The Welfare Queen of Wall Street:Matt Taibbi on the Goldman Sachs Bubble Machine

Crappy PDF of Rolling Stone article here:
http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/goldman-sachs-engineering-every-major.html

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression...

Nearly correct text OCRed here (forum "corrects" for naughty words):
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3159732&pagenumber=1

Taibbi on Goldman Sachs' Semi-Sorta Reply/Non-Reply:
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/06/30/on-giving-goldman-a-chance/

Taibbi on Goldman Sachs front-running:
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/07/02/is-goldman-legally-frontrunning-its-clients/

"You acknowledge that we may monitor your use of the Services for our own purposes (and not for your benefit)."

And finally, Taibbi on the Obama/Goldman Sacks Snuggling:
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/04/09/summers-raked-in-27-million-in-speaking-fees-from-wall-street-44-washingtonpostcom/

Most importantly, I’m sensing in these economic appointments a kind of drearily cynical parsing of the approval-rating situation here — Obama knows he’s still flying high with the “Yes We Can!” t-shirt crowd, and knows that most people simply are not going to give a shit if he packs his Treasury Department with Goldman alums and lobbyists, despite the fact that he explicitly promised to do otherwise.

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Bottom line: The U.S. federal government and Goldman Sachs have a long and jaded history of revolving door appointments and obvious favoritism for GS and against other players. When you are Goldman Sachs or some other big player, what might otherwise be financial malfeasance is actually perfectly legal. When you make huge, country fucking mistakes the taxpayers will bail you out. Whatever usury you are collecting isn't probably enough. The name of the game is power through debt and it doesn't really matter how much real wealth you have (although its a lot!) as long as you can squeeze everybody else by the balls.

Power.

to.

Squeeze.

So yeah, Obama is just another corrupt asshole so far. His appointments are a fucking joke for the people of this country. Salvation will not be forthcoming. We all wasted our votes on this asshat.