Bloomberg reports that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s closest aides earned millions of dollars a year working for Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and other Wall Street firms. Yet, they are overseeing the handout of hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds to their former employers.
The gifts of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money provided the banks with an abundance of low cost capital that has boosted the banks’ profits, while the taxpayers who provided the capital are increasingly unemployed and homeless.
Goldman Sachs has made so much money during this year of economic crisis that enormous bonuses are in the works. London Evening Standard reports that Goldman Sachs’ “5,500 London staff can look forward to record average payouts of around $800,000 each. The highest paid executives will get bonuses of $16 million.“
Meanwhile, New York City’s homeless shelters have reached the all time high of 39,000, 16,000 of whom are children. Long-term unemployment has become a serious problem across the country. Hundreds of thousands more Americans are beginning to run out of extended unemployment benefits. A record number of Americans, more than one in nine, are on food stamps. Mortgage delinquencies are rising as home prices fall.
Meanwhile, the political system is unresponsive to the American people. It is monopolized by a few powerful interest groups that control campaign contributions.
[Excerpts of an article by Paul Craig Roberts]
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