Five More Countries For Goldman Sachs To Take Over
Now that Goldman Sachs has achieved coups d’etats in Greece and Italy, DJ Pangburn at Death and Taxes lays out five additional countries ripe for bankdom to install leaders:
We present five other countries where Goldman Sachs could install bankers as heads of state.
Where to begin, though? Originally, I considered Ireland to be a prime candidate for some Goldman Sachs coup d’etat action, but it seems that Ireland already got the old Goldman Sachs in/out in the form of Peter Sutherland, a non-executive director of Goldman Sachs, as well as a non-executive at BP. Here are five countries that could use a little Goldman Sachs in/out.
Spain: With concerns in Italy lessening amidst the installation of ex-Goldman man Mario Monti as PM, bankers and investors in the eurozone and abroad are looking to Spain, which the BBC is calling the “weaker link in the eurozone chain.”
This is obviously the first country that requires a Goldman…
Bankers Undemocratically Installed As Heads Of Italy And Greece
In case you missed it, over the past eight days, the prime ministers of two major European nations stepped down. The newly appointed, not elected, leaders of Italy and Greece will be Mario Monti (formerly of Goldman Sachs) and Lucas Papademos (formerly head of the Central Bank of Greece). A signal that marriage between capitalism and democracy is coming to an end? The Independent writes:
The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic.
This…
Bank Bailouts Explained
Confused about what has unfolded since 2008? The sublime absurdity of bank bailouts and what we have(n’t) gotten in return, laid out in adorable animated form:
Chris Hedges’ Speech in Front of Goldman Sachs Leads to Arrest
Photo Courtesy of Chris Hedges
Via Nation of Change:
Chris Hedges made this statement in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on Thursday morning during the People’s Hearing on Goldman Sachs, which he chaired with Dr. Cornel West. The activist and Truthdig columnist then joined a march of several hundred protesters to the nearby corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs, where he was arrested with 16 others.
Goldman Sachs, which received more subsidies and bailout-related funds than any other investment bank because the Federal Reserve permitted it to become a bank holding company under its “emergency situation,” has used billions in taxpayer money to enrich itself and reward its top executives. It handed its senior employees a staggering $18 billion in 2009, $16 billion in 2010 and $10 billion in 2011 in mega-bonuses. This massive transfer of wealth upwards by the Bush and Obama administrations, now estimated at $13 trillion to $14 trillion, went into…
Goldman Sachs Rules The World
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.”…
Wrangling The Giant Vampire Squid
Matt 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…
Chris Hedges’s Endgame Strategy: Why The Revolution Must Start In America
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.
The Case Against Goldman Sachs
In 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…
Finance Capitalism is Causing Starvation
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…
Who Owns Facebook?
Business Insider charts who will be getting filthy rich when Facebook goes public in a year. Somehow, the answer is just what you most feared/suspected: Mark Zuckerberg, Goldman Sachs, and, somehow, Bono.
The Demise Of Facebook
Douglas 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.
Indeed, 11 years ago…
Goldman CEO Dodges Boxing Match With Journalist
Goldman 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. 10.
It’s…
Would Henry I Have Castrated Goldman Sachs?
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,…
Supreme Court Aids Corporate Fraudsters
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…
Vatican Official Tied To BP, Goldman Sachs And Media Censorship In The Oil Fiasco…
[disinformation ed's note: we're not sure whether to consider this so crazy that you can't make it up, or that actually you can - what do you think?] By Sherri Kane and Leonard G. Horowitz for rense.com:
News unfolding from the oil crisis in the Gulf of Mexico has linked media censorship to investment bankers at Goldman Sachs (GS) stewarding the Vatican’s wealth, and increasing evidence that the explosion was intended.
A near total news blackout from independent sources, and arrests of anyone caught photographing and filming the devastation, show the Halliburton-British Petroleum (BP) oil crisis is being criminally controlled, implicating some of Wall Street’s heaviest hitters.
According to a report issued by frightened, yet faithful, documentary filmmaker, James Fox, interviewed from the Gulf’s Grand Isles by Mel Fabregas on the Internet’s Veritas Radio Show, “There is a complete media blackout” on news coverage broadcast from the region.
“They are arresting people with cameras…
Worst CEO 2010: Goldman’s Blankfein vs. BP’s Hayward
Who gets your vote for most heinous CEO of the year? From Marketwatch:
Tony Hayward is Lloyd Blankfein’s new best friend. For months, Blankfein, chief executive of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has been the CEO ALTH (America Loves To Hate). He’s been defiant before Congress, unapologetic, a defender of ruthless Wall Street practices, invoking God and bare-knuckle capitalism in the same breath.
His firm has been accused of betting against clients, masking Greece’s debt problems, taking backdoor bailouts through American International Group Inc. and good, old-fashioned fraud.
Enter Hayward, the bumbling, stumbling chief executive of BP PLC, and the man ultimately responsible for the disaster that began April 20 on Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico.
Hayward’s BP is blamed for 11 dead workers, an environmental catastrophe, a slow and inadequate response and insensitivity to the havoc his company has sprung upon nature and the livelihood of those on the Gulf Coast.
In his…
Will Anyone At The Most Powerful Investment Bank Go To Jail?
Will Goldman survive the assault? Will the threat of criminal charges being pursued against the world’s leading investment bank spill over onto others on Wall Street? Is the criminalization of the crisis underway, or is all this just a maneuver?
For the last two years, I have felt lonely and isolated with my calls for a jail-out, and insistence that theft, fraud and crime are at the heart of our economic disaster. I have written two books documenting my contention and just released the film Plunder The Crime of Our Time treating the economy as crime scene.
There are a few other voices out there making a similar claim: Former bank regulator Bill Black; U.S. Senator Ted Kauffman; and even billionaire investor Jim Chanos, among them. Most politicians of both parties and media pundits have dismissed the suggestion, preferring to believe that virtually everyone was to blame and, hence, no one was to…
Let’s Give Goldman Sachs Their Own “Shitty Deal” (On Twitter)
In celebration of this paragon of capitalism, Goldman Sachs, on April 30th we’ll be giving away copies of Danny Schechter’s latest documentary on Wall Street fraud, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time (available now on DVD and iTunes) for those who Tweet the following:
Let’s Give Goldman Sachs Their Own “Shitty Deal” #Plunder #GoldmanSucks #FreeFriday http://bit.ly/cuUXky
(If you haven’t heard of the “shitty deal” yet read here.)
As always the more you Tweet the above phrase, the greater your chances of receiving a copy of Plunder on DVD. Here’s the trailer:
Goldman Sachs, In Their Own Words, Offered Investors A “Shitty Deal” (Video)
Goldman Sucks, I mean Sachs, this is priceless. Did you really have to destroy the U.S. economy to make C-SPAN this entertaining? Next time, instead of handing the potential investor a prospectus, why not just have them bend over? Via Countdown With Keith Olbermann:
