A blistering attack on Goldman Sachs by one of its own bankers has hit a raw nerve inside the Wall Street bank and is likely to stoke bitter memories among some former clients.Greg Smith, a now former executive based in London, took aim at the culture of the investment banking giant, which only two years ago was damaged by another of its own bankers, Fabrice Tourre, who described creating "Frankenstein" products that badly burnt clients.Mr Smith's core claim in his resignation letter, which ran in The New York Times, that Goldman pursues its own profit at the expense of its customers is common among Goldman critics, many of whom blame the bank for being a key player in the 2008 financial crisis.Indeed, would such an attack cause such a stir if the banker happened to be an executive director of Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan or even Merrill Lynch?

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/goldman-attack-stokes-gfc-memories-20120315-1v6c5.html#ixzz1pB1ho2WZ

Inevitably it is a matter of great fascination when a well-placed individual decides to urinate inside his tent, even as he leaves it.

That is what Goldman Sachs executive director Greg Smith did this week as he resigned from the investment bank's London-based derivatives business.

On his way out of the marquee, he sent an explanation for his resignation to The New York Times and hence to the rest of the world.

Guess what, Greg? You didn’t do your homework about the firm where you worked for more than a decade and happily took home one bonus check after another. Goldman Sachs has been in and out of trouble throughout its 143 years — chiefly because it chose to put its own interests before those of its clients. What appeared to be a revelation to Smith was actually available to anyone who looked for it, buried deep within Securities and Exchange Commission and court records. Smith could have saved himself grief if he had only used his Stanford education to examine Goldman’s DNA before crossing its threshold.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/goldman-sachss-long-history-of-duping-its-clients/2012/03/15/gIQAVlu3GS_story.html?hpid=z3

Goldman Sachs has begun scanning internal emails for the term "muppet" and other evidence that employees referred to clients in derogatory ways, chief executive Lloyd Blankfein told partners in a conference call this week, according to people familiar with the call.

The company-wide email review comes after an executive director named Greg Smith resigned last week in a scathing op-ed column in the New York Times in which he said he saw five Goldman managing directors refer to clients as "muppets," at times over internal email.

On the conference call with partners this week, Mr Blankfein said the company was taking Mr Smith's claims seriously and was conducting a review of his assertions, including the email scan, according to these people.

Donald Trump's trade war puts him at odds with Goldman Sachs which is one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world. Goldman Sachs, also known as the "vampire squid" is not only too big to fail, but it's also too big to lose.

At first glance, Donald Trump and Goldman Sachs are unlikely allies, however Trump's entourage is full of former Goldman Sachs employees, known as "Goldmanites."

The "Goldmanites" have few things in common with the former employees of other financial institutions, and that is because the "Goldmanite" community functions more like an influence network or a quasi-secret political club.

However, the gargantuan influence of the Goldman Sachs alumni is an open secret. In 2008 the British newspaper The Independent published a list of influential "Goldmanites" under the title "How Goldman Sachs took over the world."

The go-to resource for American stock investors Investopedia has an entire article, dedicated to Goldman Sachs influence: "26 Goldman Sachs Alumni Who Run the World".

...

Suffice it to say that a short and woefully incomplete list of "Goldmanites" in positions of power would include Hank Paulson, Treasury secretary under George W. Bush; Mario Draghi, Head of the European Central Bank; Robert Zoellick, ex-president of the World Bank and former deputy to Condoleezza Rice at the State Department; Robert Rubin, US Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton; Joshua Bolten, campaign aide and chief of staff under George W. Bush; William Dudley, president of the New York Fed and vice-chair of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).

...

The US is not a republic anymore and it doesn't have a functional democracy. Right now the US political and economic system looks like a rigged casino, where the odds are always stacked against the average Joe. Sadly it looks like the "vampire squid" is running the casino, and I bet you've all heard the old Las Vegas adage, "The house always wins."

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201803171062614783-trump-goldman-sach...

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With Mario Draghi as Head of the European Central Bank, no wonder the Yourpeans can't get of the teats of Yankeemummy... Idiots.

Goldman Sachs has agreed to pay nearly $3bn (£2.3bn) to end a probe of its role in the 1MDB corruption scandal.

The bank's Malaysian subsidiary also admitted in US court that it had paid more than $1bn in bribes to win work raising money for the Malaysian state-owned wealth fund.

US officials said the record settlement reflected Goldman's "central" role in a "massive corruption scheme".

Goldman admitted it had fallen "short", calling it an "institutional failure".

In all, the investment bank is due to pay about $5bn in penalties - about two thirds of its 2019 profits - to regulators around the world, including in the UK, to resolve cases that have severely tarnished the firm's reputation.

Goldman's board also said it will recoup or withhold $174m in compensation awarded to executives, including retired boss Lloyd Blankfein, under whose watch the scandal happened.

"The board views the 1MDB matter as an institutional failure, inconsistent with the high expectations it has for the firm," it said in a statement.

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54597256

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According to a warning from Disney, the show features “stereotypes” and “mistreatment of people or cultures.”

“This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” the roughly 300 billion-dollar corporate giant declared. 

“Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.”

No references are made to what specifically Disney considers to be offensive about the show's content, though it does depict minorities including Asians and people from the Middle East, as well as featuring a homeless character named “Oscar the grouch” who lives in a trash can. 

In season five, singer Johnny Cash also performs in front of a confederate flag. 

“Even the Muppets are now ‘offensive.’ Anyone watching ‘The Muppet Show’ on Disney+ will first see a warning against ‘offensive content.’ It's time to pack up, seriously,” wrote one baffled Twitter user.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/516209-disney-muppet-show-offensive-content/

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Warning: this website — yourdemocracy.net.au — can contain some offending material, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not... “Gus the grouch” lives in a trash can on these glorious pages. Often, I asked John, "am I pushing too far?" and he often answered with an obtuse "not far enough..." except on one occasion, but then Mungo MacCallum, in a sharp column the next day, went for the full "banged" that I had blanked out on the toon...

Boy! We all miss John...

From The New Yorker...

Rachel Pearson

25 December 2019

In 1978, the psychiatrist Stephen Bergman published the novel “The House of God,” written under the pen name Samuel Shem. Based on Bergman’s experiences as an intern at Harvard’s Beth Israel hospital, the book rapidly became a staple of any medical resident’s required-reading list; to date, it has sold more than two million copies. A 2003 edition included an introduction by John Updike, who wrote that “The House of God” “could probably not be written now, at least so unabashedly; its lavish use of freewheeling, multiethnic caricature would be inhibited by the current terms ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ and ‘ageist.’ Its ’70s sex is not safe.”

For Updike, for those who made this argument before him, and for those who continue to make it today, a measure of freedom has been lost in a culture that requires writers to watch their words for unintended cruelty. An army of chiding librarians seems to have arisen, tsk-tsk-ing the poor writer’s bawdy, outrageous imagination. Updike’s concern is embodied in the real phenomena of Twitter pile-ons and sensitivity readers, but it is also Foucauldian: the chiding librarian is within us, suppressing the writer’s creativity before it even makes it to the page. In the panopticon where every action can be seen, known, and embedded in a tweet, no actual chains are required. Ultimately, we control ourselves.

“The House of God” is “not a great book,” the literary critic Kathryn Montgomery has written, “but it is an important book.” Bergman claims that it shows how residents are dehumanized in the course of their sleepless, gruelling medical training, and in turn begin behaving cruelly or carelessly toward their patients. As the physician and poet Jack Coulehan has pointed out, however, Bergman undercuts his argument somewhat when his narrator, Roy Basch, refers to patients as “a heifer” and “a hippo” on his first day of work. If the narrator’s callous attitude toward patients is a product of the dehumanizing power of residency training, how did Basch get there so quickly? Coulehan argues that the novel does a disservice to medical-student readers, who “internalize the message that clinical training is dehumanizing without sufficiently noticing that the group most dehumanized is patients.” Others, such as the emergency physician Jay Baruch, argue that the novel’s descriptions of the disgust, shame, and horror that patient care sometimes evokes comprise a badly needed articulation of the lived experience of residents. “The House of God”  likely contributed to some of the reforms in medical training that have come about since the nineteen-seventies, particularly in regard to long work hours that lead to sleep deprivation. The book is taught in medical schools and quoted by physicians; whether we realize it or not, we are quoting “The House of God” when we say, for example, “The first procedure in any cardiac arrest is to take your own pulse.”

More than forty years after its publication, many of the book’s episodes, such as the suicide of an intern, still feel contemporary. Other bits are frighteningly dated or always felt slanted, particularly the portrayal of women. The book’s nurses have none of the clinical insight or skill of actual nurses, but they’re eager to reveal their montes pubis for the interns. There is just one female physician, a frigid, universally loathed character named Jo. The last of the women is Roy Basch’s partner, Berry, who is intelligent but inexplicably content to serve as a surrogate mother for Basch, while displaying no expectation that he might broaden her horizons in turn, or even refrain from copulating with nurses.

As sympathetic as I am to Updike’s concerns about social control, and as nostalgic as I may be for the time when I wrote like a child—blithe, mindless of consequence, the only audience in my mind an audience of people who already loved me—I am no longer a child. These days, I write not only for my best friends but for general readers. Growing up involves coming to realize that others are as human as oneself, with inner lives at least as rich as one’s own. The realization that others have inner lives is a developmental milestone that we humans are supposed to achieve around age four. But, as it turns out, many of us are still working on it, decades later. Or perhaps we gain the ability to imagine the lives of others around age four, but we may or may not put that ability into practice.

I look to literature to attune my mind to the inner lives of other people, and it is painful when a book falls so short of deeply imagining the other that it portrays some whole wings of the world as flat, airless, not truly worth inhabiting. It is ironic, in a sick way, when the art that ought to bring us closer accidentally insists that some of us are not really worth the effort. I read “The House of God” in medical school, as many of us do, and was left looking askance at my chosen field. Because the book is lionized so uncritically in my profession, I could only suspect that my future colleagues did not hold women in particularly high regard.

Bergman and his apologists (including many of my women colleagues in medicine) say that “The House of God” was simply a novel of its time. When asked about the novel’s sexism in a recent interview, Bergman replied, “I was roundly criticized for the way women were seen” in the book, then launched into an anecdote about a doctor and nurse having sex in an on-call room in the nineteen-seventies. “Things have changed,” Bergman added. The anecdote is telling, with its implication that feminist thinkers object to sex itself, rather than to the portrayal of women as sex objects. The accusation that women who display the capacity for critical thought must be frigid is a tired one, and one given full treatment in the character of Jo—the only woman in “House” who occupies a position of authority, the “lonely single woman” whose supervision of Basch and her other male subordinates equates to “lop[ping] a bit off his schlong daily by telling him what he’d failed to do.”

Other authors have managed to see women in health care as complex humans: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in “Cancer Ward”; Michael Ondaatje, in “The English Patient”; Elizabeth Norman, in the beautiful and deeply researched “We Band of Angels.” As more women have trained as medical professionals, physician writers such as Danielle Ofri, Pauline Chen, the former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, and the Navajo surgeon Lori Arviso Alvord have told our stories in memoirs. Part of a book’s essential work is to bring readers deeply into the worlds of others, and thus it is fair to criticize authors who make no attempt to examine the worlds of whole categories of people. As Eudora Welty said of her stories and novels, “What I do in writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart, and skin of a human being who is not myself. Whether this happens to be a man or a woman, old or young, with skin black or white, the primary challenge lies in making the jump itself. It is the act of a writer’s imagination that I set most high.” It is odd to blame the times, then, for a failure of imagination—that freewheeling, unabashed thing that Updike prized.

The other defense of “The House of God” that I commonly hear is “But it’s satire!” And “The House of God” is wonderfully effective satire insofar as it points an accusatory finger at systems of power in medicine. But the spectacle of the male Harvard Medical School graduate satirizing women colleagues is painful; good satire deflates systems of power, not the people who toil and suffer in those systems.

Naturally, I turned to “Man’s 4th Best Hospital,” the recent sequel to “The House of God,” with cautious curiosity. I wondered if a forty-year career as a psychiatrist could have acquainted Bergman with the notion that women have inner lives. The novel’s first sentence—“Except for her eyes, Berry is fully clothed”—dimmed my hopes only somewhat. Roy Basch is back, and his life in the years between the two books maps closely with Bergman’s. Both men married a psychologist who believes that profound and fixed differences between genders not only exist but also can begin to be bridged by using the word “we” more frequently; both adopted a daughter from overseas; both became psychiatrists with a special focus on addiction medicine; both wrote a novel called “The House of God.”

In the first chapter, Basch and Berry are staying at their Costa Rican finca, and Basch requires stitches from a Tica physician. “When she bent over to examine me,” he describes, “I could not help noticing that her purple blouse was—to use a line from The House—‘unbuttoned down past Thursday,’ breasts cradled in the lace palms of a pink bra. . . . As she left . . . I noticed she was wearing tight bright pink pants and red high heals—make that heels.” For Basch, this is “familiar ground: sex and death. Especially in the Medical Intensive Care Unit, in the daily horror of lingering disease and death, the healthy sex with the nurses, orgasms crying out We’re still alive and young! At the threat of disease and death, the sensual, the vital—and, yes, the hope.”

Read more:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-house-of-god-a-book-as-sexist-as-it-was-influential-gets-a-sequel

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You can't see or smell power.

But with enough practice, it's easy to recognise who has it and who doesn't — especially when you're the one without it.

Social psychologist Professor Dacher Keltner, from the University of California, Berkley, has talked to thousands of people about power. He's studied it for 25 years.

He says most of us consider power in terms of work, money or prestige.

However what power really comes down to, he says, is your "capacity to alter the state of another person … their thoughts, their feelings, their actions, their pocketbook, their health". 

So how do you attain power? Why can it be so easy to lose, but so hard to give up?

Professor Keltner says in many workplaces gaining power and rising in the ranks largely comes by doing right by your colleagues and peers. 

"People rise in power by connections, by developing strong social networks, by inspiring, by empathising," he tells RN's This Working Life.

He says it's the same at work as in a team, or in a community — power often comes from the other members of that group.

"People give other people power, studies show, if they are bold in their ideas, if they are sharing and willing to brainstorm and pass on their own wisdom, as opposed to hoarding it to themselves."

But, he warns, power can corrupt almost anyone.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-21/how-power-changes-people/13150450

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See also: