You can listen to a 34 minute interview on public radio by Leonard Lopate of WNYC. Click here to access the web page that will let you see a 4 minute video clip of the interview and either listen to or download the 34 minute audio of the interview.
If you want to find out how ugly the Wall Street banks are, and in particular, this behemoth that appears to have a death grasp on the US government and therefore on the taxpayer public. Or as Taibbi puts it, the "vampire squid" that has its tentacles around all the levers of power.
As he points out, for the tax year 2008 Goldman Sachs paid $14 million in taxes on profits of $2.2 billion. That is a "tax rate" of just 1%. The amount of taxes paid by Goldman Sachs was just one-third of what the CEO earned as a salary in 2008.
According to Barry Ritholtz, Goldman Sachs got a total of $25 billion in bailout money (mostly via AIG), see here.
According to Bloomberg news, Goldman Sachs intends to pay its employees bonuses of $6.65 billion, see here.
Do any of these numbers make sense given that the US taxpayer took a company that was on the ropes in October 2008 and saved it? What did the taxpayers get, according to Bloomberg: $426 million. That's right, the taxpayers who saved the company get less than one-tenth the "bonuses" that the company is planning to give to its employees, the very employees who ran the company off a cliff forcing the US taxpayers to save it!
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