By Sam Pizzigati
Has picking a year’s greediest “top ten” ever been easier? We don’t think so. We could, this year, fill an entire top ten just with bankers from Goldman Sachs — or JP Morgan Chase or any of a number of other Wall Street giants. All sport executive suites packed with power suits who fanned the flames that melted down the global economy, then helped themselves, after gobbling down billions in bailouts, to paydays worth mega millions — at a time when, in over half our states, over a quarter of America’s kids are living off food stamps.
Now that’s greed. But that’s also not the whole picture. The Great Recession’s greedy don’t just sit on Wall Street. They occupy perches of power throughout the reeling U.S. economy. So we’ve tried, in this our latest annual ranking of avarice, to survey that bigger picture.
Where does all this greed come from? We humans have always, of course, had greed among us. But levels of greed vary enormously from one historical epoch to another — and from one society to another.
What determines which societies see the most greed and grasping? In a word: inequality. The more wealth concentrates, the more greed grows. The United States remains the most unequal nation in the developed world. Next year, we suspect, will bring us still another bumper crop of greedy.
As ordinary Americans reel from the Great Recession, these gluttonous all-stars continue to claw in absurd amounts of money.
Lets take a look at Robert Rubin:
Back in 1997, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin won huzzahs the world over for his efforts to fix the Asian financial crisis. One crisis “solved,” Rubin proceeded to help create another — by brokering the 1999 deal that repealed the New Deal’s most important financial industry reform legislation.
That reform, the Glass-Steagall Act, essentially prevented investment banks from speculating with the cash commercial banks and insurance companies were collecting from depositors and policy holders. Glass-Steagall would be weakened over the years, but still had enough oomph, at century’s end, to prevent Citicorp from finalizing a merger with Travelers Group insurance.
Citi, America’s biggest bank, and Travelers needed Glass-Steagall eliminated. Rubin obliged. His contacts and credibility, notes Public Citizen president Robert Weissman, helped speed repeal through Congress — and paved the way for the wild Wall Street run that crashed the U.S. economy.
Rubin, a Goldman Sachs alum before his stint at Treasury, would go on to join the newly merged Citigroup as a senior strategist. Citi, betting heavily on subprimes, would go on to lose over $65 billion during Rubin’s stint, and, this past January, Rubin formally resigned his Citi duties.
Overall, Rubin pocketed $126 million in cash and stock for his Citi labors. But he seems to regard his years at the bank as something akin to public service. Declared Rubin in one exit interview: “I bet there’s not a single year where I couldn’t have gone somewhere else and made more.”
Continue reading 10 Greediest People of 2009