|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By Kurt Vonnegut
$17.82
 . '/' . substr('9781888451788',-6,3) . '/' . '9781888451788' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Ron Kovic
$40
|
|
|
|
AP / Richard Drew
|
By Chris Hedges — When the bailout trillions run out, Wall Street’s maladjusted gamblers will come back for more until our currency becomes junk. Not that any of these people, who exhibit the same traits as psychopaths, have thought this through.
|
AP / Haraz N. Ghanbari
|
By Robert Scheer — Maybe I got it wrong. During the presidential campaign I wrote columns blasting Sen. John McCain for siding with the big bankers on deregulation, citing his choosing ex-Sen. Phil Gramm, currently a vice chairman of the Swiss-owned banking giant UBS, as his presidential campaign chair.
|
Flickr / saebaryo
|
McClatchy reporters have been digging into the shady offshore dealings of Goldman Sachs and what they found in the records of the financial-meltdown villain is as maddening as you’d expect. (continued)
|
AP / Mark Lennihan
|
Was there ever a time when Goldman Sachs was more, um, ethical and client-centric than greedy and profit-driven, as its reputation now suggests? That’s debatable, but whatever its previous corporate ethos might have been, all signs point to Goldman’s current chairman and CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, as the major driving force behind the firm’s push for building bigger profits quicker these days.
|
AP / Susan Walsh
|
On Monday at the White House, President Barack Obama reminded a group of big banking honchos (or “fat cats,” as he called them Sunday) about last year’s bailout and advised them to get busy helping the taxpayers who helped with their recovery. Well, good luck with that one.
|
Flickr / antiparticle
|
Goldman Sachs has had a record year in terms of employee earnings—The Wall Street Journal says Goldman’s 31,000 worker bees brought in an average of more than $700,000 each in 2009—and that would be better news for the firm if it hadn’t been on the receiving end of major federal funding from last year’s bailout.
|
|
Bank of America has been cleared by the U.S. government to repay the $45 billion in TARP funds it received last year at the height of the banking crisis, and BofA may be preparing to do so before 2009 comes to a close. That said, it’s not a foregone conclusion that the transaction will take place this month, even though the company has some built-in motivation to quickly make good on its payback promise.
Posted on Dec 2, 2009
READ MORE 
|
AP / Jose Luis Magana
|
By Robert Scheer — Jail, anyone? Perhaps that’s too harsh, and at any rate premature, but is anyone ever going to be held accountable for the behind-the-scenes sweetheart deals that passed tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through the AIG shell game to the very banks that caused the financial meltdown?
|
|
Those entitled Wall Street types at Goldman Sachs are apparently oblivious to the fact that they’re having some PR issues of late—either that, or they don’t really care. Either way, “SNL” stars Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers make them the brunt of their jokes in this clip from last weekend’s show.
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
That Timothy Geithner must love the big banks he spends all day talking to. Back when he was in charge of things, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York forced AIG to pay off Wall Street tycoons for all those toxic bets, even though the mega-insurer was busy trying to negotiate a better deal.
|
AP / Gerald Herbert
|
By Robert Scheer — Who are these people? I am not referring to the pathetic parents of “Balloon Boy,” whose fake drama I have been unable to escape while on the treadmill this week, thanks to my gym’s insistence on tuning its flat-screen TVs to Wolf Blitzer’s nonstop self-parody.
|
AP / Al Behrman
|
If it seems contradictory (read: hypocritical) that former Rep. Dick Gephardt, at one time a self-styled anti-lobbying, pro-labor crusader, would become a lobbyist for Visa and Goldman Sachs, well, that’s because it is. Oh, and you can strike “pro-environment” off of Gephardt’s list of political poses, too.
|
infiniteunknown.com
|
It’s unsurprising to say the least: A Freedom of Information Act request has discovered that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is in daily two-way communication with a small group of Wall Street CEOs—at Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs—while lawmakers like Rep. Xavier Becerra are forced to leave messages for him.
|
AP / Charles Dharapak
|
By Robert Scheer — A president has only so much capital to expend, both in tax dollars and public tolerance, and Barack Obama is dangerously overdrawn. He has tried to have it all on three fronts, and his administration is in serious danger of going bankrupt.
|
Flickr / World Resources Institute Staff
|
It’s been nearly a year since Lehman Brothers went belly-up, effectively kicking off the financial implosion of fall 2008. However, despite the firm’s catastrophic demise, some Lehman execs managed to land on their feet. Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal gives an update about their current activities.
|
AP / Mark Lennihan
|
By Robert Scheer — By now everybody must know that the top banking executives responsible for our economic meltdown have no shame. Otherwise they would not have dared give themselves such hefty bonuses as a deeply perverse reward for actions that caused millions of Americans to lose their jobs and homes.
|
Collage: Flickr / david.nikonvscanon and Staples.com
|
By Marie Cocco — The arithmetic of this recession still looks pretty dismal and the politics and psychology of it are starting to become disconnected from reality in a scary way.
|
AP / Mark Lennihan
|
By Robert Scheer — Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation’s history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well?
|
taisha.org
|
Fresh off the bailout, Goldman Sachs raked in $3.44 billion in net profit this quarter, beating analysts’ already high expectations, and the firm’s success will pay off for employees in the form of generous bonuses. Not surprisingly, pro-Goldman types think this is all good news.
|
Flickr / antiparticle
|
Goldman Sachs is expected to announce a windfall quarter, thanks no doubt to billions in bailout money, but many people at the firm aren’t puffing their chests out. According to the Financial Times, Goldman executives dumped close to $700 million in stock between September 2008 and April 2009—after taxpayers came to the rescue.
|
Flickr / aflcio2008
|
Unemployment rose to 9.5 percent last month, the highest level in 26 years. Meanwhile, Wall Street payouts are not dropping. Goldman Sachs will be shelling out a whopping $20 billion to its employees this year. As we enter the 20th month of this recession, unemployment is becoming a way of life for many, and the very same people who created this mess are still reaping the profits.
|
Flickr / World Economic Forum
|
Mark Ames via Alternet —
Why did Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley steer millions to a company Larry Summers directed while he administered “stress tests” on them?
|
|
By William Pfaff — Many in Britain and the United States are in mourning for what’s taken as the suicide of the American (or Thatcherite, or Chicago-school) model of capitalism, accompanied by the non-interventionist state that hands the national economy over to business and financial leaders to run.
|
|
Although he went down insisting that his relationship to Goldman Sachs had been “mischaracterized,” New York Federal Reserve Chairman Stephen Friedman resigned on Thursday after The Wall Street Journal, with a boost from Truthdig, brought up the issue of a potential conflict of interest earlier this week.
|
AP photo / Ron Edmonds
|
By Robert Scheer — We are so inured to tales of business corruption that even a devastating exposé in The Wall Street Journal no longer shocks us. The fact that the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank made millions off his secret purchase of Goldman Sachs stock has barely registered a blip of outrage.
|
AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
|
By Robert Scheer — We are being robbed big-time, but you can’t say we haven’t been warned. Not after the release Tuesday of a scathing report by the Treasury Department’s special inspector general, who charged that the aptly named Troubled Asset Relief Program is rife with mismanagement and potential for fraud.
|
AP photo / Charles Dharapak
|
By Robert Scheer — Not surprisingly, Lawrence Summers is convinced that he deserved every penny of the $8 million that Wall Street firms paid him last year. And why shouldn’t he be cut in on the loot from the loopholes in the toxic derivatives market that he pushed into law when he was Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary?
|
Flickr / World Economic Forum
|
Lawrence Summers is the man President Obama turns to for insight into the economy, so it’s more than a little disturbing that the very financial institutions the taxpayers are now rescuing—to the tune of nearly $3 trillion—paid Summers almost $8 million last year. Goldman Sachs & Co., a major beneficiary of the government’s largesse, paid him $135,000 for one speech.
|
|
Truthdig’s Robert Scheer appeared on “Democracy Now!” on Thursday to tell host Amy Goodman who exactly sent the U.S. into financial dire straits and to recommend some changes that could put the country on a better track. Here are some hints: One culpable party rhymes with “Shmoldman Shmacks,” and another is at the top of President Obama’s economic team.
|
Rob Young
|
Despite the apparent reality that it’s not possible to precisely quantify everything under the sun, particularly when it comes to human behavior, the worrisome trend of “quants”—experts from physics and other scientific fields—infiltrating Wall Street firms to apply their skills to the stock market is still in effect.
|
AP photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
|
By Robert Scheer — It is instructional that only one of the three tax-challenged Obama appointees has survived public scorn to claim a high position in the new administration. Oddly enough, it is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the man who will collect our taxes, whose career has not been stunted by his failure to pay them.
|
AP photo / Chris Carlson
|
By Robert Scheer — Instead of running with the “European socialist” crowd, as John McCain has claimed, Barack Obama has turned to the same American “free market” elite that views government as merely a corporate subsidiary. Even within that group, however, there are serious splits, and the more enlightened side seems to be winning.
|
abcnews.go.com
|
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson certainly has his Democratic detractors, but they aren’t the only ones who have some serious doubts about his controversial $700-billion bailout plan. In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopolous” on Sunday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich blasted Paulson’s plan, calling it “un-American” and even opining that Paulson should have resigned.
|
AP photo / J. Scott Applewhite
|
By Robert Scheer — Does it really matter which party is in charge when it comes to bailing out the Wall Street hustlers whose shenanigans have bankrupted so many ordinary folks? Not if the Democrats roll over and cede power to the former head of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank at the center of our economic meltdown.
|
AP photo / Jae C. Hong
|
By Robert Scheer — This is a time to condemn the bankers, not to embrace them. They are the scoundrels who got us into the biggest economic mess since the Great Depression, lining their own pockets while destroying the life savings of those who trusted them.
|
|
Finally, after months of hanging in the pink slip rumor mill, John Snow can move on. The White House has named Henry M. Paulson as the newest Treasury secretary; here’s what we know according to the Washington Post and NYT:
He was reluctant to accept the job.
He worked in the Pentagon as a young man.
He “has been a Goldman Sachs executive since 1974, pulling down a compensation package in 2005 of $37 million.”
He is “a birdwatcher who can often be found in Central Park with his binoculars.”
Thank you mainstream media for your thorough profile of this very important man.
|
View older articles:
< 1 2 3
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Lock Up Washington
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
