‘Goldman Sach-ed’: Could the infamous Vampire Squid be an endangered species?

Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist.

Published time: February 14, 2014 12:42

Reuters / Lucas Jackson

Take a look around Europe these days and you will find a former Goldman Sachs hand on almost every tiller of every treasury.

Famously dubbed “Goldmine Sachs,” then “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, this firm sits at the heart of world banking mis-regulation and barbarism. Their private empire is well on the way to buying up every democratic institution with the capacity to oppose them.

Since the 2011 Euro crisis, the governments of Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland and Italy have been cursed with one or more former Goldman Sachs executives in their key financial positions. At the beginning of 2013 Britain, too, brought in Mark Carney from Switzerland's sinister central bankers' central bank, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). He, too, is ex-Goldman Sachs, as is the European Central Bank's president, Mario Draghi.

Goldman Sachs are key players, too, in one of the planet's most formidable political lobbying outfits, the Bilderberg meetings. Founded and chaired by a former SS officer, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, until 1975, Bilderberg has an uncanny knack of inviting NATO secretary generals, prime ministers and presidents to their secret conclaves with royalty and their oil and media barons, just before they come to power.

So let's face the painful fact: unless a politician is prepared to name, shame and throw Goldman Sachs and the other privately-owned vampire banks to the floor he or she is simply not worth our vote. For since these crooked institutions were bailed out in 2008, they have consolidated their grip on Western politics and, more worryingly, us – that is our dependence on them for our day-to-day needs.

Dictating to the Scots

Should Scotland vote for independence on Sept. 18 this year, all three main UK political parties have pledged this week to block the Scots from negotiating a currency union with Britain. This announcement spells out quite clearly for those with ears to hear how when it comes to money, there is no room for debate, dissent or democracy. By keeping the door open to a currency union with England and Wales Labour's shadow chancellor Ed Balls could reap enormous political capital and win MPs both sides of the Scottish border. But spineless Balls is too far down the power elite food chain to be allowed to make decisions based on national interest, or even Labour Party interest any more.

AFP Photo / Josep Lago

No, Britain's real First Lord of the Treasury sits not in the House of Commons or round the cabinet table these days, but down Victoria Embankment in the Bank of England. New BoE chief Carney, a former exec not just at Goldman Sachs but also at the Swiss-based, Nazi-funding Bank for International Settlements, got his soundbite in on Jan. 29, explaining that the Scots would have to cede some important independence if they wanted any kind of currency union with England. The next week, Westminster's puny political leaders of all parties were all lined up behind him.

Slowly opening up our bank accounts to fraud

Introduced in 1965 as the 'Cheque Guarantee Card' and becoming the Debit and Credit card in 1988, the way we pay for our goods and services has undergone important moves toward electronic money and away from cash in the last generation. More recently, in 2004 signatures for goods and services were abolished and although it slightly speeded up transactions, 'Chip and Pin' removed the necessity for robbers to have to trouble themselves with forging a signature to steal our money: They just peer over our shoulder, or watch us punch in our numbers on CCTV.

And what about that little silver chip on the card? Yes, that too is changing, again without our being asked. The creep to contactless payments is getting little publicity and again, no debate. So how do banks convince customers to embrace a system that makes their money less secure? In May 2013 BBC Radio 4's 'Money Box' program showed that retailer Marks & Spencer was taking payments twice from contactless card accounts and even from other cards in nearby customers' pockets.

Just walking near a contactless payment checkout is enough to trigger surreptitious payments that will only be discovered when the newly-vigilant account holder gets sight of their bank statement. Despite their inherent insecurity, contactless payment cards, with their distinctive “four waves” logo, are being forced on every single bank customer in the land.

Some commentators suggest that contactless payment cards bring more than just new ways into our bank accounts for organized crime; they bring the implementation closer of the human microchip. A diabolical decision, made decades ago, by these same technocrats to, like dogs or cattle, furnish from birth every human being with a permanent electronic ID chip injected beneath the skin.

This week the BBC website published, then almost immediately removed, an article by science writer Frank Swain entitled, "Why I Want a Microchip Implant." In it, he bemoans passwords and pin numbers as "attempts to bridge the divide between your digital and physical identity, and if you forget or lose them," he reminds us, "you are suddenly cut off from your bank account, your gym, your ride home, your proof of ID, and more. An implanted chip," on the other hand, he intones sweetly, "could act as our universal identity token for navigating the machine-regulated world."

So does the BBC consider the subject too sensitive to publish? There has been an enormous amount of negative criticism of Swain's positive spin in just two days. Or is it that some BBC editors have stopped functioning as journalists, becoming simply a conduit for the technocrat elite to present their control freakery for sale to the public in the best possible light?

Reuters / Brendan McDermid

Our lives in their hands

Goldman Sachs and their vampiric elite literally hold our life lines in their hands. Since our ancestors were evicted, torn from their homes and fields in centuries past, that is what our bank accounts have become. When an elite can decide whether you will be evicted from your home, and if you will be allowed enough food to eat this week, you are no longer a person, but a slave. Indeed that descent into barbarism is already with us: Channel 4 Dispatches revealed this week that as slices of their welfare payments are taken away, a staggering 350,000 disabled people in Britain are now under threat of eviction under Cameron's despised “Bedroom Tax.”
 
Since the 1992 Blue Arrow trial informally brought an end to all law enforcement in the City of London, the City's secret Unique Selling Point (USP) can be loosely translated as: “Do what thou wilt be the whole of the law.” In the lawless world money, of course, becomes the only law and the lords and masters, those who control it. In short, the vampire squid has passed the point of no return. Their QE casino is devouring our real economy, and the host on which they feed: the labor, livelihoods and wellbeing of the people.

Today's City of London culture is not just about Tory London Mayor Boris Johnson's “Greed is good” speech. It means rewards for failure and the taxpayer picking up the bill when Goldman's private gamblers lose their money. And before long, the great oak tree that was the British economy will come crashing to the ground.

Plan B: Positive Money – a campaign for monetary reform

Articulating public disgust at multimillion pound bonuses for failure and the rest, come the green shoots of some tightly focused monetary reform campaigns, which strike at the very root of the rot. Determined to call out unpayable debt for what it is, and wrench the right to create money away from the private banking system, Positive Money is run by young activists who have thought long and hard about what needs to change.

At their upcoming annual conference on March 1 in London, Positive Money will not be flogging dead horses like the aforementioned power elite, but bringing former bankers together with Occupy activists, economists and students to actually change the system.

To reintroduce money that will oil the wheels of commerce and ensure the needy can access food and shelter. Money that serves humanity, rather than turns the rich into crazed addicts and the poor into wretches. Ranged against them will be the dead horses of the British Bankers Association, whose 20 full time lobbyists are paid for with Gordon Brown's 2008 bailout money.

In 1978 the Irish Republic joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) and the Irish pound, or 'Punt', broke its links with the UK pound until Ireland joined the Euro in 2002. Many Irish people now look back wistfully to those 24 years of relative economic stability when they were their own masters, not in thrall to Brussels and European Central Bank public service destruction programs.

Across the water in Scotland many will be wondering whether, with their own currency, they might be able to take confidence from the lowly Irish Punt and do, on a grander scale, what the Icelandic people have done? To cancel unreasonable and unpayable debts, and jail any crooked English banker foolhardy enough to cross the border.

Scots might also notice that, since a certain vampire squid has its suckers into all London's main political parties and most of its media outlets – financial sovereignty may be the only sovereignty left.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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