While Goldman’s later pattern would be to capitalize on changes in the regulatory environment, its key innovation in the Internet years was to abandon its own industry’s standards of quality control.

“Since the Depression, there were strict underwriting standards that Wall Street adhered to when taking a company public,” says one prominent hedge-fund manager. “The company had to be in business a minimum of five years, and it had to show profitability for three consecutive years. But Wall Street took those guidelines and threw them in the trash.” Goldman completed the snow job by pumping up the sham stocks: “Their analysts were out there saying Bullshit.com is worth $100 a share.”

Matt Tabbi’s Rolling Stone article on Goldman-Sachs, “The Great American Bubble Machine (PDF),” is just as frustrating as advertised. The U.S. economy comes off as a big confidence game, rigged to the benefit of insiders and lacking any consequences for its momentous failures.

Instead of improving the situation, Obama seems to be further entrenching the status quo.

“We haven’t gone four weeks since February without some poor guy — always with a long history of mental illness, usually with a record of military service and/or domestic violence, and invariably jacked up on a toxic cocktail of white male privilege; us-versus-them enemy seeking; fury at women, blacks and/or Jews; and a belief that the world as he knew it was ending unless he took up arms — taking out his gun and offing innocent Americans in a suicidal bid for glory.”

Sara Robinson of Orcinus has a tally of far-right murders since the election, analyzing the cultural factors motivating this type of violence. I think her conclusion is alarmist, but it’s extremely concerning to connect the dots.

GQ reports:

In the days surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, cover sheets…began adorning top-secret intelligence briefings produced by Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. The sheets juxtaposed war images with inspirational Bible quotes and were delivered by Rumsfeld himself to the White House, where they were read by the man who, just after September 11, referred to America’s war on terror as a “Crusade.”

But Muslims would have to be crazy to think that there was any religious motivation behind any of this. It’s not like any U.S. generals referred to Allah as an idol or anything like that.

1. Bush administration officials displayed a minimum of due diligence before embarking on their torture program.

2. Khalid Sheik Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah were waterboarded 266 times.

3. Intelligence officals argue: “There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics.”

4. One of the main motivations for toture? “The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime…“