Goldman Sachs: Bullies on the Block
by ilene - September 14th, 2010 3:25 pm
Goldman Sachs: Bullies on the Block
Courtesy of Janet Tavakoli, President, Tavakoli Structured Finance
Originally published in Huffington Post
Arianna Huffington’s new book, Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream speaks for the disenfranchised middle class: Americans that have lost wages, lost jobs, lost value in homes, and lost substantial value in investments and retirement funds. The U.S. middle class is being scammed out of existence. Wall Street and large corporate special interests — including energy companies, large financial institutions, drug companies, and the large military industrial complex — effectively bought Washington.
For most Americans, the Great Recession never ended, and for many of the 14.9 million unemployed Americans, it’s a 21st century Depression. Yet in December 2009, Larry Summers, director of the White House National Economic Council, told ABC news: "Today, everybody agrees that the recession is over, and the question is what the pace of the expansion is going to be."
The recession was over for bailed-out banks paying billions in bonuses. Taxpayers fund Wall Street with nearly zero-cost loans, and Congress changed accounting rules in April 2009 so that Wall Street firms could hide losses to create the illusion of "big profits," as they try to fill the gaping holes in their balance sheets.
Money Cartel’s Yes Men
The money cartel is as dangerous as the Mexican drug cartel. Its weapons of choice are taxpayer subsidized funds for swarms of Washington lobbyists, "money jobs" for politically connected yes men, and lucrative positions for former regulators and the law firms that hire them. Wall Street is winning the class war, and taxpayers supplied the arms.
[White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel famously declared, "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go