Goldman Target of ’Occupy’ West Coast Protests

From Bloomberg.


Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the fifth- biggest U.S. bank by assets, is a major target of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who plan to blockade ports from Anchorage to San Diego to cut into profits of the company they blame for helping spur the financial crisis.

“They represent the greed of the corporate elite, the 1 percent that’s causing ruin for everybody else,” Michael Novick, a member of Occupy Los Angeles, said of Goldman Sachs in a Dec. 7 telephone interview. The Occupy movement’s slogan is, “We are the 99 percent.”

Demonstrators today hope to disrupt the largest U.S. and Canadian container ports -- Los Angeles, Long Beach and Vancouver -- as well as Anchorage; Seattle and Tacoma, Washington; Portland, Oregon, and San Diego and Oakland, California. The economic value of containerized cargo at West Coast ports is about $705 million a day, according to Martin Associates in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Los Angeles protesters circulated a flyer -- “Occupy the Ports! A Day Without Goldman Sachs!” -- featuring a caricature of Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein steering a ship loaded with bags of money. The company is part-owner of Carrix Inc., whose SSA Marine provides cargo handling services as the largest U.S.-owned container terminal operator.
Andrea Raphael, a spokeswoman for the New York-based bank, declined to comment on the protest.