What’s in those sacks, gold? At dusk on Sunday, passersby
heading to catch the last subway took pictures and joked about the thousands of
sandbags heaped in front of Goldman Sachs headquarters, like pillows atop a
princess bed. “Kind of overdoing it, maybe?” they said. “No wonder they’re
worried about the beaches in New Jersey eroding, all the sand is here.” The next day, after the waves sloshed in and
the lights blinkered out, after the bank’s generator kicked in and 200 West
Street lit up like a Christmas tree, they would have other things to say.....Goldman’s lights
were so bright that it looked completely alone, as though it had been caught in
a spotlight against the blacked-out backdrop of Lower Manhattan.
“Are you trying to send a message to the rest of us?”
demanded The Nation. “The fact that the NYU hospital is dark but Goldman Sachs
is well-lit is everything that’s wrong with this country,” wrote one Twitter
user, who was re-tweeted over 3,000 times….. It was frustrating to
be criticized for what should have been a good thing. “It’s really ridiculous,”
Blankfein said, his brow creasing. “We were lucky. We were in the heart of the
flood zone, and I’m not going to take it that someone is going to scorn us for
doing what we did. We worked hard and did sensible things. And by the way,
having done that, it put us in a position to help other people in the
neighborhood. As soon as the crisis passed, Port Authority borrowed our pumps,
we had extra water and power we gave out to people in the community, people
came by and took showers, we set up a charging station.....”
Read all about it at http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/11/goldman-has-the-power.html
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