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In the Time:Person of The Year readers poll, Zuckerberg came in at 10th, with Julian Assange getting far and away the most votes, beating Zuckerberg by many orders of magnitude.
Time: Person Of The Year Readers Poll Top 10
Julian Assange
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Lady Gaga
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
Glenn Beck
Barack Obama
Steve Jobs
The Chilean Miners
The Unemployed American
Mark Zuckerberg
But it started to make a little more sense after yesterdays announcement [3/1/11] that Goldman Sachs had invested in Facebook to the tune of $45Billion, valuing Facebook now at a cool $50Billion and overtaking Google in its reach.
So why exactly is Facebook worth so much to Goldman Sachs, the most profitable investment banking organisation, [or "vulture capitalists" as they're called by numerous politicians and commentators] ?? Surely it's not because they're interested in watching people play Farmville or seeing their messy drunk photos..
Goldman Sachs have been described by The Rolling Stone as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money". Their $1Trillion portfolio broadly comprises Investment Banking [ Financial Advisory (mergers and acquisitions, investitures, corporate defence activities, restructuring and spin-offs) and Underwriting (public offerings and private placements of equity, equity-related and debt instruments)], Trading and Principal Investments [ [interest rate and credit products, mortgage-backed securities and loans, currencies and commodities, structured and derivative products, trading in equities, equity-related products, equity derivatives, structured products and executing client trades in equities, options, and futures contracts on world markets, merchant banking investments and funds ], and Asset Management and Securities Services [investment advisory and financial planning services, investment products, clearing, financing, custody, securities lending, reporting services to institutional clients, hedge funds, mutual funds, and pension funds. The division generates revenues primarily in the form of interest rate spreads or fees ] Their assets include major power and gas utilities, oil companies, health care, casino, insurance, financial trading and debt consolidation companies, meat processing factories, hotel chains amongst others, and they are involved in advising and brokering on in such deals as the privatization of major highways in Indiana, Texas and Chicago and selling them to foreign investors. A significant sector of their profit share comes from controlling financial interest in trading and principal investments on things like interest rates, credit products, mortgage-backed securities and loans- many of which were the kind of high risk, high return sub-prime loans that brought about the advent of the global financial crisis. So culpable were Goldman Sachs in promoting unfair home loans that they were investigated by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office. As there are a significant number of former Goldman Sachs employees who have gone on to hold key position in the U.S. administration, notably including Henry Paulson who was the Treasury Secretary from 2006-2009, some noses could have been put out of joint and so on May 10, 2009, Goldman Sachs paid $60Million to end the investigation.
It was the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the global financial services company that had greedily relied too heavily on the high risk sub-prime mortgages, that had brought the global financial crisis into effect, bringing the financial world to it's knees. When asked whether the U.S. treasury should have stepped forward to save the bank, Henry Paulson, [yes the same Henry Paulson who is former CEO, significant share holder, and hedge fund controller of Goldman Sachs.. responded saying,"I never once considered that it was appropriate to put taxpayer money on the line [in resolving Lehman Brothers]". This was on the 15th of Sept 2008.
However on the evening of the 16th of September 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank announced that the New York division were to bail out A.I.G. [The American International Group, the American Insurance Corporation]. Even though Goldman Sachs had seen the crisis coming and had off-loaded a lot of their junk-loans, doing quite well for themselves in the process, and were well insured they could have 'potentially' lost billions. Lucky for them, they had their good friend Stephen Friedman, a shareholder and former director of Goldman Sachs on their side as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Robert Rubin [who was employed at Goldman Sachs for 26 years ] working as Barak Obama's economic advisor as well, of course, as their homie US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson [ the same Henry Paulson who was named runner up Time: Person Of The Year in regards to the global financial crisis. Time commented, ""if there is a face to this financial debacle, it is now his."] Apparently he and BFF Lloyd Blankfein, current CEO of Goldman Sachs, were on the phone in the order of 24 times a day when the AIG deal was being negotiated. The list of former Goldman Sachs executives that have gone on to hold key positions in the U.S.administration and other powerful global institutions is long and exhaustive and has earned them the nickname "Government Sachs".
But so that it didn't seem SO flagrantly corrupt, the crafty devils at Goldman Sachs cooked the books in December 2008, shifting large write-downs to create an "orphan month'- reporting a net loss of USD $780Million for the month along with net profit of USD $ 1.81Billion for Jan-March. Boo hoo.. But miraculously the next quarter was significantly higher than average, and with the millions of dollars worth of taxpayers money that they got through the AIG deal, they paid themselves million dollar bonuses and at the end of 2009 reported it's most profitable year ever.
Naturally this enraged the American people who had lost their homes, jobs, pension funds and investments and were going to suffer the effects of cutbacks on social services that stem from the governments USD $12 Trillion [yes, that's trillion with a "T"] bail out package for greedy bankers who had recklessly gambled with their money.
Michael Moore lead a protest outside the Goldman Sachs headquarters, demanding that the bailout money be put back in the American Trust. Goldman Sachs were non-responsive.
Lloyd C. Blankfein [who takes home at least USD $68 Million per annum, not to speak of bonuses..] is aware that people would jump for joy if he were to slit his wrists, though remains self-righteous. “We’re very important,” he chortled in an interview with The Times of London. “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.”
"We're just doing God's work", he glibly remarks.
While this apparently was his idea of a joke, it is even more of a joke that Goldman Sachs representatives endeavour to convince people that this is true. Speaking at a discussion about morality and markets [and I haven't even gotten to the punch line..] at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Brian Griffiths [ Goldman Sachs' international vice chairman and former advisor to Margaret Thatcher ] sermonised that giant paychecks for bankers were an 'economic necessity', saying, “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all,”.
Excuse me?? We have to ...tolerate the inequality... as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all??
That sounds like the biggest load of nonsensical, hypocritical bollocks to me.
Goldman Sachs is the sort of company that has artificially fixed food trading prices for increased profit, resulting in starvation amongst many, and it has proven it's track record of moral bankruptcy on scores of occasions.
This is why people ought to be very concerned about the fact that they now have a major controlling interest in Facebook. There has been a steady erosion of civic legal rights to privacy and protection since 9/11, and social media platforms have lured millions of people around the world to give over access to their personal information, essentially making the line between public and private disappear. Facebook have already demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to protect your personal information, and profit from data-mining, surveillance, and tracking the data-trail of your every move online.
To hand this kind of power over to an enormous company that already has the world over a barrel in almost as many ways as possible has terrible implications. It is simply too much power for one entity to have, and there is too much likelihood that this power will be abused.
People can take that power back by choosing to disengage from their enterprises, and realising that they have a choice.
I personally will be committing Facebook suicide and suggest that you think about doing so as well.
Peace
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/255237/november-11-2009/goldman-sachs-does-god-s-work
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6907681.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2009/03/11/98586.htm
http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2009/03/16/98729.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/business/28melt.html?_r=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldman_Sachs_Group,_Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Paulson
http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/12/13/julian-assange-readers-choice-for-times-person-of-the-year-2010/#ixzz1A84MEZ5a
http://www.pcworld.com/article/213763/facebooks_zuckerberg_is_times_person_of_the_year.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_International_Group
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goldman_Sachs_Group,_Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/lloyd-blankfein-still-doi_b_551301.html
http://onlinedocumentaries.softarchive.net/bbc_two_the_love_of_money_part_back_from_the_brink_dvdrip_documentary.105212.html
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