The Goldman Sachs NIghtmare Casino

After reading the excellent, must-read Matt Taibbi article The Great American Bubble Machine in the current issue of Rolling Stone I have started seeing articles wailing about the gray-suited vampire lord Goldman Sachs just about everywhere. Here's today's, from Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

The Goldman profits and the manner in which the very same people who brought the financial world to its knees last year, are getting rewarded humongous bonuses with taxpayer dollars (read: YOUR dollars) shows that what is being practiced in America is no longer capitalism but a means of socializing losses while privatizing gains. It's as though the entire financial system is a nightmare casino where, no matter what you do, the house run by Da Mob find ways to suck money out of anyone who is dumb enough to play.

What I really don't get is why people aren't more ticked off. The uber rich are p*ssing on the citizens and calling it rain. How docile and cattle-like have we Americans become? For all our flag-waving and tiny flag pins on our lapels, we have forgotten how to stand tall, to duck our heads to no man and to fight the machine.

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From Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine" in Rolling Stone Issue 1082-83.

QUOTE The 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. UNQUOTE
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Not This Again...

Remember the fellows who shipped pallets of American tax dollars to Iraq and then promtly "lost" them? They're back...

The first order of business for Mr. Obama's cabinet -- and one that really cannot wait until inauguration --must be halting the robbery-in-progress known as the "economic bailout." The authors linked to herein have spent a month examining the loopholes and conflicts of interest
embedded in the U.S. Treasury Department's plans. The results of that research can be found in a just published feature article in Rolling Stone, The New Trough as well as recent Naomi Klein Nation column, Bush's Final Pillage.

QUOTE Bankers watching bankers, regulators who don't believe in regulating — all standard fare for the Bush crew. What's most striking about Jeffery's résumé, however, is an item omitted when his new job was announced:
He served as executive director of Paul Bremer's infamous Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, during the early days of the Iraq War.

Part of his job was to hire civilian staff, which made him an integral part of the
partisan machine that filled Baghdad's Green Zone with Young Republicans,
investment bankers and Dick Cheney interns. Qualifications weren't a big
issue back then, because the staff's main function was to hand over stacks
of taxpayer money to private contractors, who were the ones actually
running the occupation. It was this nonstop cash conveyor belt that earned
the Green Zone a reputation, in the words of one CPA official, as "a free
-fraud zone."

During Senate hearings last year, when Jeffery was asked
what he had learned from his experience at the CPA, he said contracts
should be handed out with more "speed and flexibility" — the same
philosophy he cited back while in charge of regulating Wall Street traders.UNQUOTE

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