It looks like Barack Obama and the highest-paid CEO on Wall Street are getting along just fine:
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein would support returning to Clinton-era taxes on the rich if that’s what it takes to avert the fiscal cliff, he said Wednesday after meeting with President Obama.
This should alarm anyone who believes Obama shouldn’t concede ground on Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid while attempting to resolve the fiscal showdown.
Ethan Rome’s lead paragraph in his piece on the king of corporate welfare:
The hypocrisy of Lloyd Blankfein, a Wall Street banker, and other corporate leaders who have inserted themselves into the debate over major tax and spending decisions under consideration in Congress is nothing short of repugnant. Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs got billions from the federal government during the Wall Street bailouts, enabling him to hold a job that paid him $16.1 million in 2011, and now he wants the rest of us to take a pay cut — now and in the future. Referring to Social Security, he told CBS, “You’re going to have to do something, undoubtedly, to lower people’s expectations of what they’re going to get.” That’s a second-rate vision for a first world country, and we just voted for a lot better than that.
