Nazis, political smears from The Oxford Club, and Bernie Sanders

Some years ago I began subscribing to a couple of publications from an organization called The Oxford Club. Their subscription mailings were terrific at massaging whatever organ it is that generates intensely overwhelming feelings of greed.

What their publications generally do is recommend stocks to invest in. I’m dredging up the numbers they touted from a faulty memory, but essentially their solicitation mailings were saying things like, “Earn profits of 200 percent, 300 percent, four hundred and eighty-seven percent!” 

Yes, yes, ye-e-e-essss! I thought, as my greed gland went orgasmic and my signature spurted across a check for my subscription.

“Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement,” declared Dr. Samuel Johnson back in the 19th Century. And this was nearly two centuries before the Oxford Club began promising me, without regularly delivering, humongous multiples of my money.

Well, for a while, The Oxford Club did reasonably well by me. No, they never generated 200 percent, much less six hundred and eighty-seven percent in profits. At least not for me. But a couple of their recommendations have increased significantly in value since I bought them, and the stocks recommend in their retirement income letter did, as promised, generate some income.

Of course, that was when the market was going up. Recently, the Oxford Club has been closing out quite a few positions, sometimes at a loss. I have still more beefs with their stock picks and their methods, but that’s for another day. What I’m here to tell you about is the not-so-subliminal message lurking just below the surface — or sometimes right on the surface — of the onslaught of e-mails they send me every week, in addition to my monthly newsletter subscriptions.

Turns out The Oxford Club is a right wing organization with right wing “friends” who spread political opinions, and sometimes considerable misinformation and paranoia among its subscribers. (Sample from a recent mailing that led off with the presidential election, "Your Bank Accounts Will Soon Be Confiscated Whoever Wins!")

I have no way of knowing whether issuing a screed against anything that doesn’t favor the one percent, tax cuts and hatred of government is required writing if you want to keep your job at the Oxford Club. But it seems that, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, nearly all their writers who regularly send me messages have at one time or another bashed the notion that the one percent are anything but God-dispatched saviors of our national economy. And that  — if I may continue a rather racy metaphor that I began some paragraphs back — taxes are the ejaculate of the devil.

But the Oxford Club went more than a few paces two far last week when Alexander Green, the Oxford Club’s “Chief Investment Strategist” painted Bernie Sanders as the world’s biggest Nazi since Adolph and Eva romped joyfully at Berchtesgaden while Buchenwald gassed Europe’s Jews.

“How a Vote for Sanders Is Like a Vote for Hitler,” declared the headline on an e-mail from The Oxford Club written by Green. And the Oxford Club’s Green Slime ran downhill from there. Here’s what appears to be the nub of this disgusting argument, complete with Green's stereotyping:

Hitler convinced his people that Germany's troubles were caused by just 1% of the population: the Jews. 

In reality, of course, German Jews were a tremendous asset. They were hardworking and successful, particularly in business and finance. They were more highly educated, more affluent and more law-abiding than most, committing few crimes in relation to their numbers. 

Yet Hitler projected every fear, anxiety and frustration onto them. He scapegoated them so successfully, in fact, that ordinary Germans began to detest them, even those who had never met a Jew….

Hitler was a monster. But his fundamental flaw was that he was a deluded and unrepentant bigot. 

So is Bernie Sanders. 

Sanders does not scapegoat an ethnic or religious minority, however. He scapegoats a financial one. He dislikes rich people. 

Listen to a Sanders stump speech, and you'll discover
that folks with money are the bane of our existence. They
have "fixed" the economy, corrupted politics, denied
healthcare to millions, cheated the working class, shirked taxes, created shocking inequality and hoarded the wealth for themselves. 

I must live in an alternate universe.

Yes, Alexander, you very much must live in an alternate universe.

Hitler picked on people because of their ethnicity, arrested them, sent them to filthy concentration camps, turned them into slave laborers, starved them, and gassed them to death when they weren't forced to dig their own graves before being shot. Whereas Bernie Sanders is mostly proposing to somewhat increase the taxes on the topmost part of the income that very rich people earn. 

There is no comparison. There is no parallel. What there is, it seems to me, is The Oxford Club baiting a Jewish candidate for wanting to make sure that people who work for the one percent receive fair and proportionate compensation to their own contributions to the economy. Calling a Jew a Nazi because of his economic principles and belief in fairness is tantamount to what Dr. Goebbels did — inventing and broadcasting a big , slanderous lie.

In the same e-mail, Green accused Sanders of “preaching class hatred.” No, Mr, Green, it is you and The Oxford Club who are attempting to disseminate hatred. Bernie Sanders is preaching class fairness.

Shame on The Oxford Club for enabling you with a platform to broadcast your trash.

Note: If the Oxford Club hasn’t been embarrassed yet into taking down Green’s vile e-mail, you can find the full text posted here, along with some mostly furious replies by Oxford Club members, many of whom, I hope, will cancel or not renew their subscriptions.

Cross-posted at The New York Crank