He is good. A new blogger called Thrasybulus at Conscience of A Progressive is someone I’m now visiting often. He’s just a wee bit interested in the drama of Goldman vs the rest of the world. Some good words from today’s entry:
As we’re all treated to yet another public flogging of miscreants – reminiscent of the circuses surrounding Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Bros, ad nauseum – it’s important to bear in mind the important distinction between punishing people who broke existing laws and the need to reinstate a modicum of sanity into the system forms the underpinning of our entire economy (and a good chunk of the rest of the world’s as well).
My personal “I can’t believe this shit” moment came while listening to one Goldman exec’s lawyered-up evasions of the direct question “Does Goldman Sachs consider it its duty to be to act in its clients’ best interest?” His answer was some version of “we love our clients and think we’re very helpful to them”, which is of course code for “We try not to fuck them over so much that they really notice it…or at least notice it too too often.”
. . .
Nobody built this country – or has ever died for it – so that Ivy-trained assholes could feast on its lifeblood. We may have gotten fat, dumb & happy as a result of our success, but if we don’t want to on the ashcan of history faster than any empire that’s come before us we’re going to need to mind the store. Outlawing behavior such as this would be a great step in the right direction.
You can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or democracy. But you cannot have both.
Whatever Works 