Monday, January 11, 2016

Jewish Financiers

There is so much talk in financial circles about the Federal Reserve raising interest rates that it has piqued my interest in the role of Jews in the US.  There have been only Jewish chairmen of the Fed since Paul Volker in the Carter administration. Prior to Volker there had been only one Jewish Fed chairman, who held the post at the height of the great depression. 

My concern is that the Jewish dominated Fed has helped Jewish bankers, financiers, and businessmen in a preferential manner.  This may not have been the result of some great scheme or cabal, like that envisioned by Henry Ford, but simply the result of a convergence of interests, formed at dinners, social occasions and business meetings among Jews over the years.  The results of this convergence of interests may not have been illegal insider trading, but they may have disproportionately benefited Jews over other parts of American society. It was a form of insider trading that was too vague and amorphous to be illegal, but one that affected how trillions of dollars were invested.  

Jews have been involved in financial businesses since before America was a country, and they have been active in financial circles since before the founding of the country.  But they did not play the huge role that they do today until after World War II.  The Holocaust drove many wealthy Jews out of Europe to America, where they resumed the financial activities in which they had excelled in Europe.  Today Jews not only play a dominant role in the Fed, but in most financial activities, particularly on Wall Street.  

Most wealthy financiers would not win any prizes for being great humanitarians.  They tend to be greedy, selfish, and often dishonest.  If they don't break the law, they go right up to the legal limit, and today they pay lobbyists to change the laws to let them do what they want to do.  Most of them leave a lot of their riches to charitable and cultural foundations as they approach death to try to atone for the evil they did in amassing their fortunes.  But that doesn't make the evil they did while amassing their fortunes any less evil.  The Protestant Rockefellers, Carneigies, Astors, Vanderbilts, Hearsts and their cohorts all fall into this same category, along with many present day Jews and Gentiles.  However, this cohort contains considerably more Jews in the top 1% than their 2% of the population would represent.  Jews represent nearly half of the richest of the rich in America.  

Jews believe they are smarter at doing business and manipulating markets than other people, so that if business and the markets are very complicated, Jews are likely to win and do better than their Gentile competition.  Thus, if interest rates are either very high or very low, Jews are likely to do better.  Many Gentiles would be happy just putting their savings into insured savings accounts and earning some interest, but if interest rates are less than one percent, that is not an option.  When rates are high, you have to be very clever about borrowing, or have money in hand, so that you don't have to borrow, again favoring many Jews.  Thus, Jews have disproportionately benefitted from the global financial turmoil, and from the complicated financial instruments and transactions that have been developed in recent years.  

NYT article on rich not paying taxes.

As described in an article in The New York Times on Wednesday, tax rates on America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers fell sharply from the late 1990s through 2012, when their average effective income tax rate fell to 16.7 percent from 26.4 percent.  Of the few names specifically mentioned in the article, most were Jews, including Loeb, Simons, and Soros.    

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/business/economy/for-the-wealthiest-private-tax-system-saves-them-billions.html?_r=0

Tax rates rose for wealthy last year

Data released by the I.R.S. on Wednesday shows that tax rates on the income of America’s 400 wealthiest taxpayers rose sharply to 22.9 percent in 2013, erasing a majority of the last two decades’ decline in their effective tax rate, although 22.9% is still less than the old 26.4%.  They are all much lower than the maximum 39.6% tax rate which you would expect the wealthiest people to pay, even accounting for the lower tax rate they would pay on the first few thousand dollars they earn.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/31/upshot/thanks-obama-highest-earners-tax-rates-rose-sharply-in-2013.html

Monday, January 04, 2016

Recent MTCR News Items

Since I worked on the creation of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) back in the 1980s, I'm interested to see that it is still going.  Here are some recent news articles about it collected by Google Alert.  Most of them deal with India.  


No Decision Yet on India's MTCR Membership Application





Turkey and the Kurds

On CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Anne Marie Slaughter picked the Turkey-Kurd issue as one of the most important for 2016, and I agree with her.  We have become increasingly dependent on the Kurds in the most volatile parts of the Middle East in which we are involved – Syria, Iraq, and Iran – and now the conflict is boiling over into Turkey.

Turkey used to be a reliable ally, a secular Muslim country with a competent government.  Now it is becoming increasingly sectarian, and the government is becoming increasingly problematic.  One of the main issues for the government is the irredentism of the Kurds in Turkey, who want to form a greater Kurdistan with their Kurdish brothers in Iraq, Syria, and Iran.  Years ago, Turkey got the West to agree to characterize the Kurdish rebels in Turkey as terrorists.  So, while the US is primarily worried about ISIS terrorists, the Turks are mainly worried about the Kurdish terrorists.  When we ask the Turks for cooperation against terrorists, we are thinking, “Let’s go kill some ISIS rebels,” and the Turks are thinking, “Let’s go kill some Kurdish rebels.”  Meanwhile the US is supporting the Kurds in Iraq and Syria, who have been the main line of defense against ISIS. 

Turkey sees the Kurds as a threat to its very existence; the Kurds would cut off a chunk of Turkey and incorporate it into greater Kurdistan.  Where does the US come down?  On the side of the Kurds who are fighting with us in Iraq, or with the Turks who have been NATO allies for many years. 

If we lose Turkey as a NATO ally, we face big problems in central Europe.  Turkey controls the Bosporus.  Without access to the Black Sea, we have real problems confronting Russia’s recent take over of Crimea, as well access in general to that part of the world.  I would think the US Navy would really want Turkey on our side.  In addition Turkish air bases give American air power better access to that unstable part of the world.  We would miss them. 

But if we don’t support the Kurds, what happens in Iraq and Syria?  We have to balance our interests there against our interests in other parts of the world, including Russia and Ukraine.  Plus, we have to worry about where Turkey is going.  Is Erdogan a passing phase for Turkey, or does he represent a long-term turn toward a less Western, more Muslim state?  We don’t want our opposition to push Turkey away toward a more religious Muslim orientation. 




Wednesday, December 23, 2015

Regime Change and Assassination Nation

This Wall Street Journal article discusses the intraparty dispute that has broker out within both the Republican and Democratic parties over the role of “regime change” in US foreign policy.  Against regime change are Republicans Donald Trump, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, joined by Democrat Bernie Sanders.  Hillary Clinton is for regime change, since she oversaw it in Egypt and Libya, although she says she argued for more gradual change in Egypt but was overruled by others in the Obama administration.  Her interventionism is echoed by Marco Rubio.   

I am disappointed that the US has become “assassination nation,” beginning perhaps after World War II when the CIA was formed.  But it was relatively rare until the Bush and Obama administrations.  Bush just liked killing Muslims, mainly in Iraq and Afghanistan.  With drones Obama now can kill anybody anywhere, and he often does.  Assassination by drone is probably better than the old fashioned way which often involved many collateral casualties, even in the case of bin Laden. 

For me, however, it goes against the standard set by leading men in the old Western movies, who did not shoot their enemies in the back.  Attacking individuals secretly from the sky seems cowardly, even if it may be good for American security.  You can argue that terrorists have no right to any kind of fair treatment, but when the US abandons fairness and justice, it sets a bad example for the rest of the world.