Senior bankers at Goldman Sachs are arming themselves with handguns to fend off any forthcoming populist uprising against the bank. A friend of one of the bankers tells a Bloomberg News columnist, "I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit," swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker. This unidentified banker says he's not the only one stocking up on guns, and the NYPD confirms that some of the Goldman Sachs bankers do have pistol permits. Well, this ought to fix their public image problem!
Goldman Sachs has become the #1 symbol for how the financial industry has fleeced the American taxpayer, particularly after a widely read Rolling Stone article looked back at how this group of influential "gangsters" have played a hand in the economy's boom and bust cycle over the past century. At one point, author Matt Taibbi famously described the firm as a "vampire squid sucking the face of humanity." And now that squid is ready suck and shoot.
But where is this torch-toting mob the bankers so palpably dread? Most down-on-their-luck proles amassing at angry rallies have been directing their inchoate rage at communist Obama. On the left, the Working Families Party bussed some protesters out to the homes of AIG executives, but taxpayer contempt for Goldman Sachs—which made $27 billion from trading in the first nine months of this year—hasn't even come close to riot level.
Thing is, these bankers are sick of being made into scapegoats for the recession, and it could very well be that their growing arsenal is motivated as much by fear as a desire to unload on the ungrateful rabble. One imagines that somewhere in Greenwich, old-timely Gatling guns are being rolled up out of the basement. It's go time! You gonna take that, plebes?
