EW YORK (CNNMoney) — Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has retained the services of prominent defense attorney Reid Weingarten.
Investors did not take the news well. Goldman shares plunged in the final minutes of trading, following a report published late Monday by Reuters. Shares dropped almost 5% to $106.51 — a fresh 52-week low. The stock lost another 1.5% in trading after the close.
Weingarten, an attorney at Steptoe & Johnson, is one of the nation's premier white-collar crime attorneys. He represented WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and former Enron accountant Richard Cause, among others.
Item 1 is an insightful essay by Patrick Seale outlining the common characteristics of the political instabilities and revolutionary pressures now sweeping Europe and the Middle East. Although Seale uses the term Global Intifada to describe these instabilities, the term Intifada evolved out of the Palestinian struggle against occupation. He suggests the instabilities may be following a more general dynamic. The common causal factors he describes in the second paragraph also bring to mind a very loose comparison of the unrest unleashed in 2011 to the explosion of revolutions in 1848 across Europe. That many of Seale's common factors also exist in varying degrees in the United States makes one wonder why the politics of rage in the US remain confined to the right side of political spectrum. Item 2, “The World Consequences of US Decline,” is an equally insightful essay by Immanuel Wallerstein that suggests obliquely that this may be a temporary condition.
The memorandum “Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001” has been circulating for years on the Internet, studiously ignored by most. It was previously posted as a journal item on this website. Since then, the public has learned a great deal more about both gold and greed, and the memorandum is once again circulating.
This is by no means the complete story, and there are some leaps of imagination and speculation that must be deeply investigated or discounted. Central to appreciating the magnitude of the government cover-up is the FACT that MONTHS before 9/11 Dick Cheney set in motion the national counter-terrorism exercise that gave him complete control on “the day” of 9/11.
What is clear is that there is a great deal more investigation to be done, and that a truth and reconciliation commission should be created in time to put Dick Cheney and the others on the stand before they either die a natural death or are assassinated by foreign governments righteously angry over what has been done to them by American children playing with fire.
Here are a few extracts that today have a greater likelihood of being appreciated for their substance.
Yes, we are watching something melt down. But I'd argue the thing that's dying is not business itself, but a financial parasite — a speculative marketplace that no longer funds business but instead seeks to extract value from healthy commerce. More a funds vampire than an infuser of needed capital, the investment industry has been exposed as a drag on business. The future of commerce looks bright to me because it may be unencumbered by the weight of this non-productive capital.
. . . . . . .
Once we accept the fact that the money and banks we have grown accustomed to using are not the only ways to generate capital, we liberate ourselves and our businesses from a finance industry that has enjoyed a monopoly over our commerce for much too long. They have not only abused our trust through corrupt self-dealing, but abused their privilege through systemic usury. Businesses are only obligated to support their employees, owners, and customers — not an entire finance industry.
Wow. Henry Blodget has discovered and pulled out incredible stuff from a document filed with the SEC by a former senior employee at Moody's, one of the big-3 securities ratings agencies.
Moody's is partly owned by a company in which I've owned stock for many years: Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett has consistently defended Moody's (and the sleazy Goldman Sachs, another big BRK investment) with feel-good non-answers to serious questions. I'm increasingly disenchanted with Buffett, and that's one of the main reasons why.
A former senior analyst at Moody's has gone public with his story of how one of the country's most important rating agencies is corrupted to the core.
The analyst, William J. Harrington, worked for Moody's for 11 years, from 1999 until his resignation last year.
From 2006 to 2010, Harrington was a Senior Vice President in the derivative products group, which was responsible for producing many of the disastrous ratings Moody's issued during the housing bubble.
Harrington has made his story public in the form of a 78-page “comment” to the SEC's proposed rules about rating agency reform, which he submitted to the agency on August 8th. The comment is a scathing indictment of Moody's processes, conflicts of interests, and management, and it will likely make Harrington a star witness at any future litigation or hearings on this topic.
Secretary of Defense Panetta used an invitation to the National War College as an opportunity to lobby against cutting the defense budget more than the $350 billion he has already agreed to. In the absence of any informed or probing questions, Panetta's extreme rhetoric has also oozed into new Washington DC hysteria resulting from reports about a new round of Pentagon budget cuts. Even the most severe version of the cuts being bandied about would leave DOD quite flush with money in historic terms.
The invitation came to me from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's public affairs office to attend a “conversation” with Panetta and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton at the prestigious National Defense University in Washington. Although I knew it wasn't me they wanted to talk to, I sat in the audience to hear Panetta and Clinton in action, especially on the subject of my prime interest: the defense budget.
A sobering Japanese bookend to the stunning Sprey-Cockburn report which documented Fukushima's increased infant death rates in some cities in the United States (distributed on 16 Aug). Yet another nail in the claim that we can evolve a safe carbon-free economy in the near term. Given the low power density of green technologies, like wind and solar, going carbon-free or moving away from fire — i.e., the invention that launched millions of years human cultural evolution — in the next 30-100 years necessarily involves a huge expansion in nuclear power, because is the only high power-density, non-carbon solution available over the foreseeable future).
Japanese doctors warn of public health problems caused by Fukushima radiation.
by Dahr Jamail
Scientists and doctors are calling for a new national policy in Japan that mandates the testing of food, soil, water, and the air for radioactivity still being emitted from Fukushima's heavily damaged Daiichi nuclear power plant.
“How much radioactive materials have been released from the plant?” asked Dr Tatsuhiko Kodama, a professor at the Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology and Director of the University of Tokyo's Radioisotope Centre, in a July 27 speech to the Committee of Health, Labour and Welfare at Japan's House of Representatives.
Read more….
Phi Beta Iota: We do not agree with Brother Spinney's conclusion. Infinite free energy is available now, particularly in countries such as Chile where a wide variety of solar, geo-thermal, and oceanic forms can be deployed. We have lacked both political will and scientific imagination, as well as the essential focus on distributed self-sufficiency. The “central” generation paradigm is corrupt and will not scale.
