The Love of Gold, Man, Is The Root of Sacks of Evil

Looking at the Goldman Sachs execs sitting all stiff and arrogant yesterday in the Senate hearing, The Lion wondered how much their suits cost. One suit must have been worth a few mortgage payments for some poor sap for whom the wheeling and dealing of Goldman had cost his house, his life savings, his job.

These guys, by Goldman’s own admission, are the best and the brightest that recruiters sucked out of business schools with the promise of lots and lots of personal wealth. Smart guys. No dummies among those suits.

“Come work for us, and we promise you’ll be a multimillionaire before you’re thirty. You’ll work your butt off, but you’ll be richer than you can even imagine,” say or imply or hint the recruiters.

It’s probably not too different from the way the mob recruits bookies. Work hard, do right by us, and you’ll earn big bucks. The difference is that if you screw up with the mob, you end up dead. Goldman and their ilk will just discard you to go live among the hoi polloi you spent your career screwing.

But these guys never see the masses. They no more see the damage their greed does than a  compulsive gambler sees the havoc he wreaks on his family and friends. They don’t even see their own greed, their own lust for gold. Money is the currency by which they measure their lives. The more they have the more worthwhile they are as a member of society.

They get the fancy penthouses. They get the fancy cars from Italy. They get the fancy women, but a million dollar woman is still a million dollar whore. And to keep it all coming they cook up more deals, more bets, more devious and complicated schemes to suck money from both sides of every bet they make, to suck money from the rest of society.

They don’t build anything. They don’t create anything, other than personal wealth. They don’t do anything about poverty and hunger and illiteracy, other than an occasional minor public relations stunt. They don’t create jobs: in fact they are largely responsible for American jobs going overseas while Americans sink deeper into impoverishment.

They’ll tell you they provide the cash that keeps business going in this country. They provide credit, they’ll say. But they barely do that anymore. They can’t make enough money to satisfy their lust for gold that way, and frankly, that sort of thing just isn’t exciting enough for them. Not when they can wheel and deal and make a million bucks in a couple of hours after lunch.

They’re parasites. They suck up the money, drain the economy, and thumb their noses at the people they’ve made homeless and jobless and hungry. They’re amoral. They live outside society in penthouses and mansions and gated communities. Their fingernails never get dirty, and their maids iron their shirts before the maids go home to families they can barely feed anymore. They’re parasites, and they are as clueless as lice feeding on the heads of kindergartners about the bigger world that they afflict, that they disease.

They steal from lesser beings and bequeath the spoils to themselves. There exist only two rules in their world: make money for the company, and don’t get caught.

They go for the gold for themselves, and they bring down the evil on everyone else.

But they do get to wear those nice, expensive suits. And there’s nothing like an expensive suit to impress the Congressional Republicans who stand with you against reform of the financial industry.

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