16 May 2012

Goldman Data Admits to Naked Short Selling, Disclosing Client Positions, Abusive Legal Practices


“He should be someone we can work with, especially if he sees that cooperation results in resources, both data and funding, while resistance results in isolation.”

Goldman Sachs


"To be a sophisticate in the 21st century requires the ability to shut one's eyes and one's mind to anything that one does not want to see or think about. The more glaring that the contradiction between what is said and what is done becomes, the harder it is to remain sophisticated. The tragedy is that the only alternative, that of becoming an independent thinker, is looked upon as more terrifying than to go on pretending to be deaf, dumb and blind."

Bill Buckler, The Privateer

Is there any wonder why economics stands as a disgraced profession, and the mainstream media is so oddly silent on so many things? Financial corruption permeates and undermines the fabric of society and its thought, by action and example.

It both frightens and tantalizes, rewards and victimizes. And as that contagion spreads into the government, as it inevitably does seeking power and greed, no one is safe.
"False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men, and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing."

Joseph de Maistre
Standing for the truth can be isolating and painful, especially in a people who have given themselves over to selfishness and corruption. So much easier to take the money, and just go along to get along.

Often all one has to do is to close their eyes and say the words. It starts so easily. Who does not want to be flattered and favored, to be accepted as one of the better people, not one of them?
"This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you...He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them. He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods.

Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J.H.Newman, The Time of Antichrist
Do you imagine that this time will be different? This is how an educated people of ordinarily good spirits can learn over time to tolerate almost anything, and in the end ignore even torture, cruelty, and murder, and to defend the indefensible with glib lies and slogans, until one day their grandchildren look at them with horror and revulsion asking, 'How could you have allowed this? What were you thinking? What have you become?'

Rolling Stone
Accidentally Released - and Incredibly Embarrassing - Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in 'Naked Short Selling'
By Matt Taibbi
May 15, 2012

It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes God smiles on us. Last week, he smiled on investigative reporters everywhere, when the lawyers for Goldman, Sachs slipped on one whopper of a legal banana peel, inadvertently delivering some of the bank’s darker secrets into the hands of the public.

The lawyers for Goldman and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch have been involved in a legal battle for some time – primarily with the retail giant Overstock.com, but also with Rolling Stone, the Economist, Bloomberg, and the New York Times. The banks have been fighting us to keep sealed certain documents that surfaced in the discovery process of an ultimately unsuccessful lawsuit filed by Overstock against the banks.

Last week, in response to an Overstock.com motion to unseal certain documents, the banks’ lawyers, apparently accidentally, filed an unredacted version of Overstock’s motion as an exhibit in their declaration of opposition to that motion. In doing so, they inadvertently entered into the public record a sort of greatest-hits selection of the very material they’ve been fighting for years to keep sealed...

Read the rest here.

Here is the link to the Goldman court filing.