The Money in Politics Question

Give Me Your Shiksas wants more than your women

This week I posted a video which delved into a recent Jimmy Dore video on dark money and the Democratic Party, that video as a means to both criticize the “neoliberal” core of the party and to also criticize progressive politicians for their “gutless” reaction to the actions of that core. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the Dore political narrative, this is a basic theme which goes back to him championing Force the Vote in late 2020 if not longer - I’m not sure when he started pushing the “gutless Bernie” meme. That take should have taken root way back in 2016 when Bernie essentially did “a Gore” regarding the nomination, and supported and campaigned for Clinton while turning down the Jill Stein offer to head the Green Party ticket. But it seems like the same people who backed Bernie in 2016 were backing him in 2020, I guess still in the “fool me once” phase of that infatuation.

[Going into that election cycle I still considered myself a leftist, although already in transition into something different, something non-aligned, but in 2015 when I heard he was going to take a run at the nomination I took a closer look at him and decided that I could not ever support him, even running against the hideous Killary.]

One of the reactions to that video was a comment attack from someone calling himself Give Me Your Shiksas, and that and his avatar (a photo of an orthodox Jew) is probably a strong hint at what he is, although in our exchange that is never confirmed of denied. But his first and repeated attack on me is as a racist antisemite, which seems consistent with that assumption.

At the heart of that matter here is my position on the Dore video’s foundation, which is dark money, and which Dore defines as campaign contributions without a known ultimate source, allowed under current election disclosure law. Despite that inability to determine the actual source of this money, he eventually labels it as Republican and corporate money. One can only guess at the reasoning underlying those assumptions, but that’s not hard to do – the memes of Republican election dirty tricks go back to at least Nixon, and “corporatism” in general is a much grander theme on the American left.

My position in my video is that the best guess at the source of this money coming into the party is the same source as the money we already know about, including money with a known source enabled by court decisions over the last 10-15 years, the most notorious being Citizens United. And, again, the citations on that are this article from 2016 in the Jerusalem Post which reports on a study that concludes half of the money donated to the Democratic Party comes from America’s Jews: US Jews contribute half of all donations to the Democratic party - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com) SuperPAC donations, also largely enabled by these court rulings, get closer to the issue, and again here is my citation on the nature of those, a Forbes article from 2016 on Clinton’s largest donors: The Top 20 Donors To Hillary Clinton's Super PAC (forbes.com) At least 13 of her top 20 donors were Jews, including the top five, and you can find other articles confirming that. Btw, Biden apparently had more diversity – only 4 of his top 5 donors were Jews from what I saw reported at the time.

My basic take on this video is that, whether founded in intention or ignorance, Dore is practicing misdirection, avoiding informing his viewers about a critically important aspect of campaign funding today, and instead pushing what can be viewed at this point as propaganda, unsupported claims about the money which hide the most-important aspect of its actual sources. Give Me Your Shiksas defines this as anti-semitism and says instead it’s all about the wealthy and class interests: “Because he [Dore] does confront the real source of power - monied elites and those that protect them, regardless of political party despite the cost to him financially and socially… You fault Dore for not claiming the US government is controlled by the Jews as opposed to rich people generally. Apparently, you seem to think the important thing is that they are Jews as opposed to rich people who would pursue their class interest regardless of religion/ethnicity. That's right, if the Jews weren't disproportionately economically successful, your capitalists would treat you better. LOL… Stick to class, forget about race just like Jimmy.”

Now, the first problem with this is the level of disproportionality – 2% of the US population making 50% of the donations to the Dems and 35-40% to both parties combined (making Jews easily the largest special interest, btw, unless one claims Jews have no common interests), and 65% of the largest donors to one party’s presidential candidate, etc., etc. Jews are certainly wealthy overall, having an average income some 50% higher than the average white income and 70% higher than the average US income. But there are other like minorities with high average incomes – for instance, Indian-Americans, who probably have the highest average income of all (although that is likely due to specific circumstances of the day and may not sustain in the longer run), and Chinese-Americans. And you don’t see their faces on that Clinton donor list, and they certainly can’t also make up 50% of the overall donations to the party. Jews have a greater disproportionality in terms of billionaires – I think 30-40% of America’s uber-wealthy – but again that still falls somewhat short of the slice of uber-donors.

So this gets to the subject of political activism among Jews, and I don’t think there is any question that Jews are on average more politically-active than the rest of the population. Which then gets to the nature of that activism and what Jews want out of the US government. I’m not going to get into the Zionist impulse and Israel, not exactly, but I don’t think anyone can argue coherently that the US support for Israel doesn’t go well beyond what it would be if there were no Jews in America today. Neoconservatism is a more general matter, though, and I believe that this is the best example to look at in terms of the impact of Jewish political activism and Jewish money in politics, particularly related to the Democratic party. And as I addressed in my Jeffrey Sachs blog earlier, I think it would be absurd to not define neoconservatism as a Jewish political philosophy and movement, driven by Jews and with Jewish-specific intentions. [insert “of course, not all Jews…” here]

In terms of foreign policy, perhaps the most-important and most-lasting impact of Democratic left activism in the 1960s-70s was the Vietnam Syndrome. But even that only really lasted 25 years, from the start of the mass anti-war movement on the left in the late ‘60s until the first Gulf War in 1991. That was a critical point in a transition in US foreign policy and US politics (including deep politics) more generally. That war, which was framed as a “good” war and was relatively quick and pain-free, not only broke down the Vietnam Syndrome idea of getting bogged down in pointless and hopeless conflicts, but ironically played a role in ending the Bush presidency, even though he emerged from that war with a 90%+ popularity rating. Why? When they went back in 2003 to end Saddam’s rule and turn Iraq into a failed state we saw why – Bush Sr. didn’t get the job done.

This was also a point of change in terms of money and politics, and that can be seen in the wiki of one Rahm Emanuel: “At the start of then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton's presidential primary campaign, Emanuel was appointed to direct the campaign's finance committee. Emanuel insisted that Clinton schedule time for fund-raising and delay campaigning in New Hampshire. Clinton embarked on an aggressive national fund-raising campaign that allowed the campaign to keep buying television time as attacks on Clinton's character threatened to swamp the campaign during the New Hampshire primary… Emanuel's knowledge of the top donors in the country, and his rapport with ‘heavily Jewish’ donors helped Clinton amass a then-unheard-of sum of $72 million. While working on the Clinton campaign Emanuel was a paid retainer of the investment bank Goldman Sachs.”

The Emanuel story fills out the picture some, from his father being a doctor for the Irgun to Rahm spending summers during his childhood in Israel to volunteering for the military during the Gulf War the year before this – not the US army but the IDF.

From what I was able to determine searching information on the web, the 1992 election was the first time a Democratic presidential candidate had outraised/outspent a Republican candidate going back beyond at least Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, when money really started to matter because of television. Not by much, but important given Bush’s popularity the year before, Clinton’s status as a relative unknown and the reluctance of better-known Dems like Mario Cuomo and Sam Nunn to get into a race against the perceived-unbeatable Bush. The total amount of money raised was something like $110-115M, I believe.

Fast-forward to 2008 and Obama manages to raise $750M, again with assistance from Emanuel – the story is that once he determined that Obama would be the nominee (he was neutral in the nomination fight) he took Obama by the hand and brought him to meet with the Conference of Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, the largest donor operation within the massive Jewish-Israeli lobby, and made the deal that got their support. But the GOP’s McCain, himself the biggest Republican goy Zionist warmonger in congress, was only able to raise about $380M, so the margin was no longer close. This was before the legal and practical changes in campaign financing had hit, and in 2012 and 2016 Obama and Clinton were able to raise about $1.2B each, again crushing Romney and Trump by McCain-like margins.

Consequences? In 1991 there certainly was still serious opposition to going to war in Kuwait on the Dem side, and well beyond St. Bernard. In fact it may have been Dem Rep. Tom Lantos and his Nayirah/babies/incubators myth which made the difference in congress; Lantos was an Auschwitz Holocaust survivor from Hungary if you didn’t see Spielberg’s Last Days. But what was starting to be utilized to get the left to support reviving war-mongering in the 1990s was the genocide play – it was used repeatedly during Clinton regarding Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo. Very creative, by someone. At the heart of all this sat Madeleine Albright, UN Ambassador-turned-Sec of State, daughter of Josef Korbel (who was mentor to Condi Rice at the Univ of Denver), mentor to Killary as Sec of State, the heroine of criminal state of Kosovo, the calculator of worth regarding Iraq sanctions and children, in this century the Grand Dame of Dem foreign policy superseding Zbig Brzezinski.

Again fast-forward to Obama and we have Killary replacing Rice as Sec of State, the wars do not end, and by 2011 we have Libya and the beginnings of the hopelessly-complicated involvement in Syria. Then comes EuroMaidan and the rise of the new cold war with Putin’s Russia, becoming Russiagate by Obama’s final days. That balloons during the dark days of Trump, and in 2021 the Dems are back – along with Blinkin, Sullivan, Haines, Nuland (a genuine core neocon) running US foreign policy, all Jews. A year later we get an actual hot war against Russia in Ukriane, this a proxywar sacrificing Ukrainian blood.

So, getting back to Give Me Your Shiksas, is this just a matter of rich people and their interests? Is this just a class issue? [that worldview inseparable from Marxism, btw] Why has the “left” party in the US separated so dramatically from the beliefs of so many of its masses over the last 30 years? Is this just rich people being rich people, and we all know rich people hate Arabs and Russians? Or is this a reaction to the specifics of the money that has increasingly floated the Dem boat over that time and breathed political power life back into a party that seemed almost dead during Reagan-Bush?

This naturally evolves into the economic side of the party’s political philosophy over the last 30 years as well, the embrace of neoliberalism, previously installed as Reaganomics in the ‘80s, by Clinton in the ‘90s, the appointments of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers as Secs of the Treasury and the reappointment of Alan Greenspan as Fed chair, the end of Glass-Steagall, etc. Another fast-forward to Obama and we see essentially no prosecution or regulation of Wall St. after that disaster, and Jewish leadership at the Fed is extended to more than 30 years with the appointment of Yellen to replace Bernanke; removed by Trump, she is now back at Treasury under Biden.

Neoliberalism, like neoconservatism, goes back to the Univ of Chicago in the 1960s and rose to real prominence during the ‘70s, and was then invited into the White House by Reagan. It’s neoliberalism that has resulted in the billionaire oligarchization of the world over the last 40 years, and oligarchs are people with real economic power who assert that in the political arena. Which gets me back to those uber-donors on that Clinton superPAC list, 65% of whom are Jews. Is that simply immaterial? Or do the specifics of the conflicts of the last 30 years speak to the specifics of that money?

For more on neoliberalism and politics, read from Jeff Gates’ 2008 book Guilt by Association - which I cited in my last blog - in Chapter 6 – Money, Democracy and the Great Divide: https://hiddentaxonhumanity.com/guilt-by-association/chapter-6-money-democracy-and-the-great-divide/

I also need to say that the mountain of Jewish money supporting the Democratic Party does not all come from billionaire oligarchs, not even close. The most notorious piece of the vast Jewish-Israeli lobby is of course AIPAC, and AIPAC doesn’t directly donate money to campaigns, as I understand it, they are instead a lobbying organization. But they do facilitate and coordinate bundlers, again as I understand it, individuals who know networks of other like-minded individuals who donate individual contributions limited by law to $2800 per candidate. Through multiple layers this adds up to huge sums of money, and where it goes is coorinated by AIPAC; where it comes from is ordinary doctors, lawyers, professors, stockbrokers, realtors, etc. In 2020 I showed the math on how a like-network coordinated by someone like J Street could have been responsible for something like 75% of the millions raised by Sanders, coming from only a few thousand people, and without him violating his claims on sources (no corporate money, no superPAC money) or his $18 per donation average size (or whatever it was; in 2016 I think it was $27). Smoke and mirrors?

I’m mostly focusing on neoconservatism and wars here, but there are other things that one can reasonably view as consequences of the power of Jewish money supporting the Dems, like the Clinton-Obama Jew-packing of the Supreme court - of their five nominees four (Ginsberg, Breyer, Kagan, Garland) were Jews. Imagine that, 80% of the nominees coming from 2% of the population, which would have resulted in 44% of the court, due to 50% of the donations to the party of DIVERSITY. If they really believed in proportional representation none of these people would have been nominated, because in the entire history of the Supreme Court there have only been something like 115 justices, which would only entail the Jews to two, and that would have been met with Brandeis and Cardozo 90 years ago. Now we are down to one, but that’s due to the GOP refusing to consider Garland, Ginsberg dying, Breyer retiring, Trump getting three shots at nominating even more Catholics (which led to the success of the GOP’s overriding SC goal, overturning Roe v Wade), and Biden’s campaign promise to name a black woman - one cannot assume it’s over.

Here’s a quiz for you - when was the last time a Dem president nominated a person of Euro-Christian heritage (you know, the majority of the US population) to the SC? 1968, 54 years ago, when LBJ nominated his fellow Texan Homer Thornberry as an associate justice. But that vacancy only happened when LBJ tried to move the Jew Abe Fortas to chief justice, and because he was a lame duck in the middle of an election year the move didn’t work, and so Nixon eventually seated Warren Burger to replace Earl Warren as chief justice. Then Fortas resigned from the court under threat of impeachment and was replaced by Harry Blackmun, another white guy, and the court didn’t have another Jew until Clinton/Ginsberg. Johnson’s successful nominations were Fortas and Thurgood Marshall (from the Jewish-run NAACP), and Kennedy’s last nomination was Arthur Goldberg (yes, another Jew), so the last successful nominee was JFK’s Byron “Whizzer” White (ironic last name, isn’t it?) 60 long years ago.

Anyway, one can dismiss Give Me Your Shiksas as simply another Jew pursuing Jewish-specific interests, whether that’s out of ignorance or intent. That’s fine, I guess, although I don’t care for the name-calling. But should we also forgive someone like Dore for doing the same, even if out of ignorance, given his massive audience and influence? When do we get to real bedrock on the matter of money and politics? Or do we continue to ignore that, because doing so would constitute antisemitism? Should the left instead embrace echoes of its past, viewing this through the lens of Marxist class warfare, that also being a disproportionately Jewish-led socio-political/economic philosophy and movement during the first half of the 20th century, before so many Jews themselves abandoned it for greener pastures - like neoconservatism and neoliberalism?

Money in politics is a huge problem, I think most would agree. But most people don’t understand the specific nature of that problem today. And why would anyone think that money can get people to vote against their own interests and beliefs, but also think that money cannot get people to believe things that are against their own interests? If one believes that any discussion about the influence of Jews as a group today (which isn’t clearly positive, of course) is simply antisemitic, then they need to face the possibility that someone has claimed ownership of their very beliefs.