It’s not a matter of whether it’s against the law, it’s a matter of whether it’s right.

The New York Times recently featured another example of the investigative reporting that has made it the best damn paper still being published. The piece that has captured my attention is about what actually happened to drive AIG – the huge insurance company – into a financial crisis so bad that they needed $185 billion dollars of taxpayer money to avoid dragging the rest of us into their hole with them. (Keep in mind that “bad” and “worse” are still different things. What we experienced was “bad”.)

Before getting into the most recent revelation, I think it’s necessary to put down a little bit of foundation about a different company, the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs.

As I wrote in Consider the Economy as an Engine, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority in England was talking about Goldman Sachs when he used the phrase “socially useless activity.” He was being kind, as it turns out. Goldman is far, far worse than just useless.

Google, to its credit, has reintroduced the concept of “good” and “evil” into the corporate vocabulary. Their corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”. (See Note 1) It doesn’t have to be “anything, anything at all” in the name of profit. Goldman is clearly a leader in the forces of actual “evil”.

While the government was passing out money, Goldman took their share – about $23 billion. Not as much as AIG, of course. AIG was clinically dead but was revived. Goldman just had a cold. Since then, it’s become more and more clear that Goldman was just playing us. They were in good enough financial condition to repay $10 billion in direct federal bailout money early. We the people made a profit on that part of it. But in return, they got to ability to pay obscene bonuses to their executives. Then they announced all time record earnings in July to justify those obscene bonuses.

How did Goldman fall into the outhouse and emerge smelling like a rose? Answer: they’re profiting on our misery. The worse it got for us, the better it has been for them.

The New York Times article is filled with financial details that show how Goldman placed huge bets on the collapse of the mortgage market – that is, millions of people losing their homes – and then insured those losses with AIG. The result amounted to “betting against your own team”. Except that Goldman isn’t on anybody’s team.

When everything blew up, Goldman still found a way to turn our loss into their profit. With the Federal Reserve Board’s blessing, AIG used $12.9 billion in taxpayers’ dollars to pay off every penny it owed Goldman for insurance claims. Did you lose money? I did. The executives at Goldman Sachs didn’t.

Like the international super corporation they are, Goldman is now busy ruining other economies besides ours. You may have heard that all of Europe is in a brand new financial crisis because the Greek economy is close to failing. According to the Los Angeles Times:

“It appears that Goldman Sachs have colluded with past Greek governments to reduce the appearance of Greece’s debt for short-term gain, while in reality making it worse than ever,” said Arlene McCarthy, the vice-president of the European Parliament’s economic and monetary affairs committee. “These deals have increased costs for Greek taxpayers and left a mess behind for Greece’s citizens and the eurozone.”

Corporations are not sovereign beings. They exist, in theory, to make it possible for us to work together in cooperative enterprise. Goldman Sachs is one of the best examples of one that has turned into a malignant cancer. We need a cure and with cancer, you know what that is.

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Note 1: Google has also painted a target on themselves with this motto. Some writers have said that Google has changed their stripes and this motto is coming back to bite them. They’re a tough and sometimes ruthless competitor, no doubt. But I’ve never held that against anybody. So is Microsoft. We need some toughness. It’s a tough world. In their stand against Chinese censorship, they have demonstrated to me, at least, that they haven’t totally forgotten their motto.