Wall Street On Parade (January 9) details the boggling Goldman Sachs presence on Trump’s team. My comments will follow the list of names.
“Trump nominated Steven Mnuchin, a 17-year veteran of Goldman Sachs to be his Treasury Secretary.”
“Stephen Bannon, another former Goldman Sachs banker, was named by Trump as his Chief Strategist in the White House.”
“The sitting President of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, has been named by Trump as Director of the National Economic Council, which, according to its website, coordinates ‘policy-making for domestic and international economic issues’.”
“…Trump nominated a Goldman Sachs outside lawyer, Jay Clayton of Sullivan & Cromwell, to serve as Wall Street’s top cop as Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
“…Clayton’s wife currently works as a Vice President at Goldman Sachs.”
“According to Politico, Goldman Sachs partner, Dina Powell, President of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, is Ivanka’s ‘top adviser on policy and staffing’.”
“Then there is Erin Walsh who had worked at Goldman Sachs since 2010 as an Executive Director and head of its Office of Corporate Engagement for Asia Pacific…Walsh is now part of Trump’s transition landing team for the State Department and is engaged in prepping the just retired CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, for his Senate confirmation hearing this week to become the Secretary of the Department of State, according to Politico.”
“And there is yet another former Goldman Sachs banker, Anthony Scaramucci, who sits on Trump’s transition team.”
The first question is: would a Trump-Goldman deal benefit Trump in a personal way? Wall Street On Parade offers possible clues.
“Now the Dow Jones company, MarketWatch, has reported that Trump’s debt is held by more than 150 Wall Street firms. The New York Times has reported that Goldman Sachs Mortgage Company holds a loan on an office tower at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, a building that is 30 percent owned by Donald Trump.”
“Some of the Trump debt held by Wall Street firms, according to media reports, includes Donald Trump’s personal guarantee in the event of a default. The true owners of other Trump debt are shielded behind secretive Limited Liability Corporations…”
If Trump is in trouble with those loans, if he’s in danger of not being able to make his payments, then that fact could form the basis of a Goldman Sachs deal. Trump gets loan protection, Goldman gets a number of influential (and self-serving) seats at the big table in Trump’s administration.
Beyond this, Goldman Sachs is…I’ll let Matt Taibbi describe them. From his classic 2010 Rolling Stone article:
“The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis [2008], 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.”
“By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush’s last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There’s John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain’s sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman…”
“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 — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts…”
So, Goldman Sachs wants to keep on doing what it has been doing. On the other hand, Trump wants a rising stock market—a symbolic signal that the economy is strong. Understanding that the market is manipulated by insiders, Trump would know where to go to make a deal.
Goldman gives him rising market numbers, and Trump gives them what they want. How much of what they want?
Another area where Goldman could provide help: assembling the funding for a major part of what appears to be an FDR New-Deal project to rebuild America’s infrastructure, putting large numbers of unemployed people back to work. The cost? At least a trillion dollars. Convincing Congress to back this plan—and also support Trump’s tax cuts—could run into a serious roadblock. The money has to come from somewhere.
It might be useful to analyze the ominous levels of public debt accumulated by state governments. The debt is floated on bond issues, and someone has to underwrite and guarantee those issues. Banks like Goldman Sachs are in that business. Trump may have approached Goldman with the premise that, by creating whole swaths of new jobs across the country, the states’ tax revenues will rise, and therefore the payback on Goldman’s investments will become more secure.
It seems certain that Trump is leaning heavily on Goldman to run interference for him. He is walking a risk-laden path.
Partnering with a vampire squid doesn’t inspire confidence.
Since I began writing and speaking about Trump (archive here), I’ve emphasized that his millions of supporters—who actually want more freedom and more of what America should stand for—have to hold his feet to the fire when he takes a direction that spells trouble and runs counter to his announced aims.
He is doing that now.
Here are two final quotes from Wall Street On Parade:
“During the primary campaign, when it emerged that Trump’s opponent Ted Cruz had received a loan from Goldman Sachs, Trump said that Cruz was ‘owned’ by Goldman Sachs.”
“During his political campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly railed against Wall Street with a specific focus on Goldman Sachs. In the final days of his campaign, Trump released an advertisement…that featured his opponent, Hillary Clinton, shaking hands with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. As the image flickers on the screen, Trump does a voice over, stating: ‘It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.’ As the ad ends, Trump bares his soul: ‘I’m doing this for the people and for the movement and we will take back this country for you and we will make America great again’.”
Has Trump convinced Goldman Sachs they can still make sky-high money in a genuinely strong American economy, with millions of new jobs? And without fake bubbles and crashes?
Has he decided he must have Goldman on his side, if he’s going to make economic progress—that, because of their power, there is no way around them?
Or is Goldman playing along and working Trump and outflanking him?
Finally, I wouldn’t bother bringing any of this up if I didn’t think Trump wants to do good things for this country. I have enumerated those intentions of his in other articles. Right out front, he continues his war against major media. He doesn’t let up. This is vital, because those media have been functioning as the prime eyes, ears, and mouths of the nation—and they are falling rapidly from that precipice. Which is a cause for celebration.
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.
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There’s also Rick Perry as Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary. When Perry was the governor of Texas he supported the Security and Prosperity Partnership on the path to a North American regional government. Globalist Perry said he thought it would be a good idea if the US and Mexico blended their social security systems. Also, in 2007 Governor Perry issued an executive order mandating that Texas girls receive the HPV vaccine.
When Perry was running for president in 2011 he said during a debate that if he won he would eliminate three government agencies. One of them was the Department of Energy.
Hahaha… the entertainment continues.
Great catch, again!! Three ringed Illumi-naughty circus.
Gotta wonder about Perry previously having said the Dept of E should be eliminated & his nomination timed with a MASSIVE shift in capital underway in global energy sectors. For instance, Saudi Arabia under “Vision 2030” and Russia “Strategy 2030” are privatizing state assets Aramco and Rosneft, in turn, the monied interests in those nations are investing their capital all over the globe in large oil & gas projects, solar, uranium mining, etc – e.g. months ago the Saudis purchased the largest oil refinery in the US, and Rosneft & BP coming together like Siamese twins in Russian projects. No disagreements behind the curtain as they fuse into a tangled monstrosity, the supranational corporate oligarch takeover of all resources – one of the 4 pillars of UN2030. So…. maybe the agenda is for a radical transformation of the US Dept of E to outwardly serve the wishes of the global energy titans wrapped by UN tentacles, rather than so-called “American interests”. Clearly TPTB don’t want us to have a say in policies that directly affect us, the Dem Gov of CO threatening to sue a CO town for banning fracking near homes and schools, going so far as to meet with oil & gas executives to pledge he would sic the state A.G. bulldog on the town.
My-oh-my… with all that major globalization in energy going on behind the scenes, Perry would be thrown into a wolf pack and totally out of his intellectual realm. Perhaps that’s intentional. Or perhaps he brings with him some heavy Texan oil hitters… who knows what really goes on at that level? But I’ve known for years privatization was the beginning of the end of America. Every asset the taxpayers have funded is being sold to for-profit corporations that take the profits out and stash them in offshore or central banks. Dollars have been hemorrhaging out of this country for decades, never to be seen again, with no accountability. We are being silently raped and pillaged. That’s why 5D parents are homeschooling: decentralized education! Our snowy roads get cleared by neighbors with snow plows instead of waiting for the decrepit country DOT plows to show up because there is “no money to pay the drivers overtime on weekends” even though some taxpayers just might want to use their roads on the weekends.
It’s all part of the process of decentralization, taking responsibility instead of relying on criminals to take care of our needs. How this is going to butt heads with the globalists remains to be seen, but it’s all part of the inevitable timeline transition between the old/new paradigms.
Well said, R. Have a great weekend!
From James Corbett: “Ten years ago, everybody was on MySpace. Ten years from now, the Twitters and Facebooks and YouTubes of today will be dinosaurs, abandoned by users sick of censorship and centralized control. Thankfully, the alternatives to these social media dinosaurs are already here, and they’re blockchain-based, torrent friendly, decentralized and censorship resistant.”
That’s what I’m talkin’ about… Have a great weekend yourself.
Isn’t it Perry’s wife who has publicly contradicted him concerning women’s reproductive rights?
Hi See Janus. Happy New Year! …..I wasn’t aware of that. Since the vast majority of what the minions say is scripted obfuscation, I tend to follow the money and watch what they do. Though, I note the conditioning.
Let’s remember, regardless of who won the election, the bankers/globalists still control our currency and can easily begin creating chaos whenever they wish. Fixing this system will take far more than a stroke of the pen. JFK tried.
‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’
– the Godfather
You cant control a dog that is four feet in front of you. You need that dog close by, at your side, to grab its collar. The long list of cronies in Goldman was interesting. But what of it? Who actually repealed the laws that protected us from mergers of banks and investment companies???? Uhh. Our Congress. Who forced the banks to lend even tho they weren’t good loans? Janet Reno. I saw her in person as all that was going down. The Treasury threatened the banks with law suits et al. Everybody deserves a house and mortgage. The plan was on the GOVERNMENT side. Sure Goldman went along. The make money! You dangle money and they follow! trump needs to bring back and keep in the US the trillions of dollars under the sway of Goldman Sachs. Who else to stop theft and burglaries than a burglar. Goldman guys know the rules and the loopholes. Trump will have Goldman helping him to save the economy. Maybe even get the elite banks and the fed out of town. That would be later I think.
So true!
Goldman Sachs bank was one of the 8 banks that originally held class A stock in the Federal Reserve Bank. Their biggest competitor was Lehman Brothers Bank, another holder of Class A stock in the Fed, before the crash of 2008. After the crash, Lehman Brothers Bank, was not bailed out and allowed to fail. Now, there only 7 Banks holding Class A stock in the Fed. – 3 in the U.S. and 4 in Europe. The Fed should be nationalized and actually become a Federal Bank that actually worked for the benefit of the people instead of the Fed.’s stockholders.
Part of the reason is there were no remaining Lehman Bros male heirs and all females had been married into the families of the other 7 banks. It was a simple estate planning maneuver.
That is interesting! Where did you get that information?