Category: Politics

22 June

How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World

Doubleday, 2011     Amazon.com

Book Description:

From the bestselling, prize-winning author of The Last Tycoons and House of Cards, a revelatory history of Goldman Sachs, the most dominant, feared, and controversial investment bank in the world

For much of its storied 142-year history, Goldman Sachs has projected an image of being better than its competitors – smarter, more collegial, more ethical, and far more profitable. The firm – buttressed by the most aggressive and sophisticated p.r. machine in the financial industry – often boasts of “The Goldman Way”, a business model predicated on hiring the most talented people, indoctrinating them in a corporate culture where partners stifle their egos for the greater good, and honoring the “14 Principles”, the first of which is “Our clients’ interests always come first”. But there is another way of viewing Goldman – a secretive money-making machine that has straddled the line between conflict-of-interest and legitimate deal-making for decades; a firm that has exerted undue influence over government since the early part of the 20th century; a company composed of “cyborgs” who are kept in line by an internal “reputational risk department” staffed by former CIA operatives and private investigators; a workplace rife with brutal power struggles; a Wall Street titan whose clever bet against the mortgage market in 2007 – a bet not revealed to its clients – may have made the financial ruin of the Great Recession worse. As William D. Cohan shows in his riveting chronicle of Goldman’s rise to the summit of world capitalism, the firm has shown a remarkable ability to weather financial crises, congressional, federal and SEC investigations, and numerous lawsuits, all with its reputation and its enormous profits intact. By reading thousands of pages of government documents, court cases, SEC filings, Freedom of Information Act papers and other sources, and conducting over 100 interviews, including interviews with clients, competitors, regulators, current and former Goldman employees (including the six living men who have run Goldman), Cohan has constructed a vivid narrative that looks behind the veil of secrecy to reveal how Goldman has become so profitable, and so powerful. Part of the answer is the firm’s assiduous cultivation of people in power – dating back to 1913, when Henry Goldman advised the government on how the new Federal Reserve, designed to oversee Wall Street, should be constituted. Sidney Weinberg, who ran the firm for four decades, advised presidents from Roosevelt to Kennedy and was nicknamed “The Politician” for his behind-the-scenes friendships with government officials.  Goldman executives ran fundraising efforts for Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush. The firm showered lucrative consulting or speaking fees on figures like Henry Kissinger and Lawrence Summers. Famously, and fatefully, two Goldman leaders – Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson – became Secretaries of the Treasury, where their actions both before and during the financial crisis of 2008 became the stuff of controversy and conspiracy theories. Another major strand in the firm’s DNA is its eagerness to deal on both sides of a transaction, eliding questions of conflict of interest by the mere assertion of their innate honesty and nobility, a refrain repeated many times in its history, most notoriously by current Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s jesting assertion that he was doing “God’s work”. As Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review of House of Cards said, “Cohan writes with an insider’s knowledge of the workings of Wall Street, a reporter’s investigative instincts and a natural storyteller’s narrative command”. In Money & Power, Cohan has marshaled all these gifts in a powerful and definitive account of an institution whose public claims of virtue look very much like ruthlessness when exposed to the light of day.

Reviews:

“[A] definitve account of the most profitable and influential investment bank of the modern era…recounts these events capably…[and explains] Goldman’s cultivation of a reputation for brilliance unique even in the rarefied precincts of Wall Street…gives readers the information they need to ponder whether investment banking has moved in a constructive direction.”  The New York Times Book Review

“Destined to be a runaway bestseller…There’s no shortage of Goldman clients, rivals, and former employees willing to explain how greed and recklessness led Goldman to become too big, too powerful, and even too conflicted to fail. As one Goldman alum puts it, ‘I saw what they did to their customers…They’d steal from them, rape them, anything they could do.’ It worked like a charm…[Cohan] has produced the frankest, most detailed, most human assessment of the bank to date. Cohan portrays a firm that has grown so large and hungry that it’s no longer long-term greedy but short-term vicious. And that’s the wonder – and horror – of Goldman Sachs.”  Businessweek

“A well-researched history and analysis of the world’s most powerful investment bank. Written with the co-operation of the top people at Goldman, Cohan’s book is neither a hatchet-job nor a whitewash – and all the better for that.”  The Financial Times

“[Money & Power] offers the best analysis yet of Goldman’s increasingly tangled web of conflicts…The writing is crisp and the research meticulous, drawing on reams of documents made publicly available by congressional committees and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.”  The Economist

“[E]xhaustive, revelatory account of the rise and rise of Goldman Sachs…engrossing…penetrating…Cohan revels in a good bust-up and lingers over anecdotes involving intrigue….All the senior partners still living spoke to him, often very candidly, and only a few from the next ranks seem to have refuse…a vast trove of material.”  The Financial Times

“A former Lazard Freres & Co. banker and newspaper reporter, Cohan brings the bank’s sometimes ‘schizophrenic’ behavior to vivid life…Drawing on more than 100 interviews with clients, competitors and Goldman leaders including Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein, Cohan evinces an eye for telling images and an ear for deadpan quotations.”  Bloomberg

“In Money & Power, journalist and former investment banker William D. Cohan launches a quixotic quest to show that Mr. Blankfein and his peers are money-sucking evil-doers that came to their riches mostly by nefarious means…(full disclosure: I was once a Golman Sachs employee myself)…Mr. Cohan’s complaints against Goldman seem to be that it is ‘ruthless’ in pursuit of profit; doesn’t do enough to protect its instutitional clients from making bad decisions; works too closely with government; too often advises clients on both sides of a deal; and skirts close to the line of ‘insider trading’.”  Mary Kissel, The Wall Street Journal

About the Author:

William D. Cohan is the author of the New York Times bestsellers House of Cards and The Last Tycoons, which won the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, has a bi-weekly opinion column in The New York Times, and writes frequently for The Financial Times, Fortune, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post, among other publications. A former investment banker, Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

Spence Publishing Company, 2000 (1999)     Amazon.com

Back Cover:

Branded a “real live bigot” for bucking the party line on race, David Horowitz shows that the anti-white racism of the Left remains one of the few taboo subjects in America. A former confidant of the Black Panthers and the author of Radical Son, David Horowitz lays bare the liberal attack on “whiteness” – the latest battle in the war against American democracy.

“Horowitz is angry and polemical, but he is also a clear and ruthless thinker. What he says has an indignant sanity about it.”  Lance Morrow, Time

“No one picks apart the pretensions of the civil rights crowd quite the way Horowitz does.”  Fred Barnes, The Weekly Standard

“This is a raw and courageous book that turns over some rocks and shows what is crawling underneath. it reveals the ugly reality behind the pretty and politically correct words and visions of our time.”  Thomas Sowell, author of The Quest for Cosmic Justice

“His prose is splendidly savage and invigoratingly rude. David Horowitz has a message to deliver, and if he offends someone in the process, that’s just too bad.”  National Review

Review:

“Indignant Sanity; a right-wing convert’s different view on race.

Anyone who thinks about the trouble between blacks and whites in America encounters a secondary division, almost as old. This is the line between what might be called the Externalists and the Internalists.

Externalists, who tend toward the political left, say that America’s racial problems are to be addressed through outside interventions (affirmative action, busing and other government programs to repair the damage of the past and enforce racial justice). Internalists, who are apt to be conservative, stress solutions that require efforts from the inside: education, hard work, self-motivation, morale, bourgeois values, deferred gratification, the old immigrant virtues (turn off the TV, shut down the gangsta rap).

David Horowitz – the onetime ’60s radical and ally of the Black Panthers who eventually went through a Whittaker Chambers-like conversion that he documented in a memoir, Radical Son – is a bracing, abrasive Internalist.”  Lance Morrow, Time Magazine [clearly the same review as the one cited on the back cover – JOB]

About the Author:

Wikipedia

Jätteneddragningar i vården när Reinfeldt satsar på illegala invandrare

“Personer som olovligen uppehåller sig i landet ska till okänd kostnad få helt gratis sjukvård, tandvård och läkemedel. Samtidigt kommer rapporter om kraftiga neddragningar på landets sjukhus, vilket kan leda till att vanliga svenskar blir tvungna att betala allt mer ur egen ficka för sin vård.”   Läs mer

Läkare: Reinfeldtcare öppnar för storskaliga bedrägerier

“Regeringens beslut att erbjuda skattefinansierad vård till illegala invandrare kan innebära att fler aktörer startar bedrägeribolag i stil med bluffverksamheten Flyktingmedicinskt Centrum, som avslöjades 2010. Det uppger vårdpersonal för Fria Tider.”   Läs mer

Så funkar Reinfedtcare: Hela listan på förmåner till illegala invandrare

“Regeringen Reinfeldts uppgörelse med Miljöpartiet om skattefinansierad vård för illegala invandrare blev mer generös än vad många befarat. Även utvisningsdömda våldtäktsmän ska nu få skattefinansierad vård – trots att de inte har rätt att uppehålla sig i Sverige.”   Läs mer

Nu klart: Illegala invandrare får gratis vård, tandvård och läkemedel

“Idag presenterades överenskommelsen mellan Miljöpartiet och regeringen om att ge illegala invandrare rätt till gratis sjukvård, tandvård, läkemedel och skola. Det är som vanligt de svenska skattebetalarna som står för notan.”   Läs mer

–

Är FTs framställning felaktig, populistisk (i lägre mening), förenklad, vinklad, ensidig, förvrängd? Synpunkter är välkomna.

Vad invandringsfrågan handlar om

How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

Encounter Books, 2000     Amazon.com

Book Description:

In The Long March, Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, shows how the “cultural revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s took hold in America, lodging in our hearts and minds, and affecting our innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life. Kimball believes that the counterculture transformed high culture as well as our everyday life in terms of attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality. Believing that this dramatic change “cannot be understood apart from the seductive personalities who articulated its goals,” he intersperses his argument with incisive portraits of the life and thought of Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and other “cultural revolutionaries” who made their mark. For all that has been written about the counterculture, until now there has not been a chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped provoke today’s “culture wars.” The Long March fills this gap with a compelling and well-informed narrative that is sure to provoke discussion and debate.

Front and Back Flaps:

“The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock”, Roger Kimball writes in this controversial look at America’s cultural revolution. “The 1960s continue to reverberate in our national life today. This decade transformed high culture as well as everyday life in terms of our attitudes toward self and country, sex and drugs, and manners and morality.”

Others may think of the 1960s as The Last Good Time, but Kimball – author of Tenured Radicals, a brilliant and acerbic study of the radicalization of American universities – has no patience with such nostalgia. He sees this decade as a seedbed of excess and moral breakdown. He argues that the radical assaults on “the System” that took place then still define the way we live now – with intellectually debased schools and colleges, morally chaotic sexual relations and family life, and a degraded media and popular culture. “This inheritance has addled our hearts and minds”, Kimball writes, “and perverted our dreams while also preventing us from attaining them.”

How did we get from there to here? In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after fantasies of immediate political revolution faded, many student radicals urged their followers to begin “the long march through the institutions”. Radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse characterized this approach as working in the institutions of American life while also working against them. Kimball says that to see how well this strategy succeeded, “you need look no further than your local museum, your children’s school, your church (if you still go to church) and your workplace.”

The Long March is organized around incisive portraits of the architects of America’s cultural revolution – among them, Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and celebrated or once celebrated gurus like Norman Mailer, Timothy Leary, Susan Sontag, Eldridge Cleaver and Charles Reich. In examining the lives and works of those who spoke for the 1960s, Kimball finds a series of cautionary tales, an annotated guidebook of wrong turns, dead ends, and blind alleys that, tragically, became the roadmap to the present.

For all that has been written about America’s counterculture, until now there has been no chronicle of how this revolutionary movement succeeded and how its ideas helped to provoke today’s “culture wars”. The Long March fills this gap with a witty and intelligent narrative that transforms the subject from what it was before Roger Kimball discovered it.

Amazon.com Review:

The 1960s, writes Roger Kimball, “has become less the name of a decade than a provocation.” This incisive critique of that turbulent time won’t calm the debate. The Long March will enthrall conservatives who think of themselves as culture warriors and infuriate liberals who still celebrate “the purple decade.” Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion and author of Tenured Radicals, is one of the Right’s most articulate writers. He argues forcefully that the pernicious influence of the 1960s can still be felt: “The success of America’s recent cultural revolution can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values. If we often forget what great changes this revolution brought in its wake, that, too, is a sign of its success: having changed ourselves, we no longer perceive the extent of our transformation.”The Long March proceeds as a series of stimulating essays on important cultural figures and movements, beginning with the Beats. Norman Mailer comes in for an eloquent trashing (“From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania”), as do any number of counterculture icons. I.F. Stone’s articles, writes Kimball, “read like neo-Stalinist equivalents of those multipart articles on staple crops with which The New Yorker used to anesthetize its readers.” And of The New York Review of Books, that bastion of elite liberal opinion, Kimball says: “Quite apart from the irresponsibility of the politics, there was an intellectual irresponsibility at work here, a preening, ineradicable frivolousness toward the cultural values that the journal was supposedly created to nurture.” There’s a distinctly conservative crankiness to Kimball’s writing; the jazz of Miles Davis is inevitably “drug-inspired” and rock music “was not only an aesthetic disaster of gigantic proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive.” Yet this inclination can lead to fascinating, if arguable, insights about modern American culture: “Everywhere one looks one sees the elevation of youth – that is to say, of immaturity – over experience. It may seem like a small thing that nearly everyone of whatever age dresses in blue jeans now; but the universalization of that sartorial badge of the counterculture speaks volumes.” Kimball’s writing is at once highbrow and accessible. Fans of Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind – or readers who have never quite believed all the English professors proclaiming Allen Ginsberg a poetic genius – will find The Long March engrossing and indispensable.

John J. Miller

Booklist Review:

Despite naming his book after Mao’s protracted war against Chiang Kai-shek, Kimball spends less time demonstrating that ’60s radicalism won its long march and became turn-of-the-millennium orthodoxy than he does denouncing the usual suspects. His targets – the Beats, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, liberal university presidents, the Berrigan brothers, Norman O. Brown, Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver, the New York Review of Books, etc. – are relatively easy, for they were often contradictory and illogical. Recalling just how outrageous they were is a sobering corrective to ’60s nostalgia. But Kimball also scores his betes noires for sexual misbehavior, which for him means anything except conjugal rights. This obsession leads him to rope the bisexual Paul Goodman into his rogues’ gallery, even though Goodman disagreed with nearly all the others. Goodman did, however, place sex at the center of his social and psychological thought. That Kimball can’t abide, at some cost to the cogency of his rebuttal of David Allyn’s Make Love, Not War, and other wistful backward glances.

Ray Olson

Back Cover Blurbs:

“How deeply rooted are our nation’s cultural problems? What is the legacy of the 1960s? Where are America’s culture wars going? Few people take these important questions more seriously than Roger Kimball. And few write about them with such clarity and eloquence.”  William J. Bennett

“I think it is terrific…We haven’t had a radical analysis like this – ever.”  William F. Buckley, Jr

“Deftly and with memorable wit, Roger Kimball shows how banal and derivative, how intellectually trivial cherished Sixties icons like Susan Sontag, Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg, and all the rest of the really are. Kimball is as astute as he is amusing.”  John Ellis

“The extent of the cultural revolution we have lived through since the Sixties is still not clear to us, nor is its meaning. Roger Kimball has produced a searching and comprehensive study that brings it alltogether, high and low, from Herbert Marcuse to Monica Lewinsky. His well-told story is equal to the amazing event. It shows the routinization of exciting ideals, and the power and impotence of ideas.”  Harvey C. Mansfield

“Roger Kimball is among our most intelligent, thoughtful, and provocative cultural critics. He also is uncommon in that he writes lucidly and persuasively.”  Irving Kristol

 About the Author (from the Back Flap):

Roger Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the London Spectator. He is author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education [and many more – JOB] and editor (with Hilton Kramer) of several books on art and politics. Mr Kimball lives with his wife and son in Norwalk, Connecticut.

JOB’s Comment:

See my essay ‘Left and Right Eclecticism: Roger Kimball’s Cultural Criticism’.

Portland, Oregon, 2007

Gender Mainstreaming – Auf dem Weg zum geschlechtslosen Menschen

Stocker, 2008     Amazon.de

Mit dem Begriff Gender Mainstreaming (dt.: „durchgängige Gleichstellungsorientierung“) ist der Versuch verbunden, die Gleichstellung der Geschlechter auf allen gesellschaftlichen Ebenen durchzusetzen. Der Amsterdamer Vertrag von 1997 hat dieses Konzept auch zum offiziellen Ziel der EU-Politik erhoben. Dagegen wurde von Anfang an scharfe Kritik erhoben, die im Gender Mainstreaming-Konzept einen totalitären Kern ortet. Zu den Kritikern der GM-Politik gehört auch Barbara Rosenkranz. Die Autorin zeichnet in ihrem Buch zum einen die Entwicklung des GM nach und versucht dieses Phänomen einzuordnen. Leitend für die Untersuchung sind unter anderem folgende Fragen: Was unterscheidet Gender Mainstreaming von klassischer Frauen- und Gleichstellungspolitik? Inwieweit geht GM daran vorbei oder darüber hinaus? Wer sind die hauptsächlichen Propagandisten des GM? Wie konnte es zu der Rechtsstellung des GM kommen? Gibt es einen Zusammenhang zwischen Feminismus und Neoliberalismus? Welche konkreten Auswirkungen hat das GM auf das tägliche Leben, insbesondere in der Verwaltungspraxis und im Erziehungsbereich? Wie stark GM bereits im öffentlichen Leben verankert ist, zeigt unter anderem die Verweiblichung von Piktogrammen und Verkehrsschildern. Auch hier spürt die Autorin den Gründen für diese schleichende Veränderung im Alltagsleben nach. Die Argumente und Beobachtungen, die Rosenkranz zusammenträgt, sind alarmierend, gelingt es ihr doch, das GM-Konzept als neomarxistische Ideologie zu enttarnen, die darauf abzielt, einen neuen, geschlechtslosen Menschen zu schaffen. Grundlage ist ein behavioristisches Menschenbild, das jeglichen biologischen Unterschied zwischen den Menschen zu leugnen bestrebt ist.

Über die Autorin:

Barbara Rosenkranz, Jahrgang 1958, war u. a. Abgeordnete zum Niederösterreichischen Landtag 1993-2002, seit 2006 ist die Autorin Obmann-Stellvertreterin des Freiheitlichen Parlamentsklubs.

Antaios, 2011

Wer die Globalisierung für ein unentrinnbares Schicksal hält, gilt als Realist, wer sie als Ergebnis zielgerichteter Politik zur Errichtung einer Neuen Weltordnung (NWO) auffaßt, als “Verschwörungstheoretiker“ – und dies ist heutzutage kein Kompliment, sondern eein Ausschlußkriterium.

Wären die globalen Eliten aus Politik, Wirtschaft, Medien und Wissenschaft Teil einer Verschwörung: es wäre die geschwätzigste Verschwörung der Weltgeschichte. Denn jeder kann nachlesen, welche Pläne sie verfolgt und welcher Utopie sie anhängt. Das Publikum jedoch ist dazu erzogen worden, in denselben Begriffsschablonen zu denken wie die herrschenden Eliten selbst, und so erscheint als gegeben, was in Wahrheit politisch herbeigeführt, als alternativlos, was nur eine Möglichkeit unter mehreren ist: Man sieht Schicksalsmächte walten, wo durchaus benennbare menschliche Akteure am Werk sind.

Die in Errichtung befindliche Neue Weltordnung so zu nennen heißt: durch eine ideologiekritische Brille sehen. Genau dies tut der bisher vor allem als Islamkritiker bekannte Berliner Sozialwissenschaftler Manfred Kleine-Hartlage im vorliegenden Essay: Er seziert die Begrifflichkeit der globalistischen Ideologie und Propaganda, in der nahezu jedes Wort das Gegenteil von dem bedeutet, was es zu bedeuten scheint; er deckt auf, welche Interessen damit bemäntelt werden; und er zeigt, daß und warum die Neue Weltordnung eine totalitäre Herrschaft neuen Typs ist.

2009