Apparently Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks one of the world’s most powerful corporations needs to be protected from a single former mid-level employee saying mean things about it. From Bloomberg Businessweek:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s headquarters in Manhattan in a show of support after a departing employee publicly criticized the firm’s culture yesterday.

“The mayor stopped by to make clear that the company is a vital part of the city’s economy, and the kind of unfair attacks that we’re seeing can eventually hurt all New Yorkers,” said Stu Loeser, a spokesman for the mayor.

The most amazing thing to me about Greg Smith’s resignation letter from Goldman Sachs is not his actual criticisms, most of them are relatively old news for a company known as the ‘vampire squid,’ but the intensity of the often bizarre wagon-circling by the financial elites in Goldman Sach’s defense. The quantity of people choosing to publicly support Goldman at this moment with some truly pathetic defenses is significant. There seems to be some actual fear that this one op-ed could do some real damage to Wall Street.

After seeing this story, I do find it amazing that for several years among political pundits there was a relatively widespread delusion that Micheal Bloomberg could have ever been a strong successful independent candidate for president. This incident is a reminder that compared to the elitism of billionaire Bloomberg, Mitt Romney looks like a cross between William Jennings Bryan and Joe Sixpack.