Interesting article about Goldman Sachs and Warren Buffet teaming up to provide millions for budding entrepreneurs.

$2.5 Trillion - That’s the size of of the global oil scam. It’s a number so large that, to put it in perspective, we will now begin measuring the damage done to the global economy in “Madoff Units” ($50Bn rip-offs). That’s right - $2.5Tn is 50 TIMES the amount of money that Bernie Madoff scammed from investors in his lifetime, yet it is also LESS than the MONTHLY EXCESS price the global population is being manipulated into paying for a barrel of oil. WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE? WHERE ARE THE INVESTIGATIONS? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, BP, TOT, Shell, DB and Societe General founded the Intercontinental Exchange in 2000. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate ”dark pool” trading in the commodities markets. Billions of dollars are being placed on oil futures contracts at the ICE and the beauty of this scam is that they NEVER take delivery, per se. They just ratchet up the price with leveraged speculation using your TARP money. This year alone they ratcheted up the global cost of oil from $40 to $80 per barrel.

"The chief executive of Goldman Sachs, which has attracted widespread media attention over the size of its staff bonuses, believes banks serve a social purpose and are doing 'God's work.'"

“The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest,” Goldman’s Griffiths said Oct. 20, his voice echoing around the gold-mosaic walls of St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose 365-feet-high dome towers over the City, London’s financial district. “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.” via Profit `Not Satanic,’ Barclays Says, After Goldman Invokes Jesus – Bloomberg.com. I didn’t believe this story was true at first — thought it had to be a spoof. But it turns out to be true. The great banks of the world have gone on a p.r. counteroffensive in Europe, and are sending spokescrooks in shiny suits into churches to persuade the masses that Christ would have approved of the latest round of obscene bonuses. Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets even weirder when one tries to figure out what could possibly have motivated this person, and by extension his employer Goldman Sachs, to make such statements in such a place as St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The crime and corruption continues in the third part of this interview with Greg Gordon. "Inside investment circular were the details of a secret $2 billion deal channeled through a tax haven."

New Jersey taxpayers are sending almost $1 million a month to a partnership run by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for protection against rising interest costs on bonds that the state redeemed more than a year ago. While New Jersey replaced the debt with fixed-rate securities in 2008 after the $330 billion auction-rate bond market froze, the swap -- in which two parties typically exchange fixed payments for ones based on floating interest rates -- isn’t scheduled to expire until 2019.The state paid $940,000 under the agreement last month and a total of $11.4 million since the auction-rate bonds were redeemed. The expenditures come as the fund reaches its borrowing limit and Governor Jon Corzine, Goldman’s former chairman who was a U.S. senator when the contract was signed, seeks $400 million in budget reductions as tax receipts fall.

Public must learn to 'tolerate the inequality' of bonuses, says Goldman Sachs vice-chairman --Goldman Sachs is currently on track to pay the biggest ever bonuses to its 31,700 employees after raking in profits at a rate of $35m (£21m) a day. 21 Oct 2009 One of the City's leading figures has suggested that inequality created by bankers' huge salaries is a price worth paying for greater prosperity. In remarks that will fuel the row around excessive pay, Lord Griffiths, vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International and a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, said banks should not be ashamed of rewarding their staff. Speaking to an audience at St Paul's Cathedral in London about morality in the marketplace last night, Griffiths said the British public should "tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all". --Tolerate *this.* http://www.legitgov.org/essay_southwell_arming_the_left_is_the_time_now_102203.html

Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's closest aides earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and other Wall Street firms. Bloomberg reports that none of these aides faced Senate confirmation. Yet, they are overseeing the handout of hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to their former employers. The gifts of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money provided the banks with an abundance of low-cost capital that has boosted the banks' profits, while the taxpayers who provided the capital are increasingly unemployed and homeless. JPMorgan Chase announced that it has earned $3.6 billion in the third quarter of this year. Goldman Sachs has made so much money during this year of economic crisis that enormous bonuses are in the works. The London Evening Standard reports that Goldman Sachs' "5,500 London staff can look forward to record average payouts of around 500,000 pounds ($800,000) each. Senior executives will get bonuses of several million pounds each, with the highest paid as much as 10 million pounds ($16 million)." In the event the banksters can't figure out how to enjoy the riches, the Financial Times is offering a new magazine -- "How To Spend It."...

This Thursday, in a move that would make Baron von Louis Rothschild blush with shame (or burst with pride), Goldman Sachs will announce that it is more than doubling its bonus pool: from 11 billion in 2007 to 23 billion in 2008. I always thought the concept of the “Welfare Queen” was eliminated during the Clinton Regime (where his SecTreas was a former chair of G.S.) however, Goldman Sachs has received billions of dollars in taxpayer welfare and supposedly paid that back, except for the 13 billion that was funneled through AIG to Goldman through loan guarantees. Well, wouldn’t it be hunky dory if every loan we consumers took out from these banksters came with a guarantee that if we failed, our government would pay our loans off?

One of the central goals of President Obama’s regulatory overhaul plan is to rein in banks and financial institutions that are “too big to fail.” The meltdown that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers exactly one year ago, followed by the nightmarish spectacle of bailing out reckless giants like American International Group and Citigroup, are things that policymakers never want to see again. “Too big to fail isn’t a policy; it’s a problem,” Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has often remarked. But at least for the moment, Too Big To Fail is an even bigger problem now than it was before the crisis. And while Mr. Obama has offered two basic ideas to address it, his economic team has yet to offer anything close to a concrete plan. The nation’s four biggest banks now control 60 percent of all bank deposits in the country, higher than two years ago. The handful of banking winners, like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, have acquired giant failing competitors. The ranks of bulge-bracket Wall Street investment banks have been cut back by the loss of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. The remaining survivors, like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, have been recruiting top producers from their crippled rivals.

Larry Flynt, known to many Americans as an outspoken, fearless champion of the First Amendment, and pornography entrepreneur as the publisher of Hustler Magazine and various other enterprises, is speaking up about his belief that the American government has "...been taken over by Wall Street, the mega-corporations and the super-rich..."

Charlie Gasparino reports that senior executives inside Goldman are in a panic over its image, trying to hire a "brand manager"—and even blaming a prejudice against the firm's Jewish chiefs. How worried are Goldman Sachs executives about their ability to manage the coming media tsunami when bonus season comes around?

The FED and Hank Paulson needed Buffett's image to sell the bank bailout and AIG rescue to the American public. Without Buffett's help Goldman Sachs ends up like Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns.

Few things so powerfully illustrate the cowardly passivity of modern Americans than the lack of response to the news about Goldman Sachs. It’s OK to get angry, America! Here are some of the major volleys to date in this emerging story.

What the mainstream press can learn from a Goldman takedown. .... Mainstream financial journalism is doing its level, eye-rolling, heavy-sighing best to stuff Matt Taibbi back into the alt-press hole he came from, but he’s not going along with it, and the mainstreamers in any case are making a big mistake.

Boorish CEO behavior is legion. You can't swing a chandelier without hitting some lunkhead whose company is on the public dole while he collects a 400% bonus. Many say the proletariat's anti-fat cat feelings are merely jealousy. I say CEOs are like children - spare the rod, spoil the petulant little capitards.

From the moment I left Yale and started working for Goldman Sachs, I’ve felt uneasy interacting with those who don’t. It’s not that I think less of Goldman outsiders than I did while I remained among you. It’s just that I feel your envy, and know that nothing I can do or say will ever persuade you that I am no more than human. Thus, like many of my colleagues, I have adopted a strategy of never leaving Goldman Sachs, apart from a few brief, spasmodic attempts to make what you outsiders call “love” or “the beast with two backs.” Goldman recognizes how important it is for its people to replicate themselves. We bill no performance fees for the service. Today, the sheer volume of irresponsible media commentary has forced us to reconsider our public-relations strategy. With every uptick in our share price it’s grown clearer that we who are inside Goldman Sachs must open a dialogue with you who are not. Not for our benefit, but for yours. America stands at a crossroads, and Goldman Sachs now owns both of them. In choosing which road to take, ordinary Americans must not be distracted by unproductive resentment toward the toll-takers. To that end we at Goldman Sachs would like to dispel several false and insidious rumors.

An advocacy group on Wednesday launched a campaign to derail the nomination of a Goldman Sachs executive to a high position in the US state department because of his past role in raising public funds for a Chinese company linked to Sudan. Public Accountability Initiative, a not-for-profit organization, said Robert Hormats, whom Barack Obama nominated this week as undersecretary of state for economic affairs, had made misleading comments about the 2000 listing for PetroChina, the Chinese energy group whose parent, CNPC, has been present in Sudan since 1996. As vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs International, Mr Hormats told the Wall Street Journal in 2000 that “Sudan should not be an issue because of extensive legal firewalls in place to ensure that IPO proceeds are used domestically in China.” The Public Accountability Initiative said those comments were misleading, maintaining that firewalls were not in place, and that some funds from the IPO went to CNPC. “Hormats’s role in the PetroChina deal raises serious questions about his fitness to serve in a post that will give him substantial influence over international economic policy and US-China relations,” it added. Neither Mr Hormats, Goldman Sachs nor the White House immediately responded to requests for comment.

Popular Rolling Stone contributor, writer and blogger Matt Taibbi claims that he was sent e-mails which attacked him and accused him of anti-Semitism for exposing the investment bank giant Goldman’s Sachs and their shady financial dealings over the years. Taibbi goes into great detail in his seven page essay Inside The Great American Bubble Machine on events relating to such market manipulations as the Great Depression, the commodities bubble, the housing bubble and even the upcoming green/environment bubble, and has fingered Goldman Sachs as playing a leading role in each catastrophe. More important than the various scams that have played out, much to the detriment of the average American, Taibbi exposes the reloving door tradition of the private sector employee of Wall Street into high level, unelected positions in the US government. For that blistering expose alone, Taibbi expected that he would receive reprisals from the Wall Street types looking to rebuke his charges, but never did he imagine that he would be charged with anti-Semitism for his article.

Have you received your thank you card from Goldman Sachs yet? Don't hold your breath. But you can be sure that when they've screwed up what people are trying to pass off as a recovery, they'll be back at our Treasury Department again for the next big bailout courtesy of you know who. We have no government left. It's simply a welfare agency for the most favored failed financial giants; a paper money producer to wrap the ugly truth in fictional dollars; a subprime governance scheme developing Potemkin Villages everywhere. It's socialism for the ultra rich and survival of the fittest for the rest of us.