Post to "Seeking Alpha" about GS

Post to this thread about Matt Taibbi's article calling for the prosecution of Goldman Sachs' executives:

C'mon - GS and many of the posters on this board are traders, or directly or indirectly in the service of traders...and, as such, are into siphoning money from the nation's financial circulatory system as cleanly and with a minimum of ancillary effort as possible. Period. There is nothing nice or "high-ground" about it.

Glorify as you will, dress it up in as many glitzy trappings as you will ("providing liquidity"...yadda, yadda), sugar coat it with high-priced press releases and PR flack as you will, smokescreen it in legalese...whatever. The goal is still to engage in, as much as can be achieved, clean, "freebase" siphoning of cash as possible.

Goldman does this tremendously well. They do it by being the croupier ("market maker") in a giant virtual casino that, more and more, they run. They manipulate the casino by infiltrating the policy-making bodies and the regulatory bodies with ex-GS soldiers. They do it by subverting ethical common sense and dressing it up as legal high ground. They are too hypnotized by piles of cash and pseudo-respectability to pause for a moment and stop stinking up the joint ethically. They are, looked at in one way, deeply lazy.

I understand the idea of legally siphoning money, because I used to be a full-time blackjack card counter - there is precious little difference between what I did and what GS does. I made my living siphoning money (ultimately) from poorly-educated patrons of the casinos. I've heard every rococo ethical rationalization for what i an and other card counters did on the blackjack message boards, and they're all BS. I finally quit because I was uncomfortable with doing absolutely nothing productive in the process of earning a living. It stunk. It felt uncomfortable. I was a cash siphoner - that was all.

GS are glorified money siphoners. They are just like a vampire...a vampire squid.
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