Blog has moved, searching new blog...

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Jewish Supremacists Bribing Politicians and Laundering Proceeds of Criminal Activity

FBI: Van Pelt took $10,000 bribe for Waretown development:
Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, R-Ocean, took $10,000 in bribes to help move a development along in Waretown, according to the FBI.

Van Pelt was arrested this morning in a wide-sweeping corruption probe by the FBI. A total of 44 officials and religious leaders from New Jersey and New York were also arrested.

Also arrested was Jeffrey Williamson, a Lakewood housing inspector who was charged with taking more than $15,000 in bribes over the last two years.

Van Pelt, the former mayor of Waretown, is accused of taking a $10,000 bribe from a cooperating witness who posed as a developer. The money was for Van Pelt's "assistance" in getting a proposed multi-unit, multi-use development approved in Waretown, according to the FBI complaint filed in U.S. District Court.
Disgraced real-estate mogul Solomon Dwek, 36, is apparently a key witness in the FBI corruption cases today.

In court documents, the FBI referred to a "cooperating witness" who was arrested in May 2006 on bank fraud charges. Dwek was charged with bank fraud that month when he tried to cash a bogus $25 million check.

The FBI this morning made the arrests as part as an international money laundering probe, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office said.
The subjects of the arrests also include religious leaders from the Syrian Jewish enclaves in Brooklyn, Deal and Elberon. Sources said the IRS and FBI this morning seized documents from the Deal Yeshiva and the Ohel Yaacob synagogue on Ocean Avenue in Deal.

The Deal Yeshiva is a religious school which teaches children in the Sephardic Jewish tradition, The Yeshiva has two separate divisions: a boys' school on Logan Road in Ocean Township and a girls' school on Wall Street in West Long Branch.

The school was founded more than 20 years ago by Rabbi Isaac Dwek and Raizel Dwek, the parents of Solomon Dwek, of Ocean Township. Rabbi Dwek was the school's president, and Raizel was its treasurer, until 2006, when their son's real estate empire began to crumble after Dwek deposited a bad $25.2 million check at a drive-through window at the PNC Bank in Eatontown.
The probe also involves international trafficking in body parts, sources said.
Those charged include:

• Peter Cammarano III, the newly elected mayor of Hoboken and an attorney, charged with accepting $25,000 in cash bribes, including $10,000 last Thursday, from an undercover cooperating witness.

• Assemblyman L. Harvey Smith, D-Hudson, and recent mayoral candidate in Jersey City, charged along with an aide of taking $15,000 in bribes to help get approvals from high-level state agency officials for building projects.

• Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt, R-Ocean, charged with accepting a $10,000 bribe.

• Dennis Elwell, mayor of Secaucus, charged with taking a $10,000 cash bribe.

• Anthony Suarez, mayor of Ridgefield and an attorney, charged with agreeing to accept a $10,000 corrupt cash payment for his legal defense fund.

• Louis Manzo, the recent unsuccessful challenger in the Jersey City mayoral election and former assemblyman, and his brother and political advisor Robert Manzo, both with taking $27,500 in corrupt cash payments for use in Louis Manzo’s campaign.

• Leona Beldini, the Jersey City deputy mayor and a campaign treasurer, charged with taking $20,000 in conduit campaign contributions and other self-dealing in her official capacity.

• Eliahu Ben Haim, of Long Branch, N.J., the principal rabbi of Congregation Ohel Yaacob in Deal, charged with money laundering of proceeds derived from criminal activity.

• Saul Kassin, of Brooklyn, N.Y., the chief rabbi of a synagogue in Brooklyn, New York, charged with money laundering of proceeds derived from criminal activity.

• Edmund Nahum, of Deal, the principal rabbi of Deal Synagogue, charged with money laundering of proceeds derived from criminal activity.

• Mordchai Fish, of Brooklyn, N.Y., a rabbi at a synagogue in Brooklyn, charged with money laundering of proceeds derived from criminal activity. His brother, also a rabbi, was charged as well.
Mayors, rabbis arrested in corruption probe:
The FBI began the large operation three years ago. The public corruption and money-laundering probes were separate but linked by common players, a source close to the investigation said.

The source described the alleged public corruption as "straight bribery" -- cash-filled envelopes exchanged for political influence.

The other investigation centered on a group of rabbis who allegedly laundered tens of millions of dollars through their religious organizations for a fee, according to the source.
MONEY IN NEW YORK; The Sy Empire - New York Times:
At the end of this past August, Jakie Kassin, a community leader, grandson of the author of the Edict and son of the current chief rabbi, received a laminated wooden plaque measuring 4 feet by 2 feet for his inspection. It was the most recent incarnation of the Edict. The original Edict was a document signed by five dignitaries. Since then, it has been reaffirmed in each generation by a progressively larger number of signatories. The newest version, issued last year, was signed by 225 rabbis and lay leaders, testimony to the growth of the community and the enduring power of the Edict.

''Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,'' Kassin told me by phone, summarizing the message. ''Push them away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don't want gentile characteristics.''
Thou Shall Not Steal: Rabbis Masterminded Money Laundering Ring, Say Feds - Crimesider - CBS News:
The money laundering operation involved high-ranking religious figures who sometimes, but not always, worked together, to wash millions of dollars of ill gotten funds, according to the Department of Justice. Participating rabbis could take as much as a 10 percent fee for using charitable, tax exempt organizations associated with themselves or their synagogues as pass-throughs. Dirty money would go in. Clean cash would come out, and the rabbis would take their cut, according to the DOJ’s press release.

In one case, investigators say Eliahu Ben Haim, the principal rabbi of Congregation Ohel Yaacob in Deal, N.J., received checks ranging from tens of thousands to $160,000. In order to handle the heavy flow of money, prosecutors say Haim farmed out the money laundering to a network of rabbis in New York and New Jersey, who would also use accounts associated with their synagogues to disguise the transactions.
Following the N.J. corruption money trail: Money laundering splintered into political probe - NJ.com:
What began as a federal investigation into money laundering by Syrian Jewish community leaders in New Jersey and New York a decade ago spawned into a broad web of political corruption that enveloped two N.J. assemblymen and three mayors.

At the heart of the probe was the money. The politicians are accused of taking bribes. And five rabbis are accused of laundering it through their non-profit religious institutions, while keeping a cut for themselves.
The money was laundered, in part, through cash houses in Brooklyn, as well as an Israeli named Levi Deutsch, who traveled frequently between New York and Israel. According to the complaint, he told the cooperating witness that his source of cash was the diamond business, and a Swiss banker.
NJ corruption probe nets rabbis in money laundering ‘network’ | New Jersey Jewish News:
“Of course it is not religious-related,” Marra told NJ Jewish News after the press conference. “It is group of criminals hiding behind a facade of being religious leaders in order to commit crimes.”
In a separate complaint that grew out of the probe, the federal officials are charging a Brooklyn man, Levy Itzak Rosenbaum, with trafficking in the sale of human kidneys.

“He would pay people desperate for money $10,000 to donate a kidney, then charge recipients $160,000 for the kidney,” Marra charged. The complaint said Rosenbaum has been brokering kidneys for the past 10 years.
Arrests put spotlight on Syrian Jewish community | AP | 07/23/2009:
Charged with money laundering were Eliahu Ben Haim, 58, of Long Branch, the principal rabbi of Congregation Ohel Yaacob, and Edmond Nahum of Deal, principal rabbi of Deal Synagogue.

"These are the biggest leaders of our community, our role models," said Steven Esses, a member of Nahum's congregation. "It's hard to believe they could do something like that when these people, all day long, teach the importance of being an ethical person. I still have faith in them."
Nahum is accused of working with Saul Kassin of Brooklyn, N.Y., the 87-year-old chief rabbi for the Syrian Jewish community in the United States.
UPDATE 24 July 2009: Sweeping federal probe nabs crooked politicians & alleged black-market kidney peddler:
Most of the Jewish leaders busted were accused of laundering the snitch's dirty money through their charities, which they also used to mask ill-gotten gains from the sale of fake Gucci and Prada bags.

The most outrageous arrest was that of Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum, 58, of Brooklyn, who authorities say would buy kidneys from vulnerable people in Israel for $10,000, then turn around and sell them for $160,000.
The takedown can be traced back to one man, a confidential informant identified in published reports as developer Solomon Dwek, who was charged with defrauding a bank of millions in 2006.

Dwek apparently offered the feds to turn on rabbis - who stunningly still dealt with him even though it was well known in their community that he had been charged by the government.

Dwek told the targets he was in bankruptcy and interested in hiding his assets. He laundered $3 million since June 2007.

One of the launderers introduced Dwek to a Jersey City building inspector who, authorities say, took a $20,000 bribe and kicked off the public corruption portion of the probe.

Over and over, politicians and candidates solicited and accepted bribes to grease the wheels for Dwek, who claimed he needed building permits and other approvals, authorities said.

It was in the course of the money-laundering prong of the probe that the informant came across Rosenbaum, 58, who was purportedly in the real estate business but actually makes money trafficking kidneys, officials said.

For a decade, prosecutors said, Rosenbaum would buy kidneys from vulnerable people abroad - in Israel and elsewhere - for $10,000, then turn around and sell them for $160,000.
Raids also went down at smaller "cash houses" run by associates of the rabbis throughout Brooklyn, such as a beeper store and a charity called Bnoth Jerusalem above a paint store in Williamsburg.

The feds say Mordchai Fish, a rabbi at Congregation Sheves Achim, and his brother, Lavel Schwartz, laundered nearly $600,000 for the informant, accepting his check and giving him cash after taking a 15% cut.

Fish's lawyer, Michael Bachner, said the informant "used his closeness and the sterling reputation of his family to manipulate my client, who trusted him."
What was the basis for that trust?

Meet the flimflamming informant, Solomon Dwek, behind the busts:
The son of a prominent New Jersey rabbi, Solomon Dwek brought shame on his tight-knit Syrian Jewish community when he was arrested for bank fraud in 2006.

That pales next to the shocking mission he undertook - exposing his community's top rabbis as a ring of accused money launderers and bringing down nearly two dozen Jersey pols as corrupt.

For years, Dwek, 36, had his hands in hundreds of real estate deals and get-rich schemes.

His empire included a gambling boat, estates in Jersey and Florida, office buildings and plans to build high-rises just across the river from Manhattan.

It all came tumbling down when he was accused of bouncing a $25 million check.

He appears to have gone from full-time mini-mogul to a very busy federal snitch after that - even as he filed bankruptcy and was besieged by creditors.

Dwek is the observant son of Rabbi Isaac Dwek, leader of the Syrian Jews who turned a summer getaway in Deal, N.J., into a wealthy sanctuary of Mediterranean-style mansions for their Brooklyn-based community.

The Syrian Jewish community is renowned for its charity and insularity - taking care of its own from cradle to grave but excommunicating anyone who dares to marry outside the faith.
The Syrian Jewish community is renowned for its insularity and insular charity.
While his father founded a thriving yeshiva, Dwek jumped into the world of commerce - buying properties when he was barely out of his teens.

In the decade that followed, he built a real estate empire based in Monmouth County - and a reputation as a generous benefactor.

His world collapsed in 2006, when he reportedly deposited a worthless $25 million check at a bank's drive-through window, then withdrew almost $23 million against it.

The cash-strapped Dwek soon filed for bankruptcy after being charged with fraud. Angry crowds of creditors jammed a New Jersey courtroom, desperate to recover some $400 million they lost.

Even after he was known to be in dire legal trouble, though, top rabbis in Brooklyn and New Jersey huddled with Dwek to plot money laundering crimes, authorities said.
Anthropologist's 'Dick Tracy moment' plays role in arrest of suspected kidney trafficker:
The Brooklyn man arrested Thursday for dealing in black-market kidneys was identified to the FBI seven years ago as a major figure in a global human organ ring.

Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum's name, address and even phone number were passed to an FBI agent in a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan by a prominent anthropologist who has been studying and documenting organ trafficking for more than a decade.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California, Berkeley, was and is very clear as to Rosenbaum's role in the ring.

"He is the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network," she said.

Her sources include a man who started working with Rosenbaum imagining he was helping people in desperate need. The man then began to see the donors, or to be more accurate, sellers, who were flown in from impoverished countries such as Moldova.

"He said it was awful. These people would be brought in and they didn't even know what they were supposed to be doing and they would want to go home and they would cry," Scheper-Hughes said.

The man called Rosenbaum "a thug" who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, "You're here. A deal is a deal. Now, you'll give us a kidney or you'll never go home.' "
Rosenbaum wasn't simply "organ trafficing". He was extorting organs from misled and desperate victims and reselling them for a profit. He was an aggressive middleman.

Who were the doctors, on both ends, who Rosenbaum worked with?

The New York Times has already moved beyond reporting the facts and has begun the sympathetic dissembling and apologetics. Syrian Sephardic Communities Shaken by Charges Against Saul Kassin - NYTimes.com:
David G. Greenfield, executive vice president of the Sephardic Community Federation, a group representing the approximately 100,000 Sephardim in Brooklyn, Manhattan and New Jersey, said in a statement, “The community is shocked and saddened by these allegations, which go against every value and teaching the community holds dear.”

He added, “If over time these allegations are proven, we must remember that these are the isolated actions of a few individuals.”
Actually, as the facts have been revealed it has become clear that the only people acting as isolated individuals were the corrupt non-jewish politicians. The jews involved were conspicuously networking and conspiring along ethnic lines in the commission of crimes against large numbers of isolated individual non-jewish victims.
Unique among groups within Judaism, Sephardic leaders have tried mightily to strike a difficult balance between preservation of identity and participation in the American entrepreneurial dream, said Prof. Aviva Ben-Ur of the University of Massachusetts, author of “Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History.”

In 1935, Rabbi Kassin’s father issued an edict forbidding both marriage outside the faith and marriage to Jewish converts, she said.
Forbidding intermarriage with converts goes beyond preserving identity. It is an effective bar to non-jewish genes and reflects an obsession with racial purity. It didn't stop in 1935, nor is it unique to sephardic or syrian jews. MONEY IN NEW YORK; The Sy Empire - New York Times, quoted above, was published October 14, 2007. It says:
The original Edict was a document signed by five dignitaries. Since then, it has been reaffirmed in each generation by a progressively larger number of signatories. The newest version, issued last year, was signed by 225 rabbis and lay leaders, testimony to the growth of the community and the enduring power of the Edict.
The facts so far: A check-kiting jewish real-estate mogul (Solomon Dwek) who defrauded investors out of $400 million rats out a conspiracy of top jewish rabbis (Eliahu Ben Haim, Saul Kassin, Edmund Nahum, Mordchai Fish) laundering millions more to, among other things, mask ill-gotten gains from the sale of fake bags, likely to non-jews, for a decade or more, and a jewish organ thief (Levy Itzak Rosenbaum), preying on non-jews in Moldova, Brazil, and South Africa, operating for more than seven years. The check-kiter's bribery of non-jewish government officials has been going on for at least three years.

Somehow when the story broke it was all about the corrupt non-jewish government officials.

How many more real-estate moguls like this go undisturbed in their criminal activities, diverting a fraction of the blood money gained from enabling the genocidal immigration/White-flight pyramid scheme toward paying off crooks in government to grease the skids, tapping for support an ethnic network with access to vast funds, up to their self-righteous "religious community leader" yarmulkes in their own fraud? My guess is you can find them in Florida, Texas, California, Arizona, Massachusetts, ... all over the US.

As a variation on the theme consider the orthodox ashkenazi lubavitcher jews (who according to the NYT are completely different) in Postville, Iowa. Or (another completely different) jewish Wall Street zionist philanthropist pyramid swindler Bernie Madoff, head proprietor of The Jewish Bond.

Covering these events we have our fearless watchdog media, who will do their best to help end the career of anyone who says anything disparaging about jews, led in part behind the scenes by a cabal brimming with jews who are at this very moment likely desperately brainstorming positive or distracting spin for this story.

How to blame this all on "the anti-semites" and "age-old canards"?

UPDATE #2, 24 July 2009: Bid Rig III News Release & Addendum(.pdf), from the DOJ, details the money laundering mechanics.

The criminal complaint documents are online as well.

UPDATE #3, 24 July 2009: How the FBI used a rabbi's son to crack massive U.S. corruption case - Haaretz:
In spite of his central role in building one of the largest corruption and money-laundering cases in years, it's not certain how rosy Dwek's future will be. After selling nearly 350 of his 400 properties for a sum of around $30 million, Dwek has still not come close to covering his debts, which stand at hundreds of millions of dollars.
Developer Became Secret Witness - WSJ.com:
Mr. Dwek was charged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation with defrauding PNC Bank out of $25 million, of which $22.2 million was allegedly transferred to a different bank to pay off loans. He also was sued by dozens of former investors and partners including an uncle, Joseph Dwek. They claim he didn't deliver promised returns or, in some instances, put his name on the title of properties that had been promised to others.
Mr. Dwek, 36 years old, was well known in the Syrian Jewish community as a philanthropist and head of the Deal Yeshiva, a Hebrew school in Deal, N.J. Mr. Dwek's father, Isaac Dwek, is a prominent rabbi in the community and founder of the school. The close-knit nature of the community and Isaac Dwek's status as a respected rabbi allowed Solomon Dwek to win the trust of many investors, said Mr. Kearney, who added that investors were promised returns as high as 20%.
Respected judeo-philanthropist leverages respect, trust and a willingness to lie to pry hundreds of millions of dollars loose from "investors" who thought they'd get 20% returns. Hmmmm. Where have we heard this story before?

Here's a relatively mild sample of a self-righteous anti-anti-semitic reaction from a rabbi named Brad Hirshfield. Jew-Baiting or Good Journalism at NJ Star-Ledger? - Windows & Doors:
This may be a big deal, but the headline and the story don't match - where is the info on the rabbis? This kind of coverage actually borders on Jew-baiting, and it potentially says something at least as ugly about the author/editors as it does about those who committed any crime. Consider the following quote found on the paper's website and carried on CNN:
The arrests resulted from an FBI and Internal Revenue Service probe "that began with an investigation of money transfers by members of the Syrian enclaves in New York and New Jersey," the newspaper said on its Web site, NJ.com. Those arrested Thursday "include key religious leaders in the tight-knit, wealthy communities," the report said.
"Enclaves"? "Tight-knit, wealthy communities"? Could it be that the Star Ledger harbors deep resentment against Jews who they see as over-privileged, stand-offish people who operate as a law unto themselves?

Is this the paper's moment to celebrate how "those people" will now get their comeuppance? If not, why describe the community in classically anti-Semitic ways instead of calling out the specific leaders who broke the law, violated the religious rules of their own community and should be punished to the full extent of the law for any wrongdoing they committed?
The rabbi sees similarities between the facts of this case and "classical" descriptions of previous jewish wrongdoing because there actually are similarities. He'd rather imagine "anti-semitism" is the cause rather than a reaction. Other reactions are evident in the many media accounts I've quoted above. The ones that don't obscure, downplay, or whitewash simply state the facts as plainly as possible.

UPDATE 28 July 2009: Syrian Community Moving To Limit Damage After Sting. It's a two part plan.

First, there's the narrative for the gullible goyim:
[Morris] Bailey [chairman of the Sephardic Community Alliance] added, “Any individual action, especially when so isolated from the majority norm, does not in any way reflect on our traditional values; those being a lifelong commitment to Torah, family and society at large.”
This is reality-inverting propaganda. The syrian jewish community is described as insular because their "traditional values" include consciously isolating themselves from "majority norms" and "society at large".

Here's the other, inwardly aimed half of the plan:
In all, 15 people were charged in the money-laundering scheme, all but two of them from Jewish communities in Brooklyn. On a Jewish radio program Saturday night a former assemblyman from Borough Park, Sam Hirsch, said Dwek should face stiff retribution because of his role as an informant, the halachic concept of a moser.

“This person should have been killed,” said [former assemblyman from Borough Park, Sam] Hirsch, when asked by “Talkline” host Zev Brenner whether Dwek’s acts were comparable to those of Bar Kamsa, the man related in the Talmud as having incited tensions between the Romans and Jews leading to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Hirsch then said that Dwek and other informants should be ostracized from the community.
'Medieval Minds in Armani Designs': Inside the Syrian-Jewish Community – Forward.com describes SJ "traditional values":
Solidarity is how this community has survived intact even as other, less insular Sephardic communities — the Greeks, for example — have scattered and assimilated in America. Its communal trajectory has traced the reverse course of Ashkenazic Jewry, where each generation of the mainstream has been more assimilated than the last. With the Syrian Jews, each generation has been more insular.

It is an insularity reinforced in no small part by a rabbinic edict from the 1930s — since updated and strengthened — that, in its current interpretation, forbids community members from marrying converts to Judaism, even if validly converted by an Orthodox rabbi elsewhere. It is an insularity that has grown even as their wealth has burgeoned due to their elaborate, family-linked network of mutual aid in business no less than philanthropy.
The "halachic concept of a moser" is not limited to insular jewish sects.

The Talmudic Law of the Moser:
Informing on Jews, contends Hagaon Rav Hutner, is an action that goes against the essence of Jewish communal standards. It is a behavioral pattern that is simply not Jewish. This is not what Jews do. As such, the informer (mosser) is excluded from Klal Yisrael because of his refusal to conform to the moral character of the Jewish people (Pachad Yitzhak, Pesach, Ma'amar 63:5).
Informing On Fellow Jews:
Even though Jewish law expects people to observe the laws of the land, and even imposes that obligation as a religious duty, the Talmud recounts - in a number of places - that it is prohibited to inform on Jews to the secular government, even when their conduct is a violation of secular law and even when their conduct is a violation of Jewish law. While there are a number of exceptions to this prohibition (which are explained further in this section), the essential halacha was that Jewish law prohibits such informing absent specific circumstances. Even is secular government were to incorporate substantive Jewish law into secular law and punish violations of what is, in effect, Jewish law, Jews would still be prohibited from cooperating with such a system.

Labels: , ,

white

Thursday, July 16, 2009

John Robb's Global Guerrillas

Via John Robb on Tribalism at The Occidental Quarterly I followed a link to Robb's blog Global Guerrillas where he focuses on:
Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures.
Here's his About page.

I'm not sure what to make of Robb, but here's what I think so far. His analysis of globalism is broad, incisive, and critical, and comes from a technologically informed point of view outside the false dichotomy of partisan politics. He provides interesting opinions and links, though his writing is larded with jargon. Only cryptically, by reading between the lines, can he be understood to recognize the tribal jewish influence that so dominates the West's politics, finance, and media. He seems a typical deracinated White, for whom even a keen interest in tribalism and communities and opposition to globalism appears not at all motivated by an overt awareness of or sympathy for his own tribe.

His essay Containing Chaos (unfortunately no longer freely visible in it's entirety) begins:
We are now engaged in a conflict that will dictate whether we succeed or fail in the 21st century. Our adversary in this conflict is, in short, the threat posed by globalization.
and concludes (my emphasis):
Disruptions that result in societal and economic chaos occur most readily in societies where the health and vigor of a society has decayed. In other words, the social and economic system that the nation-state administers must be seen as fair and just, and it must deliver tangible results to the greatest number of people possible. Anything less than this and societal breakdown becomes extremely likely should disruption occur, since the allure of participation in oppositional groups, from black-market crime to guerrilla/terrorist groups, will outweigh outcomes available through participation in the status quo. In short, the nation-state will lose its legitimacy with large subsets of its population.

Here's an example of not delivering results: The incomes of the bottom four-fifths of Americans have fallen 10 percent, adjusted for inflation, over the last three decades, despite massive improvements in worker productivity. For an example of not being just and fair, we need not go far: Self-dealing financial elites defrauded markets and the government of trillions of dollars realized during the 2008 financial panic, and not one of them went to jail.

In order to retain legitimacy at a level that allows some freedom of action, the government must endeavor to deliver real economic progress to its constituents. That means that every policy should be slaved to increasing incomes in line with increases in worker productivity, and improving the long-term financial wealth of the greatest number. (The best way to measure the success of government efforts in this regard are increases in the median incomes of individuals.) One method of achieving this, already mentioned above, is to remove barriers to community resilience. Community resilience has the potential to substantially improve the incomes and quality of life for the greatest number by reducing end-user costs, creating jobs, and spurring massive leaps in innovation.

The greatest threat to achieving this outcome lies in the potential for parasitic interests to gain control of government function, since one of the quickest routes to illegitimacy is through the appearance of corruption. This unfortunate outcome was evident in the 2008 financial meltdown, as special interests proved capable of snaring trillions in subsidies from the public treasure for no apparent improvement in the lives of most citizens.
Robb's analysis is clouded by his conflation of both pro-globalist "self-dealing financial elite" tribalists and anti-globalist al-qaeda-like tribalists (mentioned earlier in his essay) as "parasitic interests". While Robb sees the jihadi threat clearly enough he seems unwilling or unable to confront the implications of his own analysis regarding the "parasitic interests" who control finance and drive globalism. That their fraud going unpunished implies not the potential to gain control of government function, but that they have already gained it. That this control goes unheralded and uncriticized in the mainstream media implies that the "parasitic interests" also effectively control media function.

The "parasitic interests" who illegitimately control the Eurosphere's government, finance, and media have made it clear that their most feared and detested enemies are White tribalists. For us repression and punishment are considered normal and deserved, especially in response to opposition to the "parasitic interests" whose genocidal immigration policies are swamping our homelands with hostile non-White tribalists.

UPDATE 16 July 2009: A bit more of Robb's essay Containing Chaos is available at The Occidental Quarterly Online, including this paragraph:
News in the age of the global supernetwork is often startling. It features an endless procession of crushing financial panics, unexpected food shortages, sharp commodity price spikes, brazen terrorist attacks that have shut down major cities from New York to Sao Paulo to Mumbai, and much more. These extreme events form a pattern of behavior that should serve as an alarm. They are an indication that the system we have come to rely upon, the global supernetwork that connects us to each other and all manner of goods and services is entering a period of extreme turbulence, where we careen from crisis to crisis at an increasing rate and incremental severity. At worst, it may even be an indication of a looming catastrophic failure of indeterminable duration.

Labels: , ,

white

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Green Shoots and Goldman Sachs

Media moguls rediscover scepticism:
Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp, said the business outlook for the next three to five years was “unanimously bearish”.

Deal talk, once the sport of choice, was nowhere to be found among the gathered media moguls at the conference, which is sponsored by Allen & Co. It was replaced by hand-wringing and cynicism over social media, an interesting but revenue-challenged section of the business.

“A lot of people are doing very well making very little money,” quipped Howard Stringer, chief executive of Sony, speaking of social media. “It’s not a club I want to join.”

Twitter, the extremely popular online service that allows users to broadcast short text messages, was forecast to be the belle of the ball.

But any chatter about the micro-blogging service, which played a pivotal role in the dissemination of news in the recent Iran elections, soon turned to how it was unlikely to make money in the near future.

“Everyone is talking about it. I don’t know if it is monetisable,” said John Malone, chairman of Liberty Media. His sentiment was echoed by a panel of media executives that included Barry Diller, chief executive of IAC, the internet group.

Evan Williams, chief executive of Twitter, sat quietly as executives puzzled over the financial future of his company, and shied away from reporters for most of the week.

When Mr Murdoch, the consummate dealmaker whose 2005 purchase of MySpace helped burnish his image among the digerati, was asked whether he would be interested in Twitter, he had a one-word answer.

He said: “No.”
It would be bad enough if one group of influential people saw economic prospects are bleak and will be for some time, while another saw "green shoots" everywhere. Here we can see that many of the former employ or lend a megaphone to many of the latter. Something to keep in mind the next time a talking head tells you that now is a great time to buy.

The poor media moguls must be pickled with envy when they look at the financial moguls at Goldman Sachs. In the middle of the "failure" of the financial "industry" that got "fixed" by a bum rush bailout that put taxpayers on the hook for multiple trillions of dollars, Goldman Sachs partners somehow ended up swimming in money from selling stock (at bargain prices, because they, like their media mogul cousins, don't swallow the "green shoots" swill) and awarding themselves record bonuses (because otherwise they'd be tempted to leave and use their big brains to wreak havoc in another "industry").

So what's keeping the media moguls, especially in their current desperation, from succumbing to the temptation to exploit the "monetisable" popular resentment that even the finance moguls recognize?

Labels: , , ,

white

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Why Labor Leaders Favor Genocidal Immigration

It's jewish "social justice".

New Labor Leaders Take a Page From History, from The Jewish Daily Forward:
Washington — If you want to see the movers and shakers behind the tumult in today’s labor movement, the place to be is Stephen Lerner and Marilyn Sneiderman’s modest home in Washington after sunset concludes Judaism’s holiest day of the year.
Last year’s dinner had an air of momentous imminence, coming, as it did, on the eve of Barack Obama’s election as president, amid a world economic crisis that recalled the collapse of laissez-faire capitalism in the 1930s. The labor movement itself was approaching the end of a year in which it would record an uptick in union membership for the second time in a row after decades of decline. Lerner began the evening by telling his guests, “The months and years ahead are our chance, our moment to be part of making history.”

Lerner and the other Break Fast attendees are at the core of a resurgence of Jewish involvement in the labor movement. Like the legendary Jewish labor leaders of the ’30s, the folks at Lerner’s house by no means represent a majority of union leaders. But like those earlier leaders, they are exerting an outsized influence, working at the front end of some of the most innovative, and occasionally divisive, union campaigns of today.

“When you are there, you physically experience the number of Jews in Washington who are in the labor movement — but also the larger passion for social justice that is driving that,” Lerner told the Forward.

There is, of course, a firm precedent for this quiet, mostly unacknowledged trend. Before World War II, an explicitly Jewish labor movement was an engine of change for the broader American society. Morris Hillquit helped found the United Hebrew Trades labor federation in 1888, and in the ’30s this body morphed into the Jewish Labor Committee, which was one of the most powerful Jewish organizations in America. At that time, the heads of the heavily Jewish garment unions — men like David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman — helped pass the legislation that created America’s social safety net and labor protections. These were Eastern European immigrants who had risen from the factory floors and moved easily among the labor community, the Jewish community and the leftist political world.

The current moment shares many similarities with the ’30s, due to the election of a president friendly to labor, the plunge in the stock market, and the resulting openness to new economic models and social reforms. The Employee Free Choice Act, which is currently moving slowly through Congress, is said to be the most significant labor legislation since the ’30s.

But the labor leaders of today are a very different breed from those of the ’30s. Jewish union leaders such as Stern of the SEIU and Booth of AFSCME — along with Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America; Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, and Bruce Raynor, general president of Unite-Here — did not rise up from the working class. They have college degrees and are part of a new, sophisticated leadership that has come to the fore over the past decade and devised innovative tactics to battle the labor movement’s long decline.

You really have the leaders of some of the largest unions — certainly some of the most progressive unions — being Jews,” said Simon Greer, a former labor activist and the current president of the Jewish Funds for Justice. “That comes out of history — and it ties back to the history.”

Unlike in the ’30s, many of the Jews involved in the labor movement today have little affiliation with the organized Jewish community — and the presence of Jews in the labor movement can be an uncomfortable topic at times, because of the relative paucity of Jews in the rank and file of union membership. But for many inside the labor movement, the Jewish presence — not just in leadership roles, but also throughout the professional staff — occasionally becomes so obvious that it cannot be ignored.

“One night last Passover, I was here trying to finish something just before Seder, and people were like, why are you here?” said Jessica Champagne, a young researcher at the SEIU. “There are just those moments where you realize that whether or not people are observant, there are a lot of Jewish folks who have found their way here.”

- - -

Despite some continuity between the earlier generation of Jewish labor leaders and the current one, the two are not connected by a simple unbroken line.

While the Jewish garment unions were national players before World War II, their political clout afterward began to fade. Then, it was industrial unions, like the steel workers, autoworkers and teamsters, that became the face of the union movement. These tended to have few Jewish members. Because many of these unions had a policy of taking leaders from the rank and file, there ended up being few big Jewish labor leaders.

“Labor was not particularly welcoming” back then, recalled Marshall Ganz, the son of a rabbi who got involved in social movements in the 1960s.

When he left the Cesar Chavez-run United Farm Workers — a progressive and open labor group — Ganz said: “For me to go work for a [conventional] union would have been a strange thing. The unions had to be reopened to a certain extent.”

This was the situation when one of the most prominent labor leaders of today, Stern, became involved. Stern joined his union of government social workers in 1972 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school. Sitting recently at the SEIU’s sleek new headquarters in Washington, Stern told the Forward that back then, “my vision of unions was Teamster white guys and construction workers.”

Stern himself had become a social activist through his involvement in protests against the Vietnam War. But under AFL-CIO chief George Meany, a staunch anti-communist, the big unions had lined up in support of the war.

“The first thing I learned about unions was not a very good one,” said Stern. “In 1968 or 9, I was watching construction workers beat up anti-war protesters.”

But then, after Stern was elected to lead his local union, he attended the meetings of the local labor council in Philadelphia. There, he ran into a number of holdouts from the Jewish garment unions, and other Jewish union activists who “had a kind of ethical, cultural set of values that I understood better than people who had grown up in a more working-class — in many cases, Catholic — background.”

“I had never thought of the union movement as a place of Jewish activism in my growing up,” Stern said. His father had been a lawyer for small businesses in suburban New Jersey. But, Stern said, he saw at the Philadelphia labor council that “there was really a disproportionate number of labor leaders who were Jewish in major positions — and a lot of them were ones that were more involved in, I would say, the more progressive side of the labor movement.”

This was not true in many other parts of the country — and in many parts of the labor movement at that time. Stern said he sometimes thinks back on the serendipity of where he got his start.

“I always think, what would have happened if I had started my union career in, say, Ohio?” Stern said. “I don’t know what would have happened if there hadn’t been a lot of Jewish leaders. It just didn’t seem odd where I was to be a labor leader and be Jewish.”

- - -

The progressive tradition that Stern noticed was legendary in an earlier era. Tony Michels, a professor of Jewish and labor history at the University of Wisconsin, said that in the ’30s, labeling a union as Jewish was often a shorthand way of describing its socialist politics. A number were further to the left, which is to say, communist.

The two most powerful Jewish unions were the ones for workers in the men’s and women’s garment industries in New York City — the largest unions in the city at that time. It was no coincidence that both unions had close ties to the nation’s largest Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, with executives moving frequently between the publishing offices and the union halls. The head of the women’s garment union, Dubinsky, and the head of the men’s garment union, Hillman, were both immigrants from Eastern Europe who spoke with Yiddish accents. Together they helped found the socialist American Labor Party. Their socialist politics also shaped the unique structure and aims of the garment unions.

The view of the Jewish socialists was that unions should be a vehicle for social change — not just a defense of narrow interests like wages and hours,” said Michels, who wrote the book “A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York.” “They were involved in cooperative housing, and educational programming and culture. Other unions just weren’t doing that.”

The Jewish labor movement itself was divided internally for decades by a bitter feud between socialists and communists. The socialists originally coalesced between 1897 and 1900 around the Socialist Party founded by Hillquit and Eugene V. Debs. The Forward, founded in 1897, was established originally as an organ for their more moderate views. The communists, who split off from the Socialist Party after the 1917 Russian Revolution, favored a more militant, confrontational approach in the workplace and in politics. The two groups battled for decades over control of union locals, newspapers and even Yiddish schools, until communists were expelled en masse from the major unions in 1948.

Historians and labor activists have given a number of explanations for the distinctive character of the Jewish garment unions. Ray Scannell, a labor researcher and historian, said that unlike many other immigrant groups, Jewish immigrants had already been isolated minorities in the places from which they had migrated. As a result, they were well practiced in banding together to protect their own rights.

“When you go back, one of the interesting things about the history of the Jewish labor movement is that they have these common organizational roots,” said Scannell, who has taught a class on Jewish labor history at the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center. “Whether it’s in Vilna or Warsaw, or the Lower East Side, the poor and the oppressed in the community know how to organize themselves to protect themselves.”

Scannell, director of research at the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union, has watched these dynamics play out in his own life. He is from an Irish Catholic family in New York, but his wife and children are Jewish, and he has been fascinated to see the lingering influences of history in families like his own.

“It’s such an interesting story, because as Jews in America become more assimilated, nonetheless they continue this idea, that is frankly not as well rooted in the white Protestant community, of community self-help and organization,” Scannell said. “Even as they moved out to the suburbs and married the non-Jews, there was a continuation of these ideals of social justice that connected them back with community traditions that they might not have been entirely aware of.

- - -

By the 1980s, as Stern was beginning to rise through the SEIU, the progressive spirit in the labor movement had all but disappeared. Union membership was in a tailspin. Federal law had made it more difficult to organize workers, and most of the big unions were committing few resources to organizing new members.

In order to combat the decline, a few peripheral unions began looking to new, more sophisticated strategies to win new members and stop the decline. Both the hotel workers and the SEIU led the charge in hiring college graduates to serve in research departments that had the task of developing elaborate organizing campaigns. Stern and Lerner were both brought into the SEIU leadership during this period by Sweeney, an Irish Catholic labor leader who had gotten his own start in the New York garment unions before becoming the SEIU chief.

A major turning point came when the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of national unions, decided to open up the Organizing Institute, which was designed to provide college graduates a direct entry point into unions so that they would not have to first pass through the rank and file. The institute was founded in 1989 by a young Jew from Kentucky, Richard Bensinger, who had been recruited into the union movement by Richard Rothstein, a Jewish labor organizer and activist at one of the garment unions.

Bensinger, who is a labor consultant today, remembers when his team began looking over applications from college students who wanted to attend the institute.

“It used to be almost a joke. They would all say, ‘I’m interested because my grandmother or my grandfather was in one of the garment unions,’” Bensinger told the Forward. “It was incredible how many people who came to the institute came out of families that were involved with that union. It was application after application.”

Amy Dean, who was the head of the labor council in California’s Silicon Valley during the 1990s, said that in the years after the Organizing Institute was founded, when Sweeney won the presidency of the AFL-CIO, she saw the first steps of a process that brought a “huge influx of Jews coming to the table and wanting to be a part of the labor movement.”

“It was exciting to be in there,” said Dean, who is currently finishing a book on the modern labor movement. “We were looking outward for the first time in many years.”

Dean herself had decided to join the labor movement rather than attend graduate school at the University of Chicago. A number of the other major labor leaders of today came into their unions after law school. This sort of influx has not happened at every union; many unions have maintained old policies of promoting leaders and organizers from the rank and file only. But it has been unions that took people from the outside, such as the SEIU and the hotel workers union, that have experienced the fastest growth. The SEIU, for example, has grown to more than 2 million today under Stern, from 625,000 members in 1980, when Sweeny took its reins.

But there is a potential downside: Stern and others in the new generation of union leadership have been criticized by more traditional union leaders for giving union jobs to people who did not get their start in the working class. The generation of college-educated leaders have also been involved in a number of recent fights that have divided the labor movement (see sidebar). Paul Buhle, a labor historian at Brown University, said that in the current era, when unions are largely trying to organize black and Latino populations, the presence of so many educated Jewish leaders can be an “embarrassing detail.”

“Not to be the rank and file is embarrassing — because Jews are giving orders even in progressive unions,” Buhle said. “It comes back to a conspiratorial view of Jews in American life.”

- - -

The labor movement is, of course, not the only progressive movement that has drawn well-educated Jews, but many progressive Jewish activists say that the labor movement has a different character to it.

On a practical level, the labor movement is one of the few progressive causes offering young people both steady work and a reliable institutional structure — in short, a career. Michael Perry, who works for the AFSCME in Illinois, observed: “These are kids like me, who grew up in middle-class life. They won’t go back and work minimum wage. They want to do justice. But I still have a middle-class job here — with decent wages and benefits.”

But Perry and others also point to the unique historical connection.

“The labor connection is more than 100 years old,” Greer noted. “This puts it in another category than other progressive causes.”

Even with the history, though, the current demographic gap between union membership and leadership has, at times, required some negotiating.

Lerner’s first job was in North Carolina, organizing workers for the garment union. During that campaign, Lerner said, one of the local newspapers wrote an article implying that the organizers were a bunch of “northern Jews and rabble rousers.” Lerner recalled what happened when the organizers next met: “After we all got indignant, we looked around the room, and there really were so many Jews in the room.”

It is no coincidence that the two most prominent films about unions in recent times have both been about the cultural exchanges that happened when a Jewish organizer pushed to organize non-Jewish workers. In the 1979 movie “Norma Rae,” the Northerner is Reuben Warshowsky, who is said to be a composite of a number of Jewish organizers who worked for the textile unions. The more recent movie, “Bread and Roses,” is based on a Jewish organizer, Jono Schaffer, who worked on Lerner’s Justice for Janitors campaign.

While the current generation of Jewish labor leaders has risen up in a largely non-Jewish labor movement, their work has nevertheless helped some of them find their Jewish roots.

Greer got his start at a campaign that was being run by Cohen, who is now the head of the Communication Workers of America. Greer said that at the campaign, known as Jobs With Justice, “I really came into my Jewish identity in noticing that among all these people I was working with, there was a disproportionate number of Jews.

Greer said it made him want to explore “what led me in my background and what led them in their backgrounds to want to be in this kind of work.”

Outside of organizations like Greer’s, though, the connection is seldom made so explicitly and with such pride. Many Jewish labor leaders see few reasons to connect their labor work and their ethnic heritage, at least as they have experienced the latter. Most Jewish organizations today have not made labor a central theme in their political platforms. The Jewish Labor Committee, which has served as a meeting point between organized Jewish community and organized labor, is a fraction of the size it was when Dubinsky and Hillman founded it in the ’30s.

There are efforts underway to change that. Stuart Applebaum, president of the Jewish Labor Committee, says he sees a greater willingness among labor leaders to identify with the Jewish community.

“There is a renewal now,” Applebaum told the Forward. “You find that the Jewish leaders have not run away from their Jewishness as they once did.”

Sneiderman, a longtime official at the AFL-CIO and wife of Lerner, said that the idea of the couple’s Yom Kippur Break Fast event is part of a “conscious effort to try to make the link for people who work in the labor movement and are Jewish, so that they see that it’s not by accident that they are doing this work — and that is tied to their roots and values.”

“We’ve lost a lot of our history,” said Sneiderman, who recently left the labor world to take a job at the Jewish youth group BBYO as chief field officer.

For his part, Stern said that he recently looked back through a family scrapbook to try to recover some of his own history.

“You do wonder how you get here — you know, what were my parents teaching me?” Stern said. Stern had a Jewish education; he became a bar mitzvah at a Reform synagogue in northern New Jersey. But at the dinner table, labor was never a subject for discussion. In his scrapbook, though, Stern found the project he had done for his synagogue confirmation. It was an ethical will that went into depth “about being ethical, and trying to use your life to help other people.”

“Clearly, the values that had been instilled in me by my parents had been much more of service than of success in a traditional sense,” Stern said, looking back.

“Underneath kind of a very normal middle-class, New Jersey life, they did actually teach me some things,” he said.

After a pause, he added, with a laugh, “I’m praying it’s true for my son.”
Via a comment by Lucius Vorenus on Sailer's "Amnesty: Our betters are back at it".

SEIU - Service Employees International Union home page. SEIU on immigration.

Labels: , , ,

white

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Anti-Ant Absolute Genetic Determinism

Ant mega-colony takes over world, reported by the BBC:
In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite living on different continents separated by vast oceans.

The most plausible explanation is that ants from these three super-colonies are indeed family, and are all genetically related, say the researchers.
They're just doing what's good for the super-colony.

Labels:

white