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From:	Jaq (12.236.179.185)
Subject:	The Welfare Queens are back. Where are our tax dollars going?
Date:	May 23, 2009 at 2:35 am PST

but they are not poor Black American Women or Single (any race) Moms, Pregnant Teens asking for WIC and Food Stamps. No, it's not even the Seniors who now are without their pensions and have lost retirement funds to Financial Engineers and failed businesses. Never mind they need health care and increasingly suffer from chronic conditions.

No, it's actually the Pirate(s) on Wall Street.

http://www.creators.com/opinion/jim-hightower/you-can-always-bank-on-the-greed-of-wall-street-bankers.html

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


By Jim Hightower
May 23, 2009

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.

((Evil Lurks in the Dark))

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.

"Outlandish bonuses for those at the top."

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.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.creators.com/opinion/jim-hightower/bank-profits-banker-pay-and-other-banker-tricks.html

Bank Profits, Banker Pay and Other Banker Tricks


I'd like nothing more than to give the bailout scandal a rest — but the bankers won't let me! They just keep coming at us with ever-more-clever inventions of greed and deceit.

Their latest bit of hocus-pocus, accompanied by big puffs of smoke, is a dazzling show of profits. Yes, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and other financial giants that only yesterday were insolvent basket cases now report that — poof! — in the first quarter of this year, they magically produced blockbuster profits. Absolutely A-mazing!

Of course, it's a con job. After all, magicians don't perform magic. They create illusions.

Hoping to con investors and the public into believing that the wizards running Wall Street have quickly and brilliantly restored these banks to financial health, the wizards did exactly what they've done in the past: They goosed up their books with accounting tricks and sleights of hand.

First — and most obvious — the "profits" are made possible only because you and I have stuffed the banks with massive infusions of tax dollars. Indeed, they wouldn't even be standing without our money. I don't mean merely the $700 billion straightforward bailout approved by Congress, but also the nearly $2.5 trillion in such backdoor subsidies as dirt-cheap loans and government guarantees quietly extended by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

Second, the banks lobbied for and won a regulatory break that lets them pretend that all of those bad housing investments weighing down their books like a load of toxic waste are worth ... well, worth whatever the bankers say they're worth. So — Shazam! — huge losses are wiped clean by banker fantasy.

Then there are special little puffs of smoke used by particular banks. For example, Goldman Sachs (which has us taxpayers on the hook for more than $50 billion in its bailout package) breathlessly announced a dazzling profit of $1.8 billion for the first quarter. The dazzle dimmed, however, when it was learned that Goldman had altered its definition of "quarter," shifting its normal December-to-March quarter ahead one month, thus disappearing December.
That was a month in which the bank lost $1.5 billion, so scrubbing it gave the revised calendar a neat banker buff job.

Meanwhile, these same bankers are using their miraculous profit numbers as an excuse to — guess what? — bulk up executive pay checks! While the Obama administration has imposed some limits on the pay of the very top executives of bailed-out banks, the CEOs expect to be out from under these restrictions before long. So, to take care of themselves — and to restore Wall Street's sense that investment bankers are the most deserving people on the planet — they are now setting aside billions of dollars to be distributed at the end of the year as executive compensation, including the return of outlandish bonuses.

Goldman Sachs leads the pack, having reserved $4.7 billion to cover such compensation just for the first three months of this year. "We need to be able to pay our people," barked a Goldman spokesperson. Well, yes, but at the rate of nearly $5 billion per quarter, every banker in the firm would average $569,000 — and, of course, top executives would draw many times that average.

Can these guys (and they are mostly guys) even spell "outrageous"? These set-asides would return Wall Street to the bloated 2007 level of gilded greed that perverted its ethics and led to the crash that has swamped us all. Meanwhile, every billion dollars snapped up by the self-absorbed bankers is a billion that doesn't go into loans to help our economy, doesn't go to repayment of the federal debt run up by the bailout and doesn't go to shareholders who've lost huge sums thanks to these very bankers.

As Chaucer once said about goats: They "stinken."

This is proof that Wall Street bankers have learned nothing. It's also proof that Barack Obama's present bailout policy of saving the bankers must go, and that the bankers themselves must go. Otherwise, they'll just keep robbing us.

To connect with a grassroots campaign to bring real structural change to Wall Street, go to www.anewwayforward.org.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly "Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.




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