“For this revolution is not, in fact, concerned with
liberating us from our poverty and misery, but rather
from our wealth and our totally excessive prosperity.
It is not a liberation from what we lack, but from
our consumerism in which we are ultimately consuming
our very selves. It is not a liberation from our
state of oppression, but from the untransformed
praxis of our own wishes and desires. It is not a
liberation from our powerlessness, but from our own
form of predominance. It frees us, not from the state
of being dominated, but from that of dominating; not
from our suffering, but from our apathy; not from our
guilt, but from our innocence, or rather from that
delusion of innocence which the life of domination
has long since spread out in our souls.” - Johann
Baptist Metz, “Christians and Jews After Auschwitz”

The disease that Matt Taibbi diagnoses in “Will
Goldman Sachs Prove Greed is God?” is far deeper than
he imagines. It is a sickness in the social soul
which all of us share and which can only be healed
through the revolution which Metz envisions for us.
The “prosperity” which is the unquestioned goal of
virtually every conscious decision made is precisely
the sickness that is destroying us, beginning with
the corruption of reason into a pure instrument of
acquisition. Mother Earth cries out in compassion for
her lost children who are unable to understand the
sacrifices required for life to flourish. We have
turned ourselves into machines fueled by other men’s
greed and only by embracing poverty of spirit can we
be saved.

Our false wishes and desires cry out for
transformation. In some secret room in our soul, we
know that the current direction of our society is an
evolutionary and spiritual dead end, yet we cannot
bear to pull the emergency cord on this train
hurtling into the abyss. Instead, we heighten the
illusions that nourish our decay and demand miracles
of the God of our imagination. In doing this, we
continually contribute to the true catastrophe, the
one “which consists in the fact that everything goes
on as before” - Walter Benjamin.

The word that best characterizes this revolution is
conversion, but not the purely privatized conversion
presented by Christianity Incorporated, that wholly
owned subsidiary of the transnational corporations. A
private conversion that has no social ramifications
is a pure fiction for those who inhabit an
inescapably political landscape of domination and
subjugation. Such is the delusion of innocence that
rots our souls with idealistic fetishes presented as
true salvation in the mega-churchs, those mega-malls
of spiritual consumerism. Jesus should once more to
overturn the stalls of these buyers and sellers of
spiritual fraud. The prayer that God will gladly hear
is the one that crucifies our false prosperity built
on the exploitation of those little ones whose deaths
we casually encompass for the sake of our SUVs.

We can embrace this conversion only when we are able
to break the chain of immediate self-interest, the
chain which Goldman Sachs gleefully wraps around
itself and the government it pretends to obey. This
sickness eats into our reason to the point that
Goldman Sachs executives declare that, “The
injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an
endorsement of self-interest.” - Matt Taibbi. This
was said in the context of defrauding an entire
country of its budget and plunging it into social
chaos.

God calls to us to shed this false wealth that makes
us lackeys of financial domination, of that world of
“greed without limit” that is casting its shadow over
us and to which we must succumb if we cannot change
our hearts and the heart of our society.

Watching President Obama give his Wall Street speech yesterday I was reminded of that scene in the movie Mephisto, where the actor tries to get the Nazi official to change a policy, and the officer replies: “Who do you think you are? You are only an actor, we can have you crushed like a beetle.”
Sadly, the President appears to be a very silly man indeed. Only weeks ago he praised Dimon and Blankfein as “savvy businessmen” who did not begrudge their monetary appetites, because, as the President said “That’s how our system works”.
And now President Obama’s call for Wall Street cooperation is not only silly, but downright pathetic.

What troubles me most are the fates of thousands of people who lost their homes and their savings accounts when it all came crashing down. Regulations on derivatives needs to come in and it needs to come in fast, that or its to seperate the industry into banking and gambling. Anyone involved in the savings of millions of hardworking americans should be regulated and prevented from diving into casino like banking ventures.

The government financial ministers of the U.K., France, Netherland, Germany,
Belgium, Russia all are recommending that their countries no longer deal with
Goldman Saks.  It is becoming increasingly clear that the financial crisis was set
up in the U.S. deliberately and that the U.S. will only seem to do something
about their culture of wholesale theft setting up another round of the same
thing unless the E.U. forces real change

The Polish plane crash may have been set up with this in mind.  The U.S has
been colonizing Poland through it’s NATO for many years.  They profess to be
protectors.  Why did they allow the old President to control the plane trip plans
from beginning to end?  Why did no-one step in and say, “No!  Split up the
party of 96 into several new planes, or, even better, all get on trains. Differing
trains, not one.

Many across the world will be wondering this.

We can forget that then..

Common Cause tried for at least thirty years to get
some meaningful campaign finance reform through,  at
times had a lot of punch and funds, still couldn’t
penitrate Capitol Hill.  What we got is what we are stuck
with,  we voted them in, we can’t get them out.
It should be illegal to take any contributions out of
district,  most representatives get more money outside
their district.

Say what you want about “Goldman-Sacks-the-people-every-chance-they-get” but the bottom line is money in politics.  Aggressive regulation would leash that dog.

Everything else, given the current system,  is just fluff and speculation.  MONEY TALKS.  LOUDLY!

It seems to me that it is relative easy to devise a scheme to mitigate the effect of money in our political system.  After all, we are a fairly mature democracy with a pretty intelligent population.  But don’t expect the mainstream media to beat that drum.  Most of the political money spent on elections goes into their pockets.

Too bad.  But one step at a time can accomplish wonders.  Public financing of elections would probably save us more money then we would have to spend on them.

I hope I’m wrong, but I expect the SEC will offer them one of those “we don’t admit we did it and we won’t do it again” settlements. Goldman will pay a fine (that hurts them less than a traffic violation hurts a working man) and go back to business as usual.

Ardee did you intentionally leave out the last sentence?
“That vessel ought to be our president, who campaigned
as the champion of the common people.”

That sentence is funny and the most telling of the article

p.s.  turn off Bill Mayer, Colbert, and Sterart!!!!!!!!!
I believe the tea bag thingy is a media made up
scare tactic using a bunch of campaign money left
over from O’s election to keep the minorities scared of
the repubs and vote democrat instead of McKinney.

@richardf “Anger at this point is a waste of time (agreed!)…Rome is burning and we need to form a bucket brigade.”

But why? Better to throw gasoline on it & Let It Burn, Baby!

Will Obama Return $994,795 In Goldman Sachs Campaign Contributions?

http://www.OpenSecrets.org

April 20, 2010

This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2008 election
cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money
came from the organization’s PAC, its individual members or employees or
owners, and those individuals’ immediate families. Organization totals
include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many
individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential
candidates. These contributions can come from the organization’s members
or employees (and their families). The organization may support one
candidate, or hedge its bets by supporting multiple candidates. Groups
with national networks of donors – like EMILY’s List and Club for Growth
– make for particularly big bundlers.

University of California $1,591,395
Goldman Sachs $994,795
Harvard University $854,747
Microsoft Corp $833,617
Google Inc $803,436
Citigroup Inc $701,290
JPMorgan Chase & Co $695,132
Time Warner $590,084
Sidley Austin LLP $588,598
Stanford University $586,557
National Amusements Inc $551,683
UBS AG $543,219
Wilmerhale Llp $542,618
Skadden, Arps et al $530,839
IBM Corp $528,822
Columbia University $528,302
Morgan Stanley $514,881
General Electric $499,130
US Government $494,820
Latham & Watkins $493,835

Thank you FreeWill

When Bill Clinton was asked on ABC’s Sunday show “This Week” if he now regretted the advice he received back then from Rubin and his protégé Lawrence Summers, now a top Obama adviser, he responded: “On derivatives, yeah, I think they were wrong and I was wrong to take it. …”

Mr Clinton, a democrat mind you, took the Reagan deregulation agenda into overdrive and presided over 8 years of a false economy hallmarked by overheating of values in all investment sectors. He helped put the term “leveraged” on the map as the new business model for a country shedding companies and jobs across many “industry sectors” and replacing them with service sector jobs and alot of fly by night IPO driven companies long since gone to the cyber “bad idea” afterlife.

Along the way, he recast the democratic ideal as “centrist” which is code for cow-tow to the right and get the vote at any cost…even at the expense of shedding your values and leaving the most vulnerable in our “great society” permanently out in the rain.

Now we have Mr Blankfein coming to Washington to tell his side of the story. You can rail against his kind and hold him up as the arch villain but know this…he is a favorite son of modern American society. He was begat and nurtured in a corporate culture that rewards those that step on the throats of the competition and squeeze every last profit margin until they implode.

I have one recommendation for our elected officials that will hold court with Mr Blankfein. Simply ask him to bring the Goldman Sachs policies and procedures manual to DC and read / explain the sections covering their “derivatives” investment division. Provide him a white board and let him (along with his “best and brightest” that hatched it) write out the algorithm for this profit making venture and process map the division’s workings…step by step by step.

When they say they can’t explain or produce what the panel is asking for…don’t get angry…take a breath and look into the face of the spawn of capitalism and deregulation then start thinking about the future of this country and what is truly sustainable.

Anger at this point is a waste of time…Rome is burning and we need to form a bucket brigade.

The RICO act was Formed just to handle this type of mass corruption, fraud, and theft.  But who is there to enforce it, when it is the government itself and the judicial system who are in collusion with the perpetrators?  No, we will not see justice or resolution to these crimes until things deteriorate to the point where people fill the streets in protest. So far the largely complacent, uninformed (brainwashed by the media) populace can barely muster enough coalescence to form a misguided out lash of rage to have a “Tea Party event”.  We need to stop expecting the government, or some one else to do the right thing and save us from this evil. We have been deluded, well fed, fat and asleep, while the big financial interests have stolen our frail democracy. Only action of the people, by the people, for the people, will get it back.

Excellent report Robert, you are a great Patriot to our Democratic Republic and our Constitution. We can not let Democracy fall to Fascism, followed by Totalitarianism. The real shadow government (the government in our government) is the Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg members who are on their New World Order agenda; a Totalitarian agenda of World banking control and power. By World banker design, the destiny of Greece will soon be our own fate.

Goldman Sachs has engineered EVERY MAJOR market manipulation since the Great Depression! They WERE A MAJOR CAUSE OF THE STOCK MARKET CRASH of October 1929! How? By doing pretty much what they do now!
They ALL NEED TO BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE!
I KNEW after Enron it was just a matter of time before Wall St. ‘misdeeds’ rather, CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES would hit the fan!
They SHOULD be indicted under the RICO Act Laws: FRAUD, EMBEZZLEMENT, MONEY LAUNDERING, EXTORTION, BLACK MAIL, ETC.
see:  http://www.ricoact.com/ricoact/nutshell.asp

See: Goldman Sachs: “Engineering Every Major Market Manipulation Since The Great Depression”
by Tyler Durden on 06/27/2009 16:51 -0500

The Great American Bubble Machine: By Matt Taibbi
Apr 05, 2010 3:58 PM EDT @ Rollingstone.com

Commodity Futures Modernization Act was rammed in the budget bill and voted by the Democrats and Republicans except Ron Paul.
The Hero and my Person of the Decade was shoved under the rug Brooksley E. Born and the same idiots who shove her out of office are still in the Obama’s Admin.

“Brooksley E. Born” is an American attorney and former public official who, from August 26, 1996 to June 1, 1999, was chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency which oversees the futures and commodity options markets. During her tenure on the CFTC, Born lobbied Congress and the President to give the CFTC oversight of off-exchange markets for derivatives in addition to its role with respect to exchange-traded derivatives,but her warnings were opposed by other regulators.

Greenspan, Ben B current Fed Chairperson, Summers, Tres. Sec Rubin, Tres. Sec Paulson, Freddy and Fanny
“Government Run or Controlled companies that were ruin by the government themselves.

However Goldman Sachs and all the other partipants should all be put in jail. And Free Bernie Maddoff let us make him Federal Reserve Chairman because he can run the best sham company.
Peace

Yes, our Nation’s History is one of Corporate control ... to a point. It wasn’t until the late 1800’s and early 1900’s that a need to regulate those Corporations became necessary.
Businesses have to have some leeway and even some protections in order to survive and generate jobs, products/services and dividends.
All we see any more is Greed. Plain and simple.
What CEO is worth multi-millions in salary with bonuses and perks on top of that? I’m not talking about a CEO who founded a company and guided it to profitability. I’m talking about the guy who was hired to run an existing firm.
The Wall Street ‘bandits’ traded on their past reputation and put out ‘offerings’ that most didn’t understand. Offerings that were designed to fail so someone else could reap profits.
The Party of No sees nothing wrong with that. They don’t understand how to make money the old fashioned way ... by earning it. They want to make money using smoke and mirrors.
The teabaggers want lower taxes. They can’t see that fraud and waste are the real problems, along with Congress Critters who are more interested in their offshore secret accounts than doing what is best for the Country.
While the teabaggers are seen as being against the Democrat’s, some Republicans, notably in Ohio, are realizing that they too are under the gun. As they should be.
It will be interesting to see how many Incumbents survive the Midterm Elections. Very few should.

It is contrary to good prudence that there be even larger and fewer financial corporations. If they mess up again it’ll be even more likely that a bailout will ensue. There will be no redundancy to fall back upon.

Goldman and the other mega(s) are eyeing a scenario where the EU regulates derivatives and the U.S. does nothing. What an apple!

Sen. McConnell want to stay the status quo while touting a “no more bailout” platform. I’ve got an island to sell him. These mega-banks or whatever they are, have to be broken up.

It took Teddy Roosevelt 10 years to break up Standard Oil. We should lay the ground work now.

It is insulting to the spirit of populist revolt, which has been fundamental to the success of America’s grand experiment in democracy, that a fat-cat Republican-funded tea party revolt is now the vessel of popular anti-Wall Street discontent.

I truly wonder if this is a true assessment of our nation’s historical beginnings. Certainly a few colonials threw some tea overboard to protest taxes that were not benefiting the colonies, and certainly both Jefferson and Madison repeatedly warned about the dangers of unfettered corporate entities controlling an infant democracy. But, on balance, this nations history is one of corporate control rather than control of corporations.

I would also question the thrust of the Tea Party movement as a protest against Wall Street, more accurately I think it an unfocused assault on a Democratic Party controlled Washington DC.