The conga line of corporate bloodsuckers

March 8, 2018
Issue 
Occupy Wall Street protesters carry a vampire squid puppet to the offices of Goldman Sachs in 2011.

Following the resignation of former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn as the Trump administration's Chief Economic Advisor, US President Donald Trump tweeted: “Will be making a decision soon on the appointment of new Chief Economic Advisor. Many people wanting the job — will choose wisely!”

I am sure he's right on at least the first part of that tweet. There will undoubtedly be a conga line of other corporate bloodsuckers eager to take the job.

Cohn's resignation followed his disagreement with Trump's planned tariffs on imports of steel and aluminium but he did not do too badly for himself and Goldman Sachs during his time as a key Trump advisor. The corporate tax cuts alone would net Goldman Sachs billions.

In his resignation statement, Cohn said he was proud to have helped Trump “enact pro-growth economic policies to benefit the American people”. No need to say, especially to benefit the rich people.

After the Great Financial Crisis in 2007–08, Rolling Stone dubbed Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.

It showed how the investment bank had successfully scammed every financial bubble between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Financial Crisis.

“The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas [petrol] prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts.

“All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.”

Corporate bloodsuckers like Goldman Sachs are in pretty much every major scam around the world. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was a former Goldman Sachs Australia executive and he was smack bang in the centre of the HIH insurance scandal — the largest corporate collapse in Australia’s history, with liquidators estimating losses of up to $5.3 billion.

Goldman Sachs is now conducting the 51% partial privatisation of the Sydney Motorway Corporation, the dodgy NSW government-owned private company that runs the notorious WestConnex tollway project. This is the biggest infrastructure project in Australia, officially costed at $16.8 billion (but believed to be much more).

The bank will get a $16.5 million fee for this dirty job and other corporate bloodsuckers, such as Morgan Stanley, UBS and Macquarie Bank, are all lined up for a slice of the action as advisors to bidders, the NSW government and in some instances even both, according to investigative business journalist Michael West.

Bloodsuckers are drawn to the scent of blood. So we can be sure there will be line of corporate bloodsuckers eager to become Trump's new chief economic advisor.

If you are sick of a world ruled — and being destroyed — by corporate bloodsuckers, then you should be part of the movement to change the system. One way of doing this is by taking out a subscription to Green Left Weekly for yourself or a friend.

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