Goldman and Sachs and Lipstick and Rouge
Posted on 28 April 2010
It’s a kind of a strange feeling now to have watched the unfolding of the Goldman Sachs drama in Congress (and the White House), the rising rage in the country towards Goldman Sachs’ blithe multi billion dollar bonuses. It’s been over a year now that I’ve been raging against this company (along with a few others)…
Now I don’t want to claim to be able to see into the future – but I’d put money on what I think is going to happen in the next six (or so) months re these high flyers. We’ll see if I’m right again about Goldman Sachs. Frankly, there’s nothing mystical going on about my predictions. It’s just logic.
What we’re seeing right now is theater. DC’s version of Hollywood. Goldman Sachs will be publically slapped for their crimes. The “lawmen” in the Justice Department, etc, who are doing the hard work to bring these Wall Street criminals to the courthouse will be compromised. In the end, none of the top guys will go to jail and almost no regulations will be brought to bare (watch Senator Dodd closely – he so looks the part – nothing will happen of substance).
Hopefully we will get through this coming fall election without another massive economic downturn. Why do we wish this? Because as bad as it’s going to be for the compromising Democrats in this election, it will be a bloodbath if the economic scene comes unglued – because then, the racist nonsense in Arizona will look like a picnic. (Think Sarah Palin headed for the White House in a wave of populist support – you heard it here – think a gentler version of the Weimar Republic in 1933). I know, I know – such a doomsayer – which is why I’ll be voting for every Democrat I can find on my ballot, even as I rage against their willingness to sell their first born at half price to any tacky corporation that will have them. They will still be better than any lock-stepping Republican.
But I can’t help but believe that the downturn will come, folks, just as cancer returns when you don’t do the hard, hard work necessary to clear it up with radiation, chemotherapy, etc – nasty – nasty – nasty stuff.
No nasty stuff has happened here – unless you’re one of the 15 million newly unemployed. The guys (and the few gals) at (or near) the top are doing just fine again, thank you very much. The body politic appears to be just fine too – none of the brutal ravages of modern medicine anywhere in sight.
But the cancer will return like taxes. I’m (very, very sadly) betting on it now. And what you are seeing with Goldman Sachs et al is simply the appearance of a cure. Appearances are really just another form of lies: lipstick and rouge covering the ravages of a powerful and advancing illness.
Lies don’t work in the end.
In fact – if the lies are big enough – they cause incalculable, even fatal, damage.
1 Response to Goldman and Sachs and Lipstick and Rouge
“…a gentler version of the Weimar Republic.” ???
Stephen, you mis-speak, or at least mis-characterize your prophecy of the rise of a Palin government by comparing it to and by comparison denigrating the Weimar Republic.
There was nothing wrong with the political and social era known as The Weimar Republic. Historically, it was a wonderfully creative period. It can fairly be characterized as an era of important political, cultural and social innovation. Every issue about the Weimar Republic, about life in Germany in the 1920s was intensely debated — simultaneously at the intellectual and artistic level and at the more pedestrian level of politics and society.
It’s true that there was intense instability in the economy, in society, and politics. But there was, at the same time, deep intellectual engagement that, for the first time, emerged as a by-product of the problems of living in the then-emerging modern age.
The revolution of 1918/19 was crucial to this cultural rebirth as well. The revolution threw out the Kaiser and established a democratic system — the most democratic system the Germans had lived under to that point. The spirit of revolution created a sense that the future was open, that people were living in an era of unbounded possibilities, that society could be shaped in a more humanitarian way.
Of course, we all know it did not last. But the rise of Nazism after 14 years of the Weimar experience is not the cause of Weimar’s demise. It was the Great Depression that brought down the Republic and the ascendant panic allowed the soothing order of dictatorship to seep up from the sewer and capture the minds of the desperate.
That is the corollary you should expound. Other than that, we’re on the same page.