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Goldman HQ in Manhattan
CEO Blankfein
That was THEN….
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…..Matt Taibbi’s explosive Goldman exposés
Goldman triggered the horrific Great Depression of 1929-41, during which millions of white Americans died of hunger, poverty, despair and alcoholism. AND it caused the current Great Recession 2009-present, which Trump is papering over with huge tax cuts and exploding budget deficits.
This article originally appeared in the July 9-23, 2009 of Rolling Stone magazine.
Excerpts:
I ask the manager how it could be that selling something to customers that you’re actually betting against — particularly when you know more about the weaknesses of those products than the customer — doesn’t amount to securities fraud.
“It’s exactly securities fraud,” he says. “It’s the heart of securities fraud.”
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After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?
Fourteen million dollars.
That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent.
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It’s not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there’s a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years.
You can’t really register the fact that you’re no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you’re no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight […]
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It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics [….]
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How Goldman deliberately screwed its own clients
Lloyd Blankfein went to Washington and testified under oath that Goldman Sachs didn’t make a massive short bet and didn’t bet against its clients. The Levin report proves that Goldman spent the whole summer of 2007 riding a “big short” and took a multibillion-dollar bet against its clients, a bet that incidentally made them enormous profits.
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…My email exchange with the brave and honest Jew, Neil Barofsky, who ran the banks bailout in 2009
https://johndenugent.com/my-first-video-and-they-hate-it-the-most-the-feds-top-secret/
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