Goldman Sachs is planning to use $20 billion to pay bonuses. TWENTY BILLION DOLLARS!!! The investors (big ones) are mad and want that cut to $10 billion. TEN BILLION IS A CUT!!! How wonderful of them! Insanity reigns and there are no adults in the room to stop the greed-fest.
Goldman Sachs got $10 billion in bailout money -- no strings attached. That's the amount the big investors want for bonuses. Should we all say "You're welcome"? The Administration is nowhere to be found (indeed, current Treasury Secretary and last year's bailout leader as chief of the New York Fed, Tim Geithner, is the chief enabler) and Congress is too corrupt to stop this nonsense. When they had a chance to add strings last year, they did not. Now, the Wall Street gang is using our tax dollars to further bribe Congress (yes, that's very much you too, Democrats) to not have any meaningful regulatory reform. Thus, we are prone to future collapse right back into the mess we have now.
Corporate interests have long advocated "say-on-pay" for unions so that no objecting union member's dues could be used for political purposes. There is no corresponding restriction for shareholders on corporations. We need corporate reform (what I call "corp reform" to mimic "tort reform") by way of requiring ALL shareholders to approve ALL pay of ALL executives at ALL publicly traded corporations. Gramm-Leach-Bliley (which led directly to our current Depression) should be repealed and Glass-Steagall should be restored. The long-standing, incestuous practice of officers nominating directors and directors deciding on the pay of officers, is crazy and must end. Only when the shareholders have true control of the corporations, and the regulatory laws have been changed, can this looting insanity end.