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Its a good thing this now going to change....hmmmm.....
Quote:
[SIZE=+1]T[/SIZE]he first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.
By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the ******* chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …
But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine/1 - broken link)
the next great goldman sachs bubble is cap and trade. it is the perfect winning bubble combination of government controlling business and goldman controlling government.
does anyone think that these bubbles represent any form of true capitalism? there wouldn't have been bailouts if capitalism was involved and those bad decision makers would have taken the beatdown that they deserved.
does anyone think that these bubbles represent any form of true capitalism? there wouldn't have been bailouts if capitalism was involved and those bad decision makers would have taken the beatdown that they deserved.
The answer is the firms knew they would be bailed out if anything ever went wrong. Therefore it was not capitalism at work. If there was Capitalism then AIG, Bank of America, CITI et al... would not be here today or would they? Maybe if there never was the notion of "too big too fail" these firms would not have taken the obscene risks they took and the economy would not have bubbled then exploded. Interesting.
I don't like the government controlled by a small group of individuals who do not have the country's best interests at heart....as it is now.
Who do you think is running the show?
The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bull****. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy? It's the free market. And you're a part of it. You've got that killer instinct. Stick around pal, I've still got a lot to teach you.
Businesses actually hate the market because an open market can eliminate profit and allow businesses to fail. Business prefers a system that controls the market and protects the businessmen from the losses they incur. As business controls our government they are protected from their own foolishness. The rest of us are definitely not.
I don't like the government controlled by a small group of individuals who do not have the country's best interests at heart....as it is now.
Who do you think is running the show?
I think twas ever thus.
Goldman and all investment firms and money management firms exist to make money. Thats all they're there for, the only thing. They're made up of people who love and want and are motivated by nothing more than money. It's silly hyperbole to claim that GS "runs" the government, but that huge level of international finance that involves the fates of entire countries and currencies I dont know much about. (Was it JP Morgan that loaned the US the money to finance WWI? Something like that.)
Do you like the idea of tying the hands of the free market with more regulation, in order to create a superficial impression that money companies "have the country's best interests at heart"? What are you, some kinda socialist?
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