I'm doing 'God's work'. Meet Mr Goldman Sachs »
Posted By Progressive 1 week, 5 days ago in Business & FinanceWhatever you call him, Lloyd Blankfein says he’s just a banker “doing God’s work.” The Sunday Times profiles money-making machine Goldman Sachs, and the result is maddening, inspiring, or amusing, depending on where you fall on the populist-rage scale. The newspaper says that for Blankfein, Goldman’s CEO, “the credit crunch has rekindled his innate passion for moneymaking.” Learn how the bank makes its money and how its alums end up with choice political appointments, all in their own words: "We didn’t f*** up like the other guys… So, now we’ve got a bigger and richer pot to **** in." “We don’t club baby seals. We club babies." Adds a rival, "They’re a clever gang—of thugs."
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Progressive
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. -- Oscar Wilde
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Progressive1 week, 4 days ago
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Hardly. Goldman Sachs is no longer privately owned.
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FTA:
Blankfein is a good advertisement for wealth creation. His own. He is no scion of privilege, dispensing plummy-voiced homilies to raw capitalism from his 30th-floor eyrie. Born in a tough neighborhood in the Bronx, the son of a postal worker and a receptionist, he was the first in his family to go to college and used financial aid to go to Harvard.
Even though he proudly pays himself more in a year than most of us could ever dream of — $68m in 2007 alone, a record for any Wall Street CEO, to add to the more than $500m of Goldman stock he owns — he insists he’s still "a blue-collar guy". -
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hyperbola1 week, 3 days ago
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Well, it is certainly true that Blankfein is an adherent of the "old-testament-god" as an israel-first zionist. The same is true of almost all the other CEOs of the "investment" banks and "insurers" that the zionists in the Bush/Obama administrations (Greenspan, Paulson, Summers, Bernanke, ......) have just "bailed out" with TRILLIONS of taxpayer money.
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Time to get back to CEOs not being paid more than 40 times average workers salaries - as we had only 30 years ago before Reagan put the "super-rich" swindles and abuse into place. -
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hyperbola1 week, 3 days ago
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Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire
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Bankers, Zionists, Militants
.... The financial ruling class is internally stratified into three sub-groups: at the top are big private equity bankers and hedge-fund managers, followed by the Wall Street chief executives, who in turn are above the next rung of senior associates or vice-presidents of big private equity funds who are followed by their counterparts at Wall Street's public equity funds. Top hedge fund managers and executive have made $1 billion dollars or more a year-several times what the CEOs make at publicly traded investment houses. For example in 2006 Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs....
.... Within the financial ruling class, political leadership does not usually come from the richest hedge fund speculators, even less from among the junior bankers. Political leaders come from the public and private equity banks, namely Wall Street-especially Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group and others. They organize and fund both major parties and their electoral campaigns. They pressure, negotiate and draw up the most comprehensive and favorable legislation on global strategies (liberalization and deregulation) and sectoral policies (reductions in taxes, government pressure on countries like China to 'open' their financial services to foreign penetration and so on). They pressure the government to bail out bankrupt and failed speculative firms and to balance the budget by lowering social expenditures instead of raising taxes on speculative 'windfall' profits.
... The greater the salaries, bonuses, profits and rents for the financial ruling class engaged in 'restructuring' for M [mergers and acquisitions] , the greater the decline in living standards for the working and middle classes.
.... Inequality in the distribution of national income in the US is the worst in the entire developed capitalist world. Moreover studies of time series data reveal that in the US the inequality increase was far greater and intergenerational social mobility was far more difficult than in any country in Western Europe. The growth of monstrous and rigid class inequalities reflects the narrow social base of an economy dominated by finance capital, its ingrown intergenerational linkages and the exorbitant entry fees (ranging around $50,000 per annum tuition with room and board) to elite private universities and post-graduate business schools. Equally important,)finance capital and its associated conglomerates wield uncontested political power in the US in comparison to their counterparts in any country in Europe. As a result the US government redistributes far less through the tax and social security, health and educational system than other countries.
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hyperbola1 week, 3 days ago
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An overwhelming chunk of the funds that Democrats raise nationally for election campaigns comes either from Wall Street financiers or Silicon Valley software entrepreneurs. The Democratic congressional electoral campaign was tightly controlled by two of Wall Street's favorite Democrats, Senator Charles 'Israel First' Schumer and Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who selectively funded candidates who were pro-war, pro-Wall Street and unconditionally pro-Israel....
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.... Political corruption, not economic efficiency, is the driving force of economic empire-building. Its success is evident from the massive-trillion dollar-transfers of wealth, enterprises and resources from the state sector to US/EU MNCs which has taken place in Russia, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Baltic countries and the Caucasus since the fall of communism. The scale and scope of Western pillage of the East is unprecedented in recent world history. In their European conquests, neither Stalin nor Hitler took over and profited from so many enterprises as have the Western MNCs over the past two decades. What is worse, the initial pillage set in motion an entire international political system embedded with kleptocratic pro-Western free market regimes, which constructed legislative frameworks that facilitated high rates of return. For example, legislation on reductions of wages, pensions, job tenure, work place safety and health regulations, and land use policies in the ex-communist countries were designed and enforced to maximize profits-and 'attract US and EU MNCs with their hard currencies. Pillage and political corruption created a mass of low paid, precarious, underemployed and unemployed workers who are available for exploitation by overseas US corporations and their partners, the overseas institutional investors looking for high return.
Corruption is especially prevalent in several sectors of MNCs' overseas operations. Arms sales, involving billions annually, is rampant with corruption as the military-industrial firms bribe state officials to purchase US weaponry. Military purchases, most with no real security value, deplete local treasuries of funds, while raising profit margins for the arms industries of a number of states, but mostly the US, and the institutional investors who engage in overseas investments....
..... The entire network of MNCs criss-crossing the globe and forging political and economic compacts with corrupt political leaders forms the basis of contemporary economic empires. -
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hyperbola1 week, 3 days ago
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... The structure of the imperial system is based on the power of ruling classes to exercise and project state and market power, to retain control of exploitative class relations at home and abroad, and to organize mercenary armies from among their client states. Led and directed by imperial officials, mercenary armies collaborate in destroying autonomous popular nationalist movements and independent states.
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Israel is clearly a colonialist power, with the fourth or fifth biggest nuclear arsenal and the fourth biggest arms exporter in the world. Its population, territorial spread and economy, however, are puny in comparison with the imperial and newly emerging imperial powers. Despite these limitations Israel exercises supreme power in influencing the direction of United States war policy in the Middle East via a powerful internal Zionist political apparatus, which permeates the state, the mass media, elite economic sectors and civil society. Through Israel's direct political influence in making US foreign policy, as well as through its overseas military collaboration with dictatorial imperial client regimes, Israel can be considered part of the imperial power configuration despite its demographic constraints, its near universal pariah diplomatic status, and its externally sustained economy.....
.... For the first time in the history of world empires, a tiny ethnic-religious minority representing less than two percent of the population is able to shape US policy in the Middle East to serve the colonial interests of a foreign country (Israel), which represents less than one percent of the population of the Middle East. And indeed, within Israel itself, given occasional polls indicating Jewish Israeli preference for peace over maintenance of settler colonies, that number shrinks even further. The Zionist power configuration in the US, with several hundred thousand fanatical activists throughout the country, can mobilize close to 98 percent of the US Congress on any legislation favoring Israel. AIPAC (the America-Israel Political Affairs Committee), with one hundred thousand members and 100 full time agents writes over 100 pieces of Congressional legislation affecting US trade, military aid, and sanctions policies favoring Israel every year.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Petras_James/Rul...
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