DC and NY

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, 30 May 2007 00:05.

So the outsider, the Iraq man Wolfowitz just didn’t have the class or inspire the confidence to lead the World Bank on the nine-year trek towards the sunlit, global poverty-free uplands of 2015. A really rather minor problem with his somewhat unlikely girlfriend, Shaha Riza - just a matter of arranging jobs, steepling pay rises, and “outstanding” ratings in performance reviews, nothing really - has proved fatal. All a bit of a shock for someone doing probably only what he thought everyone always did. This time next month the Wolf will be stoically packing away his unused WB-imprinted toilet rolls in his WB-embossed briefcase, and walking out into the DC night a banking giant no more.

Despite pleas from several member-nations for the choice of successor to be thrown open to non-Americans, President Bush announced his man for the job today. It’s career diplomat turned Goldman Sachs banker, Robert Zoellick. An administration official said that his dual experience “makes him uniquely prepared to take on this challenge.”

Prepared certainly.

After the Wolfowitz resignation, the man charged with “finding” a successor was US treasury secretary Henry Paulson. Now Paulson is, some may be surprised to hear, a Christian Scientist. But the important point is that he is actually Goldman Sachs to the core, having joined the bank in 1974 and succeeded to the post of CEO in the early 2000s. He has a net worth estimated at $700 million. Like each of his three previous Goldman Sachs CEOs, Joe Corzine, Stephen Friedman and Robert Rubin, he found the pull of a government appointment too strong and took up the post of Treasury Secretary in June of last year (it was thought at the time that one Robert Zoellick might beat him to it). Strangely, a former colleague at Goldman Sachs, Bob Steel, has just been nominated as Undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance.

This cosy relationship between money and power has been going on since the days of FDR, when Goldman Sachs then head Sydney Weinberg made the switch. He argued for other senior executives to follow him in a second career as a public servant, and the trend was quickly established. It is recognised in the recruiting strategy at the bank, which consciously seeks managers with government experience.

Robert Zoellick - no Christian Scientist, by the way - is such an individual. It must have been a tough job for Paulson to root out a man with such rare gifts at ... Goldman Sachs. Among these is a past association with Team Bush, namely that in the run up to the 2000 Presidential Election, Zoellick served on a foreign policy advisory group known as the Vulcans, led by Condoleezza Rice. Other group members included Richard Armitage, Richard Perle and ... Paul Wolfowitz. Small world.

But then Zoellick goes back with Wolfowitz, Armitage and Perle well into the nineties. All three were signatories to a letter to President Clinton drafted on 26th January 1998 by the PNAC calling for “removing Saddam’s regime from power.” Small, small world. Just as it is designed to be.

Tags: Global Elitism

Comments:

Posted by MMR on Thu, 31 May 2007 10:16 | #

The lack of response to this important post is revealing of how little Americans, including the highly informed MR readership, know about their overlords.

Posted by gongstar on Thu, 31 May 2007 19:45 | #

Michael Medved sadly notes:

There is also a tendency on the part of paranoid anti-Semites to search out a few Jewish names even in areas in which Jews play minor roles in order to triumphantly affirm the myth of “Jewish control.” Consider the case of the Bush administration and the frequent, laughably absurd charge that it’s somehow dominated by Jewish “neo-conservatives” who forced the President to make war on Iraq for the sake of Israel. In truth, Jews remained conspicuously absent from positions of authority during the first Bush term: for the first time in more than 65 years (since the Presidency of FDR!) the President’s Cabinet (15 department heads in all) included not a single Jew.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23787

The “neo-conservatives” don’t exist, already! And even if they do, they ain’t dominated by Jews! And even if they do exist and are dominated by Jews, they had nothing to do with the Iraq war! And even if they do exist, are dominated by Jews and had everything to do with the Iraq war, it’s antisemitic to say so.

Meanwhile, the notorious antisemite Taki writes:

My choice would have been Le Pen, but at least France did not end up with Ségolène, the Gallic version of the ghastly Hillary… Next week it’s Washington for a speech about the future of the American Right. There is no future — the neocons took care of that — and then on to London and some serious partying. I have my opening line all ready for my speech: ‘What is the difference between neoconservatives and women? You can sometimes find women on the battlefield.’

http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/life-and-lives/31049/part_2/bad-taste-in-ladies.thtml

Posted by ben tillman on Thu, 31 May 2007 21:11 | #

FORWARD named him most influential Jew for the year 2003:

The deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, is probably the most talked-about figure in the Bush administration, and for good reason: He is the primary architect of the most important American foreign policy initiative in a generation: the plan to invade Iraq and establish a democracy in the heart of the Arab world. While he managed to transform his advocacy of removing Saddam Hussein into action, Wolfowitz, 58, also got a first-hand taste of the messy aftermath when rockets slammed into his hotel during a visit to Baghdad last month.

http://www.rushkoff.com/profiles/forwardfifty.html

Posted by Al Ross on Thu, 31 May 2007 21:41 | #

Michael Medved, like so many Jews, lies to us when he claims that “the President’s Cabinet contained not a single Jew”. The post of energy Secretary was held by the Jew, Spencer Abraham.

Posted by Al Ross on Thu, 31 May 2007 23:22 | #

My mistake, Fred, and one shared by David Irving :

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Letters/Auschwitz/Sceptical_11.html

Posted by Scimitar on Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:43 | #

Is Zoellick a Jew?

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:44 | #

Yes, he is.

Posted by Al Ross on Fri, 01 Jun 2007 01:22 | #

I think it possible that Spencer Abraham may be a Donmeh.

Posted by Scimitar on Fri, 01 Jun 2007 01:23 | #

If you have confimed he is Jewish, be sure to let VNN know.

Posted by Guessedworker on Fri, 01 Jun 2007 08:36 | #

Well, how interesting. If you google “Jewish Robert Zoellick” quickly enough up pops the Wikipedia entry with the sub-line:-

... Illinois, where he was raised, and has Jewish German ancestry. .... An October 2004 letter from Robert Zoellick to Japan’s Finance Minister Takenaka ...

But click on the actual page and the line reads “and has German ancestry”.

Same for Answers.com.

Now, naturally I checked the ancestry of Mr Zoellick (Zelig) when the story broke, and the Wiki entry surely read “Jewish-German”. So that’s a very recent edit, and it remains to be seen whether it is correct. VNN are right to be cautious, not least because his Jewishness is their issue. Mine is the manner in which the power elite rewards and sustains itself. That it is a significantly Jewish elite, most especially in the fields of banking, foundations and intellectualism, is not open to question.

Posted by Scimitar on Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:18 | #

The Wikipedia article traces back to this:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9506E4D7123BF93BA35751C0A9659C8B63&sec=health&spon;=&pagewanted=print

That fits with Mr. Zoellick’s preoccupation with history. In his rare hours of relaxation, he says he is either running or studying history. He considers his greatest achievement to be his role in the first Bush administration as a senior negotiator who helped bring about the reunification of Germany.

In a speech at the Reichstag in Berlin last summer, he said he considered himself fortunate ‘‘to be among the final cohort of America’s cold war diplomats, to have been one of the last of a long line of my countrymen who kept a promise to the German people: a pledge of Freiheit und Einheit’’—freedom and unity.

A Midwesterner with German ancestors, Mr. Zoellick received the Knight Commanders Cross from the unified German government.

Posted by Scimitar on Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:24 | #

The Wiki article on Zoellick has been edited numerous times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Robert_Zoellick&action=history