Democrats want to take all our money and return to us one dime out of each dollar.
Republicans want to take all our money and give it to corporations and the wealthy.
Neither is acceptable!
Campaign 2010
Countdown to Congressional Elections
The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.
Noam Chomsky, M.I.T. emeritus Professor of Linguistics
Most of the leaders of that industry — Blankfein being one of them — barely felt a pinch. Their salaries, bonuses and benefits were hardly scratched, and the little it was didn’t amount to a hill of beans. [...]
Goldman Sachs — well known in certain circles as Government Sachs and headed up by Lloyd Blankfein — is being sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The suit is a civil one (which is all the SEC can charge), but many knowledgeable people say there are reasons to believe criminal suits from others will follow. With only the small bits and pieces we know about now, the shadow name of the bank is well justified since the SEC knew about their criminal actions but allowed them to run amok.
As you most certainly have heard by now, His Royal Highness Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Government Sachs, has announced he has decided to pay himself another $100 million bonus for his outstanding, “above and beyond the call of duty”, leadership. Although Goldman has paid back the TARP funds, their continued existence is still completely dependent on dirt cheap money borrowed from the taxpayers, compliments of Ben Bernanke at the Federal Treasury, AND through hundreds of billions of dollars in loans guaranteed by the Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation. Obviously we taxpayers are not concerned or we’d do something about it. But we’re just too busy taking care of a more important business: keeping the Democrats in office or pushing the Republicans in. So I will simply leave the Blankfein issue with the following depictions.
The jockeying by Wall Street to avoid regulation and control, their efforts to re-write financial crisis history, and continue with business as usual, has gone pretty much unnoticed. [...]
Just about an hour ago CNBC announced that Goldman Sachs plans to pay out $16 billion in bonuses this year. Evidently the other news services haven’t picked up on this yet as I can find no articles about it. However, this is of no surprise for many reasons, but with their stock selling today for $186, a rise of $60 since September of last year (with a dip later in the year), they certainly seem to be out of the woods. And, of course, the $10 billion in TARP money and billions more in a stock sell to the government didn’t hurt any either. Especially when you consider that more money has come to them through the Federal Reserve.