02.17.11
Why Lloyd Blankfein Won’t Be Lynched
Explained by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone.
A lot of it you know — government capture by Wall Street, the revolving door between the financial policing agencies of government and plush Wall Street positions which guarantee you are “fit for life” once landed.
A couple graphs really stand out:
“You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street,” says a former congressional aide. “That’s all it would take. Just once.”
=======
As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. He put a Citigroup executive in charge of his economic transition team, and he just named an executive of JP Morgan Chase, the proud owner of $7.7 million in Chase stock, his new chief of staff. “The betrayal that this represents by Obama to everybody is just — we’re not ready to believe it,” says Budde, a classmate of the president from their Columbia days. “He’s really fucking us over like that? Really? That’s really a JP Morgan guy, really?”
========
The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don’t feel real; you don’t see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They’re crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let’s steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They’re attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone’s claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.
Another mental stumbling block is that most Americans don’t even know who Lloyd Blankfein is, given the execrable track record of the mainstream media in pointing out who the big villains are.
Earlier in the week DD ripped a new hole in an old colleague who not only didn’t know who Blankfein was but thought that was the name of the rock n roll band.
So as far as the matter goes, Americans know things have turned awfully rancid. But as to the details and who did the bad, many are still radically mis- and under-informed.
And while there is a great desire loose in the land to see people punished, it’s not the real public enemies who are the targets of the ire. Instead it’s people like school teachers in Wisconsin who the President has failed to enthusiastically support in what can only be described as continuing evidence of politically expedient cowardice.
The idea that he might actually fly in to get on the line in the Madison courthouse with the people who voted for him in 2008 seems very alien now. Instead he flew to see Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.
Taken altogether it forms the context of the idea that the greatest national security threats faced by the people of the United States are not abroad. They’re right here.
But there are still countless idiots who hog up all the frontpage space whinging about al Qaeda, pathetic alleged homegrown jihadis and Iran.
“Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein” — which I will play in Pasadena on Saturday night — here.