Transocean Hails 2010 as ‘Best Year’ in Safety–execs get ‘safety’ bonuses, despite Gulf spill disaster

Transocean's Deepwater Horizon oil rig

Transocean Ltd., the company that owns the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that caused immeasurable damage to the Gulf, recently gave its top executives “two thirds of their total possible safety bonuses.”

This was despite the explosion of its oil rig that killed 11 people and spilled over 200 million gallons of toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Why did execs get “safety” bonuses?

For achieving the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history.”

Note: Please do not confuse this with the Transocean, Ltd world headquarters building.

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Scapegoating Public Employees — Wall St congratulates themselves with $144 billion in bonuses

The Republican vs. Democrat charade — good cop, bad cop nonsense — is a mere smokescreen. Don’t be confused by obsolete preconceptions and propaganda. There is one war being fought, The Global Economic Elite Vs. The People. (Source)

CEO, Goldman Sachs

Endless affirmative action for the rich

It should be clear to anyone with a little more intelligence than a turnip that the bailouts were nothing more than calculated theft from ‘the people’ in order to cover the inconvenient results of Wall Street’s greed and mistakes and to allow for wholesale robbery in name of protecting the system. (Source)  Consider Goldman Sachs, for example (Source2):

• Investment: Goldman Sachs is the 3rd largest contributor to House and Senate campaigns–and to the Obama Administration
• Rise to power: Goldman Sachs successfully lobbied  the Obama Administration and Congress to have 48 Goldman Sachs operatives appointed to key financial administration positions  (updated list here: An Updated List of Goldman Sachs Ties to the Obama Government).
• Payouts:  Goldman has taken more than $20 billion in taxpayer cash through bailouts, payments and backstops; BUT, what a lucky coincidence, in 2009 Goldman paid themselves $16.2 B in “bonuses”; plus Goldman Sachs paid out $5 billion more in bonuses in the first three months of 2010 [Without Governments bailouts Goldman's 2009 bonuses would have been zip, zero, ziltch.]
• It’s systemic: The nation’s six largest banks set aside $140 billion for executive compensation in 2009–which works out to an amount equal to over $1000 from every household in America, just for Wall Street’s 2009 bonuses! . . . and Wall Street to get $144 Billion in Bonuses for 2010.
• But, it’s all OK because, “We Serve the Banks“–see also Econ 101, and At a Glance.

After the public’s money has been given away to bail out the rich, of course there’s nothing left to pay for much else . . . Meanwhile,

There’s been a wave of propaganda over the last couple of months, which is pretty impressive to watch, trying to deflect attention away from those who actually created the economic crisis, like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, their associates in the government who—Federal Reserve and others—let all this go on and helped it. (Source)

For example, Mish Shedlock of  the blog Global Economic Trend Analysis, routinely scapegoats public sector workers by arguing that state and local finances are completely broken because government workers are overpaid. But apparently public workers are not the problem in states like California–Mish himself writes in his blog that:

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