The Foxes Have Taken Full Possession of the Henhouse

Article on DailyKos, based on another Matt Taibbi article on Goldman Sachs. If obscene profits based on misuse of YOUR tax money don't bother you, then just skip this post. But if your blood boils when you hear that the average Goldman Sachs employee is going to make over $600,000 this year, and if you reach for the torches and pitchforks when you hear that GS became a bank just so they could grab more and more of the bailout money, then read on ...

By now, everyone knows that AIG owed GS about $20 billion when AIG started coming apart. If AIG had been allowed to bankrupt, GS might have gone down with it. Instead,

Goldman gets to call upon its former chief, Hank Paulson, who green-lights this massive, $80 billion bailout of AIG (with Lloyd Blankfein in the room), at least $12.9 billion of which went straight to Goldman. Moreover, let’s not forget this: both Goldman and Bank Societe Generale had been tattooing AIG with collateral calls in the period before AIG’s collapse, with Goldman extracting a full $5.9 billion from the company during that time. It was those collateral calls that really killed AIG.

Now, ask yourself: exactly how big would Goldman’s profits be this year, if they had to fill a still-extant $13 billion or even a $20 billion hole on its balance sheet from AIG’s collapse? You think it would still be $3.44 billion? What if Hank Paulson had elected to save Lehman instead of saving AIG/Goldman, how big would Goldman’s profits be then? Is anyone even asking this question?

There's more, lots more, where that came from. Go read the article. Read BOTH articles, the original one by Taibbi and the dKos diary with the comments. Then start reading the other Goldman articles (search on Daily Kos for "Goldman" in "Diaries and Stories" over the past two weeks, then read the ones with the most comments). Read Taibbi's other articles. Then you'll know why I'm concluding with this double quote Taibbi's article, language and all:

Taken altogether, what all of this means is that Goldman’s profit announcement is a giant "fuck you" to the rest of the country. It is a statement of supreme privilege, an announcement that it feels no shame in taking subsidies and funneling them directly into their pockets, and moreover feels no fear of any public response. It knows that it’s untouchable and it’s not going to change its behavior for anyone. And it doesn’t matter who knows it.