Er zijn nog steeds westerlingen die zich verbazen en soms zelfs verbijsterd zijn over het gegeven dat joden in de diaspora en de zelfbenoemde Joodse staat zoveel invloed en zelfs macht hebben over de buitenlandse politiek van het Westen zodra het Israel betreft. Het antwoord is tamelijk voor de hand liggend in een neoliberaal bestel waar alles om geld draai, en geld de amorele norm is van de macht:
Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer quits Harvard board, blasts university’s president over Hamas student letter
Israeli billionaire Idan Ofer and his wife are resigning from their posts on the executive board of Harvard’s Kennedy School in protest of school president Claudine Gay’s belated, lukewarm response to the student letter blaming Israel for the massacre committed by Hamas terrorists on Saturday.
Ofer, the shipping and chemicals magnate whose net worth was valued by Forbes at $14 billion as of Thursday, said he and his wife were quitting the board, according to the Hebrew-language news site TheMarker.
Ofer and his wife, Batia, said they resigned “in protest of the shocking and insensitive response by the president of the university, who did not condemn the letter by student organizations who blamed Israel for the massacres.”
The Post has sought comment from the Ofers as well as from Harvard.
Gay has come under fire from Harvard alums including former school president Larry Summers, who decried the “delayed” statement from her office in response to the student letter.
“Why can’t we give reassurance that the University stands squarely against Hamas terror to frightened students when 35 groups of their fellow students appear to be blaming all the violence on Israel?”Summers wrote in his social media post late Monday.
Summers’ disappointment was in response to the lukewarm statement released by the president’s office on Monday.
“We write to you today heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend, and by the war in Israel and Gaza now underway,” Harvard administrators wrote in the statement from Monday.
The statement did not explicitly condemn Hamas, prompting Summers to post his criticism.
Follow along with The Post’s live blog for the latest on Hamas’ attack on Israel
Gay published a follow-up statement on Tuesday stating: “As the events of recent days continue to reverberate, let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.”
“Such inhumanity is abhorrent, whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the region,” Gay wrote in her statement.
More than 30 student groups issued the incendiary letter hours after Hamas staged an assault on Saturday morning that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead and thousands more wounded.
In a letter titled “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine,” 31 student organizations — including the Ivy League’s affiliate of Amnesty International — condemned Israel.
Worst attack on Israel in 50 years: How we got here
2005: Israel unilaterally withdraws from the Gaza Strip over three decades after winning the territory from Egypt in the Six-Day War.
2006: Terrorist group Hamas wins a Palestinian legislative election.
2007: Hamas seizes control of Gaza in a civil war.
2008: Israel launches military offensive against Gaza after Palestinian terrorists fired rockets into the town of Sderot.
2023: Hamas launches the biggest attack on Israel in 50 years.
Over 1,400 Israelis are dead, more than 4,200 are wounded and at least 100 were taken hostage, with the death toll expected to rise after Hamas terrorists fired thousands of rockets and sent dozens of militants into Israeli towns.
Hamas terrorists were seen taking female hostages and parading them down the street in horrifying videos.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced “We are at war” and vowed Hamas would pay “a price it has never known.”
Gaza health officials report at least 3,000 Palestinians have been killed and more than 12,500 injured.
The groups claimed Hamas’ attack “did not happen in a vacuum,” and the Israeli government has forced Palestinians to live in an “open-air prison for over two decades,” according to the letter obtained by The Post
“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” the letter reads.
“The apartheid regime is the only one to blame,” the groups claimed.
The letter prompted a furious response from business leaders, chief among them hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who demanded that Harvard produce a list of names of the students who count as members of the groups that co-signed the letter.
Ackman enlisted the support of at least a dozen business executives who vowed to never hire students who are members of the groups that supported the statement.
But Summers and Harvard professor Jason Furman pushed back on Ackman, saying he went too far.
The Ofer family is one of the wealthiest in Israel. The late patriarch, Sammy Ofer, derived most of his wealth from his ownership stake in Israel Chemicals as well as ZIM, the cargo shipping service.
Idan and Batia Ofer jointly own a majority stake in Israel Corp. and Kenon Holdings, which was spun off from Israel Corp.
Drie prominente Joods Amerikaanse Geld Beheerders, van links naar rechts Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan en Larry Summers, die de corrupte neoliberale orde wisten te redden.
Wat betreft Larry Summers het volgende:
Summers became Treasury Secretary in July 1999, receiving a congratulatory letter from Ken Lay, the President of Enron Corporation, addressed "Dear Larry." In his response to "Ken" on May 25, 1999, Summers included a handwritten PS: "I'll keep my eye on power deregulation and energy-market infrastructure issues." Read the letters here.
Summers helped negotiate the World Trade Organization's Financial Services agreement that opened global markets to derivatives and other financial products and made it harder for signatory nations to regulate banking in the public interest. In the WTO agreement, which was negotiated behind closed doors, the United States effectively pledged to get rid of the 1933 Glass-Steagall law, which was seen as a barrier to market entry by many foreign banks that were structured differently. In 1997, Tim Geither urged Larry Summers to personally call the heads of America's top five banks to seal the deal. See the Geithner memo to Summers here.
Summers pushed for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall, which was created after the Great Depression to wall off traditional commercial banking activity from the Wall Street casino. The repeal allowed commercial banks to merge with investment banks, securities firms and insurance companies, creating "too big to fail" behemoths and unleashing an era of reckless speculation. On November 5, 1999 Summers hailed the passage of the repeal: "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st Century. This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy." Read the statement here.
On November 9, 1999, Summers and other regulators issued a report that would serve as the Congressional blueprint for the Commodities Futures Modernization Act drafted the following year. The "President's Working Group on Financial Markets" concluded that "under many circumstances, the trading of financial derivatives by eligible swap participants should be excluded from the CEA [Commodities Exchange Act]. To do otherwise would perpetuate legal uncertainty or impose unnecessary regulatory burdens and constraints upon the development of these markets in the United States." Read the Working Group Report here.
Summers personally reassured Ken Lay on November 22, 1999 that Enron's derivatives trades would not be regulated, directing him to pages 34-35 in the Working Group report that reads "in light of their small market share and the apparent effectiveness of private counterparty discipline in constraining the risk-taking of such derivatives dealers, the Working Group is not recommending legislative action with respect to such derivatives dealers at this time." Read the letterhere.
Summers wrote to Congress on December 15, 2000 to "strongly support" the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. The bill that went even further than the legal changes called for in the President's Working Group Report, exempting derivatives from regulation by any federal bank regulator not just the CFTC. Summers also allowed the "Enron Loophole" to be included in bill (over the objections of the CFTC), which exempted energy trading on electronic commodity markets from regulation and helped Enron to gouge billions of dollars from West Coast consumers. Read the letter in the Congressional Record here.
As energy prices skyrocketed in California, Summers opposed Governor Gray Davis' plan to intervene with price controls, claiming: "This is classic supply and demand. The only way to fix this is ultimately by allowing retail prices to go wherever they have to go." Enron filed for bankruptcy in 2001, putting 20,000 employees out of work and Ken Lay was convicted of 10 counts of securities fraud, wire fraud and other offenses. Read Kurt Eichenwald's 2005 book on the collapse of Enron,"Conspiracy of Fools."
Summers departed the Treasury in 2001 and went off to be the President of Harvard, where he ignored repeated warnings by expert staff and lost Harvard some $2 billion of its endowment funds, including $1 billion on toxic interest rate swaps. Read about it in the Boston Globe and Bloomberg News.
Back at the White House in 2009 as head of the National Economic Council, Summers was a chief architect of the generous bank bailout, the weak stimulus and the limited structural reforms in Dodd-Frank. Summers opposed numerous efforts to strengthen the bill, most tellingly, the President's effort to include the "Volcker Rule." Volcker's aim was to put an end some of the riskiest practices by curtailing proprietary trading at U.S. banks and limiting their investments in private equity firms and hedge funds, but the rule was slow walked and weakened by Summers.Read Richard Wolffe's book "Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House."
Summers was overheard in November of 2008 chastising Arthur Levitt (former head of the SEC under Clinton) for saying that Brooksley Born was right "I read somewhere you were saying that maybe Brooksley Born was right. ... But you know she was really wrong." Levitt confirmed the account, available here.
In the years that followed the 2008 meltdown, Clinton, Greenspan, Levitt even Rubin admitted they made mistakes or expressed some regret for these actions. Summers abided by his own advice to Geithner, as Geithner prepped for his confirmation session as Treasury Secretary, "don't anyone admit we did anything wrong." Read Ron Suskind's "Confidence Men."
In 2012, Summers was grilled by a British reporter and defended his record on derivatives, saying "at the time Bill Clinton was president, there essentially were no credit default swaps. So the issue that became a serious problem really wasn't an issue that was on the horizon... If you want to assign responsibility, If you take a market that essentially didn't exist in the 1990s, that grew for eight years from 2001 to 2008, and then brought on a major collapse, if you were looking to hold people responsible, you would look to... officials of the Bush Administration." Credit default swaps were invented by JP Morgan Chase to offset the risk of the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1994 and plenty of people were worried about them, including presidential adviser Joseph Stiglitz. Watch the Summers interview.
In the shadows, between 2000-2008, the OTC derivatives market grew from $95.2 trillion to $672.6 trillion, notational value. When the dark market deals started to go sour, the impact was felt around the world. The man who was featured on the cover of Time Magazine as part of the "Committee to Save the World" with Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan in 1999, instead helped bring it to its knees.
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