In 2010, Lloyd Blankfein earned $53,965,418. Just two years earlier, as CEO of Goldman Sachs, he had petitioned the U.S. Government to give his company $12.9 billion dollars in bailout money, despite having taken out an insurance policy to cover any losses the company might have sustained. In other words, Goldman Sachs didn’t need the money: they just found a way to make the U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for some very bad decisions they had made.
After receiving the money, Blankfein in turn distributed it to 32 business entities, a large chunk of it going to overseas companies like the Royal Bank of Scotland and DZ AG Deutsche Zantrake Genossenschaftz, a German cooperative banking group.
If you average out Blankfein’s income for that period, on any given day, he earned almost $150,000. That means he would have earned over $500 in the time it would have taken him to read this diary.
In that same amount of time, nearly seventeen million children in America went hungry. We’re talking about a segment of our population that is roughly equivalent in numbers to the combined populations of Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, Nebraska, West Virginia, and New Mexico.