The Vampire Squid Tells Us How to Vote
Lloyd Blankfein, Chief Executive Cephalopod of Goldman Sachs, issued a warning about the Bernie Sanders campaign this week.
“This has the potential to be a dangerous moment,” he said on CNBC’s Squawk Box.
The Lloyd was peeved that Sanders, whom he’s never met, singled him out in a debate last week. “Another kid from Brooklyn, how about that,” he lamented.
He ranted about how frightening it is that a candidate like Sanders, who seems to have no interest in “compromising” with Wall Street, could become so popular.
“Could you imagine,” he asked, “if the Jeffersons and Hamiltons came in with a total pledge and commitment to never compromise with the other side?”
The slobbering Squawk Box hosts went on to propose firing all the academics in the country, because clearly it is their fault that so many young people are willing to support a socialist.
“I’m ready,” said co-host Joe Kernen, “to send my daughter to Brigham Young or Liberty or something.”
Then Kernen, Becky Quick and Blankfein all made jokes about how socialism doesn’t work and how all those Berniebots should take a trip to Cuba.
“The best real-time experiment is, I went to Cuba,” said Lloyd.
“I haven’t been,” Kernen said proudly.
“You should go,” said Lloyd. “You go there, stop in Miami and you just see the Cuban community and how much wealth they’ve generated.
Of course the politics of Sanders is closer to what you’d find in Sweden or Denmark than Cuba, but they were rolling by then.
Lloyd added that the current popular discontent with Wall Street was just something that happens randomly, like the weather. “There’s a pendulum that happens in markets and it happens in political economy as well,” he said.
He added that he didn’t want to pick a candidate because “I don’t want to help or hurt anybody by giving an endorsement.”
For people who so very pleased with themselves for ostensibly being so much smarter than everyone else, people like Blankfein are oddly uncreative when it comes to deflecting criticism.
The people who don’t like them are always overemotional communists. All those young people who are flocking to the Sanders campaign? Dupes, misled by dumb professors who’ve never been to Cuba.
And their anger toward Wall Street? Causeless and random, just a bunch of folks riding an emotional pendulum that brainlessly swings back and forth. Don’t take it personally, people are just moody that way.
Bill Clinton apparently agrees. A story about the former president’s thoughts on the subject appeared in Stress Test, the vile battle memoir of the financial crisis penned by infamous Wall Street toady and former treasury secretary Tim Geithner.
In the book, Timmy goes on at length about how sad it made him that the public was so upset about the bailouts and other policies he engineered to make the Blankfeins of the world whole again. Looking for a way to not feel so hated, he went to Clinton to “discuss the politics of populism with the master practitioner.”