Baba Baruch Business
On the subject of Move over Baba Bernie Madoff, here glides the carpet surfer Elazar Abuhatzeira. There is new book by Professor Yoram Bilu that looks at the phenomena in Israel: The Saint’s Impresarios: Dreamers, Healers, and Holy Men in Israel’s Urban Periphery (Israel: Society, Culture, and History).
Naturally this is not just about Moroccans and it would be a mistake to cast this business as uniquely Israeli. Definitely one of the two oldest professions… There is a review of the book in Haaretz – A “Baba” is born. Now we know why Baba Baruch’s Beer Shevah brother, Baba Elazar Abuhatzeira needed to steal so much money from the working and hardly working Jews. The dude got an underground tunnel from his house, “not to see women” of course:
“The Baba Baruch invented the new version of the tzaddik. Bilu writes in his book that already in the 1980s and 1990s, Baruch Abuhatzeira raised his father, Rabbi Israel Abuhatzeira, known as the Baba Sali, to the level of a national holy man. Masses of people began to visit his poor home in Netivot and to fill up bottles of water, which they believed became curative and brought luck, after being blessed by the tzaddik. After the death of the Baba Sali, his son built him a gravesite with a characteristic white dome in Netivot, surrounded by a national park that has become the most important site for hilulot in Israel.
At the same time, Baba Baruch built himself a sort of palace, as well as a neighborhood called Kiryat Baba Sali. He wore traditional robes, a la Baba Sali, and began to implement a program to turn himself into a kabbalist: in other words, abstaining from women and engaging in kabbala. Despite his shady past, which included affairs with women, he succeeded in acquiring status and prestige.
Many grandsons of the Baba Sali have started flourishing hatzerot (literally, courtyards) for themselves: Rabbi Elazar Abuhatzeira built a luxurious one in Be’er Sheva, which includes a tunnel that connects his home to the synagogue, so that he won’t have to see women on the way to prayers; in the north, David Abuhatzeira, the rabbi of Nahariya, conducts a court that is similar in terms of prestige and status. Because they had the sense to go far away, rather than competing with them, the Baba Baruch has been conducting battles of prestige for years with “the X-Ray,” a stranger who settled in Netivot and eroded his power. The latter seems to have gained the upper hand. Just recently, the foundation for commemorating the Baba Sali filed a petition – one of many – against the Sdot Hanegev Regional Council, claiming that, contrary to the regulations, it allocated 34 dunams (about 8 acres) for building a yeshiva.”
Interesting so it was Baba Baruch who marketed his father. Is that “X-ray-ted” dude in Netivot a Rabbi or a Rapper?
I would be remiss not to mention that Baruch’s brother Meir who was the father of Elazar and Baba Sali himself are not responsible for the shenanigans. In fact a reader of this blog writes:
“…both Meir and his father were truly saintly men who lived lives of absolute simplicity, humility and service. I’m saying this in absolute sincerity. They both lived on the verge of poverty their entire lives with no political aspirations or involvement whatsoever. They were both a source of great pride, joy and leadership to the community of Moroccan jews during the extremely(!) difficult period of the transition from Morocco to israel, and just on that account I am very proud of them. The current generation has definitely made a mess out of things, and I have nothing to say in their defense.”
Is the Google page rank algorithm redirecting our culture? At the end of last year Fred Wilson wrote a post – People First, Machines Second. Fred was saying that the page algorithm elevates linking and anchoring of information, a human action. But there is a peculiar omission from the logic, machines or uncaring humans can link and anchor many times faster, and they do to the tune of billions of pages and millions of dollars. More importantly they poison the well of knowledge by cluttering the “super highway” with the clunkers or should we call them drones. For sure Google is aware that this has the enormous impact on the search results quality. But there is the deep apprehension that Google in fact prefers quantity over quality. Google is an advertising supported business, they need the inventory to distribute the ads, they would rather monetize point of purchase not the point of information (see Chris Dixon on the massive misallocation of online advertising dollars) and they don’t particularly mind the drones because that can multiply page views by the millions (see Aaron Wall – Spam vs. Mahalo).
Now Matt Cuts started to direct humans to the Google Spam report page, “help us maintain the quality of Google search results”. If this is not an admission that a Google bot sees no difference between a splog and a blog than what is? We know that Gmail spam filer works pretty well but then it relies on the reporting benefit of the huge installed base of the darn humans. And it doesn’t look like the usability of the search results will improve anytime soon, not after the massive amount of the social media clutter is now integrated into the pages. Tweets might be a human signal but if the disjointed bits of information, mostly click-through links to the 3rd party sites is not a spam than what is? Inevitably signal to noise ratio in relationship to a particular search is dismal. In short the search no longer gives you the aha “buzz”…
This commentary would remain academic if not for the fact that the “setup” is detrimental to writers and content originators. The machines don’t emote to art, poetry, heck they don’t even properly recognize the significant technical or scientific writing. The bots are not very good at detecting copyright. The robots are way too busy selling the washer dryers and the quantifiable viral amusement. If you think this has nothing to do with the punishing grip of this great recession than you really might be a machine.
On the subject of Musicblogocide or Beware of Putting all your Eggs in Google Basket. The Swedish founder of the notorious copyright breaker The Pirate Bay Peter Sunde is launching a new micropayments system Flattr. The idea is rather elegant. You pay to Flattr a predetermined fee, say $10 per month or whatever you decide, this fee is divided each time you click a Flattr button on the participating content providers sites. In my opinion this solves only part of the problem. The only way to fix the morass of the current poisonous Internet culture is to have a mandatory micropayments on all creative content embeds. The payment has to be essential not a a volunteer, complimentary charity. A micropayment has to follow usage, i.e. quoting, embeds, sharing instead of being a charity on a pay-wall-less site. But here is the explanation video from Peter Sunde: ►►►read more
Two events last week should put all users of Google services on notice. First was the so called “Musicblogocide” as described in the Guardian – Google shuts down music blogs without warning, as years of archives are wiped off the internet. We have seen before similar actions from Google and this one seem to fit the pattern. Google denies service in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, there is usually no warning and most importantly there is virtually no recourse, no innocent until proven guilty, no reasonable possibility to appeal or appease the lawyered up machine.
Similarly on the same week Google announced that they are discontinuing FTP service to the Blogger blogs, a serious disruption to thousands of users. Google’s excuse is that they are spending too much on the resources for the FTP based blogs is laughable. But back to the Musicblogocide.
There is a vast problem on the Internet with the copyright, especially as it relates to music but not only music. Google itself contributes to the ambiguity on this issue if not pushes people away from the admittedly digitally outdated copyright interpretations. The Google Internet as it exist today leads people in a certain direction. Specifically the Internet is viewed as an advertising page inventory with the following dire consequences:
- Quantity trumps quality, keywords trump coherent sentences. This leads to millions of Splogs and the entire Affiliate Marketing industry.
- Original authorship is diluted, share alike and mashups culture is encouraged. This leads to the proliferation of the aggregators (borderline Splogs really).
- The common “share alike” practices encourage republishing or even outright stealing of content (the borders are blurred again).
- There is still no micro payment system to deliver any value to the content originators, the so called “creative class”. You don’t have to look far to see the result of this, even in the current great recession.
Google is in the unique position to change this poisonous climate. But there is an impression that all they care about in the end is the display ads inventory. Today Google presides over the Internet that is anti authorship and anti intellectual property. But instead of tackling the root causes of this decrepit culture Google prefers to pick on the bloggers who only blindly follow where the system created and blessed by Google leads them. One way to solve this is to create a micro payment app to drive the value to the writers and the artists. You want to embed anything, pay the micro price. Shift the value proposition on the Internet from the DJs to the creators and composers. And don’t blame the DJs for the direction you Google yourself googled for them.
Great news, hopefully all medai sources follow this example. I have no doubt it will be more profitable than the print news ever was.The Times to Charge for Frequent Access to Its Web Site:
“The New York Times announced Wednesday that it intended to charge frequent readers for access to its Web site, a step being debated across the industry that nearly every major newspaper has so far feared to take.
Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site.”
“Early 2001″, why not now?
Drew Brees, a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints. weights against the NFL in the case in front of the Supreme Court – Washington Post:
“The case involves a multimillion-dollar deal struck in 2000 between the National Football League and Reebok that grants Reebok the exclusive rights to make hats, sweatshirts and other gear with NFL team logos. What does that deal have to do with the ability of my teammates and me to perform our jobs and entertain football fans around the country? Potentially, quite a bit: The gains we fought for and won as players over the years could be lost, while the competition that runs through all aspects of the sport could be undermined.”
As it stands today and because of the “free agency” agreement with the player union, NFL is a strange hybrid. On one hand there is a total monopoly in regards to merchandising, TV, video rights, etc. On the other hand every player (and a team) is a unique separate enterprise and even employer agreements with each of the NFL players are tailor-made. While in majority of business a worker enters a standard agreement for a company. If NFL is to act as a state it should take a cut (tax) from any mechanize sold but not to restrict and dictate who will have a monopoly on hats. This also means that a game could be shown on any channel, as long as a tax or fee is payed to the NFL, instead of restricting a game or even a Superbowl to a single network. Drew explains:
“Amazingly, after the NFL won the case, it asked the Supreme Court to dramatically expand the ruling and determine that the teams act as a single entity not only for marketing hats and gear, but for pretty much everything the league does. It was an odd request — as if I asked an official to review an 80-yard pass of mine that had already been ruled a touchdown. The notion that the teams function as a single entity is absurd; the 32 organizations composing the NFL and the business people who run them compete with unrelenting intensity for players, coaches and, most of all, the loyalty of fans.”
Incidentally there was a competing football league XFL that played only one season and failed. Go Saints!
Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Google – The meaning of open. Worth reading closely.
This seems like an oxymoron, yet Noam Scheiber asks in the New Republic - Why Do German and Japanese Manufacturers Innovate More?
“The logic of this comes from the Harvard Business Review piece by Robert Hayes and William Abernathy that I cite. Hayes and Abernathy basically make two points. First, because the Europeans and Japanese rely so heavily on overseas markets, where the prices of their products can fluctuate owing to factors beyond their control, like exchange rates and tariffs, their manufacturers are forced to focus on quality and technological superiority. Technological advantages remain even when an exchange rate cuts against you. By contrast, American companies have always had a huge domestic market, so they could afford to mostly compete in terms of price. (They certainly don’t have to, but they can get away with it, whereas the Japanese can’t and the Europeans couldn’t for decades.) As a result, managers at American industrial companies have tended to think a bit more in terms of short-term costs–ways to undercut the other guy rather than outperform him.
Second, because labor markets tend to be less flexible and hourly labor costs tend to be higher in Europe and Japan (consider Germany’s famously powerful industrial unions), manufacturers there couldn’t traditionally cut costs very easily even if they wanted to. Whereas American manufacturers could often lower costs simply by lowering wages or axing employees, the Germans and Japanese had to either make their workers productive or have them produce more valuable products. It’s not that American manufacturers never did the latter, of course. But some of our foreign competitors simply had no choice, and they were very good at making virtue of necessity.”
I am not familiar with the automobile industry but I can speak about the construction industry. America is much more sensitive to risk and litigation. Today most innovative construction materials come from Europe. There is less litigation and regulation in Europe. For example there is a short cycle for the approvals of the experimental drugs. In order to innovate you need to have a high tolerance for the mistakes and failures. Risk aversion is the avoidance of experimentation and innovation. Especially if you don’t have a job security, like they do in Europe. If you feel secure about your job you are can be inclined to innovate and to experiment. The picture is actually reversed in the High Tech field, compared to the manufacturing. I think this is due to the fact that the startup category is a “financial allocation” in America, etc.
How about the insistence that Leib Tropper and the multiple recent scandals are the perversions of the Jewish religious legacy? Someone said: “I want my Judaism back”. And what Judaism would that be, as it exists in the imagination and books or as it lived in real life? This is like saying that the glossy presentations to the BTs and the goyim at the fancy retreats (from reality) is the truth but the way Tropper conducted himself with the whores, the oligarchs and the gdolim is a lie. This is like saying that communism that was practiced in the good old CCCP was the perversion, but the communism that exists in Rabeynu Carl Marx’s books is the reality.
Leib Tropper articulates the Judaic culture rather perfectly; he takes it to the ultimate conclusion. Chassidim are not the ceramic dancing tchotchkes, nor are they Buber bobe mayses, the Chasidic conquest was fueled by the collusion between the Rebbes and the rising merchant class. The currency of money and communal stature are interchangeable and trade-able. And this in nutshell was Tropper’s game, the game as old as this world.
If you strip Tropper from the lurid predilections, the mechanics are no different from that of all the “outreach professionals”. What they all do is sell the Jewish nostalgia back to rich Jews who are one or two generations removed from the abominable reality of the Jewish communal life, long enough to forget the bad and but not too long to still remember some good. What the benefactors can’t readily understand is that people who fall in the sphere of influence of the “leaders” are treated like pawns or props, they are deprived of humanity or even abused. The victim and the pawn on the tapes can’t realize that she is dealing with the law abiding citizen, it’s in his interest to delay the actual conversion indefinitely, so she can continue to be used for the “treatments”, in full compliance with the holy Torah. Notice how the man says on the second tape: “I can love anybody”. This is the code word for the exactly the opposite and just few sentences later; he inevitably evokes the rape.
The comparison of Leib Tropper to Tiger Woods is plain wrong. Tiger in his texts is still looking for the elusive meaningful connection. He didn’t pimp his women and he actually made his money through the hard work and the incredible talent. But you can comrade Leib Tropper to Bernie Madoff (although Bernie was a legit star trader at some point). Bernie sold the perceptions and the myth, his Ponzi Scheme was basically the same as Tropper’s. Stir imagination, trap the investors, the false reports, buy influence and hope to have a genuine business one day. Leib Tropper is Bernie Madoff plus the pimping (see The Chasidic Court of Bernard Madoff).
The only surprising element of this astonishing scandal is that Shmarya Rosenberg managed an entire post without the quotation marks and the scraping. The anomaly probably due to the fact that the article was edited by the Jewish Week in a familiar formula – Shmarya supplies the dirt, the paper complements the dirt with the English.
Anyway, here ends my futile attempt to stay out of the ditch. A friend asked me how did Leib Tropper manage to sign up all the gdoilim? Well, he followed the well-known business plan. Find an oligarch investor, then approach that oligarch with a well rehearsed pitch: “You have your needs, and I have my needs”. Perhaps a blond needs to be made into an honest wife, or whatever. After the Angel round of financing, time to issue the preferred stock and assemble an impressive board of directors (enter gdolim). Now you are a Wal-Mart ready to crash mom and pop stores. The power is aligned along the vertical axis of evil and the peripheral bottom up voices are deliberately marginalized. In practical terms this means that you can’t be helped by a local clergy while on the precipitous verge of the most momentous decision in your life, instead you need to deal with the City Hall bureaucracy and be prepared to bribe the inevitable pimp in charge (can you imagine the bribes required for the carnally challenged?)
If you think this is an isolated phenomenon, think again. How did Berl Lazar manage to silence every fledgling pluralistic voice in the mother Russia? Indeed, you find an oligarch, etc. This unholy alliance between the snake oil salesmen and the oligarchy is a miniature model of every hareidy institution on the face of the earth. But then again, some pimps got bigger cojones.
A note about the Internet moment. The energy is out of the bottle and it can’t be contained, no matter how many pshkevilim they plaster on the old walls. In the past this scandal would have been shoved under the carpet because the MSM would not report on it and the Rabbis would cover up for it. And to be sure there have been technically worse scandals, after all we are just dealing with the consenting adults here. But the vividness of the audio, the unbelievable divergence between the public rhetoric and the private reality is so astonishing. The fact that the man was endorsed by the entire politburo. The fact that the man who built a staggering startup to monopolized the entrance tolls on the road to the hospitable Abraham’s tent is just an alleged pimp is unimaginable. And the unfortunate BTs initiated into the world of lies by a conman. This is so much worse thab Bernie Madoff, at least as Slavoj Zizik put it, “he took the system to its logical conclusion, followed where the system pushes you”. But in this scandal the con is so brazen. The remaining (not yet authenticated recordings) might also identify the Jonhs, are any of them from the politburo?
Leib Tropper and Attorney Nathan Lewin at the EJF conference in Boston (don’t copy the photo without permission)
Leib Tropper with unidentified man
I have been “sitting” on this link for a while. Perhaps now is the right time for an aspirational resolution and a small memorial to William Safire who founded a club that is really what true networking is all about. And it’s a pretty simple formula – you meet the same people regularly (decades) and you share meals and conversations. 