The Great American Bubble Machine - June 2009

The Great American Bubble Machine

By Matt Taibbi

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 relentlessly sucking onto 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.

...If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain - an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

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...

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 (headlines) 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.

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This revealing expose breaks down exactly how Goldman Sachs has been at the heart of every bubble in the American economy since the Great Depression and really helps explain last year's huge spike in oil prices and the bottomless pit of bailouts--the vortex of a black hole--that has subsumed our economy...

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