(from Raw Story 12/18/2008)

Say you got a ten billion dollar loan to shore up your finances, and you paid your employees $10.9 billion, and you raked in $2.3 billion for the year.

What would you say you owed in taxes? One percent?

That's what you'd pay if you were Goldman Sachs, Inc. The high-flying brokerage -- and former home of Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson -- has announced it's paying just $14 million in taxes this year.

Last year, their tax bill was $6 billion, or 34.1 percent. That represents a year-over-year tax rate drop of 33.1 percent, and an actual percentage drop of 97 percent.

Goldman attributed its lower tax rate to "more tax credits as a percentage of earnings" and "changes in geographic earnings mix."

Texas Democrat Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who serves on the House Ways and Means Committee, said Goldman, like other banks, shifted income to countries with lower taxes to reduce its tax burden.

"This problem is larger than Goldman Sachs," Doggett told Bloomberg. "With the right hand out begging for bailout money, the left is hiding it offshore."

Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs until mid-2006, and earned $35 million at the firm in 2005. He drew a $16.4 million salary in 2006 -- even though he served as chief executive for just half the year.

When will you and all your fellow bloggers face the truth: We *are* already down those 10 steps to tyranny, we *are* a tyrannical nation, we *are* about to leap off the cliff and allow this tyranny to sweep away common citizens right here on American soil. Once the Second Amendment is gone every last shred of pretense will disappear. It won't matter who is president. It won't matter what Congress does/doesn't do. CAN ANYONE SEE, please, we've been taken over by a banking cartel with the biggest military arm in all of history. Read Vin Suprynowicz-dot-com. The biggest danger to freedom is ROGUE GOVERNMENT. We're already THERE.

You said:

"By all means, wait to judge Obama based on his decisions and policies, not who he appoints to administer them."

I can't believe this is the same Glenn Greenwald I've been reading for almost a year! Did the fact escape you that Obama's cabinet appointments *are* his first decisions? Who he appoints to administer his policies will make all the difference in the world. Think Rumsfeld, Rove, Card, Ashcroft, oh my, how much clearer a picture do you need.

Obama had an entire universe to choose from; he's supposedly in sympathy with rising-star types like himself, yet we see the same troubling faces, the same elitist framework, only this time it's the left-hand version of the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger in the wings feeding everyone their lines.

I'd puke if I wasn't so scared. These people are crazier than the neocons. They talk delightedly of a world monetary system, one-world government, elimination of 80% of the population, grand theft of global resources for their own benefit-- the most despicable ideas imaginable. Why are we trusting a man who has been groomed by these Brzezinski-ites for 25 years?

I hope you'll join the rest of America as we exercise together in Obama's cheery civil preparedness camps, getting buff for our new positions as laborers rebuilding America's crumbling infrastructure--roads, bridges, and schools-- because all our jobs are disappearing into thin air. (google Obama rebuilding infrastructure)

Yes, it's a happy day for the globalists.