Zbig on Morning Joe

The best thing about "Morining Joe" is when Mika's Dad, Zbigniew Brzeznski appears.  He makes more sense than almost anyone else pontificating on TV.  Today he warned that the US should do everything it can to avoid being perceived in the Middle East and remaining colonial power hated by all who lived under colonialism for the past 100 or so years.  Many in the US seem determined to take on this mantel.  Robin Wright warned against being sucked into defending the artificial Middle Eastern boundaries created by the West after WW I.  The problem with this is that tearing up old borders and creating new ones may lead to more violence than trying to maintain the old ones.  Look at what is going on in Ukraine, where the Russians are trying to establish new boundaries.

It's too bad Joe or Mika did not ask Zbig about Ukraine.  As Pole, this has got to be an issue that is close to his heart and that is perhaps more difficult for him to be objective about.  After all, western Ukraine used to be an important part of Poland.  The borders of poor Poland have moved east or west over the centuries, depending on which power was predominant (Russia or Germany), and who won the last war.

On the Middle East, Mika asked her dad about Netanyahu's address to Congress.  Zbig correctly said that this invitation was a terrible idea.  It was an attempt to undercut Obama's policy and negotiations on Iran.  It was an attack by the Congress on the President.  Joe said it was a diplomatic response; Katy Kay said it was pretty strong.  I think it was a strong rejection of the Republican effort.

Friedman on Turkey

I like Tom Friedman.  Despite his being Jewish, he is usually very evenhanded in his treatment of Middle East issues.  However, I have a problem with his column in today’s NYT.  He starts off by criticizing Turkish President Erdogan for anti-Semitism, which is a valid criticism.  Erdogan probably is anti-Semitic, but he also probably has some reason to be concerned about Jewish animosity toward him.  Friedman, jokes about the lack of a real Jewish threat to Turkey, “So few Jews, so many governments to topple.”  

Then Friedman proceeds to cite statistics from Larry Diamond at Stanford about how democracy is failing all over the world.  He says that Putin and Erdogan are the poster children for this trend, concluding, “Rule of law in Turkey is being seriously eroded.”  I couldn’t find out anything about Larry Diamond’s personal background, but Larry Diamond is a typically Jewish name.  The closest connection I could find was that Diamond lectured at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2013.  So, it seems that despite Friedman’s claim that Jews have no interest in Turkish politics, a man who is probably a Jew is fiercely criticizing Erdogan.  Of course many Gentiles are also fiercely criticizing Erdogan. 

I wouldn’t worry so much about this if I didn’t think there were more to it.  Friedman’s posturing that there’s nothing to worry about from us Jews -- we’re just sitting here in Jerusalem minding our own business – rings hollow.  A French Jew, Bernard-Henri Levy, led the campaign to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, plunging Libya into chaos, which is terrible for everyone from the Libyans, to the Americans, to the Italians, but not for the Israelis, who rejoice when Muslims kill Muslims (or Christians).  Jews win without fighting.  But there is fighting going on, fomented by Jews in Israel, America, France, and probably other places. 

Of course the argument is that the Muslims are to blame, and they are.  But they have had a lot of help stoking the fires of their animosity, from the creation of Israel in the 1940s to the invasion of Iraq in the 2000s.  Turkish-Israeli relations were not helped by Israel’s 2010 attack off the coast of Israel on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara, part of the Gaza flotilla raid, in which the Israelis killed eight Turks and one American.  

Putin and the Jews

The op-ed “Save the New Ukraine” in the New York Times by Bernard-Henri Levy and George Soros (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/opinion/bernard-henri-levi-george-soros-save-the-new-ukraine.html) makes me wonder what prominent Jews are up to regarding Ukraine and Russia.  Levy, who is supposed to be a French philosopher, was the man behind the ouster of Kaddafi in Libya, which has led to much chaos and bloodshed.  He no doubt relished the humiliating death of Kaddafi and the ensuing Arab on Arab bloodletting in Libya.  So, now what violence and chaos does he want to create in Ukraine and Russia?  Soros, an extremely wealthy and powerful Jew, lends his name to this enterprise, whatever it is.  To the extent that Ukraine separates from Russia and joins the West, it weakens Russia.  Putin realizes he is in trouble, but is being pressed on so many sides that he is having difficulty dealing with the situation. 

There is clearly a Jewish issue in Ukraine.  Ukraine has the third largest Jewish community in Europe and the fifth largest in the world, more than 250,000.  Before World War II there were over one million Jews in Ukraine.  (http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/communities/show/id/91)  So, it makes sense for Jews to concern themselves about Ukraine, not just from an international relations perspective, but from a Jewish racial perspective. 

Meanwhile, Jews played an outsized roll in the creation of the Communist state back in the early 1900s.  Then 75 years later, many (about half) of the billionaire oligarchs created by the destruction of the Communist state were Jews.  It’s these Jewish oligarchs who I think are a thorn in Putin’s side and likely to be shoved out in favor of KGB and old party types who are closer to him.  In 2007, the Guardian wrote (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/02/russia.lukeharding1)

…in a country where anti-Semitism is still rife and openly expressed, nationalist rabble-rousers have made much of the fact that of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia's economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish: Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman and Valery Malkin. 

The 2007 Guardian article goes on to say that some of the Jewish oligarchs were replaced by Slavs who were closer to Putin.  The 2007 oligarchs included Roman Abramovich, Oleg Deripaska, Mikhail Khodorkovsky (a Jew who ended up in jail), Boris Berezovsky (a Jew who lives in London as Putin’s enemy), Mikhail Prokhorov, Viktor Vekselberg, and Mikhail Friedman (a Ukrainian Jew then on decent terms with Putin). 

A 2012 Jerusalem Post (http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/At-Putins-side-an-army-of-Jewish-billionaires) article, “At Putin’s Side, an Army of Jewish Billionaires” described the unveiling of the Red Army monument in Netanya, Israel.  With Putin were Mikhail Friedman, Moshe Kantor, as well as several other wealthy Russian Jews who now live in Israel. 

A January 2015 Bloomberg article (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-22/putin-said-to-shrink-inner-circle-as-ukraine-hawks-trump-tycoons)

 said: 

Businessmen who have long been close to Putin are “on the periphery now,” said Sergei Markov, a political consultant who helped monitor the referendum in Crimea that led to Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in March.

The core group around Putin is led by Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Federal Security Service head Alexander Bortnikov, Foreign Intelligence Service chief Mikhail Fradkov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, according to Markov.

It will be interesting to see how Putin’s relationship develops with Russia’s Jewish oligarchs as he comes under increasing international pressure from the West.  Will he trust the Jews to continue to support him?  The Jews close to him will come under increasing financial pressure from Western sanctions, which may make them rethink their support for Putin. 

 Meanwhile, what to powerful, influential Jews like Levy and Soros have in mind.  Jews play an important roll in financial activities throughout the world.  They will be very involved in sanctions on Russia, and thus on at least some of their fellow Jews.  If Putin is making it more difficult for Jewish oligarchs in Russia, will the Jewish financial community act together to try to force him out.  If he perceives that they are trying to do that, how will he react?  If they were trying to do something sneaky to Putin, they would hardly call attention to it by writing an op-ed in the New York Times. .  But Putin must know that Levy succeeded having Kaddafi killed and throwing Libya into bloody chaos. 

  

The Moneychangers

I just finished reading The Moneychangers by Upton Sinclair, and was surprised by how little the financial industry has changed in the 100 years since he wrote the book.  Sinclair is best known for The Jungle about tainted food and general poor living conditions of immigrants in America, which resulted in the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.  Since he wrote The Moneychangers, the US has created the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, but the main difference is that the unscrupulous bankers and traders are now billionaires instead of millionaires, and the old trusts are now called hedge funds.

The 2008 “Great Recession” was very similar to the Panic of 1907 that Sinclair wrote about.  Lehman Brothers went down in bankruptcy in 2008 as the Gotham Trust Company did in The Moneychangers.  One of Sinclair’s main points was that Wall Street tycoons made their money by using other people’s money, usually leaving the little guys exposed to the loss if anything went wrong.  In the housing meltdown, it was the homeowners and retiree pension funds that suffered most of the losses, while the fat cats got bailed out by the government.  The nation can endure thousands of small individual foreclosures and bankruptcies, but not one huge one.  Lehman was just small enough to let die.

Relating to my obsession with the involvement of Jews in the financial industry, The Moneychangers only mentions the word Jew once, when a cleaning woman tells the main character that a man who looked like a Jew had paid her to go through his trash.  Presumably all the stock market manipulators were Episcopalian Christians, who perhaps had not paid too much attention to the sermons.  They all loved the show of money in their elegant town houses, their massive Newport beach “cottages,” their yachts, etc.  It sounds like the titans of Wall Street today.  And the banking practices still sound almost the same.  They have made some changes to get around the regulations designed to protect the public, but the results are pretty much the same, and as 2008 showed, the public is still not protected.