Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The Bee Still Publishes Some Wisdom From Time to Time

Clarity when we most need it....

Just six months ago, Goldman Sachs was on the verge of bankruptcy. Now it announces a quarterly profit of $3.4 billion and an $11 billion bonus to employees [story July 15]. How did that happen?

Thanks to Hank Paulson, former Goldman CEO and then treasury secretary, $128 billion of your money was used to bail out AIG to insure that Goldman got the $20 billion it was owed from AIG. Goldman Sachs then converted to a bank holding company to qualify for the $28 billion in low-interest loans from the government (basically free money from us).

They then loaned the $28 billion at higher interest rates, allowing them to reap $3.4 billion in profits from using taxpayer money.

Is this genius and does it merit $11 billion in bonuses? Or is it corporations infiltrating government and then using it to rob taxpayers?

Next time you blame government for something, scratch a little more and see who is pulling the strings. Inevitably you will find a big corporation behind it. Governments are merely puppets of the corporation. We don’t have free market capitalism. We do have socialized capitalism.

In other words, we have a systematic trickle up or, more accurately, a flood of wealth transfer upward.

Alan Cheah

Oakhurst