Goldman Sachs and “War Profiteering”

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Gaan Obama of 'de wal' het schip nog keren?
Denk het niet.
Obama heeft geen zin/mogelijkheden deze idioten aan te pakken, ze hebben
immers de eerder gekregen steun terugbetaald.

Deze lieden blijven wel profiteren van de 'high frequency trading' op Wall
Street en de andere financiele Amerikaanse markten (dmv eerder op de
hoogte te zijn van vraag en aanbod door technische kunstjes).

Dit profiteren gaat ten koste van alle andere handelaren, inclusief ONZE
pensioenfondsen.

Wanneer worden deze wakker? Of zijn hier andere belangen in het geding?

Groet / Cees

PS Misschien moeten de 'andere handelaren' hun tanden eens laten zien door
de markten die dit mogelijk maken te boycotten?

http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=8077
 Goldman Sachs and “War Profiteering”

By Martin Sieff | Thursday, October 22, 2009

The prospect of Goldman Sachs awarding record bonuses in the wake of the
financial collapse has the potential to incite a broad-based populist
backlash, argues Martin Sieff. He explores how Wall Street has roused the
public's ire in much the same way as did war profiteers in 1920s Weimar
Germany.

Why doesn't Goldman Sachs order its senior executives to wear silk top
hats and 19th century long jackets with tails, and encourage them to kick
beggars in the street with cable TV news teams covering them? They seem to
be doing everything else they possibly can to discredit the capitalist
system and make it despised after it has done so much to enrich the world.


On October 15, 2009, Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd C. Blankfein
confirmed that its annual bonus pool had soared above $23 billion — the
highest figure for bonuses in the company's history and double the 2008
figure.

The discontinuity between the good times on Wall Street and the woes on
Main Street is striking: The U.S. unemployment rate is now at 9.8% and
likely still climbing, and the ratio of the employed to the total U.S.
population is at the lowest level in a quarter century.

This has not gone un-noticed in American popular culture. One of the
biggest Country and Western music hits of the past year, sung by John
Rich, has the evocative title, "Shuttin' Detroit Down." It had the even
more revealing and politically charged lyric, "They're livin’ it up on
Wall Street in that New York City Town / "But in the real world, they're
shuttin’ Detroit down."

Country and Western music is not usually a medium of social protest in the
United States. It is highly patriotic, socially conservative and
celebrates family values. The huge success of Rich's song, however, echoes
the fierce anger in popular culture in 1920s Weimar Germany towards the
major business figures who were popularly perceived as having profited
from the horrors and heartbreaking losses of World War I.

The memory of that torn social fabric, the pain and anger it generated and
the chasm of cynicism and dangerous radicalism it opened up, can be seen
in the searing caricatures of George Grosz and Otto Dix. Substitute
"banker" for "war profiteer," and John Rich's audience would understand.

The United States has only experienced small and remarkably easily
contained strains of populist working class resentment over the past
century. Most of the populist passion was successfully channeled by the
two most politically successful and influential presidents of the century:

Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s during the long, drawn-out recovery
from the Great Depression, and Ronald Reagan following the oil/energy
price shocks and the collapse of much of U.S. manufacturing and heavy
industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

So far, indeed, the political ripples from the worst U.S. financial crisis
since the Great Depression and the worst jobs crisis in a generation have
been remarkably mild. As far as the two venerable parties on Capitol Hill
go, it's business as usual.

Republicans are confident they can make major gains at the Democrats'
expense in the November 2010 mid-term congressional elections. The
Democrats are focused not on bold, long-term reform programs, but on
looking statesmanlike, reassuring and moderate to centrist voters and
containing the GOP drive.

Neither party as yet widely fears any popular, angry surge of white
working class and lower middle class voters driven into hard times by the
failure of both Bush- and Obama-era policies.

However, if things don't get better over the next year and the executives
of Goldman Sachs and their colleagues keep handing out more billions to
each other, that may finally change.

Washington has bailed out many, though certainly not all, of the sinking
financial institutions and banks of Wall Street after the great financial
crisis of September 2008. Trillions of dollars of taxpayers money was
printed and poured into the effort. President Barack Obama gave the
bailout his own stamp of approval, making veteran Wall Street insider
Timothy Geithner his Treasury Secretary and keeping Bernanke on for
another term at the Fed.

If the domestic economy recovered under Obama, this cautious, centrist,
conventional behavior so typical of the president would have been
acclaimed as the epitome of wise statesmanship. But the economy has not
recovered in terms of reducing the unemployment figures.


The hemorrhaging of U.S. jobs has, if anything, only accelerated under
Obama. Even Bush never had to contend with 10% unemployment rates such as
the American people are on the brink of today.

In such a climate, the continued self-aggrandizement of the Wall Street
financial elite to the tune of multiple billions of dollars at a time —
right after they have been bailed out by trillions of dollars of
government money — runs the risk of creating a bitter, broad and
long-lasting reaction.

Resentment of so-called war profiteers played a surprisingly large role in
American politics in the 1920s and early 1930s. It helped create the
climate of isolationism that kept the United States far from any desire to
use its vast weight to stabilize or rescue Europe in the fateful decade of
the 1930s when Adolf Hitler, flanked by other fascist dictators and
demagogues, came to power.

So deeply felt was the hatred of war profiteers that Republican
Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia of New York famously tried to push through
legislation mandating the death penalty for them. He failed, but his
effort didn't hurt his political career.


As mayor, LaGuardia, although a Republican, became one of the most
powerful and important allies of President Roosevelt in pushing through
the financial system and social security reforms of the New Deal.

LaGuardia understood that FDR was not demolishing capitalism, but rescuing
it from the excesses, greed and reckless stupidity that had brought on the
Wall Street crash and the Great Depression.

Far from preserving or defending capitalism, the executives of Goldman
Sachs and their Wall Street colleagues are discrediting it in ways that
Marx and Lenin would gleefully applaud.

-------------
Today's Country and Western music echoes the fierce anger in popular
culture in 1920s Weimar Germany towards war profiteers.
-------------
Resentment of so-called war profiteers played a surprisingly large role in
American politics in the 1920s and early 1930s.
-------------
The United States has only experienced small and remarkably easily
contained strains of populist working class resentment over the past
century.
-------------
Neither party as yet widely fears any popular, angry surge of working
class voters. But if Goldman Sachs keeps handing out billions in bonuses,
that may finally change.
He went on to become a three-term mayor of New York City, and arguably the
greatest in its history.
-------------

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