Stewart began with an update of what was going on in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and turned to find an embodiment of what exactly the movement was upset with. Enter Corzine, who went from Wall Street to politics and straight back to Wall Street, except in this last round, Corzine seems to have completely collapsed his organization. Stewart joked through several television appearances in which Corzine demande stricter regulations for banks– back when he was a politician, of course– and one in which he, ironically, looked at the collapse of Lehman Brothers as unfortunate.

While the politician Jon Corzine saw Lehman Brothers as a cautionary tale, Stewart joked, the investor Jon Corzine saw Lehman as a dare to make even riskier bets, and so he bet on European debt, which Stewart joked was like betting “purple” in a roulette game.

The segment via Comedy Central below:

Members of the group Anonymous have been seen at the protests, and those who have work the infamous Guy Fawkes mask have been arrested due to an obscure New York law banning masked gatherings. But a few days ago, hackers managed to collect the personal information of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. So Homeland Security issued a warning to big businesses that they could be next.

While the DHS warning doesn’t mention Wall Street protests in particular, it did say that “publicized events” like Occupy Wall Street may motivate the group.

Nevertheless, the agency wouldn’t weigh in on the ways it might monitor Anonymous’s involvement in Occupy Wall Street.

“We don’t have any role in someone’s right to public protest,” said a DHS official.

One member of the protests quoted in the above article expressed his doubts at the effectiveness and outcomes of Anonymous’ actions, but it’s clear its members only represent a fraction of the protestors.

h/t NY Post

Notes the NYT’s Dealbook, which broke the scoop: this makes Facebook “worth more than companies like eBay, Yahoo and Time Warner.” It also doubles Mark Zuckerberg‘s multi-billion-dollar worth. It also makes Goldman Sachs the gatekeeper to who now gets to invest in the super-hot Facebook, and to the inevitable Facebook IPO. According to Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn Rusli, Goldman is “planning to create a ‘special purpose vehicle’ to allow its high-net worth clients to invest in Facebook, which would allow for max investment while circumventing disclosure rules for companies with 500 or more investors. Clever, that.

So: This is a big deal. Everyone’s already saying that this is putting Google even more on the ropes (seeing as now Facebook is the most visited website in the land) and that Goldman couldn’t be sitting prettier. Here are a few other things it means:

(1) Facebook hiring spree! To paraphrase Antoine Dodson, hide your startups, hide your engineers — Facebook’s a-comin’. Snapping up Hot Potato and Drop.io? Poaching Foursquare’s Nathan Folkman? That’s nothing compared to what Facebook’s got coming. Rumor has it they’re about to close on purchasing the Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo Park from Oracle. That’s probably not just for the scenery. They want to stock up, preferably with talent – and, importantly, companies – that will help it integrate across every platform possible. (I’m guessing one of the new buzzy photo apps will be snapped up.) If you think people are complaining about a developer shortage now, just wait.

(2) China! Mark Zuckerberg recently returned from a trip to China. Innocent pleasure jaunt for the Mandarin-speaking Facebook founder or connection-making relationship-building fact-finding mission to the land of 450 million potential users? China is certainly not an easy place to do business — they just kicked out Skype — but in a globalized, connected world, it’s certainly tough to ignore. Approximately 33% of its massive population is online and as we all know from the rest of the world, that is growing. It’s an insane market to ignore and smart, Mandarin-speaking audacious visionary CEOs probably aren’t going to shy away from trying. Facebook China. It’s gonna happen.

(3) Goldman’s PR Whitewash The Vampire Squid just attached itself to the buzziest, growing-est, Oscar-nominated-est, Person Of The Year-iest tech company around. Who will remember their year of scandal and record bonuses and how everyone hated Goldman Sachs (sample Gawker headline: “Who do you hate more, BP or Goldman Sachs?“). Goldman’s not there for you to like them, people, they’re there to make money — lots of it. But they did have a bruising year and being attached to the shining future-makers at Facebook (never mind the gatekeeper to the Facebook IPO) will certainly help. This lets them offer something shiny to their clients, and bask in that reflected glow. (And guaranteed cashola.) That doesn’t fool the people who know — I like Howard Lindzon‘s take:

For Goldman Sachs, this is a no lose situation. If it works, they get the IPO and make some money. That is their job. They got off so easy with the government that this is like Vegas money they probably thought would be the taxpayer’s at some point a year back…The only thing I DO know is that Goldman could give a rat’s ass about the social web and sharing. If they are the top in social web, it’s small potatoes. The war in bonds, currencies and commodities is where the real money is at. This is play money. I hate that Facebook is letting them in.

This is not a coup for Goldman Sachs, this is a shame for the social web.

Okay I lied. I love Howard Lindzon’s take. So, maybe Goldman’s got an uphill PR sell. But — they’ve also got Facebook. Watch the narrative change.

(4) Bigger Players, Bigger Bets When Lindzon points out that this is small potatoes for Goldman, he’s not kidding. But now the bigger fish are sniffing around and what started as mutterings about a bubble somewhere in the late fall now seems to be turning into a gold rush. (Doesn’t Google and their adorable $6 billion offer for Groupon seem so quaint right now? Never mind Twitter’s recent $3.7 billion valuation.) These are billion-dollar figures, and they are actually now starting to sound…eensy. As Ray Kurzweil points out, when technology advances it does so exponentially — so it makes sense that the explosion of tech startups would chicken-egg in conjunction with an explosion of investor dollars — not just the usual (and educated!) suspects, but people on the sidelines reading about Facebook in their Time magazines and deciding that maybe the Internet’s not a fad, after all. (Yes. These people do exist, and many of them have a LOT of money.) High valuations, big deals, young companies getting scooped up — it’s gonna be a dizzying year.

(5) Sympathy For The Google. It’s official: Facebook has gone from underdog challenger of the mighty Google to the top social-tech dog. So watch for everyone to start rooting for Google again. After a wave of backlash (see here and here), the pendulum will swing back around to rooting for the loveable search giant with the cuddly name. Google can take your pity – its market valuation is almost four times Facebook’s at $190 billion, and its current year revenue is about $22 billion to Facebook’s $2 billion. Back to Lindzon: “I think that Google has to buy Twitter and that will start to be a meme soon. It’s a chess game and nuclear war now in the social space.” That sound you hear is the sound of the tech press collectively wetting itself. Ew. But still — everyone likes to root for an exciting matchup. Expect to see some bold moves from Google, soon — if they’re smart. Big “if” (RIP Google Buzz). But isn’t that how underdogs like it?

(6) New Facebook Ad Models. All that said…Facebook has made a big point about how it hasn’t really focused on the silliness of “making money” yet, despite that $2 billion annual rev and nearly 1 trillion display ads per year. I believe them — can they really not do better than targeted ads for Jewish singles in your area? You bet they can: They also make a point about knowing every little bit of information about you for the ultimate in micro-targeting. The online ad industry is evolving and innovating right along with the rest of the web (see AdKeeper) and the key to dominating going forward will be data — using it wisely to convert your users into dollars for advertisers. This is where smart technology will take user data and figure out how to map it on top of shopping data, so that purchasing intent can best be harvested. The stigma about buying online has now pretty much disappeared. With more people using the web, and mobile devices, more often do run more of their lives, there are big bucks at stake. And I’m not even TALKING about how Facebook is looking to horn in on search.

(7) New Facebook Business Models. They have all these users. All this data. They’d be crazy just to stick with what they’ve got. Hell, now they’ve got fun money just to fling up into the air and see where it goes. They’re poaching the best and brightest who all gush on and on about how “exciting” and “creative” and “free” it is. Clearly these people are getting to work on some fun stuff. So far Facebook has shown itself as adept at replicating the innovations of its competitors (see: Foursquare –> Facebook Places). But with all the resources at their disposal and innovations happening across every industry on every platform, they’d be nuts not to at least test the waters. Hey, that car’s not gonna drive itself. Oh, wait.

(8) People Generally Freaking Out This has already started to happen. First Groupon (“What? But they AREN’T EVEN A TECH COMPANY!!!”) and now Super-Sized Facebook. Entrepreneurs and founders and people with fledgling ideas that are half-built that they’ve been slaving over at night are obsessing about all day are suddenly freaking out that they have to get to market NOW before the bubble pops and the money dries up. Chill out, dude. (And, ladies!) If you’re making something of value, it’ll take. Just focus on it, be smart, and don’t let Twitter and TechCrunch freak you out. (Here, take some advice from these people.) Just a moment of Zen amidst the craziness. All right, now – onward! It’s 2011 and YOU’D BETTER NOT SCREW THIS UP. Haa, just kidding. Mostly.

Well: It should be interesting. Happy New Year, everybody!

Related:
Goldman’s Facebook Coup [Felix Salmon - Reuters]
The Social Web Index … All-Time Highs in Pressure and Price and Shame on Facebook [Howard Lindzon]
Was Goldman wise to invest $500m in Facebook at a $50B valuation? [Quora]
Goldman Sachs Just Bought The Facebook IPO [Business Insider]

Follow Rachel Sklar on Twitter here.

Illustration of Mark Zuckerberg as Avatar-ized Time Person of the Year from Sandbox World (via Boing Boing) (hat tip: Bnter).

Rachel Maddow

Citing Thursday afternoon’s “flash crash,” the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, and the Goldman Sachs scandal as examples, Maddow argued that, if she were a foreign investor, she wouldn’t have too much faith in the American system right now:

“When you think about it, why would anybody want to invest with us if we have (a) unpredictable, inexplicable, giant, not-found-in-nature flash crashes, like we did yesterday, and (b) if government regulators are so underpowered that something like, say, the Bernie Madoff thing went on for years undetected by them? or (c) how about a financial system with giant players like Goldman Sachs allegedly selling products to their consumers– selling products to their customers– that were designed to fail?”

She concluded that the takeaway message from the American economy at the moment is that “the system is totally rigged in favor of the crooks, and you’ll get fleeced.”

Video below:

As we exited the panel, we overheard a couple whispering, “Did he think he’d get away with it?” They were obviously discussing the scandal that brought down Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York. It was that salacious side of Spitzer that brought many to the event, but the topic was only occasionally referenced and hardly discussed. Instead, interviewer Jeff Greenfield opted to focus on the Spitzer of the moment – the virtuous Wall Street fighter who was ahead of his time and is now rumored to be plotting a political comeback. Greenfield wasn’t “forgiving” Spitzer of his past sexual misconduct; he was sticking to the better story.

Greenfield began the one-on-one session by saying he wasn’t Dr. Phil and he hadn’t received any guidelines from Spitzer ahead of time. That doesn’t mean Spitzer didn’t come with his own set of focal points to repeatedly touch on and hammer home over the course of the night. He stressed how much he’s willing to contribute his opinions and insights when asked to. So he’s become a Slate writer, appeared as an MSNBC contributor, and started to do more public appearances.

Some have begun wondering if these sightings are the beginning of Spitzer’s rise back to prominence. But Greenfield was quick to point out that Spitzer still has the same enemies he made when he was governor and cracking down on Wall Street. Greenfield indicated that other politicians (Bill Clinton, Mark Sanford, John Ensign) have survived sex scandals, unlike Spitzer who was pushed out within days. Spitzer acknowledged that his determination rubbed some people the wrong way. Still, he doesn’t regret his strategy, only some of his tactics (his use of profanity and occasional loss of temper.)

As the conversation remained largely on financial reform, Spitzer denied that he’d have been able to save the world from the economic collapse, the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, or other indiscretions like the ones perpetrated by Goldman Sachs. He did, however, indicate that his outlook and approach to rebuild the financial structure could help fend off further misdeeds.

He says that the biggest problem for investment banks these days is that the bankers don’t know who their clients are and who they represent. It would be better to get back to thinking about the best interest of the public, he says. That’s what he says he’s always tried to do.

What They Said
“The structure of banking is what brought us to the precipice; it destroyed our economy.”
- Eliot Spitzer wants to rebuild the foundations

“The SEC has the better argument but by no means an easy argument.”
- Eliot Spitzer believes that Goldman Sachs has a long road ahead, though not an impossible one

“Politics is about finding the people with the right ideas for the moment.”
- Eliot Spitzer stands behind those who have the creativity and intellect to solve what needs to be done

“There’s really little that’s new in this crisis and that’s the pity of it. We should have learned the lesson.”
- Eliot Spitzer blamed our repeated dooming on forgetting history

“The stories we read about Greece, we may read about the United States ten years later. We are in dire circumstances.”
- Eliot Spitzer doesn’t think that the tide has turned yet for the economy

What We Thought

• Spitzer’s wife, Silda, sat close to the front and kept a low profile. We recognized her not as a woman making a statement, but simply a wife showing support for her husband, the keynote speaker of the evening.
• Greenfield once again put his experience and inquisitiveness to work. Not only was he well-versed in Spitzer’s accomplishments as both governor and previously as attorney general, Greenfield went into depth about the framework of the New York legislature, David Paterson, Joe Bruno, and Andrew Cuomo, among others. It led us to wonder what Greenfield isn’t an expert in.

PANEL RULES!
Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.

Panel Nerds don’t like…Half the story
We appreciated that Greenfield kept the discussion civilized and dignified. He phrased his questions delicately, carefully thinking through every word so that it didn’t portray Spitzer any more negatively than he deserved to be treated. However, when it came to the Q&A portion, Greenfield’s selection process unveiled an imposing gap. You see, all of the questions were focused on current events – financial, Supreme Court-related, political, and so on. None of them dug into the scandal that made Spitzer so notorious. It was one thing for Greenfield to dance around the subject during his time; but when the audience got their chance to ask what they wanted, Greenfield could have delivered them what they wanted. Even with a bit of temperance.

The profane emails between high-ranking Goldman officials released by the Senate seem to be the least of CEO Lloyd Blankfein and company’s problems. From the WSJ:

Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or its employees committed securities fraud in connection with its mortgage trading, people familiar with the probe say.

The investigation from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is at a preliminary stage, stemmed from a referral from the Securities and Exchange Commission, these people say. The SEC recently filed civil securities-fraud charges against the big Wall Street firm and a trader in its mortgage group. Goldman and the trader say they have done nothing wrong and are fighting the civil charges.

The investigation is in its nascent stages, and whether Goldman will be found guilty of securities fraud or not is still undetermined.

First up, the two discussed why Obama would have said it and what the public response would be, with Kelly calling it a “populist message”. The irony of anyone on Fox News accusing someone of trying to be populist aside, she makes a good point. The remark was off the cuff and Obama was probably trying to meet the anti-Wall Street sentiment that was floating around last week and went too far. When Kelly asks Stossel if he thinks the American people will respond to the comment, this is what he says.

“Sadly, I think people envy the people that are making money and think that it’s a zero-sum game. As Gordon Gekko said in that movie, ‘Some win, some lose’ and I get why you lawyers and politicians might feel that way because, in your worlds, it is. One person wins, somebody else loses. But business, because it’s voluntary, makes us all richer. And so we shouldn’t think that way.”

Later, when Kelly brings up the recent Goldman Sachs scandals, Stossel stepped in to defend the country.

“I don’t know if these people really were cheating but Goldman Sachs didn’t cause the bubble to pop. If someone’s to blame, it’s Fannie and Freddie and all the policies that encouraged reckless spending. And that’s government.”

It’s interesting to hear someone sticking up for the company after two weeks of them being a pariah in every news outlet around. If this is at all indicative of how the media (or the conservative media) begins to turn during the debate over financial reform, it’ll definitely seem like Obama’s comments merely helped the people he was trying to hurt while hurting himself in the process.

Giving a talk with Bob Schieffer on the recent Senate hearings on Goldman Sachs’ activity during the housing crisis (and subsequent embarrassing emails released), Clinton specified that, while he did think the emails were morally damning, he was unsure of whether there was a legal case against them. While Clinton opponents will probably jump at the soundbite to prove that Democrats are just as supportive of Wall Street as they claim Republicans are, Clinton is not exactly defending them. In fact, his ultimate conclusion was that “too much of this stuff has no economic purpose, no matter who wins or who loses, and to me, that’s the bigger problem… There was no underlying merit to the transaction.”

The more interesting point in this clip is that it is the latest in a series of serious policy suggestions Clinton has tossed out in recent months, at a time during which both Democrats and President Obama appear vulnerable. There is no proving that Clinton’s increased public presence serves any purpose of undermining the current Democratic establishment– one which he ruled for most of a decade– but the louder he gets, the more of an opportunity he will give conservative opponents to use his presence as evidence that the Democratic Party is experiencing infighting.

Clinton’s Goldman comments from today, below:

But one thing just didn’t make sense for co-host Gretchen Carlson. Specifically, why Pres. Barack Obama would go after his buddies.

Confused, she addressed the camera: “The whole thing doesn’t fit together in my mind.” She laid out her case:

A lot of the people who work at Goldman donated to President Obama during the campaign. A lot of the people currently sitting in his administration used to work at Goldman. A lot of people who work at Goldman support his financial reform program. So why are they on the hook? I don’t get it. Usually when you support the President, then you’re not on the hook.

Our emphasis added. Yeah, why is Pres. Obama being so…fair and balanced? There must be some reason…

Check it out:

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It appears that Olbermann and his team felt that editing the hearing such that the offensive words were removed would weaken the compelling point that Goldman employees were betting against the market in a way that would profit the company while the rest of the American economy sank.

Olbermann did not make a big deal out of the fact that he refused to censor the senators, although it is, at the very least, extremely rare for a program running at 8pm– the peak of primetime and what is widely considered “family hour”– to willingly air crude language. Olbermann did warn his audience, twice, that “there is a commonplace but offensive word. It is being quoted from a Goldman Sachs internal email. It is repeated several times within this portion of the hearing. We are not bleeping it out.”

Watch the clip below, but be warned: it does included some crude language, and we didn’t bleep it out, either:

And, for contrast, here is CNN’s coverage of the hearings (via John King, USA), where the offensive words were modestly bleeped away:

Update: And here’s Hannity’s family-friendly take on the hearings:

Update 2: Even Daily Show’s Jon Stewart decided to bleep:

McCain very deliberately asked Blankfein to detail his salary and bonuses during the time in which the housing crisis put a severe dent in the national economy, which Blankfein responded to while all but visibly squirming in his chair. McCain followed those questions with a query as to how Blankfein perceived the state of the national economy at the time (“poorly”), and questions as to whether, during a time of national economic crisis, Goldman Sachs engaged in any charity work. Blankfein replied, with a straight face, “we have always been a philanthropic organization.”

The questioning, courtesy of C-SPAN, below:

During today’s heated Goldman hearings on Capitol Hill Sen. Carl Levin, head of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, quoted some rather colorful language from the Goldman emails which described one of their transactions as a “shitty deal.” Levin repeated the description eleven times in during his questioning of Goldman Exec Daniel Sparks. The pretty fantastic exchange is below. Of all these instances I think it’s hard to argue that this wasn’t by far the most justified. Look for the NYPost’s rendition tomorrow and probably t-shirts to come.

Then came the April 16th story of the SEC’s fraud complaint against Goldman Sachs. The tale of heinous public betrayal hit on the very same day that Republican senators unanimously declared their opposition to Senator Chris Dodd‘s (D-CT) financial regulatory reform bill in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). The juxtaposition was such an embarrassment that it instantly shifted the momentum, with some predicting that the Dodd bill could even pass with 70 votes.

The Republicans’ response should tell you all you need to know about whether they should be trusted within 500 yards of our economy. First, they focused their outrage, not on Goldman Sachs, but on the SEC and the White House, accusing them of timing the fraud complaint to bolster support for financial reform. They demanded an investigation, and got one.

On Thursday, less than a week after the Goldman Sachs complaint broke, ABC News was first to report on the SEC porn memo. Republicans like Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) immediately seized on the story as evidence that financial regulatory reform should be put on hold:

“This stunning report should make everyone question the wisdom of moving forward with plans to give regulators like the SEC even more widespread authority”

This makes about as much sense as saying that we shouldn’t enact any new criminal statutes until we figure out a way to neutralize Dunkin’ Donuts. While the stupidity of this is incredible, you can’t really blame them for taking a swing at it. It’s just standard political opportunism, right?

Wrong. This story didn’t just happen to drift by at the opportune moment. That memo was requested, and released, by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). While initial reports on this story mention that Grassley requested the memo, it’s only as an afterthought, and none of them mention the prior reporting on this story. What, did Grassley have some kind of Spidey-sense that told him to take a shot in the dark that there might be some perverts working at the SEC?

CBS News’ Bob Schieffer even interviewed Grassley, and in doing so read a portion of the SEC’s statement that was left out of most reports, which pointed out that this story broke in February. Schieffer dismisses it, and never asks Grassley if there’s a connection between his release of this memo and the Goldman Sachs complaint.

Furthermore, none of these reports really tries to put the SEC’s porn problem in context. They all omit the fact that the IG’s memo includes SEC contractors as well as staffers, and none of them mentions that those 33 cases are out of more than 3,500 SEC employees. That’s less than 1%, versus research that suggests that 25% of all employees spend time surfing for porn.

Why omit these clearly relevant details from this story? I can only guess that a completely fresh story with the word “porn” in the headline is a much better sale than a warmed-over memo that rehashes a months-old story.

There were some later, lower-profile reports that drew these obvious connections. The New York Daily News, for example, even asked the SEC about the connection between the porn report and the Goldman Sachs complaint, and recent Pulitzer winner Pro Publica pointed out that they reported on the SEC’s porn problem in 2008.

The SEC porn story is an outrage, but the fact that the Republicans equate it to the Goldman Sachs fraud complaint is a greater outrage, and the media’s complicity trumps both. People often try to discern a partisan bias in the media, but this is further evidence that, if there is a media bias, it’s towards clicks and eyeballs, and the almighty dollar.

CEO Lloyd Blankfein is quoted in a November 2007 email related to a New York Times story as stating “we didn’t dodge the mortgage mess. We lost money, then made more than we lost because of shorts. Also, it’s not over, so who knows how it will turn out ultimately.” Other executives make several references to shorts, which at one point made them $50 million in one day while the rest of the market was crashing, as well as what CFO David Viniar called “the big short,” which the NYT reports made the company $373 million. There are also some miscellaneous unflattering quotes, like openly stating “looks like we will make some serious money,” “looks like we are in a good position,” and a “good news/bad news” email that makes it clear that they were aware that betting against clients was both hurting the clients and helping the business.

Below is a PDF of all the emails currently released. The Senate investigations subcommittee has promised the release of several more on Monday; we’ll have them for you as they come in.

Goldman Sachs Emails

Says Stewart: “You get the sense that if Jim Cramer was around in 1912 he would have said ‘you’re not going to hear this from anyone else, but my sources tell me the Titanic has the best buffet on the high seas. And by the way if you want to get there faster, try the Hindenburg.” Shots fired. But Cramer is not alone in Stewart’s line of fire. Video, and solid explanation of the fraud, below.

Rachel Maddow

Her explanation of the financial situation after ending the story stands on it’s own. It’s classic Maddow: clear, comprehensive, accurate and easy to follow. Even if her bias and exasperation with the right is apparent, the fact that it’s visible is precisely what makes it ignorable. Then there’s the Tiny Town parable, which is either an allusion to Aesop‘s fables or Glenn Beck‘s chalkboard, or something in between. The relationship between the parable and the actual story is a little muddy, and probably serves more to confuse than elucidate, but it’s a sign that Maddow may possibly be expanding her repertoire to include oratory techniques mostly owned by the right.

Take the trip to Ye Olde Donut Shoppe below:

Today during Jim Cramer‘s segment on CNBC’s Street Signs with Erin Burnett, guest Sylvain Raynes from R&R Consulting went after Cramer – and Cramer fired back.

After Cramer seemed to defend Goldman Sachs, or at least appear skeptical of their wrongdoing, Raynes got his chance to weigh in. “I’m pleased to be on this show, since most of your previous guests were public relations officers for Goldman,” he said. “Is it ok if I’m a little critical?”

The shot at Cramer garnered an immediate response from the Mad Money host. “I don’t like to hear that,” he said. “I’ve blasted Goldman many times I don’t need to hear that nonsense.”

After some more back-and-forth, Raynes continued in his mild-mannered takedown. “I want to remain shallow in deference to Mr. Cramer,” he said at the end of his answer, with Burnett cutting in and interrupting. Before cutting to commercial, she said, “Sylvain will not be with us. Sylvain you’ve got to be more polite than that.”

Here’s the video:

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On Fox Business Network, Charlie Gasparino, author of the recently published, The Sellout, had some choice words for the company – well, one very choice word.

Gasparino was being interviewed by anchors Brian Sullivan and Dagen McDowell, and said he had been trying to get in touch with Goldman all morning. “I just tried calling Goldman Sachs media department,” he said, laughing. “I got voicemail.”

But when Sullivan brought up the idea that this whole lawsuit was the fault of a “rogue employee,” Gasparino cut in. “That’s bullshit,” he said. “Excuse the language.”

“I’m sure it’s never been said on a trading floor,” joked Sullivan.

Gasparino’s fiery delivery mixes well with his inside combination of Wall St. smarts and Main St. appeal. It’s what made his move from CNBC to FBN so important to the young business network. And as he want to turn the business network fight into a “barroom brawl,” he’s certainly got the language down.

Here’s more info about the lawsuit, from a Reuters report:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc was charged with fraud on Friday by U.S. securities regulators in the structuring and marketing of a debt product tied to subprime mortgages.

The Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit alleges that Paulson & Co, a major hedge fund run by the billionaire John Paulson, worked with Goldman in creating the collateralized debt obligation, and stood to benefit as its value fell, costing investors more than $1 billion.

Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman vice president who the SEC said was principally responsible for creating the product, was also charged with fraud.

Paulson has not been charged.

Here’s the clip:

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Separately, Mr. Murdoch said The Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corp., will start charging users for accessing the paper on mobile devices such as Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry smart phones and Apple Inc.’s iPhone. He said newspaper subscribers would pay $1 a week for mobile access, while others would pay $2 a week.

He also said the company is mulling plans to charge online subscriptions for Hulu, the video Web site that News Corp. launched with big media partners including NBC Universal. NBC Universal is 80% owned by General Electric Co. and 20% by Vivendi SA.

Typically a throw away comment like this merits very little attention. However, if the comment comes from arguably the most influential man in all of global media (and the number-one ranked Media Mogul in our Power Grid), people stand up and take notice.

1. September 2008 – Lehman Bros. files for bankruptcy, amidst a flurry of frightening headlines, and the NYT.com begins its months-long habit of instilling fear in our hearts with homepage images of plummeting graphs. The blogosphere, which was on the story before the MSM, proves itself the more adept medium to handle the breakneck pace of the fallout.

SLIDESHOW: New York City newspaper front pages from Sept 15, 2008.

2. So much has happened in the interim that sometimes it’s sort of amazing to recall now that the economy tanked amidst the most historic election of our times, and that George Bush was our President when it happened. You may recall just a week after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, Senator John McCain suspended his campaign and dropped everything, including a Letterman appearance, to rush back to D.C. in order to fix things! By way of Katie Couric‘s set. This did not sit well with David Letterman who tore him to pieces on his show that night, inflicting early, and arguably severe, damage on a campaign that had yet to suffer the full effects of the Sarah Palin fiasco.

NEXT: Bernie Madoff, Jim Cramer, and Matt Taibbi

Alls

But the “nobodies” and “morons” of the blogosphere keep trying to paint him as a Goldman Sachs muppet.  

After brushing off criticism from Janet Tavakoli, a Chicago-based financial consultant who has appeared opposite Charlie on shows like Squawk Box (because she’s a ‘nobody‘), Charlie went on CNBC’s Power Lunch with Michelle Caruso-Cabrera and punched down at a financial blogger who has been getting under his skin (Video below):

Charles Gasparino: Every time I say something nice about Goldman — even moderately nice after beating them up 90% of the time — I get these moronic bloggers writing about me… especially one moron at Zero Intelligence, or Zero Hedge, I can’t remember which one it is. But this idiot keeps writing that I’m [getting paid by Goldman]. Alls I’m doing is this: I will beat up on Goldman Sachs all the time, but I have to give their side of the story — there’s to you Mr. Zero Intelligence.”

Michelle Caruso-Cabrera: “Moronic bloggers is redundant… He’s probably not as handsome as you either.”

Now, this is nothing new for CNBC. Just last month Dennis Kneale called-out bloggers for their “mean-spirited negativity,” calling them ”digital dickweed” — “I say dickweed because apparently it is indeed a plant akin to pond scum.” Hard not to be offended when grown-ups resort to name-calling. Suck it up, cable boys!

Charlie Gasparino on Power Lunch:

(Note: Charlie busts out his French accent at the end… “Numb de plumb”?)

Dennis Kneale on 8 p.m. hour:

Where else would you learn about Martha Stewart’s bizarrely optimistic and perky letter to shareholders last April, released in the teeth of this brutish recession, or the fact that the company pays Martha a $2 million “fee” for the use of her various homes. There’s also the $233,000 Goldman Sachs spent on CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s car and driver, not to mention his “in-office meals,” courtesy of shareholders.  And it’s hard to top Qwest Communication’s amended employment agreement for CEO Edward Mueller, which allowed his stepdaughter to commute to high school in California from her new home in Denver, where the company is based, on the corporate jet — school buses are, like, so passé!

Michelle Leder is a treasure hunter who dives into the ocean of corporate America’s routine SEC filings. It’s a vast and awfully deep body of water, by the way. The SEC estimates that there are about 13,000 publicly traded companies in the nation, and every single one of them has to file a proxy statement, which usually runs around 50 pages (among other things, a proxy contains information on perks and executive compensation, which are Leder’s main focus). That’s a lot to read. Leder says she gets through as many of them as humanly possible each day, and she posts her most amusing findings, often written with surprising panache considering the subject matter, on footnoted.org.

She does all this from footnoted.org’s glittering world headquarters, her home in Peekskill, New York, where she lives with her husband Scott and her dog Kumara, whom she says she has trained to dig through SEC filings.

What possesses a person (or dog) to do this sort of thing? Early in her career, Leder, who was an economics major at college, was a reporter at a small Florida newspaper and her first scoop was based on what she says was “an SEC dumpster dive back in the days when filings used to be thick stacks of paper that were physically copied from the SEC Data room.”  She’s been fascinated with SEC filings ever since. “I wouldn’t say I have a fondness for minutiae — more of an appreciation for the things that are public and buried in plain sight.”

The site has several means of support. There’s a wee bit of advertising, but most of the money comes from high-end subscribers who pay $2,500 a year for a premium version; she also gives speeches, consults, conducts private research for institutions, and is an analyst for Research Edge, a custom research outfit.

If you are looking for a steady stream of posts about Goldman or A.I.G. dirt, however, you will be disappointed. Although she will find the occasional slip-up, like the bit about Goldman’s free lunch (the food, not its government hand-out), she says most big firms’ filings are so “over-lawyered” that there tend to be few mistakes and goodies for her. She does much better with what she calls the “B” and “C” firms. That may be the main reason footnoted.org remains a niche site whose numbers barely register.

Her top post, in terms of Internet traffic, was on a house that Countrywide had foreclosed on that was being used for sex parties. “You have no idea how many people type in “sex party” or some variation on that in Google and footnoted comes back as a top search result,” she says. “One can only imagine the disappointment on all those people’s faces when they come across a site that looks at SEC footnotes instead of what you might expect from a site that has the words “sex party” in them.”

But the site seldom disappoints its small, devoted and influential group of followers, some of whom manage billions of dollars of other people’s money and include some of the biggest names on Wall Street. It’s not a sex party, but the information is pretty darned good.

Jim Impoco is a New York-based writer and a former editor of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times and deputy editor of Portfolio. He writes occasionally on Mediaite about the financial press. Please send tips or comments to jimpoco@mediaite.com.

• The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary: GOP consultant Frank Luntz releases some 1984-worthy newspeak to use when discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (JB)

• If this is the best response conservatives can mount against national healthcare, maybe we can actually get it passed this time. (JB)

•Holy Moly! Vatican Approves of New ‘Harry Potter’ Movie: Finally you can go see the surefire box office juggernaut — guilt-free! No word from the Jews yet… (AZ)

• How Goldman Sachs is continuing to kick this country where it hurts. (JB)

Me: I want someone (you) to explain to me why Goldman Sachs was able to make so much money. Is it Taibbi’s conspiracy theory at work?

John: No. Except kind of.
It’s easy.
Goldman can borrow at very low cost thanks to government.
That means they can make money off of trades other people can’t.

Me: But if Goldman can trade at low costs because of the government how come others can’t?

John: Well, some others can too.
Morgan Stanley, for instance
But Citi and BofA have much bigger mortgage linked balance sheets.

Me: So the fact that Goldman Sachs made all this money is a sign that TARP worked?
Or a sign that Wall St is as corrupt as ever?

John: Both?
Well, I mean, it’s a sign that the game is rigged, and Goldman is really good at winning rigged games.

Me: That does not make me feel better.
But is this a sign that the economy is getting better? Or business as usual?

John: Not a sign the economy is getting better, that’s for sure. If you can borrow at artificially low rates, all sorts of things become profitable that wouldn’t have been before.
So Goldman can make money even if the opportunities are thin b/c the economy sucks.

*

Feel better now? Me neither. However if one of the reasons the economy tanked last year is that the public had no idea what was going on than at least we can assist with that end of things, in so far as providing you with further links to read!

Matt Taibbi vs. the Giant Vampire Squid

Okay, This Time Matt Taibbi Nails Goldman And The Bailout

Congrats Goldman Sachs! You’re the New Symbol of Banker Greed

The Great American Bubble Machine

Thain was a top executive at Goldman Sachs until he fell out of favor with the firm’s CEO. In December 2003, he bolted from Goldman in order to run the New York Stock Exchange, where he will be best remembered for not being Richard Grasso, whose extravagant pay package was a scandal during less turbulent economic times.

In November 2007, Thain was tapped to become chairman and CEO of Merrill Lynch, which was already reeling from the subprime crisis and whose “thundering herd” were now marching in lemming formation. He lasted all of 26 months, during which time the world, as Wall Street knew it, ended. Merrill sold itself to Bank of America last September on the day Lehman Brothers folded. But Thain’s new boss, Ken Lewis, reacted badly to, among other things, his taste in office furniture (including a $68,000 antique credenza) and he was canned last January. In a minor upset to Matt Taibbi and other believers in Goldman Sachs conspiracy theories, he hasn’t yet been appointed undersecretary of finance at the Treasury.

Unlike Taibbi, I’d be happy if all the world’s economic problems since the Great Depression could be blamed on Goldman Sachs. That would lend itself to an easy fix. Just re-elect Eliot Spitzer as New York attorney general, point him downtown toward Goldman’s headquarters, and say, sic ‘em!

To his infinite credit, Taibbi has received a good deal of attention for his article “The Great American Bubble Machine” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Taibbi, the youthful face of the franchise and a 2008 National Magazine Award winner, can be an engaging, and insightful, if occasionally bombastic writer (In the first paragraph of his latest article he describes Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

And maybe John Thain, who Taibbi lists as one of the powerful Goldman Sachs alumni (along with Hank Paulson, Robert Rubin, and numerous others) who bend the world to their will, is cloning himself in Brazil. Let’s see if the clones do a better job of dominating the universe than Thain, who often seemed a tragi-comic figure during the financial crisis.

What’s interesting is how much Taibbi’s article has resonated – and not just with the people who swear that the moon landing was staged or that the U.S. government was behind the 9/11 attacks. Folks who work on Wall Street or write about it for a living were talking about it, mostly but not only for laughs. Even a former employee, who knows better than to think the firm had inflated and pricked every financial bubble since Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s shoeshine boy offered him stock tips in 1929, told me Goldman can be its own worst enemy. Its aggressive, stealthy ways infuriate rivals. And right on cue, on July 9^th, Goldman announced that it was poised to surpass its 2007 trading-record revenue, setting the stage for big bonuses just six months after the firm had to rely on government guarantees to issue debt.

But conspiracy theories about Goldman and the shadow government it runs have been around for a long time, and Taibbi’s piece doesn’t shed much if any new light, though he does raise the ante. And the thought that Goldman created the dot-com bubble is just silly – during the technology mania in the late ‘90s, Goldman often seemed like it was playing catch-up. Between 1996 and the end of 2002, Goldman was third in tech I.P.O.’s, its market share nearly 8 percentage points behind frontrunner Merrill Lynch. It’s a bit like blaming Halliburton not just for the invasion and botched occupation of Iraq but also for the rigged vote during recent elections in Iran. And how is it that Dick Cheney never worked for Goldman? Or did he?

If you really believe in Government Sachs, here’s some advice: buy the stock. It’s a relative bargain these days. Make the vampire squid work for you!