Gingrich Takes On Goldman Sachs.... Badly

You know, for a guy who is supposed to be smart....¹

Goldman Sachs is a company that has taken billions from the American taxpayer and they had a handpicked candidate in 2008 named Barack Obama. They have a handpicked candidate this year, named Mitt Romney.

This should give you considerable pause... about Goldman Sachs. Because last time I checked, Mitt Romney ran for the Republican nomination back in 2008. Why Does Gingrich imagine that Goldman Sachs would have been repulsed by Romney four years ago, but be eager to have him replace the candidate they hand-selected a mere four years ago?

Like any multi-billion dollar corporation, Goldman Sachs is going to use its money both to help advance political candidates that will support its agenda and to try to put that candidate in golden handcuffs - "You don't want to turn the financial industry against you, because then you won't get the benefit of our wealth in the next election." But they aren't pulling candidates out of obscurity. They're picking the candidates from both sides that they believe are likely to win and are trying to influence the policies of those candidates. If they were capable of "hand picking" a candidate, the present Republican campaign would already be over. Heck, if anybody had that type of control, could Gingrich really believe it would be he and Santorum who would remain the biggest obstacles to Romney's nomination?

To the extent that Gingrich is correct, that Goldman Sachs and the financial industry want Romney and reject Gingrich, given Gingrich's own history of selling out to anybody who will pay him money, the most likely explanation for this outburst is that he's jealous. Gingrich standing up to somebody with a checkbook? Has it ever happened?
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1. In fairness, he's lying. But we remain in an odd era in which it's more polite to treat a candidate as being sincere but stupid, as opposed to pointing out that he's a liar.

Silver?

Maybe I've seen too many movies, but I don't see how this would work - after all, if you want to kill something with silver, shouldn't you instead be aiming at the vampire squid?

He Dreams of Gold[man]...

Sachs and Sachs of Gold[man].

CWD and I have occasionally debated whether Timothy Geithner is entitled to any benefit of the doubt, or if he should just be dismissed as a self-interested toady for the financial industry. They say "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity", after all. (Even smart people can be stupid on certain occasions or certain subjects.)

But it looks like CWD was right, and Geithner's motivations have always been to advance the cause of avarice.

The Worst Government Money Can Buy....

Whatever the outcome on Tuesday, let's hope it's at least marginally better than what we're continuing to suffer under Bush. We've seen the harm caused by Bush's many incompetent appointees, and now we're being, in essence, robbed by one of his few competent appointees.

The swindle of American taxpayers is proceeding more or less in broad daylight, as the unwitting voters are preoccupied with the national election. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson agreed to invest $125 billion in the nine largest banks, including $10 billion for Goldman Sachs, his old firm. But, if you look more closely at Paulson's transaction, the taxpayers were taken for a ride--a very expensive ride. They paid $125 billion for bank stock that a private investor could purchase for $62.5 billion. That means half of the public's money was a straight-out gift to Wall Street, for which taxpayers got nothing in return.

These are dynamite facts that demand immediate action to halt the bailout deal and correct its giveaway terms. Stop payment on the Treasury checks before the bankers can cash them. Open an immediate Congressional investigation into how Paulson and his staff determined such a sweetheart deal for leading players in the financial sector and for their own former employer. Paulson's bailout staff is heavily populated with Goldman Sachs veterans and individuals from other Wall Street firms. Yet we do not know whether these financiers have fully divested their own Wall Street holdings. Were they perhaps enriching themselves as they engineered this generous distribution of public wealth to embattled private banks and their shareholders?

Meanwhile, bailout money is being used to fund astronomical "bonuses" for the employees who ran their companies into the ground. In the U.K. they saw that possibility coming, and thus forbade it as part of their bailout package. Here Paulson saw it coming as well, and made sure that the recipients of taxpayer $billions had a green light to shovel taxpayer money into their pockets.

I can only hope the next President tells companies like Goldman Sachs, "We appreciate that you needed to fritter away the bailout money we gave you in order to pay bonuses to the people who bankrupted you. And don't worry - we're still here for you. Yes, if you need an additional penny of taxpayer money to stay afloat, we'll help you be taken over by a competent institution in the manner of Merrill Lynch, or help you enter the bankruptcy process in the manner of Lehman Brothers. Feel free to ask, any time."