Bailout illegal

According to the Washington Post, it seems while all eyes were on the bailout late September, the Treasury Department sneaked through a significant change to two decades of corporate tax policy that corporate tax lawyers now say will give American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion. The banks had been lobbying for this change for years.

Also analyzing the equity deals the Treasury negotiated with the banks, Naomi Klein is calling this "a trillion-dollar crime scene". Her article is a must read. And her book, The Shock Doctrine, outlines this disaster capitalism model. I think this book is a breakthrough in the analysis of how the neo-liberal, "free trade rules all" ideology has developed and how we can break it.

This is insane, the administration is robbing the federal treasury on its way out of the capital and the Democrats are afraid to anger the market. The free marketeers are holding us hostage.

I think when the Republicans realized that they couldn't privatize social security they figured out another ingenious plan - privatize the Treasury, and who better to do that than former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson.

No bonuses for Goldman Sachs?

At the end of 2006 Goldman Sachs awarded employees with over $16 billion in bonuses - an average of over $600,000 buckaroos per employee. 2007 was even better. That year Goldman employees shared nearly $19 billion in bonuses. Many of the bonuses were performance-based.

This year however, according to the New York Times, the top seven executives at Goldman won't receive bonuses. Goldman's spokesman reportedly said "they believe it's the right thing to do." Oh, how generous, how compassionate. How will they be able to put any food on the table this Christmas?

CEO Lloyd C. Blankefein raked in a salary and bonus worth over $68 million in 2007. The two co-presidents each earned around $67 million. The right thing to do is to give your bonuses back for the past three years. Use it to save your company and your job, instead of allowing the Bush administration to threaten disaster if taxpayers don't step in and save you.

Goldman Sachs recently received a $10 billion gift as part of the federal government's $700 bailout package.

So, let's see. Some simple math, hmm... take only 2006 and 2007, Goldman employees received over $35 billion in bonuses. I wonder if it's possible to use that much money in less than two years. There must be some money still lying around in safes, off-shore accounts and duffle bags hidden in storage. Surely, if Goldman's top executives scraped their cash together they could come up with some spare change. $10 billion sounds reasonable.

Hey, wait, I can't believe it. I just figured it out. They should bail themselves out. If you're homeless, on welfare, poor, unemployed, well, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." What if you're a millionaire?