Tag Archives | Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs Rules The World

By on September 27, 2011 in News 36

The trader who went on BBC News and admitted that banks rule the world, not governments, appears to have the media reeling, not sure whether or not to believe this brazen bit of truth-telling.

New York Magazine’s Daily Intel summarizes the confusion:

A trader by the name of Alessio Rastani told a shocked BBC News reporter yesterday, “The governments don’t rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.” He warned, “The savings of millions of people are going to vanish,” and said viewers should “get prepared” because the “economic crisis is like a cancer, if you just wait and wait thinking this will go away, just like a cancer it’s going to grow and it’s going to be too late.”…

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Wrangling The Giant Vampire Squid

By on August 16, 2011 in News 2

VampireSquidMatt Taibbi has been waiting to watch Goldman Sachs executives go to jail for a while–at least since 2009 when he called Goldman the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Released today, the latest installment of Taibbi’s manifesto against all things Goldman sets up a pretty simple proposition based on the recently released 650-page report from Senator Carl Levin’s Subcommittee on Investigations, detailing the collapse of the American financial system. Taibbi wastes no time with whodunnit paragraphs, instead setting the smoking gun on the doorstep of the Department of Justice. Like a rewriting of the Senate investigator’s above quote, Taibbi declares, “Everything’s fucked up, and it’s time for Goldman Sachs to go to jail. You don’t even have to investigate because the Senate did it for you. Just issue those subpoenas.” (The Atlantic Wire)

Apparently the vampire squid also has an appetite for metal.… Read the rest

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Chris Hedges’s Endgame Strategy: Why The Revolution Must Start In America

By on June 25, 2011 in News 12

Synopsis via The Raw Story:

Pulitzer-winning author and former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has a revolutionary worldview. In the video below, his recent “Endgame Strategy” piece for AdBusters is read aloud by George Atherton. His conclusions are chilling, but not entirely hopeless. “We will have to take care of ourselves,” he wrote. “We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one.

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The Case Against Goldman Sachs

By on May 11, 2011 in News 10

mainIn his usual clear, profane manner, Matt Taibbi lays out why Goldman Sachs’s executives must face criminal charges as soon as possible. Via Rolling Stone:

America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn’t exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis.

… Read the rest

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Finance Capitalism is Causing Starvation

By on February 13, 2011 in News 18

We all know Soviet-style communism causes starvation.  Looks like American-style capitalism does the same thing in a different way.  Johann Hari in the Independent, from this past July:

It starts with an apparent mystery. At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 per cent, maize by 90 per cent, rice by 320 per cent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people — mostly children — couldn’t afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in more than 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls it “a silent mass murder”, entirely due to “man-made actions.”

Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis as if they had been struck by a tsunami.

… Read the rest

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The Demise Of Facebook

By on January 8, 2011 in News 57

Facebook logoDouglas Rushkoff called the impending doom of AOL when it’s hapless merger with Time Warner was announced. Now he says Facebook is cashing out and it’s the beginning of its demise, in an opinion piece at CNN:

All signs for Facebook appear to be pointing up.

Mark Zuckerberg is Time’s Man of the Year, the movie about him seems likely to be an Oscar winner, and now Goldman Sachs is raising $1.5 billion from its favorite investors on behalf of the social networking company.

At the very same moment, Facebook’s only real competitor –NewsCorps’ waning social networking site, MySpace — is shedding employees and expenses, most likely in hopes of a fire sale.

But appearances can be deceiving. In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren’t the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.

… Read the rest

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Goldman CEO Dodges Boxing Match With Journalist

By on November 15, 2010 in News 2

Fight for HumanityGoldman Sachs bankers are the deserved target of a lot of Wall Street bashing by regular Americans whose jobs have been lost and homes foreclosed due to the many crimes (yes, crimes) perpetrated by the banks, insurance companies and ratings agencies. New York Post columnist John Crudele has challenged Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein to go up against him in a Wall Street boxing match:

Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman of Goldman Sachs, would probably like to see me hurt. And I’d like to see him investigated for insider trading.

So I figured a boxing match was in order. The only hitch, I can’t seem to get Blankfein to do it.

Let me tell you anyway how I almost became a pugilist.

A few weeks ago someone from a gym downtown was looking for some publicity and mentioned that there is a charity boxing match with Wall Street types going against each other scheduled for Dec.

… Read the rest

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Would Henry I Have Castrated Goldman Sachs?

By on November 13, 2010 in News 16

Henry I

Bad money drives out the good” – Gresham’s Law

Even primitive medieval economies understood the importance of guaranteeing the integrity of currency;  Henry I of England imposed the penalty of castration on counterfeiters.

Gresham’s Law is the formal name economists give the common sense notion that counterfeiting is a bad thing and should not be encouraged.   The upshot is that the phony money undermines your confidence in all the money in circulation, even if the bogus bucks are a relatively small portion of the total ‘dollars’ in circulation.

You need to KNOW for a fact just how much real, tangible value you can expect to receive in exchange for those ‘dollars’, and that’s entirely independent of any action on your part.  At least in the short term that’s entirely dependent on how your fellow market participants perceive the value of that currency.  Even if you accept some shiny beads as payment in a real estate deal, you shouldn’t really be shocked when you’re evicted for offering the same as a rental payment to your new landlord the following month.… Read the rest

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Supreme Court Aids Corporate Fraudsters

By on June 24, 2010 in News 4

Is this really the time to give a “get-out-of-jail-free” card to corporate chiefs who can’t resist fraudulently dipping into the honey pot of riches that they have access to? I mean we’re still unraveling (and paying for) the massive frauds perpetrated by the banksters at AIG, Goldman Sachs and their Wall Street cronies and shills in Washington. I suppose it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the Supreme Court is in on it too, but the timing shows a particularly callous disregard for public sentiment. Report from the Los Angeles Times:

A Supreme Court ruling Thursday dealt a severe blow to legislation meant to fight public corruption and also could affect the recent convictions of former Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling and former newspaper magnate Conrad Black.

In ruling on “honest-services fraud,” the justices said Skilling and Black were wrongly convicted on that charge. All nine justices agreed that such fraud was too vague to constitute a crime unless a bribe or kickback was involved.

… Read the rest

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