Michael Collins

The people's oligarch Warren Buffett just wrote a thank you letter to "Uncle Sam" published in the New York Times. It is the height of cynicism. (Image)

Buffett has a carefully crafted public image as a brilliant but people-friendly master of investments. We hear about his regular table at an Omaha diner where he conducts business (just plain Warren) and we see his occasional public stands for reasonable policies like the inheritance tax.

He claims that "Uncle Sam", the government, saved us from a financial catastrophe that would have swallowed up his company. He then endorses the notion that the housing bubble was based on "mass delusion" - meaning it was our fault. But he forgets to mention that he took advantage of the 2008 crisis to purchase a $5 billion interest in Goldman Sachs. And he forgets whose money "Uncle Sam" stole from the Treasury to save him and the rest of his cronies. What an asshole.

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By Robert Singer

I just got another one of those, “must read emails to reinforce what I am suppose to know” from our friend J.J. Citizen aka Joey Aqui.

“Read an article at AlterNet:
 America's Ten Most Corrupt Capitalists (In the O'Bummer administration), posted on May 13, by Zach Carter.

Zach Carter is an economics editor at AlterNet and a fellow at Campaign for America's Future.

Zach writes:

“The financial crisis has unveiled a new set of public villains—corrupt corporate capitalists who leveraged their connections in government for their own personal profit. During the Clinton and Bush administrations, many of these schemers were worshiped as geniuses, heroes or icons of American progress. But today we know these opportunists for what they are: Deregulatory hacks hellbent on making a profit at any cost. Without further ado, here are the 10 most corrupt capitalists in the U.S. economy.”

As you would expect all Ten of them are connected to the U.S. Treasury Department and the private credit monopoly of rich and predatory moneylenders (The Federal Reserve), that creates our money out of “thin air” and makes us pay interest on it.

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by Numerian posted by Michael Collins

Reading the SEC allegations against Goldman Sachs and Co., you get the impression the agency would prefer a simple world where you could charge a company with lying and be done with it. Lying to one’s clients is at the core of the suit against Goldman Sachs. Unfortunately there is apparently no law against lying in phone conversations and meetings, but there are laws against fraudulent written representations, and this is the legal foundation on which the SEC is basing its suit.

The meaty stuff in the SEC complaint is to be found in the behavior of Goldman Sachs and its employee who structured the transaction known as ABACUS 2007-AC1. Fabrice Tourre, now age 31, was a vice president on the structured product correlation trading desk. He put together the ABACUS deals and is said in the complaint to have left out pertinent information, or lied altogether, to the firm that helped set up the ABACUS deal and make it sellable to investors. No other Goldman Sachs employee is identified in the suit, and the management on the trading desk or in his department are described only in shadowy terms.

Goldman’s response this week to the suit says that they will defend themselves vigorously (and no doubt with many millions of dollars of legal expense), so they are not throwing Mr. Tourre to the wolves as some rogue trader. This would have been the logical thing to do since the allegations against Mr. Tourre are especially damaging. By embracing and defending him so readily, we therefore have to assume Mr. Tourre’s behavior is emblematic of the Goldman Sachs culture, and how he comported himself is how many others behaved at the firm. This in itself is very revealing about Goldman Sachs and its management.

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Numerian (Feb 15) Posted by Michael Collins with permission of the author

Ask yourself who knows how much has really been borrowed by various governments around the world?

Greece is turning into a battle royal between the global financial elites and the average worker in the industrial West. This started out as a more limited struggle, pitting the finance ministers and central banks of the European Union against the Greek unions, but the fight has unexpectedly broadened with news of the surreptitious involvement of Goldman Sachs in helping Greece avoid borrowing constraints.

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