Qaddaffi and the Bankster Vampire Squid

If We’d Hang a Few Investment Bankers Life Would Be Good Again

by Mike Farrell

I’ve been feeling lousy and just now starting to feel better. However, I’m still enough out of it to not be able to really sustain a piece of writing.    Fortunately, there are things that really amaze and don’t need a lot of commentary, or if they do, there’s someone who does a great job. In this case,  Quadaffi and Goldman, Sachs as dissected by the inimitable Matt Taibbi and Rolling Stone.

... there was a widespread feeling of relief within the walls of the bank after news broke that Goldman a few years ago offered to  sell Moammar Qaddafi a $3.7 billion equity stake in their company. The relief, it seems, stemmed from the fact that the deal was  never struck – and therefore Goldman doesn’t have to answer charges now of having funded repression in the Middle East. From  the Carney piece:

“The last thing we need right now would be headlines reading ‘Vampire Squid Profits Funding Libyan Dictator,’” one senior Goldman investment banker told NetNet.

I appreciated the shout-out there, but I also had to laugh: only a Goldman, Sachs executive would fail to see that offering to sell yourself to a ruthless anti-Semitic dictator/terror sponsor is just as bad as actually completing the sale. If anything, it’s worse. There is no modern-day Goethe or Faust with the genius to even invent an anti-hero pathetic enough to not only try to sell his soul to the Devil, but fail! But apparently, this shameful episode is what counts as a PR win for the esteemed i-banking King these days…

Now, the story is involved and somewhat convoluted…Goldman had managed to lose 98% of a Libyan investment of several billion dollars in a fairly short time — amazingly short time, as Matt points out, unfavorably comparing Goldman’s skill for it’s clients in this case with a “blind three legged donkey sent into Caesar’s with $1.5B in chips.” Then, for some reason, the Goldman people were surprised that the people who brought you Lockerbie were incensed and threatened more than just some more lawsuits for misrepresentation, malfeasance and misfeasance. So, the obvious thing to do is to offer Q and the gang a large equity stake. Odder still, showing that some thieves have some honor someplace, the Libyans turned them down. Hilarity ensues…

Here’s the thing. Forget about any relationship between a lot of senior Goldman employees and Israel…these guys were dealing with Quadaffi. Obviously, scruples are trumped by profit, and that’s probably something the various conspiracy theorists ought to keep in mind. When you’re looking for a motive, sex, greed and power tend to come to the top in about equal amounts.  In this case, they robbed him using the electronic skills that they had honed so sharp, and then were surprised at possible repercussions. This is a piece with everything — knowing how to screw money out of stange mathematics is not an effective way to run a world. There are people like the Libyans who are perfectly capable of bringing things down to reality really quickly. So, let’s let Matt sum it up:

In con-man parlance, this is called the reload. You beat someone in a Ponzi scheme for his life’s savings, and when he shows up at your door with an axe, you get him to mortgage his house to buy a stake in the Brooklyn Bridge. After blowing $1.5 billion of Libya’s money almost instantaneously, Goldman’s solution to the problem was to immediately get Qaddafi reaching back into his pocket for a cash sum over twice the size of the original losses. It’s really hard not to admire the sheer balls of the whole deal.

If we’d hang a few investment bankers, life would be good again.

Speaking of good, I like Anthony Weiner. He’s articulate, smart and generally on the right side of things. He also just made a complete ass out of himself and Taibbi makes the point very clearly. Frankly, I find the thought of taking pictures of your erect member in or out of your shorts is kind of infantile. I recall a soldier questioned about how he ended up in the emergency room with a lightbulb shoved up his ass responding to the company commander with, “Sir, my sex life is none of your business…” Hard to make it clearer than that…except if you want to be Mayor of New York and a national spokesman for the Democratic party, you don’t get to have pictures of your dick around. Anywhere. Not even an etch-a -sketch. The correct answer to “Is that your penis in the picture that was tweeted?” is “No, goddamnit. And if I can find out who did this, I’ll do whatever it takes to ruin him, her, it or them!” Certitude? Again, let someone who writes better than I have the last word…

In other words, when you’re a certain kind of famous, there are a few things you’ve just got to give up in life – like uploading pictures of your dick, for instance, or tweet-herding hot twentysomething women by the hundreds. Is it really that hard to find other hobbies? Why do I feel like this kind of thing isn’t a problem for someone like Bernie Sanders? Politicians never cease to amaze.

Yep.

Short URL: http://www.veteranstoday.com/?p=111129