t be, is just how much wealthy jewish “philanthropy” actually goes to exclusively jewish causes. Sailer commenter “up your new yawk” notes the double standard. For jews it is considered perfectly normal to support jewish causes, but the idea of Whites contributing to or participating in or even saying nice things about exclusively White causes is grounds for an accusation that you want to load all the non-Whites onto boxcars and gas them.

A theme that is coming through, loud and clear in what I’ve heard from the MSM, Auster, and Michael Savage, is sympathy for the “investors”. It’s disgusting. The people who participated in this scam, whining now that they’ve lost everything, don’t deserve any sympathy. They’re like the border-running aliens packed in a van that veers off a cliff trying to escape the police. They’re like the bank robbing accomplices who get cheated out of their share by their crooked ringleader.

For years these “investors” thought they were golden, wringing their soft greedy hands with glee over the returns from their invite-only too-good-to-be-legal “jewish bond”. It paid them far more than the lowly nobody putzes, ie. the rest of us, could make via honest means, and they knew it. We nobodies must accept a return that is stable but doesn’t even beat inflation, or we play 401K roulette and take on real risk. Hands up, how many of you lost big money in your 401K this year and can expect the government to bail you out? Hands up, how many don’t have any savings?

This Madoff scheme is being described as the “biggest fraud in history”. No, that would be the September bailout as a whole. Madoff is but a small window into finance capitalism’s corruption and insolvency. Even so, Madoff’s collapse exposes a few major lies upon which the thoroughly judaized progressivist-globalist regime is based: “we’re all equal, but some of us are more equal”, “we deserve these big profits because we take big risks”, and “trust us, we’re really smart and know what we’re doing”.

The white-collar criminals have been running amok for some time. The rest of us have only recently been informed that we and our children will be paying the bill, and though we don’t know what the total is we can be sure it’s enormous. The brainiacs told us we needed millions of aliens to build homes for millions of aliens. Now we have too many homes and the next thing they’ll be telling us we have to legalize all the aliens, right away, and import even more in order to save the Holy Economy – that mother of all pyramid schemes.

Now come these poor jewish millionaire “investors” – “getting screwed left and right”. It’s perfectly natural for us to wonder, how did a handful of jews manage to amass so many billions? And it’s perfectly natural to conclude that it involved screwing the rest of us left and right.

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Minority Disproportions and the Fraud They Produce

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Steve Sailer has written several essays noting the disproportional large involvement of “minorities” in the housing bubble that triggered the Wall Street bailout, and noting the disproportionately small amount of attention the media has paid to it. More specifically he has focused on the role of “NAMs”, non-asian minorities, the euphemism he and his regular commenters use for blacks and latinos.

Sailer attributes the past decade of frenzied borrowing and spending in large part to the trendy but misplaced faith among our politically correct managerial class that relatively poor, uneducated, irresponsible blacks and latinos would pay back loans at the same rate as relatively wealthy, educated, responsible Whites. He labels this zeitgeist The Bullshit Years and calls the resulting bubble-bailout The Diversity Recession.

As usual there are some misguided souls who spring forth to defend the “brown people”. Often their argument is based on the rationale that putting minorities in a negative light, i.e. discriminating against them, is nothing but a nefarious attempt to blame everything on them, to make them scapegoats, because this is the only thing racists driven mad by hatred can think to do.

This is a dishonest but predictable response made by seemingly intelligent people. It epitomizes the prevailing political correctness and actually helps demonstrate Sailer’s point that “the Establishment” is infected with a mental disease which causes them to deliberately deny certain facts, as well as the consequences of this denial – and to villify anyone who will not behave likewise.

The fact is the plutocrats and their managerial class are more than willing to discriminate, to see minorities and their disproportions, even to the point that this willingness motivates offical policies which disproportionately aid minorities, even to the point where such policies are obviously detrimental to indigenous Whites.

Yesterday Sailer posted a reader’s more intelligent objection to his ideas. The argument in The Diversity Recession: A debunking is not based on the virtue of ignoring minorities, or the evil of not ignoring them, but instead aims at denying that minorities were disproportionately involved.

In accepting the validity of discussing disproportion such an argument is a small concession to the truth, and possibly even made in good faith, but the net result is the same: it is an attempt to defuse and deflect attribution of blame away from where it rightfully belongs. When “the Establishment” wishes to do favors for minorities there is little hesitation not only to fudge the numbers in whatever way is required to produce disproportions that need correcting, but also to blame those disproportions, sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication, on the machinations of Whites who are ostensibly disporportionately “racist”.

In the case of Sailer’s would-be debunker, if the argument that blacks and latinos were not disproportionately involved in housing bubble foreclosures is correct, then by implication Whites and/or asians must have been. Sailer and his commenters have already provided plenty of evidence countering this debunking, and at any rate it seems a moot point. Under the leadership of Carter, Clinton, and Bush the government stated its belief that blacks and (later) latinos were disproportionately suffering injustice and explicitly sought to right that wrong by applying new, discriminatory standards. Those are the facts.

Sailer’s point, which several of his commenters have pointed out to his you-just-want-to-blame-brown-people critics, is not that the “NAMs” conspired to enrich themselves. The point is that intelligent non-“NAMs” in positions of authority consciously chose to pander to “NAMs” and pursue related fiscal policies that on their face would seem highly unintelligent because the macroeconomic consequences are turning out, as some predicted, to be incredibly bad.

This begs the question: why assume these otherwise supra-intelligent people in government and finance were behaving stupidly? Obviously some people got wealthy in the feeding frenzy leading up to the collapse. Some are now getting wealthy shorting and speculating during the collapse. Still more stand to get wealthy by securing taxpayer subsidies for themselves. There are plenty of people who simply do not care how much the macroeconomy suffers as long as their microeconomy gains.

Indeed Sailer and many of his commenters don’t really seem to assume “the Establishment” is stupid. They insinuate that the negative results of the malfeasence were mostly unintentional and attribute the blame in part to short-sighted greed and in part to the hopeless naivete of “whiter people” – i.e. liberal, politically correct “whites”.

For me this also is only a partial and thus unacceptable concession to the truth. The truth is there is another minority embroiled in this scandal. A minority whose participation nobody seems to want to note. I posted the following comment to The Diversity Recession: A debunking, but it did not make it past moderation:

As long as we’re examining disproportions of minorities, what about the disproportion of jews who:

A) argue any disproportion perceived as harmful to a minority is caused by White racism (described variously as redlining, institutional racism, White privilege)

B) “innovated” ways around regulation and created new forms of leverage built on the loosened lending resulting largely from A (described variously as mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligation)

C) advocate taxpayer-funded subsidies for private enterprises (described variously as loans, buyouts, bailouts)

D) enriched themselves via A, B, or C

E) are in positions of authority and oversight, and should now be seeking to ferret out and punish wrongdoing rather than what they are doing, which is trying to find some way, any way to provide more C

I have a theory that explains why the disproportionate involvement of the jewish minority goes even less frequently mentioned than the disproportionate involvement of either blacks or latinos. It has to do with the phrase “anti-semitism”.

First, obviously, anyone who would mention the jewish minority in such a negative light can expect it to be denounced as “anti-semitism” (refer to item A). Second, but more important, this same defensive tendency means that if even a relatively small number of the jewish minority perceived that the effects of either the housing bubble or the bailout were bad for themselves or jews in general (disproportionately or not) then they would have already blamed either situation on “anti-semitism”.

My theory is that the general jewish perception is that they have participated and benefited disproportionately. But most pundits, even the non-jewish ones who realize this and are un-PC enough to attribute blame to other minorities, dare not even mention jewish involvement for fear of the consequences of criticizing the most powerful and favored minority of all.

Perhaps someone here would do those of us in the White soon-to-be-minority who have been disproportionately defrauded the favor of trying to debunk this theory.

To support my assertion of jewish disproportions I direct the reader to look into the matter for themselves. This would involve familiarizing yourself with the concept of disproportion, jewish population statistics, and the rather laborious process of finding and reading wikipedia and NNDB biographical entries of the principals involved. The most common objections are likely to be based on either innumeracy or an inability to discriminate.

These obstacles should not impede Sailer or his disproportionately intelligent commenters. They have already expended great energy researching and arguing statistics concerning “NAM” disproportions. News From The West has started the task, but it’s only the very tip of the jewish-disproportion iceberg. If jews are not disproportionately benefiting, then why haven’t they been complaining about disproportionately suffering? It’s fairly obvious that jews comprise more than 3% of the reality-twisting race hustlers, government officials who legislated that hustle, financiers who built the house of cards on top of it, economists who validated it, bureacrats and advisors negotiating a “fix” for it, and political and market pundits whose words and voices are right now so overwhelmingly shilling in favor of that fix. Are we to believe that jews enjoyed precisely 3% of the loosened lending largesse and 3% of the financial wizardry profits, and stand to receive only 3% of the bailout money and pay only 3% of the taxes that will fund it?

Hypothetically, if a disproportion of blacks and latinos in “the Establishment” had arranged to dole taxpayer money out to a disproportion of black and latino borrowers and then reward disproportionately black and latino financiers for “failing” because of those policies, then I trust intelligent and honest people would notice and discuss it as the ethnically motivated scandal it would be. Is the fact that the actual circumstances involve a jewish minority indirectly disproportionately enriching themselves by first lobbying for and then leveraging the disproportionate enrichment of blacks and latinos really so much harder to understand or accept?

Come now, what’s constraining this discussion of minorities and disproportions?

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The Greatest Ripoff in History

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It has been difficult to compose a reaction to the past few weeks worth of economic news. Each time it seems the totality of this monstrous putsch is finally in view yet another grasping tentacle flops out. One inconceivably brazen move has followed another, each pushing farther past precedent and revealing a new, previously unimaginable depth of avarice. The taxpaying cattle have been informed, drip by drip, that we are on the hook for whatever the bankers and their agents in “our” government demand of us. Tens of billions here. Hundreds there. A trillion should fix it. Maybe.

The massive fraud now unfolding demonstrates how financiers hold the real power in this country. Not Bush – nor Obama or McCain after him. And not Congress. The only role for these political figureheads is to point fingers for a while, scream that the sky will fall if they don’t act immediately, and finally to join together and rustle the cattle into capitulating to the banker blackmail.

We are witnessing a transfer of wealth unprecedented in size and rate. It is the mother of all liquidity events. The details change on a daily basis, but this much is clear: This is not a constitutional republic. It is not democracy. We live under a plutocracy.

Takuan Seiyo’s The Case Of The “Disappeared” Subprime Minority Borrower identifies the most recent roots of this transformation (original links and emphasis):

The financial debacle of a $1.4 trillion pool of subprime mortgages of which at least half are unpayable and 25% are irrecoverable did not start in a political vacuum. For years, the American political Establishment badgered the banking industry about the “racism” implied in its loan portfolio. The denial of mortgage loans to “minorities” at a greater percentage than denial to whites has been deemed a prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.

Finally, with further pushing by different government branches and agencies, mortgage lenders found a solution to inconvenient reality. It was the subprime loan, with sub-viable variations such as “interest-only” and “no-money-down.”

No forces were available to combat the American economy’s unbalancing by cultural Marxists, socialists, noisy “minority” chieftains and power-hungry opportunists. Instead of leading a counteroffensive, the federal government (mostly under Republicans) pushed toward the fall. And the bankers went along—even though it was their depositors’ capital they were converting to cotton candy.

Banks started dishing out mortgages as though they were consolation prizes for the poorly educated of shaky employability, or achievement awards for the undisciplined and uneducable with no collateral.

Overwhelmingly, these prize-winners have been “people of color.”

In trampling on rules of sound banking going back at least to medieval Italy, our financial wizards discovered the eternal quest of alchemy—how to convert lead into gold, for a while at least, before it turns into garbage. Employing PhD’s in high mathematics, they diced and mixed financial offal, stuffed it into sausage skins, gave this dubious bologna properly pinstriped labels such as “Mortgage-backed Securities” and “Collateralized Debt Obligations”, and sold it off by the slice to equally greedy and heedless financial institutions down the line.

Seiyo’s analysis is good so far as it goes. He mentions the other prize-winners, the financial wizards, but fails to note the disproportionate participation of the most noisy, self-interested minority of all – jews. Not only are jews disproportionately represented in the concocting of the financial “innovations” whose astoundingly fraudulent scope is now laid bare, they are also disproportionately represented amongst those who got the ball rolling by demonizing “discrimination”, and amongst those negotiating the terms of the ripoff-“bail out”, and amongst those being “bailed out”, and amongst the 24/7 parade of pundits shamelessly shilling for “bail out” via the disproportionately jewish-owned media.

If our nominal leaders insist on pointing at the disproportion of black and latino home ownership as a problem, then it’s only right that they also acknowledge these same groups were disproportionate benefactors of loosened lending practices. And as long as group disproportions are worthy of discussion, let’s not forget to notice the “contribution” of the US’s most wealthy and favored minority group of all. Jews.

“The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.” – Samuel Adams

Sorry Sam. We failed.

UPDATE 26 Sep 2008: One trillion, five trillion, who’s counting? According to a Bloomberg analyst:

So now they try to solve the problem by having this credit bubble actually extended and I think the $700 billion will be like a drop in the bucket because the total credit market in the U.S. is something close to $60 trillion, then you have the CDS market – credit default swap – of around $62 trillion. Then you have the whole derivatives worldwide worth about a notional $1,300 trillion. So the $700 billion is really nothing and the Treasury is just giving out this figure when actually the end figure may be $5 trillion.

He also says that last year total Wall Street compensation amounted to $68B, and of that, executive bonuses were $39B.

Tonight Juan and Hussein bickered over $18B in “earmarks” and $300B in tax cuts. Five and a half years of war in Iraq has cost almost $600B. Imagine how the big boys in the $1300T derivatives market (some 100 times the size of the US GDP, or 2000+ Iraqs) must view these trifling amounts. Think how precious their magically-derived pile of funny money is to them and how it would evaporate if middle class taxpayers got the gumption to revolt en masse. Imagine the gold-plated diaper changes even one month’s worth of widespread late mortgage payments would cause. The media pundits have been trying to guilt-trip us for being over-leveraged. Seems to me the big boys are far more leveraged than even the most irresponsible Mr and Mrs Sixpack.