Everybody’s favorite vampire squid, Goldman Sachs, has practiced a form of virtual class warfare for a long time now.
But Bloomberg reports today that top execs there are now arming themselves for the real thing:
“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.
I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names…
Talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall-Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other. The last thing they want is to be so reasonably paid that the peasants have no interest in lynching them.
I’m not sure what kind of Mad Max future these people are envisioning, exactly. But it is kind of funny to imagine an investment banking nerd thinking that dropping $500 on a Glock 19 will turn him into the Road Warrior.
UPDATE (4:00PM): More reactions…
They just don’t get it. The thousands of people that showed up outside their door in Chicago and DC aren’t part of some violent mob; we’re taxpayers who’ve been taken for a ride by Wall Street and want to get off at the next stop. Our message has been clear and simple every time: stop using our money on lobbying and bonuses.
Goldman employees…think about this for a moment. You work for one of the nation’s most hated institutions. You’re pretty unpopular already. But one of the few things Goldman has not yet been accused of is actually killing someone. Do you really want to be the one to break that long and storied tradition of not killing someone? That’s a guaranteed way to get your bonus chopped down to five figures, mister.
*This post originally appeared in Change to Win on December 1, 2009. Reprinted with permission from the author.
About the Author Jason Lefkowitz: is the Online Campaigns Organizer for Change to Win, a partnership of seven unions and six million workers united together to restore the American Dream for everybody. He built his first Web site in 1995 and has been building online communities professionally since 1998. To read more of his work, visit the Change to Win blog, CtW Connect, at http://www.changetowin.org/connect.
