Yesterday's Times mentioned Jeffrey Katzenberg as one of Obama's big donors. Katzenberg is a progressive. His early support of Obama and refusal to back Hillary–he also gave $2000 to John Edwards last spring–was a widely-observed signal of Obama's strength in left-lib Dem circles.
Here's another way Katzenberg spends his money. It came up in an informal conversation I had: he has a poker game a couple times a year and people drop as much as $500,000 in three days, Thursday-Friday-Saturday. My interlocutor seemed to know what he was talking about; then I looked it up on the internet. Here it is last March at the Totalgambler site, a poker player interviewing poker pro Daniel Negreanu about Katzenberg's game.
PP: Do you think the game has been strongly affected by the showbiz aspect that seems to permeate poker these days?
DN:
That has been mostly positive. It’s brought poker into the mainstream.
There are more events and poker shows that are ‘pro-centric’. It gets
the game out there and gives people opportunities to make more money. I
played in a game with [showbiz executive] Jeffrey Katzenberg and Tobey
Maguire, but I felt uncomfortable with what I won.
The blinds
got kicked up to $200/$400 and I won half a million dollars in seven
hours. I killed it, but those guys were so good about it. They didn’t
care. Those guys have so much money that a game like that is just
recreation. [emphasis Weiss's]
Note that Negreanu differs somewhat from my source in terms of the burn-rate. What's there to say about Katzenberg's game? The new gilded age. A symbol of what is wrong with our society, when so many people are struggling and guys can burn this kind of money without thinking about it. What's the carbon footprint of that game? I'm thinking of all the SUVs running outside, and the air conditioned mansion. Is the pendulum coming back on socialism anytime soon? Maybe Katzenberg's political donations will help there…
And is it good for the Jews? No, it's a shonde as they used to say, a shame. He's just one Jewish guy of course, burning his money according to his personal whim. But as I wrote some time back, Oy, my people are too rich. Richard Witty bucked me then. But Richard, we are the top dogs, statistically, in U.S. society, and this is a marker of it; does the money mean something? Is it hurting the Jewish soul? (I point again to William Deresiewicz's brilliant piece in the American Scholar, where he showed that money has rotted the values of elite intellectual culture…)
The word to use is plutocrat.
Is it hurting the Jewish soul? (I point again to William Deresiewicz's brilliant piece in the American Scholar, where he showed that money has rotted the values of elite intellectual culture…)
– nothing can "rot the values of elite intellectual culture" without "hurting the Jewish soul." The "Jewish soul" is the elite intellectual center of the universe. Ask any Jewish journalist.
Many non-Jews are so blinded by philo-Semitism that they are unwilling to examine
the complex issue of Jews and money, a subject of enormous importance in this
country. Martha Nussbaum, for example, once
stated that she converted from Christianity
to Judaism at least partially because she
felt that WASPS were too preoccupied with
money and status!
But whence come the Jabotinskian Neoconservative and Friedmanite Neoliberal streams of wealth?
It is fairly easy to identify when Murdoch began to get access to easy credit and to find lots of new Zionist investment partners.
I allude to this issue in Followup: Subjugating American Muslims to Israel.
Marx and Engles had a wonderful concept, but their ideas were hijacked. Wars were fought to try and wipe out, or contain their idea that there are only so many slices in a loaf of bread, and it isn't right that a small % of the population should have more than all the rest combined.The wealthy used their power to get out their message,and it worked. Communism became a bad word. The only gains the working man received was as a result of the threat of communism. Now that the threat has subsided, so have the benefits. The working middle class in America is on life support while greed is alive and flurishing for the wealthy. The poor and middle class Jews of Europe paid the ultimate price for the greed of the few on top.Anti semitism was never about religion.
How does a story Danial Negreanu playing poker somehow become a criticism of Jews?
I pretty much agree with bill–follow the history of banking and funding of wars, tax collection, etc.
The partnership at the top always involved people like Bush, who is nothing but a minor prince with his court Jews. Look closely.
McCain will be the same. Obama? It sure looks like it, but, as he says, there's always hope…
If I were a Jew, I'd be afraid.
Look at the on-going economic trajectory of this country.
In the past, goy serfs suffered most, and when the peasants could not take it anymore (maybe 6 dollar/gal gas tucked after war with Iran?), they vented, looking at what they saw–when they looked up, it was never them in any pilot seat, but a Jew.
The middle ages have never left.
They've just been modified, mostly by luck and putting what was left of the natives on reservations.
Phil's right, there's a new breed of robber barons, and a new gilded age. But Marx was wrong in the sense the opiate of the masses has not died. We are going backwards in time, armed with all the latest hi-tek…
Money is the root of all evil–is purely a Christian expression.
Personally, I think it depends on another idea: that real life only comes in the hereafter. Nothing like believing death is not really death to keep you enslaved in the here and now, either directly, or economically.
The world would be better off if agnostics ruled.
Suppose that Jewish financiers were to repent of their cultural command strategy, of buying up publishers and installing phony jewish 'geniuses' to run them and hype one another – which is just as obvious and predictable as for instance that of the irish, who became cops, soldiers, innkeepers, and priests?
So, what your saying keating is when the "final solution" to the Jewish problem in the USA comes. Your wife and son go along with the rest of us. You going to handle that one and do they know about that/
What final solution are you talking about, SOG?
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this is so crazy to think about.
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