Greenwatch  

Capital Research Center's Matthew Vadum has an article in today's American Spectator.

The piece, "Goldman Sachs Government: Henry Paulson's liberal bank is taking over," builds upon Fred Lucas's compelling Foundation Watch profile of Goldman Sachs.

Here is a brief clip of Mr. Vadum's article:

As Goldman Sachs alumni play a key role in stewarding the nation’s economy, it’s worth recalling that the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith blamed Goldman Sachs for helping to cause the Great Depression. In his book, The Great Crash, 1929, Galbraith,  a key figure in President John F. Kennedy’s administration, devoted an entire chapter he titled “In Goldman, Sachs, We Trust,” to detailing the “large-scale corporate thimblerigging” that Goldman and other Wall Street firms practiced in the 1920s.

Thimbleriggers or not, supremely self-assured Goldman Sachs alumni at the highest levels of the Bush administration are now pulling the levers of power in the nation’s capital, confident that they know the way out of the current market turbulence.

Their power is likely to grow no matter who’s in charge in Washington. Commentator David Brooks may not have been joking when he observed this summer: “over the past few years, people from Goldman Sachs have assumed control over large parts of the federal government. Over the next few, they might just take over the whole darn thing.”

It might seem reasonable to trust ex-Goldman executives because they helped build what is undeniably a spectacularly successful company. Goldman is on Fortune magazine’s 2008 list of the “Global 500” largest corporations (by revenues), which ranks it as #1 in the securities industry, #20 stateside, and #61 internationally.

But are Goldman veterans the nation’s salvation, or are they pushing the same kinds of disastrous interventionist policies that prolonged the agony of the Great Depression? Steve Milloy, portfolio manager for the Free Enterprise Action Fund, argues that Goldman alumni are working from within the Bush administration to clean up the toxic economic mess they helped to create. “It’s government by Goldman Sachs and for Goldman Sachs,” he said.

With their determination to command the financial tides, these overachieving bankers believe that they are uniquely qualified to steer the U.S. economy between the Scylla of dollar devaluation and the Charybdis of negative economic growth.