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Cornell FE Cornell Senior: Throw Goldman Sachs Off Campus

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The following editorial essay from a Cornell Senior is getting heat from his schoolmates. The Sun is students newspaper of Cornell University

Tony Manfred is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Associate Editor of The Sun. He may be reached at tmanfred@cornellsun.com. The Absurdity Exhibition appears periodically this semester.

Goldman Sachs is a criminal money factory with a vast network of alumni who occupy the most powerful positions in the financial-regulatory world, effectively protecting the bank from any economic threat — governmental or otherwise — such that the bank is free to suck every bit of profit out of every corner of American life, regardless of collateral damage, like an impossibly large vacuum cleaner whose belly fills not with dirt and hair destined for the garbage, but dollars and cents destined for the already bulging pockets of the upper-class. This we can all agree on.

Yet each fall and spring Goldman recruiters are afforded space on East Hill. The bank, along with the rest of corporate America, pursues Cornell’s best and brightest — tabling at career fairs, holding information sessions and setting up shop in the narrow corridors of Barnes Hall. It vets and interrogates, tests and examines, and eventually it leaves campus with a wish list of eager undergrads. A few months later, those same undergrads are paying for a few rounds of drinks at a celebratory Long Island iced tea night. And come summer, these undergrads have transformed into full-fledged Goldmanites — squeezing every drip of profit out of the rag that is America with conscious abandon — under the tragically correct assumption that the rest of us are, above all else, jealous of them.

This must end. A corporation with Goldman’s track record of bubble-building and profiteering has no place on this campus.

Soon-to-be grads who are cynical and money hungry enough to want to work for the bank can seek it out themselves, but this campus should not be the setting of such a union.

The bank can hold information sessions downtown and conduct interviews at the Courtyard by Marriott, but it should not, in any way, shape or form, be permitted to use this university’s facilities and resources to enlist Cornell students into its system of economic manipulation and moral abjectivity.

Goldman’s presence on campus, and the notable mass acceptance of this presence, illustrates our generation’s irrational conception of work. We act like the professional aspect of our lives lies outside of the morals, values and interests that govern the rest of our choices. For us, the goal of getting a job supercedes the substance of that job. Employment of any kind, by definition, cannot be a bad thing. Yes, a job can be amoral, meaningless, sadistic and socially destructive, but — as our mindset suggests — it is still a job.

Indeed when a friend tells me she’s applying for investment banking positions, I don’t protest. In fact, I say good luck. And when an acquaintance tells me that he scored a position at Merrill Lynch, I offer my truthful congratulations.

But this sort of courtesy is undoubtedly a part of the problem. We need to move past the idea that employment is unassailable, that jobs are immune to moral- or value-based criticism. We need to come to terms with the fact that people who go to work for a greedy, criminal machine that has been consciously inflating economic bubbles and screwing over the public since the 1920s, are, by definition, greedy criminals. These people are our classmates, our sorority sisters, our best friends, but they are also bad people. To put it bluntly, they are assholes. Huge assholes. Assholes who are aware of the social and economic damage they will soon perpetuate, but don’t care.

No one is putting a gun to AEM majors’ heads and demanding they work for Goldman, there are plenty of other job opportunities at their disposal. But yet, they choose to work as money-grubbing minions for a bank that played an active role in this nation’s recent economic collapse.

There is nothing we can do to stop Goldman Sachs. Goldmanites are entrenched in every nook and cranny of America’s financial system, with roots so deeply seated in its power structure that there is little realistic chance that it will be forced to change its practices.

What we can do is make our tiny plot of Upstate New York Goldman-free. We can make our facilities and resources a privilege afforded to companies that don’t knowingly sell billions of dollars in crap investments to unsuspecting traders. We can play professional matchmaker between strapping undergrads and upstanding young businesses that don’t sacrifice economic sanity for short-term profit. We can make it the rule that a company that paid a tax rate of one ******* percent in the same year it helped cripple a nation’s economy is given no quarter by this university.

Most importantly, as students, we can cut the bullshit and tell our friends that, yes, working for Goldman Sachs does make you a bad person.

Throw Goldman Sachs Off Campus | The Cornell Daily Sun
 
Where does one draw the line ?

The Catholic Church also recruits from universities, and it has organised the rape of tens of thousands of children. Makes anything Goldman does look pretty tame.

The various weapons makers also recruit. There are two ways to look at them, the obvious one that they make weapons, but because they have frequently produced defective systems they have killed US servicemen, and by fraudulent overcharging and bribing politicians they have diverted money from both equipment that works, and whatever program you think ought to be better funded.

Teaching unions are responsible for a large % of all that is wrong with America. They defend defective teachers, block reform and work to ensure that although America spends more than any other country, it's educational standard would shame many their world countries.

Nestle, a firm that has bribed 3rd world officials to allow them to sell products that have led to the poisoning of hundreds of thousands of babies recruits many graduates. The fast food industry are not exactly the good guys either are they ?

The SEC, whose actions are so shit you really can't tell if they are incompetent or corrupt recruits grads.

Every single member of congress, governor and presidential candidate has accepted money for favours in a way that in most democracies would expose them to the risk of jail time. But both main US parties are allowed to recruit grads.
As an aside, why is Goldman evil to bribe elected officials, but it's OK for you to vote for them ?

IBM and Intel have been found guilty of heinous acts of pollution that have left many dying of terrible diseases. HP rips millions of people off over toner, and as well Dell have been shown to have committed serious crimes of dishonesty involving hundred of millions of dollars.

Ford, Toyota et al have produced cars that they knew were dangerous, and then used their wealth and power to cover it up.

I could go on, but if you go down the road of banning people who behave badly, make sure you know where it leads...
 
What's the old saying?

Anyone under 30 who's a conservative has no heart.
Anyone over 30 who's a liberal has no brain.
 
This guy obviously ignored GS's massive drop in market cap a couple of years ago. They are not impervious. If anything, GS hires the best and the brightest so it makes sense that their alumni will go off and do amazing things.


Unimaginative populist rant. I am glad that a college senior has an opinion and the gal to write about it, but he should take a spoon full of humility and realize that there is more to things than he touches on.
 
Most importantly, as students, we can cut the bullshit and tell our friends that, yes, working for Goldman Sachs does make you a bad person.
Does that include the Janitors?
 
Where does one draw the line ?

The Catholic Church also recruits from universities, and it has organised the rape of tens of thousands of children. Makes anything Goldman does look pretty tame.

The various weapons makers also recruit. There are two ways to look at them, the obvious one that they make weapons, but because they have frequently produced defective systems they have killed US servicemen, and by fraudulent overcharging and bribing politicians they have diverted money from both equipment that works, and whatever program you think ought to be better funded.

Teaching unions are responsible for a large % of all that is wrong with America. They defend defective teachers, block reform and work to ensure that although America spends more than any other country, it's educational standard would shame many their world countries.

Nestle, a firm that has bribed 3rd world officials to allow them to sell products that have led to the poisoning of hundreds of thousands of babies recruits many graduates. The fast food industry are not exactly the good guys either are they ?

The SEC, whose actions are so shit you really can't tell if they are incompetent or corrupt recruits grads.

Every single member of congress, governor and presidential candidate has accepted money for favours in a way that in most democracies would expose them to the risk of jail time. But both main US parties are allowed to recruit grads.
As an aside, why is Goldman evil to bribe elected officials, but it's OK for you to vote for them ?

IBM and Intel have been found guilty of heinous acts of pollution that have left many dying of terrible diseases. HP rips millions of people off over toner, and as well Dell have been shown to have committed serious crimes of dishonesty involving hundred of millions of dollars.

Ford, Toyota et al have produced cars that they knew were dangerous, and then used their wealth and power to cover it up.

I could go on, but if you go down the road of banning people who behave badly, make sure you know where it leads...

totally agree!!!!!!!!!
 
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