Housing Activists Target Goldman Sachs On Twitter

The Business Insider ^ | 7/1/09

[FromLori]

When housing activists like ACORN and Momsrising.org tried to use Twitter to pressure Goldman Sachs to sign onto a new affordable housing program, the told their members to tweet "“petition @GS_NEWS Prevent home foreclosures with the MHA program now! http://act.ly/5l retweet to sign #Homewrecker."

Their goals was to get Goldman, along with other investment banks, to sign on with President Obama’s new Making Home Affordable (MHA) Program. They targeted Goldman because they thought the bank was the most active Wall Street firm on Twitter, due to the number of tweets on the @GS_News account, according to the Wall Street Journal's Mary Pilon.

But here's the catch: Goldman Sachs has no Twitter account. GS_News, which bear the bank's logo and is covered in news stories about Goldman Sachs, is just an unaffiliated collection of news stories about Goldman.

Doh! Activist fail!

Anyway, on the substantive issue, Goldman says its loan servicing company, Litton, is basically already doing the kind of loan modifications that are at the heart of the MHA. It is holding out from formally signing up, however, because it wants reassurances that the government won't subject it to restrictions on hiring foreign workers if it participates. As they learned under the TARP, getting in bed with the government is risky.

[Marysecretary]

Isn’t that why we had the housing problem in the first place, dummies? Give money to people who can’t pay it back? How stupid these folks are. They never seem to learn.