Quote from piezoe:
The story is just now picking up steam. It started with an Article in the July issue of Rolling Stone, then a piece this week on PBS re that article.. The Stone article is likely the source of most of Beck's information. One thing left out of the Stone article was the tampering with the weighting of gasoline futures in the GSCI right after Paulson went to Treasury. That caused the price of gasoline to plummet just prior to the election of Bush to his second term.
I think a lot of the anger at GS - even all of Wall St - is that they are not really capitalist. With a guaranteed gov't backstop now, they are socialist.
Also, they are at best, capitalist helper (like hamburger helper), they don't really grow the economic pie, just mostly redistribute it (you can argue where).
Bill Gates, no matter what you think of his business practices, helped grow the economic pie (with Intel) by making pc's, the cottage industries around them, and increased productivity a reality.
Wall Street may help aggregate investment money into someone else's good idea, (and take a hefty cut in the bargain) but "innovation" there usually means how to circumvent regulations or taxes (i.e., "get away" with something).
So the real hope in growing the economy lies with the next Bill Gates, not Wall Street.