They all have mistresses and weekend dalliances. They know about each other. How could they not? They visit the same hotel on a regular basis. They collude in keeping the secret...until...one of them threatens to topple the apple cart in their business. And so Spitzer gets his butt kicked. It's absolutely more than a coincidence. Some enterprising young investigative journalist ought to go after the story; it would be a very hot item.

Rumor has it that the trail to Spitzer's escapades at the Mayflower Hotel was picked up by the Homeland Security sniffing dogs eavesdropping into cell phone calls records and credit card purchases logs. Its all part of the Bush years "war on privacy" as such information is scrutinized in the hopes of tracking down the money laundering schemes of rouge, clandestine groups seen as potential enemies of the state. Word is that along with Spitzer other fat cats were also nabbed in the surveillance nets of the feds but were not prosecuted and that particular investigation was shut down as soon as they discovered who Client Number 9 really was. Spitzer was loathed by Wall Street as he made no secret of his intentions to go after much of the corruption he believed was part of Wall Street's modus operandi. When you consider that the Treasury Dept. is practically owned by Goldman Sachs, a Republican administration was in power having gone steroidal shredding American's constitutional liberties, and a Democrat governor had declared war on their turf, it's not much of a stretch to think the levers of power and influence were greased by the well-positioned to cook up a convenient political scandal that would rid them of their nemesis. It's a messy business at times but after the aforementioned inconvenience and a bit of a bumpy ride for about a year or two, the good times are back with a vengeance for the Money Masters at The Street.

He already has.

if I were matt taibbi I wouldn't be flying in any small planes for a while!

California Penal code 518:

"518. Extortion is the obtaining of property from another, with his
consent, or the obtaining of an official act of a public officer,
induced by a wrongful use of force or fear, or under color of
official right."

obtaining property -- Check

obtaining an official act of a public officer -- Check

by wrongful use of...fear -- Check

But we all know who those laws were written for.

Exactly we have a photo of the real enemy right there, the militia is just a distraction to divide our energies, which should be untied to defeat people like Blankfein who exactly are a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. People like Blankfein rub their hands with glee when we direct our wrath towards the rural poor and not his penthouse and 100 year old champaign set.

Exactly. The vampire squid is poetic license but you know the story is true and well and multiply sourced, otherwise Matt would be spending his time in court fighting libel suits.

Jews have specialized in banking and finance for thousands of years.
So basically the trade gets passed on to their offspring as with every other
ethnic group you described. They eventually make so much money and game
the system so well that they end up being hated for it.

Your comment is generally true, but there are exceptions. It's not "to a man" Jewish. Hank Paulson is a Christian Scientist. Joe Cassano, who sunk AIG is not Jewish. His father was a policeman.

I think it's basically as adnoseum puts it. Just as Irish and Italians run so many city governments, Jews dominate the financial industry, because they have for centuries. There are still plenty of WASPS in high finance but Jews seem always in long supply. There are obvious links to the Israel lobby, the New York Times, and dozens of other power centers. Jews do exert a disproportionate amount of power, politically and economically, and most of it derives from their dominating positions in finance. Especially since we have hardly any manufacturing sector any more, finance and the military constitute the majority of the US economy. Blankfein can lie with same impunity about Goldman Sachs' motives and machinations as the Pentagon lies about its own. When you own the country, nobody nowhere is going to call you out on the lies. And since the USA is essentially now just a festering mountain of lies and criminality, not lying at the highest levels is tantamount to treason.

I'd speculate that this, at least in part, descends from medieval times in Europe when Jews were legally barred from many businesses and professions. Money lending however, was a prohibited practice for many Christians so they relied on the Jewish community to provide those services. Over the centuries this forced segregation produced the ethnic concentration in finance and related businesses such as trade in jewels and precious metals. This pattern was reinforced by the increasing expertise and reliability of the Jewish practitioners that evolved as each generation taught the next one. Further, the extended Jewish community, being transnational, provided relatively secure channels for international commerce immune to the difficulties of lcoal politics. Thus their success grew and expanded over the centuries while often remaining an essentially family business.

Unfortunately, human nature has a propensity for knee-jerk animosity toward those to whom we are in debt, especially when abetted by xenophobic fear and suspicion. And heaven forbid that any non-Christian appear to be more successful than I, lest I suspect them of secret and nefarious plots. The fact is, the overwhelming majority of Jewish business people are impeccably honest and their customers know it -- else they'd have disappeared many generations ago.

That said, there is absolutely no ethic group that does not produce a sociopathic sonofabitch once in a while.

This is a cultural left-over from medieval Europe, where the Catholic Church promulgated laws that forbade the faithful to practice usury & forbade Jews from living in most areas (ghetto is an Italian word referring to a specific portion of town where Jews were required to live) & banned them from most professions. Thus, money lending was one of the few occupations available to Jews (if they weren't being expelled or killed in superstition inspired riots winked at by the nobility to whom were indebted to Jewish money lenders). This also occurred to a large extent in Eastern Orthodox (particularly Czarist Russia) lands as well.
Secondly, the median educational level of the American Jewish (and the world, for that matter) community is higher than the average, as higher learning has a great position of cultural respect in the Jewish tradition. Thus, there is a higher proportion of Jewish college graduates than in relation to the slice of the general population. In recent years (beginning with Grandpa Caligula's reign [Reagan]), the financial industry has attracted the higher GPA earners of elite universities, thus it is natural that a fair amount of said "achievers" would be Jewish.
Make no mistake, the elite that runs America is WASP old money, who's most recent representative in the White House was Dubya. In fact, the great majority of American presidents, senators, & congresspersons have been and continue to be WASP's. Murmuring darkly about a "Jewish conspiracy" is merely one of the WASP elite's obfuscation strategies.

pjd I am guessing it's because Catholic Christians were barred from collecting interest by Catholic doctrine (against usury) and people of Jewish descent pushed out of many jobs other than finance due to anti Semitism and segregation of neighborhoods in the middle ages. So anti Semitism I am guessing led to family traditions of Jewish people pursuing jobs in the finance industry in areas where they were unfairly barred from other means of employment. There is some truth to the fact that example the Rothschild family is powerful in finance. That is obviously *not* an excuse to discriminate against Jewish people the vast majority of whom are *not* employed in the financial industry but just one possible reason I can think of to answer your question.

interesting responses to pjd's question:

if loaning at interest fell to the jews due to christians being forbidden to do so, and jews being forbidden to do much else, do we, at this point in time, feel loaning money at interest is 'good', or not?

That phrase was very carefully written to be totally true, but to also be completely misleading.

"...but no one - including Goldman Sachs - KNEW whether they would continue to fall or stabilize".

It is obvious that no one can KNOW the future for SURE, but you can, if you study a financial situation carefully enough, make a very good educated guess/bet on how it will play out. This is EXACTLY what G.S. (or should the now be referred to as B.S.) did.

"We certainly did not KNOW the future of the residential housing market in the first half of 2007 any more than we can predict the future of markets today."

Again it is obvious that they can't KNOW the future, but they can and should be very good at predicting it. Isn't that why people are their clients. Aren't they supposed to be providing a service, or are they implying they are no better than somebody picking stocks by throwing darts at a listing of publicly traded companies? If the later is true, why the hell do the exist?

same here..i worked very briefly in real estate in 2005 and i saw what they were doing..the outfit i was with had a financial partner in-house and i saw what they were doing too and knew it was unsustainable..i've been saying ever since that if i could see it these guys had to have known..they are pretending to be as blind as most of the masses, but they are far from it.

Justice Department--Now there's an oxymoron for you!

during the revolution we tarred and feathered scumbags like blanfein.....

hell the whole revolution was about the monopolies created by the queen and the east india trading company.....

time for a new revolution - or at least a few boiling pots of hot tar....

and the teabaggers? historically they would have been called the tories

too bad we lack any sort of historical knowledge in this country

Matt Taibbi struck a nerve, didn't he?

According to Blackfein, he is "doing God's work."

And, according to Obama, Blankfein, et.al., are "savvy businessmen."

From the beginning, we knew that Summers, Geithner, Senator Dodd, and so many others that are too numerous to count, are the enablers in a system that is completely rigged against anyone but themselves.

Brooksley Born is continuing to warn that another collapse/crisis can NOT be avoided. Nothing yet has been fixed.

Elizabeth Warren continues to fight for "we the people."

Nomi Prins continues to speak out that what we need first, and most importantly, is the reinstitution of the New Deal Glass-Steagall Act.

Yesterday, NC-Tom recommended the following lecture by William Black, who talks openly about how this culture of "sociopaths" was spawned:

https://webdisk.lclark.edu/econ/steinhardt2010/steinhardt2010.html

In addition, the 2005 documentary, The Corporation, is available as a 2-DVD set, and contains additional interviews.