A New York attorney, Robert V. Marrow, has suggested the following as what could have been more appropriate closing remarks to Congress from Goldman-Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. They do indeed strike a nerve. I include them here not because I support the grand scale thievery of the high and mighty like Blankfein who roam unobstructed among our capitalist elite, but because - absent a discussion of the merits of the case - lawyer Marrow offers a stinging rebuke to those whom we have chosen to represent us, and thus to all of us as well.
Read it and you decide.
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CLOSING STATEMENT OF LLOYD BLANKFEIN,
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF GOLDMAN SACHS, INC.
Dear Mr. Levin and Members of this Committee,
I have patiently answered your questions for more than three hours, questions that evidenced a degree of ignorance, which surprised me. Your arrogance can be taken for granted, but your ignorance was unexpected because you have had the opportunity to be briefed, informed and prepared by a staff of intelligent, highly educated individuals who probably graduated summa cum laude from the nation's most prestigious universities. Nevertheless, you apparently know next to nothing about the industry you are seeking to investigate and impugn for your personal political motives. To use one example, a Senator on this panel could not distinguish rating agencies from mortgage assemblers.
For you to speak sanctimoniously of breach of fiduciary duty is particularly distressing to me, as it should be to the American taxpayers who have seen their government run so recklessly and incompetently that a surplus of trillions of dollars was reduced to nothing in a matter of a few years, and replaced by a deficit that endangers the country you swore to serve. Your duty is greater than fiduciary. It is grounded in your sworn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, a document that you violate regularly. One example, which was particularly instrumental in driving our government from surplus to deficit, was your abdication of the power to declare war. You let the executive branch go to war with a foreign country that did not attack us, which war was instrumental in rendering us insolvent.
You have also failed to provide reasonable regulation of our economy, resulting in catastrophic financial losses to its citizens and institutions. Your incompetence is so startling as to render you guilty of gross negligence no different from criminality, and yet you have the blind gall to blame those you were entrusted to regulate for their failure to abide by rules you now pretend existed, ex post facto.
If the American people and the government they expect to protect them continues to be populated by arrogant dolts such as the members of this committee, I pray that God will protect them and their country, for only He can save this great nation from the harm sure to be visited upon it by the reckless acts and cowardly inaction of feckless leaders such as yourselves.
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Perhaps Robert V. Marrow ought to consider a career on Wall Street. Better yet, isn't there a Senatorial election coming up in New York? Either way, it appears the public would be better served than it is today.