Generation after generation of politicians running as Washington outsiders have railed against the established system. Lambasting corruption and inherent evil has been an effective populist message for a long while. We saw it from one party in 2006 and 2008 and now, in 2010, we observe it in another. Every generation appears to have been sold the same basic message. But after each wave of reformers finds the going perilous and true change difficult, we engage in an equally long-running tradition, that of demanding why. Why is this institution so resistant to change and so stubbornly ingrained? Where does one even begin?
Tag: Hubris
Apr 15 2009
Goldman Sachs laughs in our faces
The Masters of the Universe at Goldman Sachs are now so confident of their domination of America that they are publicly mocking the press, the government, and the people. They are doing this through shameless displays of market manipulation and disinformation. Any sane observer of the financial world would recoil in disgust at the following pranks.
1. Goldman drops out of their financial reporting the month of December 2008, in which they had significant losses, in order to conveniently shift to a different reporting calendar.
2. Goldman rushes through a $5 billion public offering based on cooked numbers and government subsides. The market responds with a vote of “confidence” by cutting 10% off Goldman’s stock price.
3. Goldman makes a show of intending to “return” $10 billion in taxpayer TARP money, while remaining silent about their continued issuance of huge amounts of debt GUARANTEED BY THE FDIC.
4. Goldman claims that the $12 billion of (taxpayer provided) CDO payments it received from AIG had no material affect on its financial performance. Uh-huh.
The long knives are out for Goldman Sachs. Government regulators, angry investors, consumer activists, blogosphere progressives, and most intelligent observers will long remember how one company used its legally corrupt operatives in the Obama administration to grab taxpayer funds to pay million-dollar bonuses to lying executives whose only ethos is greed. This firm deserves capital punishment. It may duck and twist and dodge for a few more years, but it is going to go down, and it will go down hard.
Goldman Sachs will be remembered like Enron: a textbook case of the pernicious and self-destructive conduct of an uncontrolled corporation.
Oct 30 2008
Two good articles at Socialist Appeal (UK)!
The first, Top Economic Strategist warns of ‘Catastrophe and Revolution’ by Rob Sewell looks at warnings from a leading strategist of capitalism in the City:
We are facing the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Despite all the efforts to bail out the banking system, the economic crisis has only just started to bite. How deep or long the crisis will last is difficult to estimate, but given the financial house of cards built up in the last world boom, the capitalist system has entered unprecedented times, in which a depression cannot be ruled out.