It is an astounding thing to me as I sit here in this period of history and realise that people in the United States are going to sit passively by and let us all be impoverished. Yet I ask myself what really is one to do? Some commentators think we the people should be hammering down doors demanding our money back from the banksters who held the government hostage. Take one as respectable as Alice Schroeder of Bloomberg's Financial Service, quoted in Mandelman's Monthly Museletter:
The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.
Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman’s greed “God’s work” and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were “clearly wrong.” Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology.
No, talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.
And if the proles really do appear brandishing pitchforks at the doors of Park Avenue and the gates of Round Hill Road, you can be sure that the Goldman guys and their families will be holed up in their safe rooms with their firearms. If nothing else, that pistol permit might go part way toward explaining why they won’t be standing outside with the rest of the crowd, broke and humiliated, saying, “Damn, I was on the wrong side of a trade with Goldman again.”
Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and — oh yes — the other banks. People “were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.”
The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.
Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman’s greed “God’s work” and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were “clearly wrong.” Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology.
No, talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.
And if the proles really do appear brandishing pitchforks at the doors of Park Avenue and the gates of Round Hill Road, you can be sure that the Goldman guys and their families will be holed up in their safe rooms with their firearms. If nothing else, that pistol permit might go part way toward explaining why they won’t be standing outside with the rest of the crowd, broke and humiliated, saying, “Damn, I was on the wrong side of a trade with Goldman again.”
Henry Paulson, U.S. Treasury secretary during the bailout and a former Goldman Sachs CEO, let it slip during testimony to Congress last summer when he explained why it was so critical to bail out Goldman Sachs, and — oh yes — the other banks. People “were unhappy with the big discrepancies in wealth, but they at least believed in the system and in some form of market-driven capitalism. But if we had a complete meltdown, it could lead to people questioning the basis of the system.”
The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.
And yet I ask myself, how exactly does one go about fomenting a revolution on the streets? Call me bourgeois but I have no idea exactly how to do that...Should i mount the Bonneville and ride to Wall Street and wave a red flag demanding the return of our cash and power to the people? Who exactly do these banksters think is going to come after them and engage in a running street battle with them? Is New York in 2010 about ready to resemble St Petersburg in 1917?
It is a curious thing to me how Americans have taken their lumps and failed to stand up and be the least bit annoyed in public with modern leadership. We find ourselves deprived of representative government by the interference of big business, we live daily with policies designed to loot our treasury and deprive us of jobs, health care and homes. we have no sense of security, no sense of our established place in the order of things, and yet we sit passively by and allow our country to be looted. How odd it is. I wonder what people alive today will tell future generations when they ask why our generation failed to act? In the 1960s we Baby Boomers acted in unison in opposition to the direct threat of the draft and war in Vietnam, but today we sit idly by and watch that heritage get looted without so much as a hiss of anger. I feel like I have an inkling of how ordinary people in Germany in the 1930s found themselves allowing the Nazis to take over their country. I guess it just kind of happened...you know? (Silent embarrassment ensues).