While a lot of the focus has been centered around Cap & Trade and the need to reform our energy policies and clean up our environment, Goldman Sachs the worlds largest & most powerful investment bank is quietly laying the groundwork for the next swindling of trillions of dollars from unsuspecting investors. As I will try to point out in this article, Cap & Trade is not about saving our planet or changing our energy policy in an attempt to lead us toward energy independence. The players who have been pushing for this bill to pass have their eyes set on what could be a windfall of trillions of dollars for those who will be investing heavily in the stock of these emerging energy markets. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and a host of her cronies from Congress and the Senate, are foaming at the mouth for millions of dollars that will come their way once this Bill is passed by Congress and the Senate.
For anyone who may still be on the fence about whether Cap & Trade is a good idea and how it will impact them in the future, I suggest that you do yourself and your family a big favor and take a few minutes to read what in my opinion could turn out to be the biggest warning to Americans since Paul Revere announced, “The British are coming”. The piece tilted “The Great American Bubble Machine” by Matt Taibi and published in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine, chronicles the history of the 5 biggest market bubbles and how Goldman Sachs essentially orchestrated each and every one of them and how it is now getting ready to do it again using Cap & Trade as their vehicle. As we get ready to celebrate the 4th of July and 233 years of Independence, this may be the last year as we know it that we get to enjoy such freedoms. Once Goldman Sachs wraps its tentacles around this newly created Carbon-credit market, it will once again take a huge chunk of out of the wealth created by many honest, hardworking and unsuspecting individuals and hand it over as pure profit to rich individuals.
WHAT IS THE CON GAME?
With all of Goldman Sachs unprecedented power & reach, they still need to have key people infiltrate the government ranks on a local, state & federal level in order to rewrite the rules which allows them to suck in huge amounts money from unsuspecting investors in the lower and middle classes. It has been a tried and tested formula that has rewarded this behemoth, trillions of dollars since it was first founded in 1869.The scheme is simple enough. At some point during an emerging speculative bubble, Goldman Sachs positions itself for huge payoffs by selling investments they know are shit. When the bubble finally bursts, they begin the process again while millions of mainstreeters are left penniless and broke. They then spin the ensuing financial crisis in their favor by lending back to us some of the millions they swindled at high interest rates and somehow portray themselves as do gooders and “men above greed’.
WHO ARE THE PLAYERS?
As I pointed out, in order to make this work you need major players infiltrating the ranks of government. No one player has served their role better than former Goldman CEO & former George Bush Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson.
Henry Paulson was the engineer of one of the worst pieces of legislation ever, TARP. At best a suspicious & self-serving plan that would eventually siphon trillions of taxpayer dollars to some of his Wall St. buddies.
First on that list of buddies was Robert Rubin. Currently one of Obama admin’s economic strategist, a former Treasury Sec. under Clinton administration, former Goldman Sachs alum & former Chairman of Citigroup. Robert Rubin no doubt played a major role in ensuring that Citigroup got a 300 billion taxpayer bailout from his dear friend Henry Paulson. There was John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch and another former Goldman Sachs Banker, who received a multi-billion dollar payout from Henry Paulson to aid Bank of America bailout his sorry ass company, Merrill Lynch.
Goldman Sachs has positioned players as heads of both the Canadian & Italian national banks, the World Bank & the head of the New York Stock Exchange. The list of influential ex Goldman Sachs employees in key positions is endless and it is not by accident that they succeeded in doing this.
BUYING INFLUENCE:
Goldman Sachs and its employees paid the sum of $981,000 to the campaign of the man that currently sits in the White House, Barack Obama. A major proponent of Cap & Trade who has the wind at his back and a fillibuster proof Senate vote. So when Barack Obama stands in front of his teleprompter to condemn Wall street greed and extol the virtues of a cleaner planet and energy independence, do not take him at his word. He is being disingenuous. So are the many of Democrats currently sitting in the Senate & Congress that received over $4.4 million dollars in campaign funds last year. This is the type of frontal assault that may manage to strong arm into existence Cap & Trade. It has always been about the money. It has always been about buying influence and lobbying and no one has been able to excel at it more than Goldman Sachs. Gone are the Henry Paulsons’ and Neel Kashkari’s and in are the new class of Goldman alumn that will take their place. Already positioned and occupying key government jobs, they will be ushering in a new wave of commodities bubble. And with big brother keeping a closer eye on the manipulation of prices, it is the very same government that will mandate higher prices for these carbon credits. So it is a win win situation for Goldman Sachs. The government will create the bubble and Goldman will be there waiting to cash-in when the bubble bursts.
Goldman Sachs knew long ago that at some point climate issues were going to become front and certain and so it began their lobbying efforts to try and get in on the ground floor of this by pumping over 3.5 million dollars to the cause. So it stands to reason that Mark Patterson on of the lobbyists is now Chief of Staff for the Treasury Secretary. They have invested in wind power, solar power and renewable diesel. They own a 10% stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange where the Carbon Credits will be traded. As Henry Paulson sated, “we’re not making any of these investments to lose money”.
THE 5 BIGGEST BUBBLES THAT GOLDMAN HAS CAUSED :
1. The Great Depression – Goldman Sachs made millions utilizing Commercial Paper or short IOU’s to small-time vendors in downtown Manhatan.These Investment Trusts basically took the money from small & larger investors & invested in a mix of Wall Street Securities. A lot of these investors who were regular guys, were made to feel like big players even though they may have invested as little as $10 dollars. These securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public to give little guy a sense of power. These Trusts were as history points out, a major cause in the Great Crash of 1929.
2. TECH STOCKS: - The basic scam in the Internet Age was pretty simple. Anyone with a half-assed idea for a new start-up dot com company, had the potential to be taken public via IPO’s , which were talked up and sold to unsuspecting investors for megamillions. Goldman was able to facilitate this by once again changing the rules of the game to make the deals look better than they actually were. Goldman Sachs was in essence pumping up these shit Tech Stocks and telling their analysts that Anybullshitcompany.com was worth hundreds a share.Only insiders at Goldman new the real price of these stocks which was in reality a lot lower than what they were trading for.
3. THE HOUSING CRASH : In the housing bubble disaster, Goldman Sachs once again took advantage of loose underwriting standards. For decades, those in the mortgage industry insisted that buyers have the the ability to come up with at least a 10% downpayment or more, have a steady job, good credit and a valid Social Security number and verifiable first & last name. That shit all changed beginning in 2000 when Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, ACORN and a host of Liberal activists insisted that more people have the opportunity to own a home. That meant that any part-time hamburger flipper or ex-criminal with nothing but a pack of cigarettes and a $20 bill in their pocket could potentially be eligible to apply for a mortgage and own a home. Once again, Goldman was able to create investment vehicles and packaged these shit filled mortgages, and eventually sell them them to unwary insurance companies and pension funds. This flooded the market with Toxic debt that in years past would have never been allowed. The banks knowing how likely these mortgages were to fail, wrote them anyway because they knew they could get rid of them by selling them to Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. With the help of Barney Frank and his minions, the government bought billions of bad assets and as you know, the rest is history.
4. The OIL & GASOLINE BUBBLE: With the Presidential campaigns in full mode and an economy in shambles, Wall street was bearing the brunt and being made the scapegoat for many of the ills the average Joe was experiencing, Wall street greed and decades of corruption scandals had left many investors leery and suspicious about investing in any form of that felt like a paper investment. In the midsts of all of this, Goldman Sachs was discreetly setting up it’s tent to once again swoop down and pick up the pieces that would be left behind by the aftermath of the oil and commodities market. With a declining dollar, a credit crunch a housing market left in shambles many investors began throwing their dollars into the commodities market. For many the choice was oil futures. As the price of a single barrel of oil skyrocketed from around $60 in mid 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008, once again, Goldman Sachs would be the beneficiary of billions of dollars in profits. They did this by persuading pension funds and a host of institutional investors to throw their money into oil futures and agreeing to to buy at a cetain price on a fixed date.Couple this with the fact that Goldman Sachs was rooting for an increase in the price of oil and predicting that the price of a barrel of oil would spike to over $200 a barrel in the not too distant future and you can clearly see the cause and effect . The Presidential candidates jumped on this opportunity to put blame on those owning gas guzzling vehicles as the primary cause of the spike in gas prices when in fact it wasn’t the consumption of of real oil that was driving up the prices- it was all the trading in paper oil that was causing the spike in price. When the oil bubble finally burst in 2008 and the price went from a high of $147 to $33 dollars a barrel, once again it was the little guy and pensioners who had invested in this load of shit that got hammered. The after shocks of this bubble had world wide repercussions including the forcing of 100 million people into hunger as a result of soaring food prices that were driven by the commodities bubble.
5. THE BAILOUTS: With no new money to feed upon, Goldman Sachs set it’s sights on the one remaining unguarded pool of capital; tax-payer money. It began with Henry Paulson making the calculated decision to let the only remaining competitor to Goldman Sachs; Lehman Bros; go under without any intervention.
That move was followed by a granting AIG $85 billion in Bailout money. With that money in hand, AIG then repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. In essence, this saved Goldman’s ass form all of the bad bets made in the past year. Immediately thereafter, Henry Paulson announced his $700 billion dollar bailout of the financial industry. The plan was then placed in the hands of Neel Kashkari, a Goldman banker to administer. In a move that went under the radar, Goldman immediately changed it’s status from an investment bank to a bank-holding company in order to gain access to billions in TARP funds and a host of other publicly backed funding. The most notable being lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. Under a new series of bailout programs, the Fed will have guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion dollars – and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret. Once all of the bailouts were in place and the dust had settled, Goldman Sachs was back at it again concocting the next scheme to clean up any remaining loose change. It pushed forward the calendar it uses to report it’s earnings, essentially wiping a $1.3 billion 4th quarter 2008 loss off the books. It then announced a somewhat suspicious first quarter of 2009 profit of $1.8 billion dollars which included a chunk of taxpayer money that was funneled to it via the AIG bailout. After all was said and done, Goldman Sachs got away with paying the effective tax rate of 1% on the $2 billion profit it made in 2008. That works out to fourteen million dollars or one third of the $42.9 salary to paid to CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
If that wasn’t bad enough, it then paid out an incredible $4.7 billion in bonuses and salaries, an 18% increase over last year. If this does not raise any questions, then nothing will.
This begs the question, why hasn’t the government allowed Goldman Sachs to fall under any circumstance? Not one word was said from anyone for given the scale and nature of this abuse. It goes to show to show how much influence money can buy. Goldman has been able to play the game and survive while millions have been put in the poor house. There is no reason to doubt that they will pull off one more heist before all is said and done and the carbon market will be their meal ticket.
For anyone who may still be on the fence about whether Cap & Trade is a good idea and how it will impact them in the future, I suggest that you do yourself and your family a big favor and take a few minutes to read what in my opinion could turn out to be the biggest warning to Americans since Paul Revere announced, “The British are coming”. The piece tilted “The Great American Bubble Machine” by Matt Taibi and published in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine, chronicles the history of the 5 biggest market bubbles and how Goldman Sachs essentially orchestrated each and every one of them and how it is now getting ready to do it again using Cap & Trade as their vehicle. As we get ready to celebrate the 4th of July and 233 years of Independence, this may be the last year as we know it that we get to enjoy such freedoms. Once Goldman Sachs wraps its tentacles around this newly created Carbon-credit market, it will once again take a huge chunk of out of the wealth created by many honest, hardworking and unsuspecting individuals and hand it over as pure profit to rich individuals.
WHAT IS THE CON GAME?
With all of Goldman Sachs unprecedented power & reach, they still need to have key people infiltrate the government ranks on a local, state & federal level in order to rewrite the rules which allows them to suck in huge amounts money from unsuspecting investors in the lower and middle classes. It has been a tried and tested formula that has rewarded this behemoth, trillions of dollars since it was first founded in 1869.The scheme is simple enough. At some point during an emerging speculative bubble, Goldman Sachs positions itself for huge payoffs by selling investments they know are shit. When the bubble finally bursts, they begin the process again while millions of mainstreeters are left penniless and broke. They then spin the ensuing financial crisis in their favor by lending back to us some of the millions they swindled at high interest rates and somehow portray themselves as do gooders and “men above greed’.
WHO ARE THE PLAYERS?
As I pointed out, in order to make this work you need major players infiltrating the ranks of government. No one player has served their role better than former Goldman CEO & former George Bush Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson.
Henry Paulson was the engineer of one of the worst pieces of legislation ever, TARP. At best a suspicious & self-serving plan that would eventually siphon trillions of taxpayer dollars to some of his Wall St. buddies.
First on that list of buddies was Robert Rubin. Currently one of Obama admin’s economic strategist, a former Treasury Sec. under Clinton administration, former Goldman Sachs alum & former Chairman of Citigroup. Robert Rubin no doubt played a major role in ensuring that Citigroup got a 300 billion taxpayer bailout from his dear friend Henry Paulson. There was John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch and another former Goldman Sachs Banker, who received a multi-billion dollar payout from Henry Paulson to aid Bank of America bailout his sorry ass company, Merrill Lynch.
Goldman Sachs has positioned players as heads of both the Canadian & Italian national banks, the World Bank & the head of the New York Stock Exchange. The list of influential ex Goldman Sachs employees in key positions is endless and it is not by accident that they succeeded in doing this.
BUYING INFLUENCE:
Goldman Sachs and its employees paid the sum of $981,000 to the campaign of the man that currently sits in the White House, Barack Obama. A major proponent of Cap & Trade who has the wind at his back and a fillibuster proof Senate vote. So when Barack Obama stands in front of his teleprompter to condemn Wall street greed and extol the virtues of a cleaner planet and energy independence, do not take him at his word. He is being disingenuous. So are the many of Democrats currently sitting in the Senate & Congress that received over $4.4 million dollars in campaign funds last year. This is the type of frontal assault that may manage to strong arm into existence Cap & Trade. It has always been about the money. It has always been about buying influence and lobbying and no one has been able to excel at it more than Goldman Sachs. Gone are the Henry Paulsons’ and Neel Kashkari’s and in are the new class of Goldman alumn that will take their place. Already positioned and occupying key government jobs, they will be ushering in a new wave of commodities bubble. And with big brother keeping a closer eye on the manipulation of prices, it is the very same government that will mandate higher prices for these carbon credits. So it is a win win situation for Goldman Sachs. The government will create the bubble and Goldman will be there waiting to cash-in when the bubble bursts.
Goldman Sachs knew long ago that at some point climate issues were going to become front and certain and so it began their lobbying efforts to try and get in on the ground floor of this by pumping over 3.5 million dollars to the cause. So it stands to reason that Mark Patterson on of the lobbyists is now Chief of Staff for the Treasury Secretary. They have invested in wind power, solar power and renewable diesel. They own a 10% stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange where the Carbon Credits will be traded. As Henry Paulson sated, “we’re not making any of these investments to lose money”.
THE 5 BIGGEST BUBBLES THAT GOLDMAN HAS CAUSED :
1. The Great Depression – Goldman Sachs made millions utilizing Commercial Paper or short IOU’s to small-time vendors in downtown Manhatan.These Investment Trusts basically took the money from small & larger investors & invested in a mix of Wall Street Securities. A lot of these investors who were regular guys, were made to feel like big players even though they may have invested as little as $10 dollars. These securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public to give little guy a sense of power. These Trusts were as history points out, a major cause in the Great Crash of 1929.
2. TECH STOCKS: - The basic scam in the Internet Age was pretty simple. Anyone with a half-assed idea for a new start-up dot com company, had the potential to be taken public via IPO’s , which were talked up and sold to unsuspecting investors for megamillions. Goldman was able to facilitate this by once again changing the rules of the game to make the deals look better than they actually were. Goldman Sachs was in essence pumping up these shit Tech Stocks and telling their analysts that Anybullshitcompany.com was worth hundreds a share.Only insiders at Goldman new the real price of these stocks which was in reality a lot lower than what they were trading for.
3. THE HOUSING CRASH : In the housing bubble disaster, Goldman Sachs once again took advantage of loose underwriting standards. For decades, those in the mortgage industry insisted that buyers have the the ability to come up with at least a 10% downpayment or more, have a steady job, good credit and a valid Social Security number and verifiable first & last name. That shit all changed beginning in 2000 when Bill Clinton, Barney Frank, ACORN and a host of Liberal activists insisted that more people have the opportunity to own a home. That meant that any part-time hamburger flipper or ex-criminal with nothing but a pack of cigarettes and a $20 bill in their pocket could potentially be eligible to apply for a mortgage and own a home. Once again, Goldman was able to create investment vehicles and packaged these shit filled mortgages, and eventually sell them them to unwary insurance companies and pension funds. This flooded the market with Toxic debt that in years past would have never been allowed. The banks knowing how likely these mortgages were to fail, wrote them anyway because they knew they could get rid of them by selling them to Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac. With the help of Barney Frank and his minions, the government bought billions of bad assets and as you know, the rest is history.
4. The OIL & GASOLINE BUBBLE: With the Presidential campaigns in full mode and an economy in shambles, Wall street was bearing the brunt and being made the scapegoat for many of the ills the average Joe was experiencing, Wall street greed and decades of corruption scandals had left many investors leery and suspicious about investing in any form of that felt like a paper investment. In the midsts of all of this, Goldman Sachs was discreetly setting up it’s tent to once again swoop down and pick up the pieces that would be left behind by the aftermath of the oil and commodities market. With a declining dollar, a credit crunch a housing market left in shambles many investors began throwing their dollars into the commodities market. For many the choice was oil futures. As the price of a single barrel of oil skyrocketed from around $60 in mid 2007 to a high of $147 in the summer of 2008, once again, Goldman Sachs would be the beneficiary of billions of dollars in profits. They did this by persuading pension funds and a host of institutional investors to throw their money into oil futures and agreeing to to buy at a cetain price on a fixed date.Couple this with the fact that Goldman Sachs was rooting for an increase in the price of oil and predicting that the price of a barrel of oil would spike to over $200 a barrel in the not too distant future and you can clearly see the cause and effect . The Presidential candidates jumped on this opportunity to put blame on those owning gas guzzling vehicles as the primary cause of the spike in gas prices when in fact it wasn’t the consumption of of real oil that was driving up the prices- it was all the trading in paper oil that was causing the spike in price. When the oil bubble finally burst in 2008 and the price went from a high of $147 to $33 dollars a barrel, once again it was the little guy and pensioners who had invested in this load of shit that got hammered. The after shocks of this bubble had world wide repercussions including the forcing of 100 million people into hunger as a result of soaring food prices that were driven by the commodities bubble.
5. THE BAILOUTS: With no new money to feed upon, Goldman Sachs set it’s sights on the one remaining unguarded pool of capital; tax-payer money. It began with Henry Paulson making the calculated decision to let the only remaining competitor to Goldman Sachs; Lehman Bros; go under without any intervention.
That move was followed by a granting AIG $85 billion in Bailout money. With that money in hand, AIG then repaid $13 billion it owed to Goldman. In essence, this saved Goldman’s ass form all of the bad bets made in the past year. Immediately thereafter, Henry Paulson announced his $700 billion dollar bailout of the financial industry. The plan was then placed in the hands of Neel Kashkari, a Goldman banker to administer. In a move that went under the radar, Goldman immediately changed it’s status from an investment bank to a bank-holding company in order to gain access to billions in TARP funds and a host of other publicly backed funding. The most notable being lending from the discount window of the Federal Reserve. Under a new series of bailout programs, the Fed will have guaranteed at least $8.7 trillion dollars – and thanks to an obscure law allowing the Fed to block most congressional audits, both the amounts and the recipients of the monies remain almost entirely secret. Once all of the bailouts were in place and the dust had settled, Goldman Sachs was back at it again concocting the next scheme to clean up any remaining loose change. It pushed forward the calendar it uses to report it’s earnings, essentially wiping a $1.3 billion 4th quarter 2008 loss off the books. It then announced a somewhat suspicious first quarter of 2009 profit of $1.8 billion dollars which included a chunk of taxpayer money that was funneled to it via the AIG bailout. After all was said and done, Goldman Sachs got away with paying the effective tax rate of 1% on the $2 billion profit it made in 2008. That works out to fourteen million dollars or one third of the $42.9 salary to paid to CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
If that wasn’t bad enough, it then paid out an incredible $4.7 billion in bonuses and salaries, an 18% increase over last year. If this does not raise any questions, then nothing will.
This begs the question, why hasn’t the government allowed Goldman Sachs to fall under any circumstance? Not one word was said from anyone for given the scale and nature of this abuse. It goes to show to show how much influence money can buy. Goldman has been able to play the game and survive while millions have been put in the poor house. There is no reason to doubt that they will pull off one more heist before all is said and done and the carbon market will be their meal ticket.
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