"Charity is commendable, everyone should be charitable. But Justice aims to create a social order in which, if individuals choose not to be charitable, people still don't go hungry, unschooled or sick without care. Charity depends on the vicissitudes of whim and personal wealth, justice depends on commitment instead of circumstance.
Faith-based charity provides crumbs from the table; faith-based justice offers a place at the table"
~Bill Moyers

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Why Goldman Sachs Is the Greediest and Most Dastardly of the Wall Street Pigs

The best explanation of what happened in the whole Wall Street Bailout, was made in "THE BIG TAKEOVER" By Matt Taibbi (If you can't find the complete report, it is also located here (Spanish version))

Recommended reading, all of the full 8 pages of it - It is worth reading to fully understand it all.

From: Alternet
By Jim Hightower, AlterNet. Posted May 22, 2009.

Goldman holds billions in taxpayer cash, plans for billions in exec bonuses this year, and has powerful friends in Obama's govt. up the wazoo.

No doubt you're going to feel terrible about this. Top executives of Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street powerhouse, are in a pout about how they're being treated by you and me -- i.e., the public.

These execs are used to being revered as financial geniuses, but having taken a $10 billion bailout from us taxpayers last fall, they're now widely viewed as ... well, as welfare recipients. Like other welfare checks, the big one that Washington doled out to Goldman Sachs came with some strings attached, causing the chieftains to get all huffy. Especially galling to these princes of privilege is the limit on salaries and bonuses that bailed out banks are allowed to give to those in the executive suites.

Thus, Goldman recently threw a little hissy fit and haughtily declared that it will pay back our $10 billion to get the blankety-blank government out of its private business. Bold move! At last, Wall Streeters are reasserting their rugged, free-enterprise ethic, right?

Uh, not exactly.

What Goldman officials fail to mention is that they'll still be clinging to several other lifeboats floated to them by those skinflint meanies in Washington. For example, when insurance giant AIG was given some $200 billion last year to save it from total collapse, $12 billion of it was actually a pass-through payment to Goldman Sachs. Best of all, this quiet handout did not come with any of those nasty restrictions on executive pay -- so Goldman is happily hanging onto this backdoor subsidy.

Then there's another $28 billion that was slipped to these hardy free-marketers in the form of special low-interest loans guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. -- a subsidy that Goldman's chief financial officer concedes is vital to its survival. Far from foregoing this government underwriting, the bankers say they expect to ask for $7 billion more of it.

Additionally, Goldman has taken many more billions' worth of low-cost loans from Federal Reserve funds. How many more billions? The Fed and the bank say this is "proprietary" information, not for public disclosure, even though it is public money.

So, while these golden ones are loudly repudiating the $10 billion public subsidy they took from us, they are coyly retaining at least 40 billion of our dollars to stay afloat -- a tidy sum that does not include any restrictions on pay levels. Coincidentally, Goldman has since announced that it is setting aside nearly $5 billion to be distributed at the end of the year as compensation for its executives, including payments for outlandish bonuses for those at the top.

Saying that such-and-such is the greediest bunch of bankers on Wall Street is like someone claiming to have the biggest hairdo in Dallas -- the competition is fierce. But that's quite a head of hair atop Goldman Sachs. Well, sniff the executives, we merely play the game according to the rules we're given.

Sure, and the Mafia plays its game strictly according to Hoyle. The difference is that the Mafia must actually break the rules, while Wall Street simply hires lobbyists and politicians to write the rules.

Indeed, Goldman Sachs has been nicknamed "Government Sachs" by its rivals, for it always seems to have at least one of its top officials strategically placed inside government to bend federal financial rules to its benefit. In the 1990s, for example, two Goldman foxes -- Robert Rubin and Larry Summers -- were inside the Clinton administration henhouse, where they helped craft the deregulation scams that enriched their former banks, before the scams caused the crash of our economy.

Following that crash, up stepped Hank Paulson, who had been Goldman's CEO before George W. plucked him off the Street to run the very bailout that has now deposited so much of our money in his bank. With Bush's demise, Hank is gone, but not Goldman. That sly Goldman Fox from the Clinton years, Larry Summers, is back, this time in Barack Obama's henhouse, where he's top economic advisor.

Not surprisingly, our gold keeps flowing to Goldman Sachs -- but don't expect the bankers to be grateful to you.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

1 comment:

  1. Fox News is in a big campaign to discredit Sonia Sotomayor, using the most Idiotic Republican Clowns, that are presented like Great Jurists and Experts. ( interviewed by Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, etc ..)

    ***********************
    ***********************

    The Kernel and Nucleus of American Politics is Race and Racism, or in other words Minorities and the Destiny of Minorities. Everything revolves around Minorities, like planets around the sun.

    Enter Fox News and you are hypnotized, mesmerized, suggested and hinted, nonstop 24hours/7days :

    That Minorities are lazy, that they live on Welfare, that American Values are destroyed by Minorities. That Western Civilization is doomed if Minorities have some Progress. That Minorities and Foreigners are incapable of Civilization ( Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly ), that Mexicans, Latinos, Africans, etc ... are dangerous lepers with syphilis and other venereals.

    They do not tell those lies outright but are always suggesting them in the most Hyprocrital way.

    Some people like Glenn Beck speak as if they were the owners of "God" and with a very personal relation to "God" .... and I use quotes for "God" because that is not a Good God but an idiot God created by the deranged mind of a child that was raised in a dysfunctional family as Glenn Beck candidly admits. There may be a Good God, but that is not the God of Fox News Hyprocritally promoted by Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Bill O'Reilly, etc ...

    Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes ( Special Report Show ) are most boring, even if they are not so stupid and idiotic as the other mentioned guys. Unfortunately Charles and Fred use their intelligence and culture to be boring, tiring. With all due respect I call Charles and Fred, the Mummy and the Zombie.

    One rare and extraordinary day Juan Williams ( the Black Guy ) spoke up against them and stood up to say that Republicans were degenerating into a White Race Party that did not understand Minorities.

    My opinion of Juan Williams changed 180 degrees after that speech. I know that Charles Krauthammer and Fred Barnes are highly respected in American Journalism. But for me they are dead corpses with a lot of cobwebs. I do not dislike them like Glen, or Bill, or Sean, or Laura. But my only use for Charles and Fred is to combat insomnia.

    Milenials.com

    Vicente Duque

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment, our aim is to publish all comments; the exceptions will be those which advocate violence, threats of violence, spam, and shameless 'pimping' of blogs or sites.

A link to an article or post, in and by itself, does not qualify as a comment.

These comments(?) will be promptly and gleefuly rejected.

It is ok to us if you'd want to publish a link to your blog or website, as long as it is done in an honest way, i.e., in a comment which is to the point and relevant to the post you are commenting on.

I also appreciate your visit very much.

"The Administrator" AKA Aurora

Fare well,

Subscribe to El Rinconcito de Aurora - - Subscribe in a reader
 
Powered by FeedBurner - - Add to Google Reader or Homepage - Subscribe in podnova -

Back to Top