“Goldman Sachs rules the world,” claimed a shockingly outspoken trader, Alessio Rastani, on the BBC two months ago. “The savings of millions of people are going to vanish,” he said, warning viewers they should “get prepared” because “economic crisis is like a cancer, if you just wait and wait thinking this will go away, just like a cancer it’s going to grow and it’s going to be too late.”

What was interesting about the media response to this was that, rather than focus on the substance of what the trader was saying, it instead went on a wild goose chase trying to decide whether or not he was a hoaxer belonging to a group called the “Yes Men”. But on one point at least Rastani was absolutely right: Goldman Sachs – aka the Vampire Squid – really have the world squeezed tighter and tighter right now within its blood-sucking tentacles.

Consider the three biggest new EU appointments:

The new president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, Italy’s new prime minister, Mario Monti, and the new Greek prime minister Lucas Papademos all reportedly have the US investment bank as a common denominator.

Here’s James Creedon with the full details:

Papademos was involved in Greece’s transition from the drachma to the euro. One of the things that made this transition possible was, of course, a gross exaggeration of the health of Greece’s finances – aided and abetted by advisers from Goldman Sachs who showed Greece how to conceal its debts using complicated financial instruments called swaps.

I think most of us, on whichever side of the political argument we find ourselves, can agree that these developments are not healthy. Here is the take on it from a blogger at Liberal Conspiracy (not normally considered Telegraph Blogs’ ideological soulmate):

Some serious questions must now be asked about democracy in the Eurozone. What Draghi, Monti and Papademos also have in common is that they are classically trained orthodox economists who have spent a good part of their lives working for the European bureaucracies and banks that have bought about this disaster.

I disagree with his analysis of why this is a problem. (He’s from the Left-leaning New Economics Foundation, and is worried that these Eurocrat banksters might get in the way of the massive Keynesian public expenditure he believes is the solution to all our ills…). But I share his disgust, as indeed I share the disgust at bankster corruption and profligacy expressed by the Occupy crowd.

We need to find common ground here, I think – those of us who believe (as the Occupy crowd do) that the current crisis is caused by the failure of capitalism and those of us who believe (as I do) that it is caused by the failure of corporatism, welfarism and – ultimately – the fiat money system. While we are busy being distracted by our particular ideological hobby horses, we are being shafted by a political bankster corporatist elite which doesn’t give a stuff about us because we are the little people and we are of no consequence to the New World Order they wish to impose on us.

Beware the Vampire Squid: whether you are on the Left or the Right it will feast on your blood and suck you dry all the same.