Showing posts with label Madoff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Madoff. Show all posts

Friday, March 6, 2009

How might Madoff behaved had he met Wiesel in the camps?

I read Elie Wiesel's Night in my late adolescence. In it Wiesel describes how he was repeatedly and brutally robbed by fellow inmates, including having his gold fillings ripped out of his mouth.

How must Madoff's relatives and "friends" feel knowing that what Madoff did was to make Wiesel a victim again of the same type of predatory criminality that Wiesel suffered 65 years ago in the camps?

I find it easy to imagine Madoff behaving like the camp inmates who in return for the chance at a few more moments of life or a temporary privilege, betrayed other inmates to the Nazis, groveled to the guards, shoved their fellow inmates into the gas chambers then afterwards removed their bodies, and preyed on their fellow inmates, including the children like Wiesel, who were weaker, more vulnerable, and less able to defend themselves.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Anti-Semitism and Madoff's Ponzi scheme?

A rise in anti-Semitic comments has been reported in the wake of Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Such commentators ignore that many of his victims are Jewish, including Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's foundation. Madoff is a criminal predator whose evil knew no bounds and who happened to be a Jewish-American.

Anti-Semitic attacks ignores the complete history of European Jews involvement in finances.

Christians are directly responsible for the the involvement of Jews in finance. First, medieval European Christians prohibited Jews from owning land and from many occupations. Then Christians adopted an extreme interpretation of the Bible that Christians could not charge each other interest. When they realized that economies cannot function without credit, they decided it would be alright if they borrowed money from Jews. As a direct result Jews became skilled at finances.

Michael Hirsch writes in his review of Niall Fergonson new book, The Ascent of Money:

“Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret,” Ferguson says. He goes into fascinating detail about how “it was Nathan Roth­schild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo” by selling bonds and stockpiling gold for the British Army. The richest bankers on the Continent in the 19th century, the Rothschilds became known as die Finanzbonaparten (the Bonapartes of finance). And, as Ferguson argues, they also played a crucial part in the South’s defeat in the Civil War by declining to invest in Confederate cotton-­collateralized bonds.
The defeat of both Napoleon and of the Confederacy were two extremely positive events that benefited the world and were directly related to the financial skills an English financier who also happened to be Jewish.