That act is the remarkable indictment of the US justice system: Goldman Sachs commits accounting control fraud that makes it billions and billions of fraudulent dollars and then, when it is found out, it just pays a few millions and carries on.
The best we have in response to such inequity is The Mock Trial of Goldman Sachs carried out by Occupy Wall Street and found on the dangerous minds website:
See the video here
The transcript of Chris Hedges' statement is found on truthdig:
Chris Hedges Arrested in Front of Goldman Sachs
Posted on Nov 3, 2011
Chris Hedges made this statement in New York City's Zuccotti Park on Thursday morning during the People’s Hearing on Goldman Sachs, which he chaired with Dr. Cornel West. The activist and Truthdig columnist then joined a march of several hundred protesters to the nearby corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs, where he was arrested with 16 others.Chris Hedges’ statement in Zuccotti Park:
Goldman Sachs, which received more subsidies and bailout-related funds than any other investment bank because the Federal Reserve permitted it to become a bank holding company under its “emergency situation,” has used billions in taxpayer money to enrich itself and reward its top executives. It handed its senior employees a staggering $18 billion in 2009, $16 billion in 2010 and $10 billion in 2011 in mega-bonuses. This massive transfer of wealth upwards by the Bush and Obama administrations, now estimated at $13 trillion to $14 trillion, went into the pockets of those who carried out fraud and criminal activity rather than the victims who lost their jobs, their savings and often their homes.Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. Goldman Sachs hoards rice, wheat, corn, sugar and livestock and jacks up commodity prices around the globe so that poor families can no longer afford basic staples and literally starve. Goldman Sachs is able to carry out its malfeasance at home and in global markets because it has former officials filtered throughout the government and lavishly funds compliant politicians—including Barack Obama, who received $1 million from employees at Goldman Sachs in 2008 when he ran for president. These politicians, in return, permit Goldman Sachs to ignore security laws that under a functioning judiciary system would see the firm indicted for felony fraud. Or, as in the case of Bill Clinton, these politicians pass laws such as the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act that effectively removed all oversight and outside control over the speculation in commodities, one of the major reasons food prices have soared. In 2008 and again in 2010 prices for crops such as rice, wheat and corn doubled and even tripled, making life precarious for hundreds of millions of people. And it was all done so a few corporate oligarchs, the 1 percent, could make personal fortunes in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite a damning 650-page Senate subcommittee investigation report, no individual at Goldman Sachs has been indicted, although the report accuses Goldman of defrauding its clients.
When the government in the fall 2008 provided the firm with billions of dollars in the form of cheap loans, FDIC debt guarantees, TARP, AIG make-wholes, and a late-night label-shift from investment bank to bank holding company, giving the firm access to excessive Federal Reserve aid, access [the corporation] still has, it enabled and abetted Goldman’s criminal behavior. Goldman Sachs unloaded billions in worthless securities to its clients, decimating 401(k)s, pension and mutual funds. The firm misled investors about the true nature of these worthless securities, insisted the securities they were pushing on their clients were sound, and hid the material fact that, simultaneously, they were betting against these same securities—$2 billion against just one of their deals. The firm then had the gall to extort from its victims—us—to make good on its bets when the global economy it helped trash lost $40 trillion in worldwide wealth and huge insurance firms were unable to cover their bad debts.
The Securities Act of 1933, established in the wake of the massive fraud that pervaded the securities market before the 1929 Crash, was written to ensure that “any securities transactions are not based on fraudulent information or practices.” The act “prohibits deceit, misrepresentation, and other fraud in the sale of securities.” The subcommittee report indicates that Goldman Sachs clearly broke security laws.
As part of the political theater that has come to replace the legislative and judicial process, the Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to a $550 million settlement whereby Goldman Sachs admitted it showed “incomplete” information in marketing materials and that it was a “mistake” to not disclose the nature of its portfolio selection committee. This fine was a payoff to the SEC by Goldman Sachs of about four days’ worth of revenue, and in return they avoided going to court. CEO Lloyd Blankfein apparently not only lied to clients, but to the subcommittee itself on April 27, 2010, when he told lawmakers: “We didn’t have a massive short against the housing market, and we certainly did not bet against our clients.” Yet, they did.And yet nothing has been done. No Goldman Sachs officials have gone to trial. This is because there is no way within the corporate state to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. There is no way through the formal mechanisms of power to restore the rule of law. There is no way to protect the ordinary citizen and the poor around the globe from the predatory activity of financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs. Since our courts refuse to put on trial the senior executives at Goldman Sachs, including Blankfein, who carried out these crimes and lied to cover them up, we will. Speculators like those in Goldman Sachs—who in the 17th century when speculation was a crime would have been hanged—must be prevented by law from again destroying our economy, preying on ordinary citizens, hoarding food so the poor starve and running our political process. We are paying for these crimes—not those who orchestrated perhaps the most massive fraud in human history. Our teachers, police, firefighters and public employees are losing their jobs so speculators like Blankfein can make an estimated $250,000 a day. Working men and women are losing their homes and going into personal bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills. Our unemployed, far closer to 20 percent than the official 9 percent, are in deep distress all so a criminal class, a few blocks from where I speak, can wallow in luxury with mansions and yachts and swollen bank accounts.
What we are asking for today is simple—it is a return to the rule of law. And since the formal mechanisms of power refuse to restore the rule of law, then we, the 99 percent, will have to see that justice is done.
See the statement here
5 COMMENTS:
We're being played on many fronts...watch this...
Dr Burzyinski Cures Cancer - And They Don't Like It
http://www.thenewsburner.com/2011/11/06/dr-burzynski-cured-cancer-and-they-dont-like-it/
MF Global's Customer Assets - STOLEN
As I suspected, MF Global took liquid assets, but not cash, from customer accounts to post as collateral to emergency funding.
When things fell apart, the lender simply took the collateral and liquidated it.
And now they are refusing to acknowledge this, and apparently the
management of MF Global is not yet talking. Why? Because it was an
insider deal, and they don't want to give back the stolen money.
This is a scandal of the first order, and a severe test for the Obama
Justice Department, the regulatory agencies, and the exchanges.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2011/11/mf-globals-customer-assets-stolen.html
Who Killed Horatio Alger?
The decline of the meritocratic ideal
But nothing upsets people like the perception that the rules don’t
apply equally to everybody. When my children were small, they sometimes
tried to play Monopoly. These attempts inevitably degenerated into
arguments. My daughter, who is two years younger than my son, would
claim that my son was cheating. My son, with the official instructions
in hand, would protest his innocence. And he was right: he never
invented any rule. Nevertheless, my daughter was right, too: my son was
engaging in selective recollection of the rules, counting on my
daughter’s ignorance and bringing up only the rules that were in his
favor. Despite her youth, my daughter understood that something wasn’t
fair, so she employed the only response she had available: giving up.
Her frustration was similar to what many people felt after the 2008
bailouts of the financial system. The system was certainly at risk, and
some government intervention was just as certainly necessary. Yet it was
false to say, as Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury
secretary Henry Paulson did repeatedly, that the choice was between the
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as it was proposed and the
financial abyss: there were feasible—and, in fact,
superior—alternatives. It didn’t escape most Americans that TARP was the
largest welfare program for corporations and their investors ever
created in human history. That some of the crumbs went to autoworkers’
unions didn’t improve things; in fact, it made them worse, showing that
the redistribution was not an accident but a premeditated pillage of
defenseless taxpayers by powerful lobbies. TARP wasn’t just the triumph
of Wall Street over Main Street; it was the triumph of K Street over the
rest of America.
They objected, rather, to the specifics of what the government was
doing. One reason they objected was their perception that lobbying
interests had influenced the intervention: 50 percent of respondents,
for instance, thought that Paulson had acted in the interest of Goldman
Sachs, not the United States.
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_4_meritocracy.html
Meritocracy vs. Plutocracy
Other Factors
Some comments on aspects of the OWS movement that are difficult, if
not impossible, to quantify. I think Americans have an inherently good
and reasonable sense of fair play. We’re not a people who begrudge
others their wealth fairly earned — with “fairly earned” being the
operative phrase. I haven’t heard many folks railing about Bill Gates,
Warren Buffett or Steve Jobs. I have — and do — hear folks clamoring
about the likes of Angelo Mozilo, Stan O’Neal, Lloyd “God’s Work”
Blankfein. Why does Rob Gillette, former CEO of First Solar Corp., walk away with almost $40MM
for 15 months (~$10,000/hr if he worked 60-hour weeks) at the helm
during which the price of FSLR’s stock declined by some 60 percent?
(Answer: See above quote from Warren Buffett.)
From the Wired piece linked to below:
When the rich do something to deserve their riches,
nobody complains; that’s just the meritocracy at work. But when those at
the bottom don’t understand the unequal distribution of wealth — when
it seems as if the winners are getting rewarded for no reason — they get
furious. They doubt the integrity of the system and become more
sensitive to perceived inequities. They start camping out in parks. They
reject the very premise of the game.
Personally, I’d argue that it’s generous to state that winners were
“rewarded for no reason.” The facts at hand tell us that many have been
rewarded for, at the very least, tanking our economy, and at worst
criminal behavior; “no reason at all” would be an uptick.
Americans don’t condone making crappy products and then pawning them
off on unsuspecting buyers, a la Goldman Sachs, et al: “Boy, that
Timberwolf was one shitty deal.” In the real world, companies are held
accountable for even inadvertently producing a defective product. On
Wall St., doing so is apparently grounds for a round of yucks and an
outsized bonus. Personally, I believe Americans have always known the
system is rigged, but it wasn’t too rigged, and while
prosperity wasn’t necessarily equally shared (nor should it have been),
its division was such that everyone (more or less rightly) felt as if
they were benefiting. Those days are gone, the illusion of any fairness
stripped away, as it’s now clear that for some enough is simply not
enough. It’s as though the parasites have inexplicably (and counter to
their own self-interests) determined that it’s time to kill the host,
but the host is determined to live on.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/11/meritocracy-vs-plutocracy/
Can't get it on MSM, why?
Behind The Scenes At OWS With Danny Schechter
Posted by majestic on November 9, 2011
Danny “Media Dissector” Schechter (director of Plunder: The Crime of our Time)
says that “Behind the scenes of Occupy Wall Street is an organization
that is pretty invisible. It is decentralized, it’s bottom up and it’s
organized into working committees.”
http://www.disinfo.com/2011/11/behind-the-scenes-at-ows-with-danny-schechter/?
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