Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it even collected.
Looks like Goldman Sachs got the drop on us folks.
Matt Taibbi has written quite the masterpiece of muckraking journalism in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. Taibbi tackles Goldman Sachs, holds them down and spits in their faces and calls them names.
The FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid
decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self·serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup. which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from
Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch
who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was
imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi billion-
dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in tax payer funds
to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company.
And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia,
scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute
payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's
Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark
Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman
lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman
director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance
giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy
came on board.
Read the whole sordid history of Goldman and all the bubbles they helped create then destroy and profit along the way here.
Can we stop Goldman Sach's before they ruin a good idea like Cap and Trade. If we allow Goldman's greedy paws on the Cap and Trade money and they blow up the bubble like they have done through out their history with other bubbles they will set back the environmental movement decades.