the curatorship of possibilities: a creed centered on the urban ethos
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The facts described in this article have been obvious to me for years (Jews and the Great Recession), yet it’s amazing that there are so many people blinded by their temporary circumstance that still don’t get it. “Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes” - Michael Lind in the Salon:The richest few don’t need the rest of us.
photo via flickr/robdobi
On the subject of the ordained Rabbah Sara Hurwitz challenging the rabbinic patriarchy, here are the five pressing problems facing the orthodoxy. If Sara Hurwitz can tackle any of these, for sure the Jewish people would be eternally grateful. Although my personal view is that we must respect the seniority and let all the homosexuals and bisexuals already in the prominent rabbinic positions proudly come out of the closet first, before we let women run the asylum. But anyhow, here are the five challenges:
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
Chris Dixon paraphrases a quote from Clay Shirky:
“Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is why it is often very hard for people to conceptualize how these user generated sites work – there is no “average user” to imagine yourself as.”
I find this fascinating, a very wealthy or a very smart person in a group makes everyone statistically below average, even though the average doesn’t really exists.
Base Line Scenario - Feudal Lords Of Finance:
“In some influential circles, these questions are now asked: What’s wrong with high levels of inequality in general, and with having very rich bankers in particular. After all, human societies have survived the presence of extremely wealthy individuals in the past – in fact, some now argue, the presence of such a “new aristocracy” can finance growth and spur innovation. This argument is deeply flawed along three dimensions.”
Please read the counter arguments from Simon Johnson there but certainly this is not only about the finance.
Sir George Clausen, Study of a group of field workers, ca. 1901
On the subject of my post Psoy Korolenko – Ekh Lyuli Lyuli. OK, I am done speaking about Slavoj Zizek without actually reading his work. Today’s article in the NYT is a good start – 20 Years of Collapse. I find his views refreshing, nothing to disagree about. In fact the views of democracy, as a self-fulfilling utopia, ring true to me:
“Where does this resurrection of anti-Communism draw its strength from? Why were the old ghosts resuscitated in nations where many young people don’t even remember the Communist times? The new anti-Communism provides a simple answer to the question: “If capitalism is really so much better than Socialism, why are our lives still miserable?”
It is because, many believe, we are not really in capitalism: we do not yet have true democracy but only its deceiving mask, the same dark forces still pull the threads of power, a narrow sect of former Communists disguised as new owners and managers — nothing’s really changed, so we need another purge, the revolution has to be repeated …
What these belated anti-Communists fail to realize is that the image they provide of their society comes uncannily close to the most abused traditional leftist image of capitalism: a society in which formal democracy merely conceals the reign of a wealthy minority. In other words, the newly born anti-Communists don’t get that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism.”
A monumental shift occurred in America over the past decades. The appeal of the American model was not because you could become rich here, people instinctively understand that’s a lottery. The American appeal was because a mechanic in Detroit can live a comfortable life where his hard work is rewarded. This all changed. The rich got themselves the access to the global workforce and the middle class got pretty much demolished. There are structural changes in this country and not a single person knows how it will all play out.
At the same time America went to war(s) to impose its way of life on the savage world. The ideological underpinning and motivations came courtesy of Natan Sharansky and the Jewish neocons. It was the messianic vision – the flame of democracy engulfing the world (iz iskry vozgoritse plamya). The vision of the messianic peace and prosperity. But the realities of Iraq and Afghanistan put an end to the rhetoric and as always in history the messianic good intentions inevitably lead to bloodshed and massive death. Appropriately a post religious Russian Jew Natan Sharansky found new metaphors to articulate the central reckless messianic ethos of our Russian Jewish heritage. So we now have two pillars of the democratic utopia collapsing in front of our very eyes. America is no longer the model with its ruinous middle class and the repelled and defeated democratic jihad in the Middle East.
The so-called Chinese and Russian democracies are monarchical lordships, with no middle class to begin with. It took decades for America to destroy its middle class and Russia and China pretty mush had a clean slate. And this is the reason for the perceived and actual economic efficiencies in Russia and especially in China. No middle class to get in a way, just super rich apparatchiks and people who are accustomed to punishing work and orders. No such luck in America, weighted down by the obsolete middle class. The whiny and spoiled populace with unmet expectations. In this context Slavoj Zizek’s is honest and timely:
“How did we come to this? Deceived by 20th-century Communism and disillusioned with 21st-century capitalism, we can only hope for new Kravchenkos — and that they come to happier ends. On the search for justice, they will have to start from scratch. They will have to invent their own ideologies. They will be denounced as dangerous utopians, but they alone will have awakened from the utopian dream that holds the rest of us under its sway.”
P.S. Performance of US stock market recently decoupled from the economic reality. The rate of the dollar is more important for a global corporation than the unemployed one-third of the American workforce. As long as the global markets are intact to manufacture and sell, who cares about the American middle class.
Image licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
First there was a dramatic but not unexpected announcement by Africa-Israel this morning that they lost NIS 1.52 billion in just the second quarter. More importantly Africa-Israel’s financial release is bracing the creditors for possible eventuality when Africa-Israel will not be able to meet its debt obligation. Globes – Asset sales may not be enough to pay debts. Africa-Israel points to five problems:
What is the remarkable is the fear in the Israeli banking system is the insolvency of the individual oligarchs not the corporate bankruptcies. Globes reports:
“The main fear in Israel since the start of the crisis has been the collapse of one of the country’s biggest tycoons such as Africa-Israel controlling shareholder Lev Leviev. Israel’s two largest banks Bank Hapoalim and Bank Leumi are expected to be the worst hurt by Leviev’s woes. The estimate is that Leviev owes Hapoalim more than NIS 1.5 billion through his privately held Memorand Ltd. and an additional NIS 500 million to Leumi through companies he controls.”
Much has been written about the unholy symbiosis between the Israeli oligarchy and the financial and political systems. But what emerges is that the banks financed the oligarchs at an astonishing rate, this in turn fueled oligarchic expansion into the Russia, Europe and USA and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Let me just paraphrase this, at the time when Israeli banks had an opportunity for extending capital to local innovation, they extended billions in concentrated and centralized capital to the oligarchs to finance the international speculations.
Paul Krugman charted the data of Professor Emmanuel Saez showing the income share of the top tenth of a percent of the USA population. You can see the rise towards 1929 and the crash of the depression and the war. The climb starts during Ronald Regan rein in 1979 and continues throughout Clinton years toward the dotcom peak in 1999 (AKA Y2K Greenspan bubble). Then there is the dotcom crash and the current bubble rise to 2007 when the tenth of a percent of the USA population took in 6% of the overall reported income.
1988 Polish Banknote.
The Baseline Scenario – Zombie Oligarchs:
“We’re looking at a near term dominated by the existing economic power structure. The remaining big banks (in the US) and big banks/corporates (elsewhere) are made invincible by campaign contributions, political connections, and everyone’s reasonable fear of a great depression. It will be hard for outsiders to challenge that structure effectively – either as new companies or with new ideas. But you won’t see a great deal of innovation, investment, and growth coming from these survivors.
How do we eventually escape the grip of zombie oligarchs? We’ll have a fair amount of time to think that through.”
