Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Mr. President, Return Goldman's Dirty Dough

The Senate is about to bring the execs of Goldman Sachs in for a dressing down for reportedly making $3.7 billion by shorting the mortgage market. Today's hearing will see the usual bloviating from Senators and incriminating e-mails like:

"According to Sparks, that business is totally dead, and the poor little subprime borrowers will not last so long!!!" Tourre wrote in a March 7, 2007, email to his girlfriend.


and

"Just made it to the country of your favorite clients!!! I'm managed (sic) to sell a few abacus bonds to widow and orphans that I ran into at the airport, apparently these Belgians adore synthetic abs cdo2," Tourre wrote in June 2007


The one missing ingredient from the typical Capitol Hill theatre is a call to return campaign donations from the pariah company/individual du jour. With Enron politicians couldn't get rid of the donations fast enough. Same with Abramoff. With the SEC indicted Goldman, not so much. Considering that Goldman was at the center of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market that led to the great recession you have to wonder about the double standard.

President Obama received $994,795 from employees of Goldman in 2007 and 2008 at the same time the company was betting that the mortgage market would collapse, taking the American economy with it. He hasn't returned a penny of this blood money. Since his campaign committee, Obama for America simply morphed into Organizing for America, the president has a vehicle to return the cash. If O for A can't cover that amount, the money should come from the coffers of the DNC, since Mr. Obama is the titular head of the Democratic party.

I think $994,795 would make a nice start for a scholarship fund for the children of the miners who died in West Virginia, whose funeral he not only attended, but addressed.

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