Throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, the recession is prompting middle-class parents to take a look at public middle and high schools they have long disdained.
Talking investment strategy might not top everyone\’s agenda for a bright Sunday morning, but about 75 local residents gathered at Young Israel of Century City on Dec. 21 to do just that.
\”It\’s all just one big lie.\”\n\nWith those words Bernard Madoff confessed to senior executives of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities that the $17 billion hedge fund he founded was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. Madoff is at the center of \”the largest investor swindle ever blamed on a single individual.\”\n\nThe news that broke today on the front pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal reverberated in Jewish communities across the world. \”A lot of Jewish charities had investments with him,\” one prominent investor told The Jewish Journal. \”So did a lot of Jews.\”\n\nUPDATE: Among the victims was the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles.\n\n
Research based on 17 years of Pennsylvania unemployment records concluded that workers affected by mass layoffs at a plant were 15 percent more likely to die of any cause over the next two decades.
Have tough economic times forced you to scale back your child\’s bar or bat mitzvah party plans? With your 401(k) down, is the ice sculpture out? Is your resetting ARM making you reconsider that 18-piece orchestra?
Wall Street\’s problem, in the president\’s mind, is not a systemic pathology, not an illness that comes on the same chromosome as the profit motive. Instead, it\’s the behavior of a frat boy on a bender, the reckless phase of a good-time Charlie rather than the symptom of profound disease.
According to a survey taken in late September by the private wealth research firm, Prince & Associates, the cuts have arrived. Fifty-one percent said they planned on giving less next year than they did this past year — and only 16 percent said they planned on giving more.
If only those nasty money changers and culture vultures in the seething cities below would just let them sow their wheat and do their books and raise their children up good.
Will the crisis on Wall Street, where so many Jews work, spur hostility toward Jews? Some Jews certainly seem anxious about it.
But there\’s also a less benign explanation for the media\’s negligence, and it\’s captured by something President Andrew Jackson said nearly two centuries ago: \”If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.\”
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.