When times get tough, Jewish people in finance become targets. Needless to say this goes back a long way. As I wrote in The Looting of America:
"At the height of the Middle Ages, when the church ban was strongest, sovereigns encouraged specific Jewish merchants to go into the money trade. The Jewish money traders were permitted, even encouraged, to charge high interest rates. But there was a catch: The sovereign could and did seize the wealth accumulated by the Jewish lenders either during their lives or upon their deaths."
During the Great Depression the idea of the insidious Jewish Wall Street banker was trumpeted by the American Nazi party and by various demagogues like Father Coughlin, the right-wing "radio priest" of that era.
Goldman Sachs, for many, is the latest target, viewed as master manipulators of any and all crises. But while Goldman Sachs, indeed, is too large, powerful and connected, it did not cause our crisis on its own, nor would eliminating the bank tomorrow, solve it. Our entire financial system failed and that system rests on an oligopoly of institutions that are still too big too fail -- Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, CitiCorp et al. Only a systemic response can stop the financial profiteering that is emerging once again.
I hadn't given anti-Semitism a second thought while hammering away at The Looting of America, my book about the current financial crisis -- nor in writing my Huffington Post blogs on the subject. But some recent discussions with neighbors and colleagues have forced me to question my complacency.
In Montclair
My current view of Wall Street is deeply colored by where I live -- Montclair, NJ, the home of many finance people. It turns out that every Wall Street person I know in our town is Gentile. So in my mind modern Wall Street decidedly is not Jewish.
While on a recent book tour to Wisconsin, I was told by Matt Rothschild, the thoughtful publisher and editor of The Progressive, that he'd been picking up more and more anti-Semitic remarks about the economic crisis. I took his concern seriously, and I became worried for the first time that my relentless pounding of Wall Street in my book and in my blogs might inadvertently be feeding the beast.
Matt's comment make me rethink a conversation I'd had with a concerned neighbor not long before. He had theorized that Goldman Sachs was so smart and so powerful that it created and manipulated the entire crisis for its own purposes. I laughed because I was quite certain that no one bank caused the crisis and that no one alive, ever, was that smart. I didn't think the comment had any anti-Semitic overtones at the time. But now I wonder if the subtext of "smart," and "powerful" might have been "Jews."
Next I noticed a reader review of my book on Amazon that railed away at Madoff, Goldman Sachs and the Rothschilds (though I never mention the Rothschilds at all in my book and Madoff has only a minor cameo). And this reviewer was praising my book!
In Rolling Stone
Then came Matt Taibbi's gonzo-journalism piece in Rolling Stone on the great Goldman Sachs conspiracy. About a dozen people sent it to me, including my cousin, because they thought it reinforced the themes in The Looting of America. I was looking forward to another inspired piece in the tradition of Hunter Thompson.
But I had a trouble getting past the first paragraph as I heard echos that I'm sure he didn't intend.
"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."
(Taibbi later wrote that he wasn't thinking about religion at all and I believe him since, in my own way, I had being doing the same. See "Ludicrous: Matt Taibbi Accused of Being Anti-Semitic for Goldman Sachs Article.")
When my parents were young adults in Germany, they were taunted with that imagery. The Nazi propaganda machine hammered away at the "blood-sucking Jews" who were controlling and destroying the Aryan world. While that imagery had been around for centuries, the Nazi's amplified it like never before. (Paradoxically, the Jews also were accused of being Communists and followers of Rosa Luxemburg, while at the same time called parasitical capitalists.)
Here's a typical example from a 1940 Nazi film, Der ewige Jude (The eternal Jew)
"In this century of industry, Jewish business blooms as never before. The House of Rothschild is but one example of the Jews' tactic of casting their financial net over the honest worker..... While millions of established Germans were unemployed and in misery, immigrant Jews acquired fantastic riches in a few years - not by honest work, but by usury, swindling, and fraud."
What Caused the Crash?
Our financial system as a whole crashed not because of one bank. Goldman Sachs certainly played a major role as did JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and CitiCorp, along with the many dead and gone players like Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, WaMu, Depfa, Glitnir, Landsbanki, Kaupthing and down the list we go. We had a systemic breakdown because nearly all of our policy makers, academics, politicians, and pundits promoted and clung to a failed ideology of self-correcting financial markets. They believed that we should promote a skewed distribution of wealth and financial deregulation in order to create an investment boom. It didn't work as advertised. Instead we created a vast Wall Street casino full of fantasy finance instruments. There are plenty of croupiers of all races, religions and creeds who walked off with big bucks while doing their part to crash the system.
As a result, I'm advocating policies that all of Wall Street hates -- I want to cap their total compensation at $400,000 a year, tax away their windfall profits taxes, and slap financial transaction fees on all their trades. But I don't hate the people on Wall Street. This is not about good guys and bad guys. Rather it's all about a very flawed financial system that John Maynard Keynes and later Hyman Minsky warned us was fragile and prone to collapse.
With unemployment rising to depression-like levels, we should be mindful of depression-like hatred. Wall Street needs to be radically changed and deserves to be put in the spotlight. We've propped it up with trillions of tax dollars and deserve much in return. If only it were a matter of a few bad individuals and companies, the crisis would be relatively easy to solve. But indulging in fantasy conspiracies won't end fantasy finance. Our task is much harder. We will need to undo the failed experiment by halting the redistribution of income from the majority into the accounts of the top few and, by dramatically reducing the size of the financial sector. It doesn't get much harder than that. But we've never had a better moment to try, provided it doesn't devolve into darkness.
Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street's Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About It, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.
Follow Les Leopold on Twitter: www.twitter.com/les_leopold
Remembering is very important. But slights are very common.
Do you know what I hate? History channel specials about heretical versions of the gospels. Why do you think the Church did it?? Duh.
You do good work. Don't worry too much!
If you look carefully, you'll see that everyone involved in the financial crisis wears one.
Chilling co-incidence or conclusive proof of the existence of an international conspiracy?
And the truly scary thing is that "they" are all around us.
( the melt down and you know...)
both affecting our national psyches tremendously.
If we aren't diligent about these problems
(and unnecessary wars as other catastrophes,
a neocon creation) then we're expected to act stupid.
When bankers are engaged in highly questionable
activities, come on, we have a right to be suspicious.
You can't casually dismiss immense Jewish presence in
the financial world who carry tremendous wealth, power and
influence- "don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain" syndrome. Nor
can you deny Bush's disastrous policies, too, that allowed this crisis. Everything
is up for scrutiny in this daunting period. It's destructive to foment racism but
it's equally so when you exert ignorance. Add on the the arrogance of the
rich companies making profits when everybody else's suffering you get some
very angry people curious about what caused it. And if you
think the money made off of taxpayers is belongs only to
these companies, and kept without reciprocation, then you just don't deserve to
operate, Jew or Gentile- this has become organized and legal corruption through 30 years of
legislated regression and our money stolen for some very interested
parties who have manipulated the system their complete advantage. So call me anything
you, it won't make the problem go away.
majority of people.
Where is Cuomo? He is doing nothing because he is owned by Wall Street. If Eliott Spitzer (a Jew) were the AG, there would be scores of indictments of senior Wall Street executives. If Krugman, Stiglitz or Roubini (all Jews) were in charge several years ago, this disaster would have been avoided.
I often have to hear comments that ethically cleansing Mexican undocumented workers in the NY metro area would bring back the $250K plus annual jobs. The finger pointing is only going to get worst as the global economy worsens.
PS: I'm not Jewish but rather a practicing born again Catholic.
The devious action by wall street is about ultimate greed. Greed is the religion. The mantra is "More money." The religious practice is to devise slicker, more devious financial tools to steal as much as possible from the mass of humanity for a very small group of people. This greed is a religion which is at a minimum anti-social and more accurately described as an evil which steals the hard-earned gains of middle class and poor people. And, the controlling forces will come back to take more and more and more until the dollar is worth a dime, and the citizenry of the U.S. is reduced to a small, rich, ruling class and the vast impoverished majority.
With reference to WWII, an immense number of allied soldiers gave their lives to stop Nazism and the atrocities being perpetrated on the world. In recount, over sixty million people (soldiers and civilians) were killed in WWII. We should have learned after that war how quickly things change when the vast majority of a population are impoverished and degraded until they're susceptible to being controlled by a small, focused group. We can't let that type of greed take control again.
All the people on Wall Street above a certain level are criminals, or at least engaged in conduct which is intentional, wilful, malicious, designed to enrich themselves by stealing all the money from everyone else. What should we do? Sort out the crooks by religion? Give a special dispensation to one group?
Anyone working on Wall Street has unclean hands, by which I mean they have received money which should not have gone to them. Should not have gone to them because their employer was engaged in fraudulent transactions or such high-risk and speculative gambling that they knew or should have known it would likely cause significant financial harm to millions of others. Even jacking up the commodities for a quick buck, and manipulating the market in that way, is just another way of stealing money from people who are already broke, and creating massive starvation in third world countries.
I have no interest in whining from Wall Street. The AG should seize all their assets, bust up the companies, prosecute the individuals, throw them in prison. Let them whine to their affectionate cellmates, not to me.
In this case the Them are bankers, and the stigma in middle america (starting from when banks took over farms many years ago), is the banks = "Jews". *All* banks, whether they are owned by Arabs, Japanese, or Protestants.
The problem is that the system is so protective of it's own culture, that they inevitably have their very own Thin Blue Line, let's call it the Thin Gold Line.
The Thin Gold Line states, keep your mouth shut, or we will shut it for you. We will sink you into oblivion and ruin your reputation, and you will loose everything. And inevitably, if the Jews take the fall for the rest of us, they will be protected/rewarded handsomely (Israel seems wonderfully protected these days).
Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, they all stick to that Line, and all are in this together. But in this country it's easier to make one group the fall guy, instead of demonizing the guy next door who looks like you, goes to the same church as you, talks like you, while he robs you completely blind.
That said, I would not go so far as to absolve the "bad people" and the undeniable whiff of conspiracy underlying the financial crisis. While there is no doubt that systemic changes are needed, there is also much evidence that those changes will be impeded by a powerful elite with strong ties to the finance industry titans and the federal government. Goldman is the worst offender because as the leading investment bank they push their competitors to follow and take more risk (Wall Street compensation is based on relative performance). Other financiers envy Goldman because they know they are the best connected, and receive valuable insider information before everyone else. They really do all get together in smoky backrooms to share information and influence.
Are these bad people? Only if self-interest that causes harm to society can be considered bad. But it would be a mistake to think that these old boy networks are not at the crux of the problem, even if the solution is systemic reform and not a stern lecture on morality or imprisonment of "a few bad apples."
Interesting article. I have one comment:
If one was take a position that religion has had an impact on the current economic recession it would be incomplete to only analyze the spirituality of Wall Street executives.
It would be more thorough to include a review of the religious beliefs of the regulators, politicians, consumers, Main Street businesses, credit card debtors, homeowners, etc. all of whom have played a part in the current credit crisis.
Sprituality is taking a larger roll in America and people are changing fast. This has nothing to do with religion or groups but individuals who a seeking a path to better themselves and for humanity.
In NYC barnes and noble that i go to has a entire back wall of new age books and yes people are reading them and getting better.
This meltdown was caused by people ont religion having anything to do with it. People of all faiths and none believers as well had a hand in bringing Americans to this multi trillion dollar meltdown.
Politicians also were the cause because of ignorance and greed and not protecting Americans aganist this and humanity.
Now did we learn or can we trut ur leaders any longer or wall street. It depends on laws and making sure they are enforced.
You will see a spritual path taking for many in business and although you may laugh or chuckle , it is happening now. on a small scale and will continue.