Crooks and Liars – by John Amato
I saw this video from 2012 over at Digby’s and it’s worth re-posting.
Sen. Bernie Sanders was reacting to Loyd Blankfein’s comments about how we must cut our safety nets because we can’t afford them in his words. This is coming from another wealthy CEO-type that has racked in hundreds of millions of dollars of his own while accepting big bailouts from the federal government.
An interview with Lloyd Blankfein is as rare as a look inside the Goldman Sachs money machine. He showed us one of seven trading floors at his Manhattan headquarters. Goldman is one of America’s most successful investment banks. It had net earnings of $4.4 billion dollars last year. When we asked Blankfein how to reduce the federal budget deficit, he went straight for the subject politicians don’t want to talk about.
BLANKFEIN: You’re going to have to undoubtedly do something to lower people’s expectations — the entitlements and what people think that they’re going to get, because it’s not going to — they’re not going to get it.
PELLEY: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid?
BLANKFEIN: You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. … So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.
Here’s how Bernie reacted:
Sanders: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein came to Capitol Hill this week to call for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. As Congress and the White House are negotiating a year-end deficit deal, Blankfein sought to “lower people’s expectations” about their retirement and health care. He spoke with all the sympathy for someone struggling to get by on $14,000-a-year retirement that you’d expect from a Wall Street banker paid $16 million last year.
“Think about the arrogance of these guys on Wall Street who were bailed out by the middle class of this country when their greed and recklessness nearly destroyed the financial system and now they come to Capitol Hill to lecture Congress and the American people about the need to cut programs for working families,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a Senate floor speech.
BLANKFEIN FACTS:Lloyd Blankfein was paid $16.1 million in 2011, a 14 percent increase while earnings fell 47 percent »
Goldman Sachs received a $278 million refund from the IRS in 2008, even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion that year »November 28, 2012
People like Loyd are invited on TV almost everyday by the beltway media to stump for cutting our social safety nets. It’s just like the run up to the Iraq war. Media hawks, liberal hawks, Republicans hawks and Dick Cheney lied their way into pulling America into a f*&ked up war. They have been proven wrong at every turn and now we have all the people that created the financial crisis promoting a destructive cut to millions of Americans after they pillaged the American people. WTF is going on?
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/bernie-sanders-lloyd-blankfein-arroganc