{"id":3128,"date":"2009-07-04T20:32:52","date_gmt":"2009-07-05T00:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/?p=3128"},"modified":"2009-07-04T20:33:54","modified_gmt":"2009-07-05T00:33:54","slug":"14-milliona-collective-denial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2009\/07\/04\/14-milliona-collective-denial\/","title":{"rendered":"$14 Million\/A Collective Denial"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Two quotes.\u00c2\u00a0 From <a href=\"http:\/\/forums.somethingawful.com\/showthread.php?threadid=3159732&amp;pagenumber=1\">this article<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Which you absolutely should read.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Fourteen million dollars.<\/p>\n<p>That is what [Goldman Sachs] paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion &#8211; yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It&#8217;s not always easy to accept the reality of what we now routinely allow these people to get away with; there&#8217;s a kind of collective denial that kicks in when a country goes through what America has gone through lately, when a people lose as much prestige and status as we have in the past few years. You can&#8217;t really register the fact that you&#8217;re no longer a citizen of a thriving first-world democracy, that you&#8217;re no longer above getting robbed in broad daylight, because like an amputee, you can still sort of feel things that are no longer there.<\/p>\n<p>But this is it. This is the world we live in now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You might not be able to change it, but you should know it.\u00c2\u00a0 And it should inform all of your civic choices and votes.\u00c2\u00a0 I understand how we ended up here.\u00c2\u00a0 And step by step?\u00c2\u00a0 It doesn&#8217;t seem so ridiculous.\u00c2\u00a0 But stepping back?\u00c2\u00a0 Fundamentally fucked up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two quotes.\u00c2\u00a0 From this article.\u00c2\u00a0 Which you absolutely should read. Fourteen million dollars. That is what [Goldman Sachs] paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[379,378,139],"class_list":["post-3128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policy","category-society","tag-goldman-sachs","tag-tabbai","tag-treasury"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3128"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3131,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128\/revisions\/3131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}