People who made the last economic crisis are fleeing this one in private jets

Goldman Sachs is doing it tough. Its 2019 profits fell to a measly US$8.5 billion. To cut costs, the world’s second-largest investment bank has ordered two private jets, with a combined worth of nearly US$100 million. “We have long made private aircraft available to senior executives who travel extensively to see clients”, a company spokesperson said. “It would be more cost-effective to own the aircraft directly.”

In the middle of a meltdown of world capitalism and a pandemic that threatens to kill millions, the big banks can think of nothing but the cheapest way to keep flying in private jets. Even first-class would put them too close to the infected riffraff of upper-middle management. Have these people ever heard of Zoom?

In the global financial crisis of 2007-09, Goldman Sachs and other big banks lied their way into a property market collapse, and then passed on the losses to everyone. They were bailed out with tens of billions of dollars from the public purse. The bank paid three times as much to its CEO in 2008 as it did to the government in taxes. In 2012, it went on to make $600 million helping Malaysian ex-prime minister Najib Razak embezzle a truly gigantic fortune from the people of Malaysia.

David Solomon’s rise to Goldman CEO was seen as a chance for the bank to clean up its reputation after a decade of scandal. When establishment outlets interview Solomon, they skip over the part where he drove his personal assistant to suicide over some stolen wine in 2018. Instead, he’s just a regular guy like you and me who moonlights as a DJ, orders his own coffees and even takes the subway. “I mean, why wouldn’t you take the subway?”, Solomon told Fortune magazine. Something to ponder until the jets arrive.

In the meantime, Solomon boosted his pay by 20 percent to US$27.5 million a year, making him the second highest paid CEO of all time. He didn’t do so last year, or even in January. He did it in March: the month of lockdowns, mass unemployment and the explosion of COVID-19 cases across Europe and the US. Even Forbes magazine called it “one of the most tone-deaf moves in corporate history”. But Forbes isn’t concerned about the sheer immorality of his extravagance. It’s not outraged about how many masks and ventilators could be produced with one monster’s salary. It’s worried that tone-deaf capitalists can’t hear the sound of pitchforks sharpening.

While this grub panic-buys private jets, health workers around the world are battling a pandemic with little to no protective equipment. A report in the British Medical Journal notes that nearly a third of US health facilities have run out of face masks, and a quarter had no more gowns. That was a week ago.

“The situation has got so bad in some places, such as San Francisco and New York”, researcher Douglas Kamerow writes, “that medical facilities have asked members of the local community to donate masks they may have bought for their personal use”. Photographs of nurses using garbage bags and plastic lids for protection are all over social media.

Ventilators too are running out. Doctors are being forced to make life-and-death decisions in overcrowded hospitals without adequate supplies. The Minnesota Pandemic Ethics Project advises doctors that if two patients have equal claim to a ventilator, “a more random technique, such as a lottery or flipping a coin, should be used instead”.

That’s what cost-cutting looks like for health workers on the front line. For Goldman Sachs, it looks like two private jets and a pay rise.

In a 2010 Rolling Stone article, US journalist Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid ... relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. This has since brought vampire squids into unnecessary disrepute. Investment banks have already got their blood funnel out for a share of Trump’s $2 trillion slush fund to save US corporations. Vampire squids remain at the bottom of the ocean making an honest living.

David Solomon and the Goldman Sachs executives, by contrast, routinely condemn the world to hell. Now they want to take whatever they can and fly away to paradise.