Given its strong performance this year, Goldman Sachs is sure to pay staffers “dramatically” higher bonuses in 2009, said Goldman CFO David Viniar, although final decisions won’t be made until year’s end. If that’s the case, the bank will be bracing for another round of public outrage since the “recovery” has yet to trickle down to average people. But the fact remains, the bank more than doubled its net revenue this year, and employees deserve recognition.

Bulldog Reporter – Daily Dog | | Goldman Prepares for Bonus Outrage Revisited: Having a Banner Year, Bank Plans to Pay Execs “Dramatically” Higher Bonuses Than in 2008

Ok. So the employees deserve recognition but I mean get serious here. We’re talking about compensation in the millions of dollars while the recovery has not reached “average people.”

This makes no sense at all.

A mining company owned by Goldman Sachs and two private equity funds is in line to get a $3 million earmark for work at a rare earth elements mine in Mountain Pass, Calif. — raising questions as to why Congress would take on some of the risk for a bailed-out investment giant that’s already making a profit.

Molycorp Minerals’s open-pit mine is one of the world’s richest sources of elements that are used in the production of powerful magnets for precision-guided missiles and smart bombs, handheld communication devices, wind turbines and hybrid cars.

I hope people would write their congressional representatives about this.

First there’s Andrew Cuomo going after Charles Schwab for their misdeeds.

In an official notice sent to Charles Schwab & Co. Friday, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo warned that his office plans to sue the largest online brokerage firm for civil fraud over its marketing and sales of auction-rate securities to clients. Emails and testimony cited in the letter show Schwab’s brokers had little idea of what they were selling and later failed to tell clients that the market was collapsing.

Auction-rate securities — short-term debt instruments whose prices reset in periodic auctions — caused billions in losses for investors after the $330 billion market collapsed in early 2008.

They’ve played their part in harming our economy. But as Robert Kuttner says they’re not the only ones.

In addition, the financial sector has not yet returned to health, despite outsized profits (and bonuses) reported by the likes of Goldman Sachs. This is the kind of purely financial engineering that caused the collapse. The fevered activity at Goldman is a sign of lingering economic illness, not economic health. The rest of the economy, which depends on the financial sector for real investment capital, is still deeply depressed.

The banks with their bailouts are like vampires sucking the US economy dry it would seem.  I also think the first paragraph of Kuttner’s piece neatly describes the current state.

We are still at the stage of the recession where economic downdrafts are producing more downdrafts. Reduced purchasing power leads to fewer retail and factory sales and more layoffs, further reducing consumer demand. The Obama stimulus package, about 2.5 percent of GDP for each of two years, doesn’t make up enough of the difference. But the federal deficit, caused mainly by falling revenues and not by increased public spending, is alarming the budget hawks. The administration worries, correctly, that deficits will be high for several years to come and wonders who will keep lending Uncle Sam the money. Yet cutting back spending before recovery comes would be suicidal.

At this point how can you trust the financial sector? What is worse is their refusal to be regulated.

They are ratcheting up shareholder activism when it is needed most. They’ve started this fundraising drive to raise ten thousand dollars so they can go to the upcoming annual shareholder meetings of these corporations and directly challenge them.