All Holocaust All the Time

Two recent articles point out how the press and the business/legal world is all Holocaust all the time. The Financial Times reports that Jews are suing the French railway SNCF for transporting Jews to concentration camps during World War II. Apparently one case has already been won Alain Lipietz.

The New York Times reports that a Jewish artist who painted Gypsies at Auschwitz wants her paintings back, which are currently on display at the prison camp museum in Poland. What is interesting about this is that Gypsies, whom she painted, went thought the same Holocaust, but have in general suffered much more since then than the Jews, who like Ms. Babbitt have become upper or middle class, while the Gypsies remain mired in poverty. (See, for example, this FT article on the Roma (Gypsies) of Slovakia.) Why should Ms. Babbitt profit more from painting these Gypsies than the Gypsies who served as her models under Dr. Mengele's orders. She cooperated with Dr. Mengele in portraying what was to Dr. Mengele the Gypsies' racial inferiority. Shouldn't the poor Gypsies get some kind of war reparations against her instead of her getting something from Poland?

Her position raises indirectly a question that bothers me: What did the Jews, who now scream "Holocaust!" at the top of their lungs do to stop it? What percentage of Jews fought in combat in Europe to free to prison camps. I have a cousin in Alabama (a Christian, redneck state) who took part in liberating a concentration camp in Germany. How many American Jews in the military liberated their brother Jews from these prisons? My impression is that many of them (e.g., Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary Morganthau) leaned on Roosevelt to send more Christian soldiers to die liberating Jews, while they stayed behind to profit from the war.

Certainly Israel would not have been created had it not been for the Holocaust, which Jews used as an argument for the state's creation. They had been trying for years to create Israel, and the Holocaust was what made their previous unsuccessful efforts, ultimately successful.

I'd like to know prominent Jews today asked their fathers, "What did you do in the war daddy to save Jews from the Holocaust?" What did Robert Rubin's father do? What did Stuart Eizenstat's father do? What did Sandy Weil's father do? What did Haim Saban's father do? What did Martin Indyk's father do? What did Sen. Schumer's father do? What did Raum Emanuel's father (or grandfather) do?

An exception, Sumner Redstone, worked breaking Japanese codes during WW II. Hooray for him! Sen. Spector's father served in WW I. Good for him!

Did Richard Armitage Leak Valerie Plame's Name?

Update: The NYT reports that Armitage has admitted that he was Novak's source.

It seems more and more likely that Colin Powell's deputy at State, Richard Armitage, leaked Valerie Plame's name to Robert Novak, as Political Animal says. Richard Armitage seems to be a straight shooter, which would justify Novak's comment that his source was not a partisan gun slinger. However, if that's the case, why hasn't Armitage come forward? Novak called for his source to identify himself last week on "Meet the Press."

It's possible that Armitage did not leak Plame's name, but only mentioned something about Amb. Joe Wilson's wife. Then Novak may have looked up Joe Wilson in Who's Who, where I think Wilson's wife is listed as Valerie Plame.

It seems likely that Armitage is cooperating with Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald on the Plame case, and thus may be a witness when Scooter Libby's case comes to trial, but we may not know before then.

How Reliable Are Productivity Estimates?

Reporting on the Federal Reserve retreat in Jackson Hole, the Financial Times said:

Gene Grossman, a professor at Princeton, offered the central bankers a new way of thinking about the problem [of globalization's downward pressure on most wages], which paints offshoring in a more positive light. He argued that we should think about trade not as an exchange of good but an "exchange of tasks". If some tasks that used to be performed onshore are offshored to lower-cost locations, the result will be an increase in the productivity and wages of workers who perform related tasks that cannot easily be offshored.

Analysis of the US from 1997 to 2004 suggests this positive productivity effect could outweigh the negative labor supply effect on wages in sectors where there had been a lot of offshoring. But it does not appear large enough to offset the broader negative effect on low-skilled wages arising from the ongoing fall in the relative price of labour-intensive goods.

Although even this analysis concludes that offshoring is a mixed blessing, to me it indicates the difficulty in separating offshoring from productivity estimates. I am inclined to believe that much of ex-Fed chair Greenspan's touting of productivity increases to account for the lack of inflationary pressure is really due to offshoring. For example, because of the lower wages, businesses can hire several foreigners for the salary of one American. They will produce more work (be more productive) for the same cost to the business. Thus, if you look at an income statement, it looks as if you get more output for the same input, but the only difference is that more work is being done overseas. Automation, computers, networking, etc., do make American workers more productive, but can you separate out those factors from offshoring? I don't think so, at least not well. All of which means that the only people benefiting from the increase in "productivity" are those at the top of the pyramid, CEOs and a handful of senior executives. The average workers suffer, not only the "low-skilled" mentioned by Grossman.

Interestingly, the article below this one in the FT is "Flows that slip through statisticians' hands."

How Far Back Should Jewish Claims Go?

I am not a big fan of changing ownership of items after many years have passed. It's true that some people ended up with assets unjustly, but it's not clear to me that their heirs, or the people that they sold the assets to, should lose the items unless they themselves engaged in some dishonest behavior. There should be some kind of a statute of limitations, and now that World War II ended more than 60 years ago, the statute of limitations should have run. We should pick up from here and move on.

The main argument against this is the Holocaust, which arguably was so terrible, that it, like murder, should have no statute of limitations. If that's the case, then I would argue that you should go all the way back. Look at how some of these wealthy Jews who are recovering property lost in World War II acquired that property in the first place. Did they acquire it in a totally honest, legal, moral way? If so, let it go to their heirs. If not, then undo the illegal or immoral transactions, even if you have to go back to the 16th or 17th century, and give the title to the heirs of whoever was the last moral title holder.

This would not apply to payments to ordinary people who are getting a few thousand dollars decades after suffering in concentration camps. It would apply to multimillion dollar settlements that are being fought in court. If the fortune originally came from profits from the slave trade, or exploitation of colonial peoples, for example, then don't undo the last 50 years of transactions.