WALL STREET, JEWISH / ISRAELI ETHICS, AND THE WORLD OF FUND RAISING
(How world Zionist movement uses Wall St. and the media to advance their agenda)
* Jewish dictate holds that the Jewish collective community is morally superior to all others and that, throughout history, they are victims of innocence. The next two chapters represent merely the beginning of an inquiry into this enforced myth, a myth represented everywhere in American popular culture as fact.
Among the economic fields in which Jews today are especially visible is investment banking -- "Wall Street," including interconnected networks of lawyers and other legal and economic manipulators stretching deeply into Hollywood and the mass media. Since the 1800s the "Old Crowd" of German-Jewish banking families (the Seligmans, Lehmans, Goldmans, Sachs, Warburgs, Schiffs, Loebs, et al) had predominated the field; a "New Crowd" of Jews has in recent decades taken their place. After World War II, melodramatically note Judith Ehrlich and Barry Rehfeld, "economic power in America and Wall Street was shifting ... Fresh faces came forward as if answering a call ... They were the children and grandchildren of Italian, Irish, Poles, and other Europeans who were not of Anglo-Saxon ancestry. But most of all they were Jews." [EHRLICH, p. 12] This is not to suggest of course that the seminal Jewish American investment firms are today inconsequential. Far from it. In 1999, for instance, Goldman, Sachs and Co. stretched across the world to become the "single largest and controlling shareholder of South Korea's largest bank, Kookmin. [BLOOMBERG NEWS, p. 11]
"In the world of high finance," observed Gerald Krefetz, "Jewish interest is concerned with investment banking, a broad catchall for activities ranging from tendering advice to underwriting securities. The heart of investment banking is public offerings and private placements, the risking of capital -- sometimes ones' own, but more often other peoples' -- to finance new companies, or expand old ones." [KREFETZ, p. 54] The nature of Wall Street entrepreneurship might well be presumed in the title of a 1986 volume by Ken Auletta: Greed and Glory on Wall Street: the Fall of the House of Lehman, or Martin Meyer's Nightmare on Wall Street: Salomon Brothers and the Corruption of the Marketplace (1993). Both Lehman and Solomon are Jewish-founded firms.
A French Jewish commentator, Bernard Lazare, noted Jewish propensities in high finance in the late 1800s:
"The man of the lower middle class, the small tradesman at whom
speculation has probably ruined has much clearer ideas of why he
is an anti-Semite. He knows that reckless speculation [by financiers],
with its attendant panics, has been his bane, and for him, the most
formidable jugglers of capital, the most dangerous speculators, are the
Jews; which, indeed, is very true." [LAZARE, B., p. 173]
Finance, investment banking, brokerage, and commodities are the speediest ways (short of outright crime) to get rich in America; by 1988 the stock and bond market and linked economic activities totaled 12 trillion dollars a year (six times the value of the assets of Fortune's top 500 companies). "Where the money went," note Ehrlich and Rehfeld, "and what happened to it were greatly influenced by Wall Street power brokers." [EHRLICH, p. 19] Corporate mergers, acquisitions, and takeovers have become an especially lucrative field. "By the 1980s, says Ehrlich and Rehfeld, "along with [Gentile] T. Boone Pickens, and a few others ... the [Jewish] New Crowd was at the very core of the mergers and acquisitions field." [EHRLICH, p. 15].... [This circle of money men] bought luxurious homes, expensive art, high-priced foreign cars, designer clothes and jewelry; they hosted or appeared at the right parties." [EHRLICH, p. 16] ... The old WASP establishment had seen its wealth eroded by changing tax laws and inflation ... arriviste Jews began to appear on the boards of such time-honored WASP institutions as the Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Public Library." [EHRLICH, p. 5] ... The New Crowd broke the stranglehold of the Establishment WASP bankers and [older Jewish] Our Crowd competitors ... and extended profit centers to newer financial activities such as block trading, risk arbitrage, a wide range of retail securities products, financial futures, listed trading of options, and junk bond financing that helped companies expand and made almost every company vulnerable to a takeover, a leveraged buyout that restructured corporate entities and raised critical debt levels." [EHRLICH, p. 394]
In the 1970s, "hostile turnovers," notes James Stewart, "bore an unsavory taint. They generated bad feelings, especially toward those who represented the attackers. This sometimes alienated other clients. Much of the WASP investment banks and loan firms preferred to leave such work to the other firms, many of them Jewish." [STEWART, p. 25] "Various techniques and instruments were used in the Wall Street boom of the 1980s," says Norman Cantor, "but the most consequential -- and lucrative was the floating 'junk' (low grade) bond to provide capital for involuntary takeovers of one company by another ... Fiscal critic Benjamin Stein [sees] the junk bond device as a huge fraudulent Ponzi scheme generating temporary money pools that could be looted by ruthless investment bankers and corporate executives and their overcompensated lawyers." [CANTOR, p. 402]
William Leach traces the influence that those in investment banking have had in shaping America, both economically and in influencing the nation's values:
"The growth of investment banking and mass consumption industries
were (and still are) closely related developments ... Bankers assisted in
undermining the competitive ethos by directing business interest toward
concentration and easy economic fixers. They helped local monopolies
become major national 'players' almost instantaneously. Banker-inspired
megalomania reinforces an already clear pattern in the economy away from
'making goods' to 'making money.'" [LEACH, p. 275]
There is a long list of Jewish entrepreneurs on Wall Street who, as a group, have been influential in literally changing the American economic system. Sanford I. Weill, for instance, "amassed a brokerage empire and eventually became President of American Express;" he was later "recognized as one of the most powerful Jewish businessmen in the nation." [EHRLICH, p. 13] John Gutfreund rose to become the chairman of Solomon, Inc., "one of the most powerful securities firms in the western world." Felix Rohatyn "perhaps more than any other, was linked with the flood of massive corporate combinations that reshaped American business for much of the past three decades." [EHRLICH, p. 14] Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., valued at around $3.5 billion and with assets of $90 billion, is "one of the biggest closely held U.S. money managers." It manages $55 billion "for institutions, such as pension funds, endowments and foundations, and $35 billion for wealthy individuals." [BLOOMBERG NEWS, INTL HERALD, p. 10]
Other influential Jewish Wall Street 'players' (financiers, lenders, borrowers, advisers, lawyers, et al) in recent years have included Alan Greenberg, Ira Harris, Bruce Wasserstein, Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, Peter Cohen, Joseph Flom, Martin Lipton, Victor Posner ("a onetime Baltimore slumlord" [FORBES, p. 45] who was indicted in 1982 for $1.25 million in income tax evasion and filing false tax returns [BRENNER, p. 72]), [Posner is "the flamboyantly wealthy Miami Beach financier [who has] been discredited as one of the most unprincipled and destructive modern corporate raiders." [BIANCO, A., 1991, p. 31], Nelson Peltz, the Belzbergs, and many others. Alan Greenberg is the head of Bear Stearns, Stephen Schwarzman founded the Blackstone Group, a prominent investing firm. Well-known traditional Jewish investment banking houses include Lehman Brothers, Lazard Freres, Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers, Bache & Co., and Cantor/Fitzgerald. [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 78-79] "Jews took the lead in the '60s," notes Jewish business author Steven Silbiger, "with new investment banking techniques that helped introduce a conglomeration craze by using multipurpose holding companies ... The concentration of Jewish-owned securities firms created well-paying employment opportunities at all levels of the securities industry: securities analysts; portfolio managers; and stock, bond and futures traders; brokers and deal-makers. Among the equity holders of the Jewish investment banking and trading firms on Wall Street are hundreds of Jewish millionaires. Upward mobility based on merit and high salaries has made working on Wall Street a Jewish-friendly career choice ... Although exact figures for the numbers of Jews are not available, they no doubt have a leading and disproportionate role on Wall Street." [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 78-80]
In a book entitled, "The Money Machine," about the KKR company (Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts), the author address three more Jewish Wall Street members:
"Here were three men who started a firm in 1976 with a few million
dollars and ten years later had control over what is believed to be the
largest corporate empire in the world ... Why did their names arouse
such intense emotions, ranging from envy, to awe, to fear?"
[BARTLETT, p. x]
By 1999, KKR controlled 23 companies. Among others, its stable included the Amphenol Corporation, Boyd's Collection Inc., Idex Corporation, Kindercare Learning Centers, Primedia Inc, and Gillette. It also made $5.9 billion profit in 12 years of ownership of America's second largest food retailing chain. By the 1980s, the company had "$45 billion in buying power," a sum "greater than the gross national products of Pakistan or Greece." [BURROUGH/HELYAR, p. 130]
A Jewish investment financier, Jeff Beck, has been afforded an entire volume about his life, entitled Rainmaker. "By the end of the 1980s," notes its author, "[Beck] was living a life of deceit so absolute that in effect his true personality had become turned inside out ...[BIANCO, A., 1991, p. 18] ... As money and money-making were glorified in the Reagan years, Beck's pursuit of wealth and the social status derived from it flowered into a full-fledged mania." [BIANO, A., 1991, p. 12]
Another Jewish financier, Carl Icahn "rose from obscurity to become one of the most feared corporate raiders in the country, Chairman of TWA, the largest shareholder in Texaco and USX (formerly US Steel) and a billionaire ... [EHRLICH, p. 15] ... [Icahn was] perhaps the most successful financial predator of them all." [EHRLICH, p. 290] Icahn is particularly notable for his repeatedly ruthless campaigns to take over unwilling companies, loot them for obscene profits, and -- successfully taking them over or not -- spitting them out again, leaving a wake of relative ruin. In 1982, for instance, Icahn warred with the whole community of Danville, Virginia, in his hostile bid to takeover a corporation called Dan River. Townspeople unified to resist him, investing retirement money and other savings into company stock. The company finally resisted the financial predator with a leveraged buyout; Icahn, however, managed to strip the town's economic lifeblood of $8.5 million." In another much publicized financial effort, during early attempts [eventually successful] to take over TWA Airlines the company president, then C. E. Meyer, Jr., called Icahn "one of the greediest men on earth." [BROCK, p. 171] By 1998 he was attempting to take over Pan Am airlines.
In an attempt to ward off Icahn's efforts to take over the Phillip's petroleum company, it had to go $4.5 billion deeper in debt, as well as cut hundreds of millions of dollars of capital expenses, sell off $2 billion in assets, limit investor dividends, and tighten budgets. 5,000 fewer employees were working for Phillips by the time Icahn was through. [BRUCK, p. 191] Icahn walked away from Phillips unsuccessful after a 10-week struggle to seize the company, but $52.5 million richer. "The business establishment took notice [of Icahn's recurrently nasty dealings]," notes Connie Bruck, "One close associate of Icahn recalled that Laurence Tisch [the Jewish] chairman of Loews and now of CBS, Inc., said to him, 'Tell Carl to cut this out. It's not good for the Jews.'" [BRUCK, p. 160]
And what of this sensitivity to issues of Jewish concern on Wall Street, Jewish solidarity, and Jewish economic influence, particularly (but not only) with regard to Israel? In 1974 Stephen Isaacs noted a premiere example:
"Gustave Levy [is the] managing partner of the important Goldman,
Sachs, and Company investment banking firm ... Many have regarded
Levy as the most powerful single individual on Wall Street, able to make
or break men and companies almost casually. He personally controls the
movement of billions of dollars. 'Gus is very conscious of being Jewish.
He's very conscious of the problems it can cause,' said Philip Greer, a
one-time stockbroker who had reported on Wall Street ... 'When you
talk about Jewish muscle, Gus will back off -- 'I don't make waves, [he
says], 'I've got it, and I can use it, and I know how to use it, and I do
use it, but I'm not going to talk to you about it because then that redneck
in Alabama is going to get very upset and I don't want him to know
about it.’.... In the Six Day War Gus was sending money over [to Israel]
like crazy. He would have financed the whole war all by himself. And he
made no bones about whether you were Jewish or not. 'You need
Goldman, Sachs. I need you now. If I don't get you now, you aren't
getting me later.' It was as simple as that. He could've raised it from
Schwartz or O'Reilly, it didn't make any difference to him, because
they're both after the money that Gus controls." [ISAACS, p. 263]
In 1995, Wall Street financier Michael Steinhardt (wizard of the moneymaking device, the "hedge fund") closed his company, Steinhardt Partners, to concentrate more deeply upon spreading the message of Jewish and Israeli identity so dear to him. With a personal fortune of $400 million, he joined as a member of a consortium that bought Israel's Bank Hapoalim and the Maritime Bank. One of his brainchildren, called "Birthright," was by 1998 still in its developmental stages; it is a plan to bring all young American Jews for trips to Israel, to renew their roots to Jewish and Zionist identities. "As part of the birthright of every Jew on this planet, we want to offer free trips to Israel in their formative years," says Steinhardt. [RABINOVICH, p. 20] A building in Manhattan for renewal of Jewish identity was purchased, and there has been sponsorship of the Jewish Campus Service Corps to pull young Jews to Jewish programs at national campus Hillel centers.
By late 1999, "Birthright" was in progress, at a cost of $210 million. "Funded by the Israeli government, in partnership with Jewish philanthropists and communities abroad," college-age Jews in America competed in a lottery for free-trips to Israel with the expressed purpose of being socialized into deeper identification with the Jewish state. The goal is to transport 50,000 Jews a year to connect to the tenets of Zionism. Not all Jews are happy with the program. The chairman of the World Jewish Congress, for example, Isi Leibler, thought there were many more worthy applications of the funds. Many Jews getting in on the program too, he noted, were already "from affluent homes." [GREENBERG, J., 2000, p. A1]
"It can be said," suggested Gerald Krefetz in 1982, "that Jewish wealth is generated from the financial side rather than the operational side. Many wealthy Jews have climbed the corporate ladder through law, accounting, and investment banking. Apparently, they are more at home massaging numbers than dealing with technical or substantive problems of production ... [KREFETZ, p. 69].... If Jews are drawn to the financial side, it is probably due to the fact that in the last decade or two the financial tail wags the industrial dog." [KRAFETZ, p. 69]
"Greed knows no bounds," said the New York Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1986, "there's always someone who makes more than you do. Investment banking is the new gold mine." [HOWE, p. 413] In the same year New York psychiatrist Samuel Klagsbann, who had "a lot of lawyers handling mergers and acquisitions" as patients, noted that for these people "business is God." [HOWE, p. 413]
"In the field of takeovers and mergers the sky is the limit," said prominent Jewish financier Felix Rohatyn (later President Bill Clinton's ambassador to France), "Not only in size, but the type of large corporation transactions. We have gone beyond the norms of rational behavior. The tactics used in corporate takeovers, both on offense and defense, create massive transactions that greatly benefit lawyers, investment bankers, and arbitrageurs, but often result in weaker companies and do not treat share holders equally and fairly ... In the long run we in the investment banking business cannot benefit from something that is harmful to our economic system." [EHRLICH, p. ]
In 1986, Dennis Levine was the first to be caught, a "dealmaker" at Drexel Burnham Lambart, for his "insider trading [exploiting confidential company information] which opened the doors to the greatest scandal in Wall Street history, a scandal that "caused grave concern within the Jewish community." [EHRLICH, p. 17] Not long after, Martin Siegel was also arrested. As the scandal opened up, it was discovered that these wealthy criminals were overwhelmingly Jewish, including all its central players. "What was particularly upsetting from a Jewish perspective," notes Ehrlich and Rehfeld, "was the fact that the [criminal] network began, in part, when one member first introduced another to a third at a United Jewish Appeal function." [EHRLICH, p. 340]
Connie Bruck, a Jewish journalist, notes that
"Privately, [lawyer Martin] Lipton expressed another concern, one shared
by many of the businessmen and lawyers who were part of the Jewish
establishment in New York, and by some of the Drexel contingent as
well. They feared that the common strain among these nouveau
entrepreneurs and their nouveau banks at Drexel -- an overwhelming
majority were Jews -- would unleash a backlash of virulent anti-Semitism
... As one Drexel client ... put it: 'It used to be that the Jews would go [to
WASP lenders] and they'd beg for money, and they'd be rejected while
the Gentile would come in and they'd all go to lunch and smoke cigars.
Now it's a shift of power to the Jews. Drexel is making these huge sums
of money and the banks comparatively little. The problem is, all
the entrepreneurs are Jews with the exception of [T. Boone] Pickens and
[Carl] Lindner -- and Lindner, a long time supporter of Israel, is the most
Jewish non-Jew I've ever known." [BRUCK, p. 205] (In 1999, Lindner
became controlling owner of the Cincinnati Reds professional baseball
team.)
"It is hard to grasp the magnitude and the scope of the crime that unfolded beginning in the mid-1970s," wrote a Wall Street Journal editor Dennis Stewart, "in the nation's market and financial institutions. It dwarfs any comparable financial crime, from the Great Train Robbery to the stock-manipulation schemes that gave rise to the nation's securities laws in the first place. The magnitude of the illegal gains was so large as to be incomprehensible to most laymen." [STEWART, p. 115] "[Michael] Milken [and] some of his Drexel colleagues and anointed players," says Connie Bruck, "had made more money in a shorter period of time than any other individuals had done in the history of this country." [BRUCK, p. 20]
"A variety of critics voiced their apprehension about what they saw as greed that had gone out of control," says Ehrlich and Rehfeld, "... over the course of the next three years, it was revealed that more than a dozen insiders -- many of them members of Wall Street's most powerful firms -- as well as one of the hottest houses on the Street, had amassed millions of dollars in illegal profits. The accused were charged with violating securities laws that prohibited insider trading, that is, they used material confidential information primarily about impending merger bids, to profit from securities and transactions." [EHRLICH, p. 338]
"During the crime wave," says Stewart, "the ownership of entire corporations changed hands, often forcibly, at a clip never before witnessed. Household names -- Carnation, Beatrice, General Foods, Diamond Shamrock -- vanished in takeovers that spawned criminal activity and violations of securities laws. Others, companies like Unocal and Union Carbide, survived but were heavily crippled. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, companies loaded up with debt to pay for the deals, profits were sacrificed to pay interest costs on the borrowings, and even so, many companies were eventually forced into bankruptcy or restructurings. Bondholders and shareholders lost millions more. Greed alone cannot account for such a toll. These are the costs of greed coupled with market power -- power unrestrained by the normal checks and balances of the free market place." [STEWART, p. 16]
A major wheeler-dealer in the 1980s scandals was Ivan Boesky, who was (only a year before his 'public disgrace') also the Chairman of the New York area United Jewish Appeal. He also was a member of the board of both Yehsiva University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, as well as a self-described "founder and supporter" of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. "Boesky's Jewish involvement," noted the Jewish Week, "resurfaced in the media at the time of his sentencing in December, with revelations that he had been taking classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary while awaiting sentencing and that leaders of some organizations that benefited from his gifts had written character references to the court, attesting to his generosity. The letters have sparked a new internecine debate among Jewish activists. Some claimed that Jewish philanthropies were 'going to bat' for a confessed felon because they had 'gotten their cut' from his ill-gotten wealth." [GOLDBERG, JEWISH WEEK, 1-8-88, p. 41] "Many Jews," wrote Ehrlich and Rehfeld, "worried that his trading abuses could cast a pall over the entire Jewish community. Not only was he the most important figure in the scandal, he was deeply involved in Jewish philanthropy." [EHRLICH, p. 341], including a $2.5 million donation to the Jewish Theological Seminary for a library to be named after him and his wife.
This former head of the UJA was a particularly nefarious character. He had been fined for violating New York Stock Exchange trade laws in the 1970s; [EHRLICH, p. 317], his 1985 book Merger Mania was written by a ghost writer, Jeffrey Madrick, and largely patterned (without saying so) on an existing volume by Guy Wyser-Pratte. [EHRLICH, p. 326] Boesky was the time of man who watched his employees throughout his company by a video system in his office; [p. 324] he paid up to $5 apiece for catered lunches so employees wouldn't have to leave their desks, [p. 36] and "screamed at [employees] regularly." His oldest son, Billy, is reported to have called his father "stark raving mad." [p. 40] Upon Boesky's installment as the UJA campaign general chairman, he told his Jewish audience: "We must make an enormous effort to encourage people's sense of responsibility -- to be sure that at the very top we have the right attitudes about giving to the campaign. Attitude filters down." [JEWISH WEEK, 6-29-84, p. 7] |
