Goldman Roiled by Op-Ed Loses $2.2 Billion … Smith Resignation Costs Goldman Shareholders $2.2B … Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) saw $2.15 billion of its market value wiped out after an employee assailed Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein's management and the firm's treatment of clients, sparking debate across Wall Street. The shares dropped 3.4 percent in New York trading yesterday, the third-biggest decline in the 81-company Standard & Poor's 500 Financials Index, after London-based Greg Smith made the accusations in a New York Times op-ed piece. Smith, who also wrote that he was quitting after 12 years at the company, blamed Blankfein, 57, and President Gary D. Cohn, 51, for a "decline in the firm's moral fiber." They responded in a memo to current and former employees, saying that Smith's assertions don't reflect the firm's values, culture or "how the vast majority of people at Goldman Sachs think about the firm and the work it does on behalf of our clients." – New York Times

Dominant Social Theme: Dig up Pecora and let him run a commission.

Free-Market Analysis: Hoo boy. Here's what we really need: New "Pecora Hearings." is this why Goldman is being pilloried once again?

Is it a deliberate hit job of sorts? Certainly it is compelling. People hate the system so much that even the alternative news media goes along when it comes to Goldman Sachs.

It never seems to occur to anyone, even the brightest of the alternative media minds, that this is the way the power elite works. Do they ever set up a dialectic they don't control? "They" OWN Goldman Sachs it seems to us. Goldman works for "them" … and "they" are offering up this firm like a sacrificial lamb.

But the stakes could not be higher. The end of the US system of capital-raising is being oiled and greased in Washington thanks to the constant drumbeat of anti-Wall Street news.

The guillotine is being sharpened. The screws are being tightened. It is almost time for the show to begin.

And what a show it will be: Political theatre designed to reduce what is left of Wall Street entirely to an adjunct of Washington, DC.

In the process it will accomplish what Alexander Hamilton long dreamed of doing 250 years ago: Reconfigure the Republic and turn it into a version of European nation-states.

After these new hearings take place, George Orwell's famous phrase will be fully operative: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face – forever."

This unpleasant sentiment has been the goal of certain individuals; but the proximate reality has drawn considerably closer in the past years now, ever since the disastrous economic collapse of 2008.

You ask why this is so. Why is it bad to have a Congressional Hearing to punish Wall Street and "throw the crooks in jail"? That's not the REAL reason for these upcoming hearings.

The real reason is to kill the last vestiges of the capital-raising mechanism in the US. Kill it. Kill it dead. After these new hearings take place, the ability for average people to raise capital – already doubtful – will be improbable indeed.

The other thing these hearings will attempt to do is to provide legitimacy for the current US political system and the penal-industrial complex. Over and over certain people complain that the "crooks" have not yet gone to jail.

But to put the "crooks in jail" will utilize the entire illegitimate structure of US power including the entirely corrupt US Congress, increasingly authoritarian law enforcement and murderous penal facilities themselves. The powers-that-be intend to capitalize on the righteous anger of US citizens to prop up the horrid system of US jurisprudence and Congress itself that only has about a 10 percent approval rating currently with the larger public.

This is only a secondary point, however. The primary goal is even more malicious. The power elite intends to make damn sure that if people make money in the future, it won't be via formal capital raising mechanisms.

The US has always been a nightmare for the elites that intend to run the world (and apparently control the world's central banks). One of the worst parts of the US system from a its standpoint is that average people have the capacity to make money. This isn't really the case in Europe where capital is doled out like royal titles: One needs, mostly, to be "connected" to get it.

But in the US even impoverished social misfits with a bright idea could raise money and build a business, even a big businesses. The power elite that now controls both money and media around the world has always found this to be unacceptable. First "they" helped create a formal "constitutional republic" and then with the advent of the Civil War, they helped destroy it.

They launched their apparent agent JP Morgan to control the wealth of the US and to create a series of phony crashes when he was fully empowered. The crash of 1907, which Morgan supposedly cured, seems to have been his creation as well.

It led directly to the Federal Reserve act and launched a century long inflation that has now devalued the dollar by about 99 percent. It is this monopoly central banking that has led to the current recessionary depression as well. The US is a hollowed-out economy. This was apparently the plan. The US and its republican culture stood in the way of world government.

On the way to the current disasters, regulatory democracy has taken root throughout the Western world. Regulatory democracy is supposedly the result of "market failures."

The biggest market failure that gave rise to regulations the way Helen of Troy's face supposedly launched a thousand ships, was the Crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression. The putative result of these events was the so-called Pecora Hearings. And now the US is gearing up for another one.

We've been writing about this since last year. In fact, we were reporting on it as a dominant social theme long before there came "news" that a Pecora Hearing committee was forming in the bowels of Congress. Boy, were we surprised … not. You can see one of our articles here: The Real Reason Bloomberg Sued to Open Up Fed Records?

Here at the Daily Bell, we observe the dominant social themes of the elite. We noticed that The Occupy Wall Street movement, funded ultimately by George Soros, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time blaming Wall Street for the woes of the world. We even believe we know who is going to HEAD the committee. (Perhaps we're only "blowing bubbles," pretty bubbles, etc. …) Just the other day, March 9, in the American Reporter, we see the following:

We are overdue for an accountability moment for the American financial industry. Fraud on a scale unimaginable has been committed, and the hard-earned savings of countless Americans has been looted, yet so far, only Madoff has taken the fall.

A bipartisan congressional panel armed with subpoena power is being formed to investigate causes of the Wall Street meltdown. The 10-member Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) will study how fraud, regulatory lapses, monetary policy, accounting, lending practices and executive pay contributed to the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The FCIC is modeled after the Pecora Commission, a U.S. Senate panel formed in the early 1930s that investigated the causes of the 1929 Wall Street crash. Those hearings, led by Ferdinand Pecora, produced the facts and momentum for the major New Deal financial reforms.

We need a Pecora-style investigation that will name names, ask tough questions and seek remedies. What we don't need is for the FCIC to be another version of the 9/11 Commission, a panel that was never allowed to fully and completely investigate all the lapses that led to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

This is what we call an elite dominant social theme, folks. You got "yours" good and hard. And now it's time for Wall Street to pay.

The initial Pecora Hearings, run by Ferdinand Pecora, took place in the 1930s under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and resulted in the Wall Street we have today. In fact, the Pecora Hearings were based on farce and developed via fallacy.

The farcical part was that the Roaring Twenties and subsequent depression were the fault of Wall Street. Today, of course, historical fact points to illegal Federal Reserve inflation.

The Fed printed much more money than it had the right to print in the 20s and then after the crash, FDR deliberately covered up the crime by declaring bank holidays so that people would never cash in their paper receipts for gold.

When this didn't prove effective, FDR confiscated gold to make sure the banks, under the thumb of the newly founded Fed, would never have to redeem a penny. Thus we can see from the 1930s on, the Fed and the US government acted as a kind of criminal syndicate. This is forbidden history. It has only emerged popularly in the past decade, thanks to the Internet.

Today, thanks to free-market Austrian thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, we know that the business cycle itself was responsible for the 1929 Crash and Great Depression. First, the Fed printed too much money and made everyone feel rich. Then, when the hot money circulated like sugar fueling a diabetic stroke, came the dreaded bust.

As a result, the Pecora Hearings were developed. The blame for the Crash and Great Depression were pinned on Wall Street and a bouquet of faux regulatory blossoms were cultivated: The SEC was formed, the NASD was created and outfits like the New York Stock Exchange were dubbed "self regulatory organizations."

The "public" stock market was invented, too. People tend to think there is a distinction between a private and public stock market but like so many other things in life, it is merely a regulatory distinction.

Let's not forget Glass-Steagall, as well. The idea of all of these nonsensical regulatory endeavors was to blame the crime of Federal Reserve monetary inflation on Wall Street chicanery. And now it is happening again. Goldman Sachs is being targeted for just this reason, in our view.

Of course, Wall Street DESERVES to be targeted. It is a shadow of a free-market facility, merely an adjunct of the power elite at this point. But it is not the MAIN MECHANISM of the coming authoritarianism. The main tools are monopoly-fiat central banking and government regulation.

The power elite flourishes via mercantilism. It created the Fed to be perceived as a PUBLIC facility and the Fed derives its authority from its PUBLIC brief. Government is not merely a helper in this regard, it is the prime enabler. Without enabling government regulation, the Fed would not exist; its credibility would not be buttressed.

The game is always … blame Wall Street. We have no affection for modern Wall Street of its crookedness, but we can see an elitist meme as well as anyone. At this point Wall Street is hardly a private entity in aggregate. It, too, is a quasi-public facility with all the attendant market failure.

Were Wall Street actually PRIVATE – and run by the Invisible Hand – we'd be bigger boosters. But Wall Street's ruin and rapine is a direct result of the regulatory regime under which it is now "run." And the game, of course, is to pile up regulation on regulation until the banking mechanisms of the country are entirely dysfunctional and run out of Washington (at the behest of the elites running the shadow government).

We are therefore a bit … suspicious of this executive director Greg Smith who quit Goldman in an open letter in the New York Times. He blasted Goldman Sachs and its unethical behavior. And the New York Times, a prime mouthpiece of the elite, was happy to report and report … and report … on it.

Our elves made a tiny bet among themselves that a Rhodes Scholarship (a sign of elite influence) lurked in Smith's background. We went looking and this is what we found, courtesy of an article in the UK Daily Mail:

… [Stanford University] confirmed he was given a scholarship but was not able to disclose how much it was for. After graduating, he applied for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship which counts Chelsea Clinton among its alumni and would have allowed him to study at Oxford University in England for a year.

Smith was one of 10 finalists but only four got a place – and he missed out. A person familiar with the Rhodes application process said: 'If he got that far academically he was brilliant. 'It is not usual for people in such a position to take a job with a company like Goldman Sachs for a year or so between university and going on the Rhodes scholarship. Firms like Goldman seek them out as they are the best.'

Despite his successful career, in his letter Mr Smith said the 'proudest moments in his life' were getting the Stanford scholarship, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist and winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics. He said that was because those achievements 'came through hard work, with no short cuts.'

We're not as enamored of Rhodes Scholarships as is Mr. Smith. The Rhodes Scholarships come out of Oxford that, like Harvard, train and create the academic stormtroopers of the elite. Here's William Jasper on the characteristics that Cecil Rhodes valued for Rhodes Scholars:

"What are the characteristics that the Rhodes scholarship selection committees were to look for in candidates and nurture in their scholars? According to Rhodes' own criteria … the traits most desired were(and are) "smugness, brutality, unctuous rectitude, and tact." … According to Rhodes' co-conspirator Stead, it was expected that by 1920 there would be"between two and three thousand men in the prime of life scattered all over the world, each of whom, moreover, would have been specially – mathematically – selected toward the Founder's purposes."

After Thoughts

We shall close with an observation that appeared in our previous article on what is manifestly planned for the US: "So … remember this, please, as you listen to whatever Congress may muster after the next presidential elections (or even before). In the world of power and money, there is NOTHING that is as it seems. Countries NEVER go to war for stated reasons. Laws are NEVER passed for the reasons that are given. Regulations are NEVER propounded to "protect" the individual, but only to advantage the most powerful – the ones who can make the rules."