Goldman Sachs Staff Buying Guns 'To Defend Themselves Against Public Uprising'

[Me.]

“Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.

While we wait, Goldman has wrapped itself in the flag of Warren Buffett, with whom it will jointly donate $500 million, part of an effort to burnish its image -- and gain new Goldman clients. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman’s greed “God’s work” and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were “clearly wrong.”

Has it really come to this? Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology. Talk that Goldman bankers might have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have become a target for public rage.

Pistol Ready”…cony…

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=ahD2WoDAL9h0

[phasma ex machina]

1. Goldman Sharks with guns - a terror to behold. nt

[endless october]

2. how are they getting concealed carry permits in NYC?

as i understand it, that's next to impossible.

[BreweryYardRat]

4. Nothing's impossible if you've got enough money/connections, sadly enough.

Sigh.

[kenny blankenship]

5. Ahem... with money all things are possible

[joeybee12]

18. It's also hard for children and hospitals to get the H1N1 vaccine, but

Goldman Sachs got that first.

[cowcommander]

50. As long as you have wealth and power, only you are allowed to own a gun in NYC

http://www.ninehundred.net/~equalccw/expose.html#otherstates

("New York City gun laws are so strict that applicants must show a 'need or special danger'," reports Alan Gottlieb of the Second Amendment Foundation in his 1996 book "Politically Correct Guns." When the Wall Street Journal won a court suit in 1981 requiring New York Police to release the names of the chosen few who had been granted pistol permits, the city revealed more than 9,000 non-police city employees had been granted this privilege which is withheld from the average New Yorker. It was subsequently revealed permits had also been issued to such "celebrities" as Laurance Rockefeller, Uri Geller, Bill Cosby, Donald Trump, Howard Stern, Joan Rivers, and anti-gun New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs "Punch" Sulzberger.) - Columnist Vin Suprynowicz, 1999, linked here.

[no_hypocrisy]

3. GS staff is overreacting.

We don't want physical injury.

We just want to take away their money.

[soleft]

32. Um....I've seen a lot of physical threats right here on DU

I particularly enjoyed the post about how, when one financial firm's employees were advised to leave the building in pairs, someone said, WOW, they can take out two at once.

[Xithras]

36. Bah. Speak for yourself.

I'd like to see them hurled from the roofs of their office towers.

[tabatha]

6. Guilt. That is what it means.

[Me.]

23. Bingo

They know what they've done and what they would do if someone else did it

[closeupready]

31. Yes. That is exactly what I think, too.

They know they have been engaging in quasi-legal (at best) financial hijinks, and that when people eventually realize it, they are going to be very angry.

[Blue_Tires]

33. +1

[Ikonoklast]

7. They'd be better off hiring an army of mercenaries.

Birds of a feather, with loyalties only to money.

Nice to see people with money and influence can easily get a handgun permit in NYC, but the 'little people' get shut out.

[jgraz]

10. That's coming. Bet on it.

They just have to figure out how to get you and me to pay for it.

[Ikonoklast]

19. I would wager that discussion has already occurred.

Disaster planning for both employees and sensitive documents, delaying tactics and crowd control, emergency exit strategies, and logistics planning to quickly move manpower and equipment into position.

You would either have to do it in-house, or contract it out.


Whoever runs security at GS isn't earning his pay, if this hasn't all been done already.





Oh, and we already paid for it. Billions of times over, sadly.

[rrneck]

26. Yep. nt

[bvar22]

39. They've already done that.

Gated communities
Private Police
Blackwater "on call",
in some places, Blackwater "on duty".

It won't help them in the end.
The hungry WILL eat them.
Always have.

[Xenotime]

8. Now the bankers are the robbers. My, my.

[arcadian]

9. 1789

It's coming - Meet me on the barricades.

[cali]

11. haha. yeah, as soon as American Idol goes off the air.

[arcadian]

16. You concern yourself with that trash, dearie?

What ever floats yours boat... or rots your brain in your case... :rofl:

[cali]

21. did I say that little honeypie?

No, twinkums, I didn't. I was making a point that clearly sailed over your wee head.

[arcadian]

24. Oh babycakes, I'm sorry.

You weren't talking about yourself, your contempt was for the American television viewing audience and the common herd in general. But don't worry shnookie, even without the sheeple there are plenty of us willing to rise up.

[SammyWinstonJack]

29. +1

:thumbsup: I think even the 'sheeple' will eventually wake at some point, hopefully before it's too late.

[villager]

28. 1789? Was that Shays?

n/t

[Burma Jones]

43. Think French......

[villager]

45. Oh right. Shays was earlier. Was thinking of earlier American betrayals of freedom and "change"

n/t

[Me.]

46. The Return Of The Sans Culottes

[Sebastian Doyle]

12. If they want guns, let's send the criminal bastards over to Afghanistan

Fucking miserable treasonous cowards. :grr:

[Lance_Boyle]

13. May their firearms jam when needed. n/t

[BreweryYardRat]

14. When these pricks go to buy ammo, the clerks need to pull a switch and give them blanks instead.

Otherwise, we're just counting the days until one of these "senior Goldman people" guns down some poor person for looking at them funny.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

15. Chop their fucking heads off

I hope they all have to live the rest of their lives in fear. The same kind of fear millions of us live in as we watch our financial world collapse, our homes foreclosed, our equity vanished, our jobs eliminated, our pensions vaporized and our health care become non existent.

You can run, you bastards, but you'd better keep looking over your shoulder.

[Demobrat]

17. They have a much right to defend themselves as anybody else.

Now if all the gun owners would stick to just shooting one another the world would be a better place.

[Ikonoklast]

20. Yeah, thieves need to defend themselves from those they stole from.

They are dismayed to discover that those that they stole from are unhappy and angry at them, for some strange reason.

[seafan]

22. Goldman Sachs leeches arming themselves? Not surprised one iota.

Goldman Sachs is on the path to annihilation.




Arming Goldman With Pistols Against Public


Alice Schroeder writes:

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- “I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.

While we wait, Goldman has wrapped itself in the flag of Warren Buffett, with whom it will jointly donate $500 million, part of an effort to burnish its image -- and gain new Goldman clients. Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein also reversed himself after having previously called Goldman’s greed “God’s work” and apologized earlier this month for having participated in things that were “clearly wrong.”

Has it really come to this? Imagine what emotions must be billowing through the halls of Goldman Sachs to provoke the firm into an apology. Talk that Goldman bankers might have armed themselves in self-defense would sound ludicrous, were it not so apt a metaphor for the way that the most successful people on Wall Street have become a target for public rage.

.....

In other words, a little humility and contrition are probably the better route.

Until a couple of weeks ago, that was obvious to everyone but Goldman, a firm famous for both prescience and arrogance. In a display of both, Blankfein began to raise his personal- security threat level early in the financial crisis. He keeps a summer home near the Hamptons, where unrestricted public access would put him at risk if the angry mobs rose up and marched to the East End of Long Island. ..... He tried to buy a house elsewhere without attracting attention as the financial crisis unfolded in 2007, a move that was foiled by the New York Post. Then, Blankfein got permission from the local authorities to install a security gate at his house two months before Bear Stearns Cos. collapsed.
This is the kind of foresight that Goldman Sachs is justly famous for. Blankfein somehow anticipated the persecution complex his fellow bankers would soon suffer.

.....

There you have it. The bailout was meant to keep the curtain drawn on the way the rich make money, not from the free market, but from the lack of one. Goldman Sachs blew its cover when the firm’s revenue from trading reached a record $27 billion in the first nine months of this year, and a public that was writhing in financial agony caught on that the profits earned on taxpayer capital were going to pay employee bonuses.

.....

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

..... Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, July, 2009

(bold type added to Bloomberg article)

[glitch]

25. They are still outnumbered. nt

[rrneck]

27. Won't help. They're outnumbered and outgunned. nt

[Blue_Tires]

34. +1000

[Dreamer Tatum]

35. Til CSI comes on, you mean nt

[phasma ex machina]

40. Hush!

:rofl:

[bridgit]

30. And that is the herald du jour (so far) the clarion calls just keep on coming

[LatteLibertine]

37. Exactly

there are way more of us than them. Many of us are armed too.

[ensho]

38. I'm glad they are afraid

nt

[bvar22]

41. Good.

They should be afraid.

[Winterblues]

42. What do you know, money from their HUGE bonuses is "trickling down"

:shrug: I could only hope the people would indeed rise up against them and burn their offices to the ground.

[CTyankee]

44. I have a good friend who's just landed a job with GS.

She's kinda quiet about it...I didn't even know it was GS when I inquired about her "new job" to her husband. He said to me "You didn't know it was with Goldman Sachs did you?"

The company is being very generous. Her benefits are fabulous. Too bad we all don't have them.

I'm not being bitter, since I am retired and happily so. But her world is so different from everyone else's it's amazing...well, not really I guess...

[Joe Chi Minh]

47. Pistols, my eye! I bet the fire-power would be a tad more impressive.

At that level, the police would have to go to them for permission to carry a hand-gun.

[branders seine]

48. they'll need them.

they are thieving bastards

[Blue_Tires]

49. evening kick