I like this from Black Agenda Report, “How to Pay for a Free, Non-Racist Higher Education,” on the for-profit shysters like U of Phoenix and other bizarre manifestations of neo-liberalism, charter school sickness and the American adage that nothing can be sold for something, for a lot of somethings in the case of this Media-Pharma-Ag-Penitentiary-Military-Energy-Financial-IT-Academic complex, on steroids, thanks to the founding fathers’ slave complex New Eden shit project for a new place to make money off the masses. These legal-financial-patent-pending schemes are being run by the exceptional ones, the chosen people in many cases. Read the Jerusalem Post below on why Jews make the best Billionaires. Brilliant.
The dominoes are falling in the for-profit college racket, a cauldron of corruption that has crushed the dreams of millions of African Americans in desperate search for tools to navigate their way through a racist, cut-throat capitalist society. Corinthian College’s stock fell from a peak of $33 a share, ten years ago, to 33 cents last month, when it became clear that the federal government intended to pull the plug on the $1.6 billion a year rip-off.
Corinthian – known to victims by the brand names Heald College, Everest, and WyoTech – will soon file for bankruptcy protection, shielding its bankster and hedge fund profiteers from liability for wanton theft and massive life-wrecking. More than 70,000 students at 107 campuses, half of whom were statistically certain to drop out before completing their courses, will struggle to find another route to mobility and dignity.
Corinthian is only the third or fourth-worst offender in the pantheon of for-profit colleges created for the sole purpose of diverting public money to the coffers of hedge funds and mega-banks. Although the titans of this fraudulent industry have committed crimes far larger than Bernard Madoff, none of them will join him in prison, since their victims are largely Black people whose usefulness to Wall Street is limited to availability for super-exploitation, demonetization and incarceration.
Corinthian’s collapse – and the panic that reigns in the rest of the for-profit education pack – was triggered by the Obama administration’s decision to shut off the criminal enterprise’s federal funding faucet, which accounted for at least 83 percent of the company’s revenue stream. Since Corinthian, like its sister shysters, was created as a pass-through of federal dollars, it could not withstand the slightest pause in payments from various federal agencies. So, it folded. Other corporate educational fraudsters will soon follow Corinthian into bankruptcy, causing a shakeup in the industry that will probably result in a leaner and more vertically integrated structure of dream-sploitation. Billions of educational dollars will continue flowing straight from federal programs to Wall Street, but with little improvement to the life-chances of the supposed beneficiaries: the educationally deprived.
“Other corporate educational fraudsters will soon follow Corinthian into bankruptcy.”
The Obama administration may abhor the chaos in which players like the University of Phoenix and Ashford University have become the top producers of baccalaureate degrees among Blacks. But the administration – and the Democratic Party, as an institution – also worships at the alter of privatization. Rather than eliminate the felonious educational enterprises root and branch – and spend the money on a nationalized system of free education – Obama will continue to provide tens of billions to nourish the poisoned tree.
Glen goes on to point out the misleadership of the Congressional Black Caucus is a prostituted group of folks with lots of for-profit money stuffed in their orifices. Al Sharpton, too, MSNBC thing that he is, haven taken tons of blood money from U of Phoenix. Shill after shill in America, and nothing gets done. (Look at the graphic at the bottom, drought):
Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who was slightly to the left of Obama when they briefly served together, blasted the for-profit education racket a year and a half ago. Durbin laid it out in a letter:
“For-profit colleges educate only 12 percent of all college students in America. Yet, a disproportionate 25 percent of all federal aid to education goes to for-profit colleges. And a staggering 47 percent of all student loan defaults are among for-profit school students.
Every year we send $32 billion to for-profit colleges, making that ‘private sector’ industry the most highly taxpayer-subsidized business in America.”
Durbin concluded, “We should be spending that money on schools with proven track records of educating rather than exploiting students, and making productive investments in infrastructure, medical research and effective worker training.”
But, of course, Sen. Durbin would transfer these monies to existing institutions (or new ones sponsored by billionaires more to his liking, such as Bill Gates), rather than spend $32 billion a year to establish a free or nominal-cost public educational agency dedicated to serving the needs of the same, disproportionately Black students that are now fodder for corporate hucksters and thieves. The very existence of Corinthian, Phoenix, Ashford and the other gangster institutions proves beyond doubt that the vast bulk of the existing U.S. educational establishment is not serving these populations. Shifting federal funds to schools that are incapable or unwilling to accommodate the millions of Black, brown and poor people who are so demonstrably hungry for learning and skills does not solve the original problem.
So, in the midst of all this discussion about an under-educated, racist, class-based society, the US of Pillaging, we have adjuncts, 1.2 million of us floundering for shekels and slave wages. Graduate students and research assistants – at these supposedly stalwart Big Ten, Ivy League, PAC 12, private religious non-profits by the several thousand.
Here I am, 57, going on 58, part-time and non-tenured track migrant worker college teacher, after how many years? Thirty one years fighting the pigs of my profession, including a vast majority of faculty who have gotten that tenure track and some of that state funding and a retirement and health care package. And, the vacations and summers off.
Movements to organize, I was involved in first in the early 1980s, in Tex-ASS, with Piece of Shit Bush as governor, having his legal pricks warn us at the University of Texas to not walk out of classes in protest, or else, the State Troopers would be probing our asses. Most of my fellow armchair liberals caved.
My fellow adjuncts, for the most part, balked, and, well, no walk-out, no attacking the very system, and, well, back then, the intellectual graffiti was on the wall about how quickly curriculum would become silly, steeped in conformity, in the consumer angst, the agnotology of the times, each day a new shifting baseline, until, well, today, we have some fucking stupid people in high and low office, in charge, in faculties and the admin class.
We have created schools with hundreds of millions spent on PR spin, on recruiting, on redecorating, on messaging, sports rapists, on the entire project for a new America. Schools for drone warfare, schools for predatory finance, schools for chipped away history, wacko psychology, schools and departments that teach youth how to be Capitalists. Tell those young people to go to school for the debt, man, to employ these turncoats and multi-tiered Little and Big Man Eichmanns. So many folk making money off of those several thousand colleges, US of state school, US of Private School, US of Religious School. They can’t converse, these faculty with tenure, the minority, now, but, with 70 percent of USA schools populated by precarious and PT workers, that 30 percent is strong, still, and the Administrative Class and Deanlets and Money Changers in the academic world, well, they are Inquisition Heroes.
How many namby-pambies have we created, and how many worthless folk have attacked me in the 1980s through the 2000’s up to just last year when I exited the academic pigsty, how many feared my shadow, my voice, my teaching, in the face of hundreds of more than satisfied citizen students a school year coming through my classes, up against a good number of fascist and fucked up children of the dumb and mean and racist and crypto-Nazis.
My work organizing adjuncts in WA state, well, the SEIU-fucked up union got my wisdom, my inside tracks, and, well, no pass after six months . . . . Threw me under the bus, because these elite-run and in my case, Jewish bosses, just do not CARE about the very people they think they are organizing. But I see those three schools I got going – Pacific Lutheran, Seattle U and Gonzaga U – are in the midst of union-izing, or at least running for that false baton. So many blogs and paper tiger groups out there, organized, ready to take a worker’s’ $50 here and $100 there a month. More money for adjuncts? Really, it’s not happening, in true Cost of Living and Worth and Value to Society dollars. By a long shot.
These chatter boxes and conferences and asinine groups dominate the academic world. Paper after paper, in that data-driven dungeon, that peer-reviewed retarded place, that bastion of conformity, play-nice and broken lies tied to the Capitalism, Walmartization, Economies of Scale, Consumer Amazon-dot-com shit world. Schools is where we should be stopping the takeover by Quantum Computer Nazis — the 3-d and 4-d printer Zeig Heils, the constant bastardization of capital and all those legal financial obligations we hobble poor whites and especially Blacks and Latinos with. Capitalism, taught and revered in community colleges, universities, private institutions. The pain gain, making money off of every inch driven on the road to prop up the One Percent and 19 Percent’s profit margins. Look below at the New Billionaires story that hit the left-right-alternative press last week. Sick, perverted stuff.
Here, though, now read, why the entire system is rigged against the students, the worker bees and the adjunct slave class –
If Obama chooses UChicago, however, he risks tying his legacy to the American university that perhaps most exemplifies higher education’s current crisis of mission. Rather than being institutions that prioritize free inquiry, research, and high-quality education, universities are increasingly acting like the worst of Wall Street, where anything goes in order make a buck for the people at the top.
The latest sign of identity crisis at UChicago? Hefty pay raises to a large number of top staff, who have enriched themselves at great cost to their institution.
New analysis of tax data from publicly available IRS 990 forms shows that eight high-level UChicago administrators have received more than $7.6 million in compensation increases since 2007-2008, even as the school moved toward and suffered a credit downgrade.
Over five years, administrators enjoyed pay increases of between 40 percent and 135 percent, and as a result each received $450,000 to $3.3 million from cumulative increases by the end of 2012-2013, the most recent year for which tax data is available.
UChicago thus ended up paying $2.5 million more annually for the combined services of these eight people — an increase from $3.4 to almost $6 million per year.
And, thus, we listen to these top-down union “leaders” telling us, adjuncts, how to make change? We are making $2700 a class for the entire quarter/semester. We make less with the for-profits listed above. Slave wages, fear incorporated, food stamps, ragamuffins in their own inability to see that we should stop teaching the way the administrators and department heads and patronizing tenure class have guided Education, for 40 years, as students dumb-down, and will be lucky, in the words of Gore Vidal, to have grandchildren in 20 years able to recognize the alphabet, let along read one of his books (Amazon Trademark, for sure).
Q: You’ve called the country “The United States of Amnesia.” Is this something in our genes?
Vidal: No, it’s something in our rulers. They don’t want us to know anything. When you’ve got a press like we have, you no longer have an informed citizenry.
I was involved somewhat with Congressman Conyers on what happened in Ohio during the last Presidential election.
Conyers is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and he went up there with a bunch of researchers. They went from district to district, and they found out how the election was stolen. He wrote a report that was published by a small press in Chicago. To help out, I said I’d write a preface for him on how the election was stolen. We were thinking that might help. But The New York Times and The Washington Post were not going to review the book about how we had a second Presidential election stolen. They weren’t going to admit it.
A huge number of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. You have a people that don’t know anything about the rest of the world, and you have leaders who lie to them, lie to them, and lie to them.
It’s so stupid, everything that they say. And the media take on it is just as stupid as theirs, sometimes worse. They at least have motives. They are making money out of the republic or what’s left of it. It’s the stupidity that will really drive me away from this country.
Q: Talk about the role of the opposition party, the Democrats.
Vidal: It isn’t an opposition party. I have been saying for the last thousand years that the United States has only one party—the property party. It’s the party of big corporations, the party of money. It has two right wings; one is Democrat and the other is Republican.
Q: What can people do to energize democracy?
Vidal: The tactic would be to go after smaller offices, state by state, school board, sheriff, state legislatures. You can turn them around and that doesn’t take much of anything. Take back everything at the grassroots, starting with state legislatures. That’s what Madison always said. I’d like to see a revival of state legislatures, in which I am a true Jeffersonian.
Q: Do you see any developments on the horizon that might suggest an alternative?
Vidal: Newton’s Third Law. I hope that law is still working. American laws don’t work, but at least the laws of physics might work. And the Third Law is: There is no action without reaction. There should be a great deal of reaction to the total incompetence of this Administration. It’s going to take two or three generations to recover what we had as of twenty years ago.
David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio in Boulder, Colorado. His latest book is “Original Zinn: Conversations on History and Politics.”
– See more at: Alternative Radio
It’s important I riff with Vidal, counterpointing the absurdity of the people I have associated with in my own short 57 years. Hilarity, the obtuseness of my realm – journalists. Pathetic, the very nature of other brethren, academics, their turn-coat and snitchy lives. Writers, as in novelists, well, some of the most disconnected publicly and self-important, egotistically damaged.
But what is this folly now about the New York Times breaking the Hoover and Nazi connection? Really? No history, this shifting baseline group of Americans. Operation Paperclip?
You have authors on Democracy Now and other places with these great new/old Jewish-backed publishing houses coming out with Nazi’s in the FBI and CIA. Does this nonsense agnotology ever get burned out? This New York writer, come on, this is not news. Talk to anyone tied to Hanford or Los Alamos. Who got the Atom Bomb going? Nah! But, then, Amy Goodman is becoming Jewish intellectual central these days: “Investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau’s new book unveils the secret history of how the United States became a safe haven for thousands of Nazi war criminals. Many of them were brought here after World War II by the CIA and got support from then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Lichtblau first broke the story in 2010, based on newly declassified documents. Now, after interviews with dozens of agents for the first time, he has published his new book, “The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men.”
Below, from one of dozens of websites on the internet, predating Lichtblau’s book!
Operation Paperclip was the code name under which the US intelligence and military services extricated scientists from Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip.
Of particular interest were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler’s Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats also disqualified them from officially obtaining visas. An aim of the operation was capturing equipment before the Soviets came in. The US Army destroyed some of the German equipment to prevent it from being captured by the advancing Soviet Army.
The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, Fort Bliss, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program.
Much of the information surrounding Operation Paperclip is still classified.
Separate from Paperclip was an even-more-secret effort to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel (Operation Alsos). Another American project (TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography.
The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946.
In November 1942 Adolf Hitler approved the production of the A-4 as a “vengeance weapon” and the group developed the A-4 to rain explosives on London. Twenty-two months after Hitler ordered it into production, the first combat A-4 — now renamed the V-2 (“Vergeltungswaffe 2″, “Retaliation/Vengeance Weapon 2″) — was launched toward England, on September 7, 1944.
SS General Hans Kammler, who as an engineer had constructed several concentration camps including Auschwitz, had a reputation for brutality and had originated the idea of using concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers in the rocket program. Arthur Rudolph, chief engineer of the V-2 rocket factory at Peenemünde, endorsed this idea in April 1943 when a labor shortage developed. More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon.[2] Von Braun admitted visiting the plant at Mittelwerk on many occasions, and called conditions at the plant “repulsive”, but claimed never to have witnessed first-hand any deaths or beatings, although it became clear to him that deaths had occurred by 1944 [2]. He denied ever visiting the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp itself.
Adam Cabala reported: “[...] the German scientists led by Prof. Wernher von Braun also saw everything that went on every day. When they walked along the corridors, they saw the prisoners’ drudgery, their exhausting work and their ordeal. During his frequent attendance in Dora, Prof. Wernher von Braun never once protested against this cruelty and brutality.” and “On a little area beside the clinic shack you could see piles of prisoners every day who had not survived the workload and had been tortured to death by the vindictive guards. [...] But Prof. Wernher von Braun just walked past them, so close that he almost touched the bodies.”
It’s instructive to maybe follow a Gore Vidal from his family roots to his death, and, well, his legacy is fleeting, as is America’s tradition. The documentary, The United States of Amnesia is a better pick than The Walking Dead or one of those methed-out cooking shows.
Guernica: What do you think of religion today in America?
Gore Vidal: It’s the work of the devil. Maybe there is no good God. But there is definitely a devil, and his predominant passion is the religion of those Protestant fundamentalists. I believe my country is beginning to resemble a theocracy. Using television, the evangelists raise appalling amounts of money which they then invest in the election of mentally disabled obscurantists.
The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age.
Since there is no system of public education, the great majority of my fellow citizens is frighteningly ignorant. They have no idea where Iraq is. They accept as the gospel whatever the government tells them. Good grief, any other normal country would have been against the Iraq war! But we live in an abnormal country, governed by experts in deceptive advertising.
Guernica: And the Democratic Party?
Gore Vidal: Ah, if you can find it, I’ll look at it. But it doesn’t exist.
Guernica: The country has never been so divided.
Gore Vidal: Yes, between imperialists and anti-imperialists. That is the situation. The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age. They say, “We were elected by the gods to govern the planet.” But the truth is that what counts is getting hold of the last oil reserves. Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the country is going to absolute ruin.
Guernica: Do you believe that freedom of expression is in danger in the United States?
Gore Vidal: Of course it is. The country belongs to a handful of men who also control the media. Look at General Electric. It produces nuclear weapons for the Pentagon and also owns the NBC News cable channel, which is a very sophisticated censure apparatus, intrinsic to the system. It’s genius. It’s like an electronic cage around the nation which blocks information from getting through.
Guernica: You have said now and then that American democracy is dying.
Gore Vidal: Democracy is something America has never really practiced. Because the Founding Fathers hated two things: monarchy and democracy. They wanted a republic, a replica of the Roman or Venetian republics. They didn’t even like the etymology of the word “democracy.”
Guernica: And literature in the midst of all this?
Gore Vidal: No one reads novels anymore. And I don’t see the situation improving. People prefer video games, reality TV, and films. There are so many reasons now not to read novels…
Guernica: Then what are your reasons for writing them?
Gore Vidal: The fact that the novels I write weren’t written beforehand, I guess.
Guernica: That’s it?
Gore Vidal: And because I am a born novelist, which does not happen all that often. There are people who try to write for a certain time, then they become Ministers of Culture under de Gaulle, and they begin living their own fictions… Between Malraux, Balzac, and Montaigne, I choose Montaigne. Montaigne will survive all the others, because the essay, meaning direct communication between the writer and his reader, will outlast the novel, by at least a thousand years.
Guernica: Is that why you’ve been writing mostly pamphlets and essays?
Gore Vidal: Yes, and also because it’s the most direct way of attacking the politics of my country. Frankly, I would prefer doing it on television, which is even more frontal.
Guernica: But you are also interested in the historical novel.
Gore Vidal: I am. Because the writing of history is our only heuristic principle. The Germans have a word for it, einfühlen. It is the ability to experience the past in the present and to recreate it. In my books, I have tried to recreate it in the most natural way possible: History must be integrated into the story without the weight of premonition.
– See more at: Guernica
Guernica: What memories do you have of your happiest years in Italy?
Gore Vidal: They’re rather dark these days. The death of Howard, my companion, was slow and terrible, and it darkened everything around me.
Guernica: Is it possible to sum up a life?
Gore Vidal: It’s an exercise in memory. And the exercise is made more difficult because memory is defective, it is never quite precise enough. It doesn’t speak, but it is there. You can pick up its trail, conjure it, but never really speak to it. We listen to it, and suddenly we’re able to write it down, subject to its intensities, suffering, fractures.
Guernica: And the future?
Gore Vidal: You are with one of the last American intellectuals, and he has chosen to finish his days hidden in the Hollywood Hills.
Try to be a fucking Vidal in the community college, on radio, alternative radio, in universities. Try it. I am not saying I am one fingernail’s worth of Vidal in his Gore, but I have been a real force to administrators and the powers that be and my own ranks, and hands down, when you are working class, precarious worker, contingent, marginal, well, it feels like a big giant battle equal to any of the historical ones, like Gore’s in his own country among his own rich clan. This country is muffled, seeped in buying, selling, style, pop, what to do with the Joneses and what to think and how to act under retail crisis. Each activity in America is marginalized and infantilized by magical thinking and allowing these white Cyrpto-corporate fascists run the show. White male/female, no sexism here.
And we ga-ga over the Billionaires story.
From the Jerusalem Post: Racist, why Jews look at Goy or Goyim as cattle, to be used by Jews —
When it comes to making something out of nothing, Israel ranks second in the world. A new study by the London- based Center for Policy Studies found that next to Hong Kong, Israel has more self-made billionaires than any other country.
The report looked at 1,000 self-made billionaires, termed “SuperEntrepreneurs,” from 15 years’ worth of Forbes annual lists and calculated how many each country around the world produced in proportion to their total population.
Those who inherited their fortunes were excluded.
Hong Kong led the list with 2.831 SuperEntrepreneurs per million inhabitants, followed by Israel with 1.788, the United States with 1.388, Switzerland with 1.229 and Singapore with 1.053.
Funnily, the study found strong correlations between SuperEntrepreneurship and several factors for which Israel is not known: “There is a strong correlation between high rates of SuperEntrepreneurship in a country and low tax rates. Equally, a low regulatory burden and high rates of philanthropy both correlate strongly with high rates of SuperEntrepreneurship.”
The World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index, which ranks things like regulation and tax burden, put Israel at 35th in the world in 2014.
Similarly, Israel ranked 54th on the 2010 World Giving Index, which measures how charitable people in different countries are.
Israel’s self-starting nature is only part of the picture. Countries such as Greece, Turkey, Spain, Portugal and Italy had many self-employed people, but few self-made billionaires. The reason, according to the study, is that self-employed people also have to be innovative, developing new products and approaches to business.
Yet Israel excels in other fields associated with the trait.
SuperEntrepreneurs tend to be well-educated, the study found. In the US, for example, SuperEntrepreneurs were five times more likely to hold a PhD as a member of the general population.
Israel also has free markets and strong property rights based on the English legal system, which was more strongly correlated with SuperEntrepreneurs.
Critics of the study could note that with such a small number of SuperEntrepreneurs, the numbers could swing wildly with the addition or subtraction of just one individual. While the US boasted 411 self-made billionaires, Israel had just 13, and New Zealand, ranked 12th, had just two.
To counter this problem, the study also looked at trends by region.
“The US is roughly four times as entrepreneurial as Western Europe and three times as entrepreneurial as Japan, measured either in terms of SuperEntrepreneurs, large-firm founders or venture-capital investment as percentage of GDP,” it found.
Overall, the report recommended that governments lower taxes, especially capital-gains taxes, and reduce burdensome regulation to unleash innovative entrepreneurs.
Now, on how Jews in Russia and at Putin’s side or beckon call, from Israel, too, help rule that roost:
When the air conditioning broke down at the reception for the unveiling ceremony of the Red Army monument in Netanya on Monday, it didn’t matter if you were a billionaire, multimillionaire or broke.
Everyone suffered the same.
In one corner sat Mikhail Fridman, the seventh-richest man in Russia, whose fortune is estimated at $15 billion by Forbes. He stayed hydrated in the sweltering heat by sipping a glass of water.
In another stood Moshe Kantor, the chemicals tycoon who Forbes said was worth $2.3b. He repeatedly removed the beads of sweat from his head with a napkin.
The two men were part of a group of two dozen or so affluent Russian-speaking businessmen who came to the ceremony where President Vladimir Putin was the guest of honor. Some, like Fridman, flew in especially from Russia. Others, like Kantor, drove from nearby Herzliya, where many businessman from the former Soviet Union including Leonid Nevzlin and Gabriel Mirilashvili, to name a few, have made their homes.
For many members of this class of ultra rich Putin’s arrival in the country was an opportunity for them to brush shoulders with one another and to mingle with friends and officials from the motherland. The richest man in the room filled with rich men was probably the media-shy Fridman, who declined to speak to The Jerusalem Post.
“I am a private person,” he said, displaying seemingly good English.
Other faces were more familiar to locals. Lev Leviev, the diamonds and real estate mogul who is a bit of anomaly in this world, was on hand. Although born in Uzbekistan, then part of the Soviet Union, he immigrated to Israel as a teenager in the 1970s and made his money in the Jewish state. Only after the markets in the former Soviet Union opened did the Israeli, whose worth was estimated at about $1.7b. earlier this year, invest extensively in natural resources and property in that part of the world.
Not everybody in the room was a billionaire. Some were worth a mere couple of hundred of million dollars.
Alexander Levin, a Ukrainian businessman who was among those who donated to build the monument, is one of latter.
The real estate developer, who last year set up the World Forum for Russian Jewry, an advocacy group based in New York, explained why he it was an important cause.
“My two grandparents were killed during World War II so it’s very important to us,” he said. “We are paying just a little [in comparison to what they paid].”
How much is a little? Levin said the exact sum “was not important” but that it was “a lot of money.”
Members of United Israel Appeal-Keren Hayesod, which raised the money to build the marble and concrete monument overlooking the azure Mediterranean Sea, were also tight-lipped.
“We organized a group of 10 to 15 top businessmen who raised the money that helped transform this dream to reality,” said Gadi Dror, the UIA’s director of the eastern region. “We do not go [into the] figures because they [the donors] prefer not to but it is meaningful amount.”
A source later said each businessman had donated at least $100,000.
Watching the group of mega-wealthy interact, one cannot help but wonder how so many affluent businessmen in the former Soviet Union are Jewish.
German Zakharyaev, vice president of the Russian Jewish Congress, cited two main reasons for that. First, Jews are few among many.
“We are a minority and as such we have to be strong [if we are] to preserve our customs,” said the businessman who, as a member of the Mountain Jewish community of the eastern Caucuses, is a minority within a minority.
“This is something in our commandments that we have to keep our Jewishness and be united in the Diaspora.”
Second, he said, Jewish businessmen are hard workers.
“We think a lot and we sleep a little,” he said.
I have this disagreement ALL the time, since I am in the job market, constantly, 57, almost 58, and, well, communications, environmental, education arenas, in Portland, where many fine Jewish business types have cornered a lot of markets, and thus, my hundreds of applications get bounced around ageist pools, where the people judging me and my skills and worth sets are not looking for a radical in any camp, even within the camps of social justice and environmental justice and grassroots organizing. So when I try to break into these corridors of power, I am up against this rampant tribalism, best explicated by DV contributor from time to time,
Gilad Atzmon:
DEBATE – Anti-Semitism: myth or reality
A Talk Given By Gilad Atzmon @ The Albion Beatnik Book Shop, Oxford, UK
April 15, 2014
Good evening book lovers and wisdom seekers.
As some of you have realized the title of this debate morphed slightly since I initiated it. The discussion was first titled ‘Antisemitism, A Myth or A Threat.’ We are now supposed to engage in a dialogue on ‘Racism, a Myth or a Threat.’
Ladies and gentleman, this shift in the title is, actually, more significant than it first appears. It is actually a manifestation of our confusion and fear of looking at Jewish identity, politics, culture and ideology.
There is no doubt among scholars that Jews, as a group, derive from multiple ethnic origins and are far from a homogeneous race. There is no racial continuum between a Polish Jew and a Yemenite one. But it is also obvious that Jewish political culture, whether Zionist or ‘anti’ is ethnocentric and, to a large extent, racially driven. Just like Israel, the Jews-only State, Israel’s Jewish opponents too often prefer to operate within Jews-only organisations such as ‘Jewish Voices For Peace,’ ‘ Jews for Justice,‘ etc’. In short, whether they are Zionist or ‘anti,’ Jews somehow prefer to operate in ethnically segregated racially oriented political cells.
The conclusion is obvious -though Jews are not a race, Jewish identity politics is racist to the core.
We can now rephrase the title of the debate slightly and ask whether Jewish racism is a myth or a threat. Let me tell you straight away, this won’t lead into an interesting discussion. Jewish racism is evident and it is certainly a threat.
Five million ethnically cleansed Palestinians can confirm that this is the case. Their brothers and sisters that stayed behind, against all odds, can tell you about Israeli ethnocentrism and racially discriminatory laws. Even here, in the UK, my Palestinian friend, the poet, Naiad Izzat, was expelled from a Palestinian solidarity group by so- called good Jewish socialists just for saying what she thinks about Jewish culture and politics. So here is another embarrassing conclusion. Jewish racism is easily visible as a threat but for some reason we cannot address it in the open.
I guess that by now we are ready to tackle the initial topic of this debate. Antisemitism, is it a myth or a threat?
Let us first make sure that we understand the terminology involved.
At a certain stage, largely at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, some elements within European intelligentsia were fascinated by Darwinism and its political applications. It was then that opposition to Jewry adopted a racist rationale. Some political thinkers and movements were clearly opposed to Jews just for being Jews. Such opposition could be recognized as an essentialist tendency that is racially driven and is often tagged as Antisemitism. However, I believe that this rationale had been defeated by the end of WWII.
As a leading commentator on Jewish identity, I am closely familiar with pretty much every critical text related to Jewish politics. I can confirm that I have never come across contemporary opposition to Jewry that is blood or biologically related. I can’t point to any body of work or political call to oppose Jews for being Jews. But I have seen many texts that criticize Jewish racism, culture and politics.
You will have to ask yourself, maybe for the first time, is cultural criticism wrong? Is political criticism a crime? Should a certain kind of politics be free from criticism? Elaborating on these questions may lead us to a better understanding of the notion of Jewish power. Jewish power isn’t solely the manifestation of the dominance of certain Jews within our political, cultural and financial landscape. Jewish power is primarily the capacity to stop us from discussing the true meaning of such Jewish dominance.
We tend to believe that politics of any kind must be subject to thorough criticism. We don’t stop ourselves from criticizing the BNP or David Cameron. We do not seem to hesitate before we criticize the Muslim Brotherhood, but try to comment on Ed or David Miliband’s support of Israel and the Zionist project. Alternatively make an attempt to question what is the meaning of the Jewishness of the Jewish State. You will quickly face a wall of resistance, and may end up subject to a smear campaign by the so-called progressive Jews. The truth is that Jewish power, i.e. the aggressive attempt to conceal the real meaning of Jewishness, is actually maintained by the Jewish Left.
The Kosher Trinity and the Jewish Quantum Mechanics
We will now try to grasp the mechanism by which this suppression of political criticism has taken place.
Due to emancipation, secularization and the rise of nationalism, European Jewry went through a radical transformation during the 19th century. By 1897, we saw the formation of two Jewish nationalist movements. One was Zionism – a promise to ‘civilize’ the diaspora Jew by means of resettlement in Zion (Palestine). The other was the Bund – a ‘socialist Jews only movement’ that demanded the rights of a nation for the Yiddish people in Eastern Europe.
Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that these two movements contributed towards the invention of the ‘Jewish Nation.’ It was the invention of the Jewish nation that brought about a new kosher trinity – as opposed to theocentric rabbinical Judaism,- modern Jewish secular identity is related to Race (a biological bond), Nationalism (a common narrative) and Religion (a fantasy of common beginnings and heritage referred to as Yiddishkeit ).
The kosher Trinity is coherent and consistent, yet a sinister amalgam. Let’s, for instance, examine the Zionist call: as a race ‘the Jews are victims,’ as a Nation ‘they deserve a place under the sun’ and for their religion ‘this place must be Zion.’
Although many Jews operate politically, and in most cases aggressively as Jews, they somehow defy any criticism of themselves in the name of racism and religious intolerance.
When you criticize Israeli policy, the Zionist Jew will denounce you as a racist. When you disapprove of the racist and supremacist tendency entangled with Judaism and the Talmud, the progressive Jew will accuse you of religious intolerance. But when you expect the cosmopolitan Jew to uphold his alleged universal commitment to humanity and to remove himself from his Jews- only progressive cell and join humanity for real, you are immediately blamed for being intolerant culturally, religiously and even a racist.
What we see here in practice is a new form of Jewish Quantum mechanics. The political Jew is everywhere and nowhere at once. The political Jew is a dynamic and coherent and yet, somehow blurred. You can never comprehend what it is or where to find it exactly, but you can be sure that it is somewhere within an imaginary tri-polar magnetic field that is formed by Jewish racism, aggressive nationalism and vague and versatile Jewish religious adherence. The Jewish political subject is bouncing endlessly between these three magnetic forces. It is never standing still, it is never found on once place -it moves, morphs and adapts
May I admit that so-called anti Semites may skip the above physical metaphors and instead refers to the Jew as a chameleon. Interestingly enough, Woody Allen’s Zelig may as well be a cinematic attempt to deal with this Jewish morphemic condition.
Now, let’s face it. At least theoretically speaking there is nothing wrong with being racially oriented, we do not campaign against Blacks who celebrate their blackness. Nationalism can be an uplifting feeling and religious rituals can purify the spirit. But, unfortunately, none of these positive potential characteristics can be ascribed to Jewish ID politics. Tragically, modern Jewish politics is always celebrated at the expense of someone else. The Zionists plundered Palestine, the Neocon suffocates Arab land with uranium depleted shells in the name of morals, the good cosmopolitan Jew rushed to Spain to kill Catholics and burn their churches in the name of the ‘proletariat’. As I speak to you tonight the Jewish lobby here in Britain, America and France is pushing for war against Syria and Iran.
I came here today to address the question of whether Antisemitism is a myth or a thereat. My answer is simple. The opposition to Jewish power is neither a myth nor it is a threat. It is actually a primary humanist and a moral duty.
The Jewish State and its dedicated lobbies are threats to world peace. To oppose Jewish power and to understand its operational mode is an ethical imperative. And it can also save the Jews.
Jews are pretty gifted in bringing disasters upon themselves. Jewish history is a spectacular chain of horrid holocausts. And if there is something Jews fail to do, it is to look in the mirror and admit some faults. Instead of taking responsibility for their past and future, Jewish culture and politics can be understood as a successful attempt to blame others. It is somehow always the ‘anti Semitic Goy’ who is at fault.
Peculiarly enough early Zionism was a rare Jewish attempt to look in the mirror. A few Jewish intellectuals such as Herzl, Nordau and Jabotinsky looked in the mirror and were devastated enough to admit that something was indeed problematic in the Jewish social condition. They diagnosed a Jewish cultural malaise but their remedy proved to be a complete failure.
Whether Jews can look in the mirror and self-reflect is an open question. However, criticism of Jewish power and culture is an ethical must, it is a necessity. We owe it to ourselves, to our kids and to future generations. I guess that it would be also right to suggest that those who are tagged as anti-Semitic nowadays, are simply brutally honest people, often enough, of Jewish origin.
Talk about cognitive dissidence/dissonance!
NASA: “The ongoing California drought is evident in these maps of dry season (Sept–Nov) total water storage anomalies (in millimeter equivalent water height; anomalies with respect to 2005–2010). California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins have lost roughly 15 km3 of total water per year since 2011 — more water than all 38 million Californians use for domestic and municipal supplies annually — over half of which is due to groundwater pumping in the Central Valley.”
We are one shit-holed Capitalist society, for sure! “Warming-Fueled Drought Helped Spark Syria’s Civil War.”
Dr. James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains the risk:
Further declines in groundwater availability may well trigger more civil uprising and international violent conflict in the already water-stressed regions of the world, and new conflict in others. From North Africa to the Middle East to South Asia, regions where it is already common to drill over 2 km [kilometers] to reach groundwater, it is highly likely that disappearing groundwater could act as a flashpoint for conflict.
Outside of this country, NASA has observed aquifer declines in “the North China Plain, Australia’s Canning Basin, the Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, the Guarani Aquifer in South America … and the aquifers beneath northwestern India and the Middle East.”