Goldman Sachs Is Part of the New "Swinish Gilded Age"*

There is no doubt that Goldman Sachs has contributed more than its fair share to the oligarchy that is now the government of the United States of America.  They are distinguishable by the power that they wield, the money that they hoard and the government that they now run.  The oligarchy is rich with the names of Goldmanites:  Robert Rubin, Hank Paulson, William Dudley, Diana Farrell, Stephen Friedman, Gary Gensler, Robert Hormats, Neel Kashkari, Eric Mindich, Mark Patterson, James Rubin, Gene Sperling, Adam Storch and many members of the Hamilton Project which is funded by Robert Rubin and Goldman Sachs.

Lewis Lapham has written an essay for Aljazeera that describes in detail how this oligarchy suffers from "pleonexia, the appetite for more of everything."

Feast of fools
How American democracy became the property of a commercial oligarchy
By Lewis H. Lapham* - Aljazeera
. . . .
Ronald Reagan's new Morning in America brought with it in the early 1980s the second coming of a gilded age more swinish than the first, and as the country continues to divide ever more obviously into a nation of the rich and a nation of the poor, the fictions of unity and democratic intent lose their capacity to command belief. If by the time Bill Clinton had settled comfortably into the White House it was no longer possible to pretend that everybody was as equal as everybody else, it was clear that all things bright and beautiful were to be associated with the word private, terminal squalor and toxic waste with the word public.

"The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country's equestrian classes."

The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country's equestrian classes, aka the 20 per cent of the population that holds 93 per cent of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas. Their anxious and spendthrift company bears the mark of oligarchy ridden with the disease diagnosed by the ancient Greeks as pleonexia, the appetite for more of everything - more McMansions, more defence contracts, more beachfront, more tax subsidy, more prosperous fools. Aristotle mentions a faction of especially reactionary oligarchs in ancient Athens who took a vow of selfishness not unlike the anti-tax pledge administered by Grover Norquist to Republican stalwarts in modern Washington: "I will be an enemy to the people and will devise all the harm against them which I can."

Please read the entire essay here