April 17, 2010 archive

OpenSecrets.org: Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs, one of Wall Street’s most prestigious investment banks, was also among the many banks in 2008 and 2009 to receive billions of dollars in taxpayer money to help it stay afloat. Like others in the securities industry, Goldman Sachs advises and invests in nearly every industry affected by federal legislation. The firm closely monitors issues including economic policy, trade and nearly all legislation that governs the financial sector. It has been a major proponent of privatizing Social Security as well as legislation that would essentially deregulate the investment banking/securities industry. The firm tends to give most of its money to Democrats. A number of high-ranking government officials in recent years have spent part of their careers at Goldman Sachs.

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Only a matter of time – Glenn Beck has offered his voice to the entitlement wars (no, not defense, SS and Medicare)

Have you ever wondered why we even have SS?  It’s not an American idea.  It’s from Germany in the 1800s.  Hmmm, let’s see who else was prominent at that time — Karl Marx, Frederich Nietsche….The progressive wave of European social insurance infected America and this is the result of it.  This is European thinking, not American.

Come on, those French monkeys must have taken the lead.

Nietsche:

Socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be:  its endeavors are thus in the profoundest sense reactionary.  For it desires an abundance of  state power such as only despotism has ever had.

Glenn, want to edit your statement?

Here’s an interesting soundbite if we think about his audience:

When FDR signed that SS bill,  it wasn’t designed to subsidize a cushy retirement, so seniors could jet set all across the globe on vacations. [it] was meant as insurance.  In 1930 life expectancy was only 58  for men and 62 for women, the retirement age was 65!  You weren’t  even expected to get benefits.  Today life expectancy is 75  for men, 80 for women and too many people rely on SS funding their shuffleboard tournaments.

You should have saved.

FAIR says 72% of his audience is 54 or older (not counting younger than 18).  Just sayin.

Come on, President Obama – surely you can find a spot for him.  

Let’s put aside that he is enormously wealthy – No, I changed my mind.  Let’s not.

A short diary – but I want to begin my luxurious life quickly this am.  I’ll be back.  

Crossposted at Daily Kos

We’ve all, at some point or another in our lives, had this fantasy.  Whether we perceive modern life as too hurried, unsatisfying, devoid of meaning, or we see ourselves as slaves to the demands of technology, some of us yearn for a simpler time when many of the great political, ideological, and literary debates of decades gone by had yet to be settled.  Conflicts or movements of the past in which we picture ourselves an integral part of.  For we are confident that our presence would have resulted in an outcome to our liking.  Great ideas that we wish we’d thought of.  Music that we know we should have recorded.  Inventions we know we were destined to be associated with.  It is the inevitable ‘what if’ question we often think of.  It is the restless explorer in all of us.

RJ Matson, New York Observer, Buy this cartoon

Allow me to indulge in my fantasy below the fold.

Open Thread