The Business Insider wrote about the voicemail all Goldman Sachs employees received earlier this month. They were told not to organize small parties even if no firm money goes to pay for them.

By "small," Goldman means exactly twelve. Starting tomorrow, they can hang out outside of Goldman in groups of eleven, but not twelve.

The rule is set to stay in place for the month of December. Why? The firm believes that it would be inappropriate for its employees to be seen partying while the economy is still shaky and unemployment is high.

Twelve might be a good cut off because it's a very Christmas-y number. Twelve is also the number of the apocalypse (supposedly December 21, 2012), but since there are "Twelve Days of Christmas," it's probably more about that.

December doesn't start until tomorrow, so party it up tonight!

The firm has canceled its annual holiday party, just as it did last year. It also instructed the smaller business units that they should not organize their own smaller parties, which had been a long tradition at the firm. The parties are banned even if no firm money goes to pay for them.

But Goldman employees were surprised to hear that even parties within private homes fall under the ban. The firm apparently believes that it would be inappropriate for its employees to be seen partying while the economy is still so shaky and unemployment is so high.

Presumably, the ban only applies to gatherings organized as semi-official holiday parties for Goldman employees. We can't imagine that Goldman would tell employees they can't have a few friends and family over for a tree-trimming party.

ArtsJournal blogger Jan Herman found the cartoon, and joins others in accusing Taibbi of "rank anti-Semitism" for the, um, vivid language he's used to characterize Goldman Sachs. Those charges are ludicrous. There's nothing anti-Semitic in vigorously attacking Goldman for its use of revolving-door politics to secure profits in good years and back-door taxpayer bailouts in bad years. And we sincerely doubt that Taibbi went trolling through Nazi-era cartoons in search of the perfect image for his opening paragraph.

Still, there are unavoidable resonances here—the octopus is supposed to be Winston Churchill, but that's a star of David over his head and that appears to be blood dripping from his tentacles—that certainly don't help Taibbi's cause. So let's retire the phrase, shall we? That includes you, Goldman employees.

Blankfein, the Goldman CEO who is doing "God's work," announced that his company would give $100m per year to the fund. The Financial Times pointed out that that represents one good day's trading - and that Goldman had 36 $100m-plus days in the third quarter of this year. Warren Buffett is also involved somehow, as a kind of bespectacled fig leaf.

It is hard to tell whether Blankfein believes his own spin. But he said the following:

What are we going to do to fulfill our commitment and our obligation to the world to be good allocators of capital and make sure we're doing the right thing, making sure we're helping the country pull out of recession, grow businesses that help generate jobs?

This is beyond mocking. Talking of which, yesterday it was revealed that not only did credit ratings agencies help engineer the economic collapse, by approving any old financial product, but also had a hand in the AIG bailout that helped get Goldman Sachs to the point where they could pay obscene bonuses again. The agencies seem to have caught the tone-deafness of the big banks. Ray McDaniel, CEO of agency Moody's, took home $7,376,555 in 2007 and $7,569,981 last year. You remember last year, you know, when the economy collapsed and everyone had less mone... oh.

When AIG was bailed out to the tune of $150 billion last year, we were told it was necessary because of the "systemic risk" to the economy that would have been posed had the insurance giant gone into bankruptcy. Turns out $61 billion of that bailout went straight to banks that AIG owed money to, including $14 billion to Goldman Sachs. They would have gotten pennies on the dollar had AIG been allowed to fail, but after the taxpayers stepped in, the banks demanded to be paid in full. And Timothy Geithner, who was running the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time and the de facto chief of AIG, caved to those demands. Why? Because the credit rating agencies had a gun to his head.

The Special Inspector General for TARP has released the report of its investigation into exactly why Goldman and the other banks AIG owed money to didn't take a haircut after that bailout, and the extent to which AIG's credit rating was a ticking time-bomb throughout the ordeal is astonishing. Keep in mind that in 2008, if you wanted to sell an insane securitized mortgage concoction premised on prospective cash flow from monthly receipt of soiled envelopes full of change mailed in by hobos, Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch would have rated it as investment grade. Here's a 2007 IM exchange, uncovered by congressional investigators, between two S&P employees regarding one of the phantom collateralized debt obligations that killed the economy:

S&P Employee #1: btw-that deal is ridiculous

S&P Employee #2: I know right.. model def does not capture half of the risk

S&P Employee #1: we should not be rating it

S&P Employee #2: we rate every deal

S&P Employee #2: it could be structured by cows and we would rate it

S&P Employee #1: but there's a lot of risk associated with it – I personally don't feel comfy signing off as a committee member.

But when it came time to rate AIG's creditworthiness, that ratings agencies suddenly became exacting arbiters of fact, and their cascading downgrades and threats of further downgrades drove Geithner's decision-making as he bailed out AIG and negotiated with the banks AIG owed money to:

On the afternoon of September 15, 2008, the three largest credit rating agencies-Standard and Poor's Financial Services, Moody's Investors Service, Inc., and Fitch Ratings Ltd.-downgraded AIG. On September 16, 2008, because of concerns that an AIG bankruptcy could cause systemic risk to the entire financial system and the American retirement system, the Federal Reserve Board, with the support of Treasury, authorized [the Federal Reserve Bank of New York] to lend up to $85 billion to the firm....

Once the bailout got started, Geithner's choices were limited at every turn by how the ratings agencies would react. When negotiating with the banks, he considered threatening to let AIG go under—thereby inducing them to take what they could get from the government—but decided not to because if word got out, the credit agencies would react by lowering AIG's rating, which would in turn spark a round of defaults:

[The New York Fed] was further concerned – as it was throughout the AIG rescue – about the reaction of the rating agencies. While threatening not to support AIG might have been useful for purposes of forcing concessions by the counterparties, it could also have been viewed by the credit rating agencies as an indication that the [New York Fed] and the U.S. government was not standing fully behind AIG, which could have had a negative impact on AIG's credit rating.

And Geithner's cursory attempt to get the banks to take a haircut—the "negotiation" with Goldman Sachs consisted of one telephone call, according to the report—was conducted under duress because he feared another downgrade was imminent:

The intent in creating Maiden Lane III [the vehicle by which the banks were paid off] may similarly have been the improvement of AIG's liquidity position to avoid further rating agency downgrades, but the direct effect was further payments of nearly $30 billion to AIG counterparties, albeit in return for assets of the same market value. Stated another way, by providing AIG with the capital to make these payments, Federal Reserve officials provided AIG's counterparties with tens of billions of dollars they likely would have not otherwise received had AIG gone into bankruptcy.

In other words, we bailed out AIG because if we didn't, the credit ratings agencies would throw it in to bankruptcy by being honest for once in their lives about its financial condition. And we paid out $61 billion to Goldman and other banks because if we didn't, the credit rating agencies would have downgraded AIG and screwed up the whole bailout. They lied us into a collapse and rated us into a bailout. Oh, and now they're doing about $400 million in business rating securities for the Fed's Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, which requires that securities purchased through the program have to be rated by two or more "nationally recognized rating agencies."

UPDATE: The cat rescuer, Patti Brotman, responded to our e-mail and says Goldman Sachs has paid up:

Yes, the bill has been paid and all of the kittens have been adopted into wonderful homes.

Thank you for your interest.

And Goldman is telling New York that the Express' reporting was "inaccurate" and that the company requested the bills on several occasions and paid up as soon as they got them. In which case we apologize to Goldman Sachs for the stuff we said about the cats, but not all the other stuff. It doesn't matter anyway, since they're not allowed to read Gawker.

SECOND UPDATE: Brotman responded to our follow-up e-mail, and says she got the check from Goldman two weeks ago, or roughly ten weeks after the firm pledged to pay the vet costs.

THIRD UPDATE: Brotman once again responded to yet another follow-up e-mail:

[T]he hold up was due to getting all the vet invoices together so we could send them as a batch instead of individually. When the batch was complete GS picked them up, processed them and cut a check to City Critters, Inc., our rescue group.

So Goldman Sachs did indeed process payment in a timely fashion, and do in fact love adorable kittens. Sorry, Goldman Sachs!

The Downtown Express, a lower Manhattan newspaper, covered the discovery of the kittens and their rescue by local residents Rich and Patti Brotman, who dubbed them "Blackberries." When a Goldman Sachs attorney read about Blackberries' plight in August, the company offered to pay the veterinary costs for the five kittens and to encourage their employees to adopt them.

"We want to be a good and responsible neighbor," a Goldman spokesperson told the Express. How very thoughtful of them.

Flash forward three months and, according to the Express, Goldman still hasn't ponied up. Three weeks ago, the Express' sister paper ran an editorial claiming that "the firm has not yet paid a few thousand dollars of vet bills for the five kittens born in its headquarters building." This week, the Express reported that all the Blackberries had found homes—it's not clear if any of them were with Goldman employees—but that the promised payment was still pending: "[Goldman] now appears to finally be about to cut the check."

We've e-mailed the Brotmans to ask if Goldman, which is on track to pay $20 billion in taxpayer-financed bonuses to its employees in the coming months, has managed to cobble up the estimated $300-per-kitten yet.

Of course, Goldman isn't a deadbeat in all its charitable endeavors. According to the Goldman Sachs Foundation's 2008 tax return, obtained by the New York Times but maddeningly not placed online, the foundation trades its endowment as frantically and shrewdly as the Ivy League financial ninjas at its for-profit namesake:

The latest tax filing for Goldman Sachs's foundation is as thick as a phone book. The list of trades is more than 200 pages, single spaced. Goldman, it seems, invests like no other, even for its own charity.... The foundation, whose returns do not appear outsized in recent years, has placed a lot of its money in hedge funds and trades heavily in futures contracts based on baskets of stocks, bonds and currencies.

So they still hustle when it comes to making money, they just don't like to give it to anybody—as the Awl notes, Goldman's foundation ranks among the top ten in terms of assets, but doesn't make the top 50 in terms of giving. Those poor Blackberries aren't alone.

So here's how Goldman Sachs goes about being a "good neighbor" when it's not busy humoring the local yokels by pretending to care about cats—the construction of the new HQ in which those kittens were born was financed by the state and city of New York to the tune of $390 million, including:

• Financing from $1.65 billion in low-interest Liberty Bonds, which saved Goldman $250 million in interest over the life of the bonds
• $25 million in Federal World Trade Center Job Creation and Retention Program cash grants
• $115 million in tax breaks
• Not to mention discounted property taxes that will never exceed $21 million per year over the term of Goldman's 65-year lease.

Stupid fucking cats.

[Via New York; Flickr photo via Marissa Cap.]

AIG collapsed last year in part because it had written insurance policies on billions of dollars in stupid bets made by Goldman, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and others. Since it was functionally bankrupt, last September AIG thought it would be able to convince those banks to accept significantly less than face value on the credit default swaps it had sold them. How much less?

[Elias] Habayeb, 37, was chief financial officer for the AIG division that oversaw AIG Financial Products, the unit that had sold the swaps to the banks. One of his goals was to persuade the banks to accept discounts of as much as 40 cents on the dollar, according to people familiar with the matter.

Then a funny thing happened: The New York Fed opened an $85 billion credit line for AIG, staving off bankruptcy with a massive influx of taxpayer dollars and effectively taking control of the insurer. Habayeb was pushed aside as chief negotiator with Goldman and the other banks on the issue of how much AIG owed for those swaps and replaced by Tim Geithner, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner had a different opening position:

Geithner's team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps.... Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar.

We'll never know how much Goldman would have accepted in the end, or how much the other banks would have accepted, or if one or all of them would have forced AIG into bankruptcy. But we know this: AIG's target was 60 cents on the dollar, and after Geithner turned on the taxpayer-financed spigot the banks got everything.

The logic of the decision, according to an analyst quoted by Bloomberg, was driven by the fact that some banks claimed that they needed the full amount of what AIG owed them or they risked failure.

One reason par was paid was because some counterparties insisted on being paid in full and the New York Fed did not want to negotiate separate deals, says a person close to the transaction. "Some of those banks needed 100 cents on the dollar or they risked failure," Vickrey says.

Goldman Sachs was not one of those banks. In March, CFO David Viniar told analysts on a conference call that Goldman's exposure to AIG was hedged: "There would have been no credit losses if AIG had failed." So if Geithner had negotiated a separate peace with Goldman—perhaps using the same sort of bullying tactics and arm-twisting that the Treasury Department and Fed had shown toward Bank of America and other institutions while trying to keep the financial system alive—he may well have gotten them down to $7.8 billion, the 40-cents-on-the-dollar haircut AIG thought it could get, and saved taxpayers $5.2 billion.

Geithner made the decision in total secrecy. He tried for months to keep the list of counterparties to AIG secret, and Bloomberg reports that the New York Fed ordered AIG executives not to file SEC documents that would reveal details of how the swaps were being handled: "Don't you think your counterparties will be concerned?"

As long as the counterparties are happy, right? Another thing that makes Goldman happy is "dark pools." Matt Taibbi has flagged a white paper the firm is circulating in D.C.—and posted on its web site—arguing straight-faced that transparency and free flow of information are not good things when it comes to equities markets, and that billions of dollars in secret transactions to which only obscenely wealthy bankers are privy are healthy. Because real-time public disclosure of huge transactions could hurt Goldman's bottom line:

In traditional exchange trading, bids and offers are public, and this transparency helps buyers and sellers to achieve the best price.

For some market participants, however, the openness and transparency of the equity market actually mean they are unlikely to achieve the best price.

Instead, Goldman argues, regulators should allow "so-called dark pools" of "non-displayed liquidity" so that they can do whatever they want to, when they want to, so the schlubs don't find out about it until it's too late and they've already parted with their money. This is actually posted on Goldman Sachs' web site, publicly.

CORRECTION: We initially misread Bloomberg's report that AIG wanted banks to "accept discounts of as much as 40 cents on the dollar" as meaning they wanted to banks to accept as little as 40 cents on the dollar. In fact, AIG wanted banks to accept as little as 60 cents on the dollar—a 40 percent discount. We've adjusted the figures in the post to reflect that.

If you know how Goldman employees will be spending their taxpayer-financed bonuses this year, let me know: you can e-mail me at the address below or post to the #goldmanproject page.

The background noise of all Times politics these days is no doubt are the apprehensions in the newsroom and the resentments a 32-year-old star reporter might spawn with a book deal, fancy Vanity Fair-hosted parties and frequent TV gigs while others contemplate whether to take the latest buyout offer or risk getting killed in the next round of massive layoffs at the tanking newspaper. But these sort of feuds pre-date the implosion of the news business and the crux of the issue is this:

Part of Sorkin's book focuses on an ethics waiver that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson received allowing him to work closely with Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein to bail the investment bank out. Sorkin posted a copy of the waiver, which he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, to his web site.

According to Kelly, some Timespersons are exercised because Sorkin failed to credit his colleagues Gretchen Morgenson and Don Van Natta, Jr., with breaking the story of the waiver in August, long before the book came out—and "some wondered if Sorkin used his star reporter status to get a peek at work compiled by his colleagues."

The peeking allegation seems to be based on the fact that Sorkin finished the book around the time that Morgenson and Van Natta broke the story of the waiver, so Sorkin must have somehow gotten a look at it ahead of time, right? It's apparently serious enough, Kelly says, that senior editors at the Times are investigating the matter.

Not necessarily. Paulson referred to the waiver in testimony before Congress in mid-July, so its existence was no secret prior to the Times story on it. Sorkin told Kelly that he'd gotten a copy of the waiver through FOIA by "late July," when he filed the chapters of his book that dealt with it. Sorkin could conceivably have learned of the waiver from Paulson's testimony and gotten it via FOIA within two weeks, though that would be an extraordinarily fast turnaround. Or perhaps he learned of it earlier through his own reporting and FOIA'd it then. In any case, Sorkin says he got the waiver through his own FOIA request, and that he had it before the Times story came out.

Which is presumably why he didn't see fit to credit his newspaper for the story. But he's being very magnanimous about that, and offering to revise it in future editions. "I have spoken to Don and told him I'd be happy to include a citation in the 40 pages of end notes as a courtesy in the next printing," Sorkin told Kelly. Which we think is Timesspeak for "fuck you, Don."

At a panel discussion in London yesterday, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach gently unraveled the moral knot that has flummoxed so many of us lesser souls as we struggle to grapple with a reason that federally subsidized banks should be paying out an anticipated $23 billion in bonuses to people who are already wealthy beyond reason while nearly 10% of the nation is unemployed: "We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all."

Well put, sir! For instance: Even if you don't have a job, you'd probably have even less of a job—negative employment!—if Goldman Sachs weren't using the money that it made by leveraging the taxes that the feds take out of your unemployment check to pay billions of dollars to people like Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach, a vice chair for Goldman Sachs International and adviser to Goldman's domestic American operation. And the record number of Americans on food stamps—32 million—would almost certainly not be enjoying the level of "prosperity and opportunity for all" that they currently benefit from if not for that commodities trader who will get $25 million this year.

In fairness, Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach did acknowledge that the the beneficiaries of taxpayer-financed bonus payouts do have moral obligations:

"To whom much is given much is expected," he said. "There is a sense that if you make money you are expected to give."

A sense, indeed. Which is why Goldman gives so generously of itself to needy elite private schools that educate the children of people who can afford $20,000 a year in tuition. But there are many ways to give, and Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach makes a good point when he says that inequality is necessary for prosperity—take for instance, the recent Formula One after-party at the Amber Lounge—"the ultimate VIP experience that follows the Grand Prix series around the world"—in Singapore that a tipster tells us was chock full of Goldman Sachs traders who'd purchased private VIP tables. According to Formula One's web site, tables for eight at the September event went for as high as $22,000, complete with a Jeroboam of Dom Perignon. If those Goldman traders hadn't been paid those bonuses, who would have showered all the women there with cash and champagne? That's how opportunity and prosperity get spread around.

Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach is quite the Christian apologist for wealthy people; he wrote a book called Morality and the Marketplace and has thought long and hard about how to reconcile the teachings of Jesus Christ with the relentless drive to acquire money. He's done pretty well with it. But wasn't there something about camels, and heaven, and rich men? And if Jesus wants Goldman Sachs employees to get multi-million-dollar taxpayer-financed bonuses, why are the Benedictine Sisters of Mt. Angel launching a shareholder movement to get Goldman to reign in its compensation packages? We guess that, for the fabulously wealthy who go for the whole heaven/hell thing, it makes sense to enjoy as many Amber Lounge after-parties as you can squeeze in while you're in this world, because the one that awaits doesn't really have much to offer.

If you know how Goldman employees will be spending their taxpayer-financed bonuses this year, let me know: you can e-mail me at the address below or post to the #goldmanproject page.

It's not entirely fair to cherry-pick the recipients of Goldman's past donations looking for examples of the company underwriting elite institutions that buttress the hyper-wealthy bubble culture that company thrives in, all in the name of "charity." So we'll point out that Goldman's assorted foundations have also given generously to genuinely needy causes like the Harvard Varsity Club, Camp Morasha, and Brown University. OK, ok—Goldman has also donated money to breast cancer research, after-school programs, and all sorts of good things that deserve its money.

But they also gave $210,000 to Rumson Country Day School in Rumson, N.J., a private school so desperately in need of money for the purposes of charging $20,000 per year to educate eighth-graders that Bruce Springsteen played a fundraiser for it in 2002.

And then there's $68,000 to the Lawrenceville School, a boarding school near Princeton, N.J. with an 800-acre campus and a 200-year history of taking disadvantaged kids like Tinsley Mortimer, Michael Eisner, and Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud and instilling them with the values of hard work and self-reliance that Goldmanites endeavor to live every day.

Or Greenwich Country Day School, which lifts children out of poverty by charging their parents $29,000 for "Grade IX," according to the school's tuition schedule. It was no doubt cheaper when George H.W. Bush went there.

Not all of Goldman's educational grants go to prep schools, of course. There are also the firm's Walter F. Blaine and H.R. Young Scholarship Programs, which award $4,000 and $7,500 scholarships, respectively, to the children of Goldman Sachs employees. Yes, Goldman Sachs has janitors and secretaries, so we imagine they employ people who could make justifiable use of such scholarships. Then again, they pay some secretaries $200,000 a year, and we'd hope that any firm that intends to pay out $23 billion to 31,000 employees this year would find a way to distribute it such that none of them need help putting their kids through college. We'd be wrong!

If you know how Goldman employees will be spending their taxpayer-financed bonuses this year, let us know—you can e-mail us at the address below or post to the #goldmanproject page.

"I think they saw that the world was about to fall off it's axis" Sorkin told Charlie Rose last night, when asked why AIG was bailed out. The amount of time to make decisions to try and pull markets from the edge of economic armageddon was less than hours, it was mere moments. Conversations in hallways between meetings that would attempt to pull a careening market from falling off a cliff. They couldn't possibly have time to weigh the consequences of their actions. They were simply in triage mode. Crack the chest of the American economic system, resuscitate, and worry about fixing the broken ribcage later.

Shotgun marriages for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were sought after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Lehman accused JP Morgan of freezing $17 billion in cash and securities that belonged to the embattled firm on the night before it's failure.

A year and a half later there is not a single regulation on the books. Nothing has been done to prevent the same crooks from robbing the store, leaving markets in the same vulnerable position it was before the collapse. Sorkin describes how financial behemoths are "answering to the shareholder, not the community, and that is a huge issue. What's right for the community might not be right for the shareholder." Self regulation is still simply voluntary, and our government naive enough to think they won't try it again.

Guess what, they already are. Sorkin breaks the bad news "Many of those toxic assets are still on the market, and they're bidding them up even higher." Wonderful.

Sorkin describes "a great scene where Ben Bernake and Hank Paulson go into the White House, and President Bush tells them, at some point you're going to have to tell me how this happened."

We're still waiting.

Erin Holland is a vice president and assistant general counsel at Goldman Sachs, which is apparently a really boring job, because she just posted this to her Twitter feed.

We're checking with other Goldman sources to confirm the blockage; Holland's Twitter presence certainly appears to be legit, though her Glee obsession seems somehow misplaced in a lawyer who specializes in credit derivatives contracts [pdf]. We'd be sort of surprised, given what we know about Goldman Sachs, if Gawker was ever available inside the building, but it sounds like Holland had grown accustomed to reading our trenchant wit and anti-Goldman jeremiads from the office.

But no more. [UPDATE: A source inside the building confirms that Gawker had indeed been previously available to Goldman employees.] We can't help but note that this ban follows closely on the heels of our announcement of the Goldman Project, our effort to catalog and track the profligate spending of the beneficiaries of Goldman's anticipated $23 billion in taxpayer-financed bonuses. But they can't kick us off the 3G network last time we checked, so to all the Goldmanites reading this in the bathroom on your iPhones: Leak to us! You have nothing to lose but your jobs. (Remember: Gmail is your friend! Also the phone: our tipline is 646-214-8138.) And to judge by Erin Holland's Twitter feed, Goldman is a horrible, horrible place to work. Except for the money. The money's great.

SECOND UPDATE: We've learned that the ban extends to company Blackberries, as well.

THIRD UPDATE: To those who've expressed concern that we jeopardized Holland's job by drawing attention to her Twitter feed: We have it on good authority that she's been "rebuked but [is] still employed." To Holland: Adjust your Facebook privacy settings.

Goldman's third-quarter take is down slightly from its record-breaking $3.4 billion second-quarter earnings, and the amount set aside for bonuses declined by roughly 20%. But so far this year, the firm has socked away $16.7 billion to compensate its young masters of the universe, and analysts believe that before the year is over Goldman will skim $23 billion off the top to keep its employees preposterously rich.

Bully for them. The downside of Goldman's remarkable resurgence in the wake of the near-collapse of the financial system is that you financed it. There was the $10 billion in TARP funds Goldman got last fall—it's since been repaid to the feds with interest, but that's probably little consolation for people who couldn't get a loan in the past year to buy a house or a car last fall despite excellent credit and documented income. There was the $13 billion pass-through bailout from AIG, wherein the taxpayer funds ostensibly directed to prop up AIG were simply forwarded to Goldman and other banks that had purchased insurance from AIG in the form of credit-default swaps on their bad investments. The AIG bailout is particularly noxious in light of an op-ed Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein wrote in the Financial Times earlier this week (in a clear bid to prebut an avalanche of anti-bankster rage at today's results): "An institution's assets must also be valued at their fair market value—the price at which willing buyers and sellers transact—not at the (frequently irrelevant) historic value." The irrelevant historic value of Goldman's credit-default contracts with AIG was $13 billion. The fair market value was whatever a hemorrhaging AIG could afford to pay. But instead of getting pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy proceedings, Goldman got the federal government to spend your money to pay them off in full. Fair-market-value for me, but not for thee.

The other ways in which Goldman has benefited—in many instances uniquely—from the federal intervention into the financial industry have been illustratively rehearsed by Matt Taibbi: Banks that want to repay TARP money are forced by the feds to raise capital, and Goldman is there to underwrite the debt and equity offerings at a reasonable 7% commission. It has access to low-cost FDIC-backed debt through the Temporary Loan Guarantee Program, saving it an estimated $600 million per year. It has access to the Fed's discount window, where it can borrow money a .5% interest. Our credit card company charges us 13%, and we didn't lose $2 billion in the fourth quarter of last year, as Goldman did.

All of this is quite objectionable. But what makes it eye-stabbingly, brain-searingly blood-boiling is the fact that Goldman's employees are personally reaping the benefits of these subsidies to the tune of an average of $700,000 per staffer. Being unjustifiably wealthy in boom times is not enough—when market forces of their own creation brought their company low, they turned to the taxpayers both to rescue the firm and prop up their obscenely acquisitive lifestyles.

Blankfein pronounced that Financial Times op-ed that "to avoid crises, we need more transparency." We agree. What we'd like to render transparent is the precise ways in which people fortunate or connected enough to be employed by Goldman Sachs are deploying the $23 billion in windfall bonuses that they've managed to skim off the top of a massive taxpayer-financed bailout of their firm. Oddly, Blankfein doesn't seem to value transparency when its directed at his own employees—he's made clear that he wants Goldmanites to keep their lavish discretionary spending to a minimum for fear of enraging the people who made it possible until this whole thing blows over. At the same time, he's floating the idea of making a $1 billion-plus charitable donation as public penance for the aforementioned sins. Why not all $23 billion, Lloyd? You didn't earn it, right? And if you did earn it, why would you attempt to shame your employees into not spending it?

To facilitate Blankfein's call for transparency, we're launching the Goldman Project, an ongoing attempt to track and publicize the multi-million second homes, $50,000 cars, $500 bottles of wine, and ostentatious living that we are subsidizing. And we need your help: Are you Facebook friends with a Goldmanite who just posted photos of his lavish bachelor party? Post them to our fancy new tag page, #GoldmanProject, or e-mail them to us. Are you a realtor who just sold a $4 million duplex a Goldman banker? Is your ex-boyfriend Goldman banker planning a year-end trip to Cabo to blow his bonus wad? Shoot us an e-mail. Likewise, if you catch any references to Goldman employees living large in the media, post them to #GoldmanProject to keep a running clipfile. And if you know anything about why Goldman made so much from its fixed-income, currency and commodity trading division in the past two quarters—a phenomenon about which one analyst told Bloomberg, "A lot of us struggle with just the size of the FICC line and understanding exactly how they make as much money as they do"—posit your theory at #GoldmanProject. Seems interesting that Goldman made a killing on currency trading at a time when dollar is plummeting.

To get you started, here's what Goldman chief financial officer David Viniar's $24 million second home in Carpinteria, Calif., looks like via Google Maps:

Looks nice! Viniar forfeited his bonus last year out of some misplaced sense of propriety. We wonder if he'll partake in December or early next year, when the 2009 bonuses will be distributed.

Viniar is a big fish at Goldman, but there are all sorts of emerging stars—like 40-year-old Michael Swenson, the trader who made Goldman billions by betting that the subprime lending market would collapse, thereby allowing the firm to profit doubly from the calamity, both directly and through the government's efforts to mitigate it—that we intend to learn more about. Here's a list of Goldman's managing directors, and here's a smaller list of the most recent batch to be named—guaranteed to contain a bunch of eager young comers just dying to make a killing and spend it like gangsters. So have a look and run some names if you're feeling mischievous, and let us know what you find. We'll be looking, too.

If this sounds like a creepy exercise in crowd-sourced surveillance to you, understand that we're not looking interested in digging up private details about private citizens. We just want to catalog how are tax dollars have been spent, and see where $23 billion goes. If Goldman's employees earned those bonuses, they should spend them with pride. Own it.

The donations are still being hashed out, but it goes something like this: the company will likely award a record-breaking $22 billion in bonuses this year, an extraordinary number considering the bank's role in the disintegration of the financial industry. Of those billions, the company may donate 10-15% to charity, a move that would make Goldman the biggest single-shot corporate giver in history, and would guarantee the bank loads of good press.

And that's just the point. An executive who's familiar with all the board room hand-wringing readily admits that Goldman considers this a "publicity stunt" and we're sure the American people will see it as such, which means then Goldman Sachs looks patronizing as well as greedy. Then the unwashed masses, still angry about the AIG bailout and golden parachutes and all of that, will have to decide whether they should be insulted by Goldman's self-serving donations or remember that the company is, in its own way, helping people.

Don't worry about whether or not to be inappropriately outraged and confused, though, because the plan's not finalized. Shareholders don't seem to keen on throwing away money on frivolous things like charity. And then there's Goldman's cash-loving culture:

Finally, there is concern over how to do this in a tax advantaged way. Goldman has a very low tax rate, thanks to its brilliant accountants. It is unlikely to be able to achieve much value by making a tax-deductible charitable donation, particularly if the donation goes to a charitable foundation Goldman controls. When asked if they realized that this sounded a bit silly, the former Goldman executive said that not giving away value was a point of pride for Goldman.

Perhaps the most advisable plan under consideration would be having bonus-receiving executives donate the money themselves, which means they receive a tax-deduction and we get to see which of Goldman's money bags actually care about the little people.

CNBC's Charlie Gasparino reports in the Daily Beast that Blankfein is "obsessed" with the hits that Goldman's image has taken after getting a $10 billion capital injection from taxpayers and $13 billion out of the AIG bailout. He's "looks like shit" because he's so worried about what's going to happen in bonus season, when he has to distribute that $11 billion bonus reserve. He's looking for a "brand manager" to rescue the firm's image, and Goldman insiders say that anyone who's royally pissed off that Goldman is simply harvesting taxpayer money as profits and handing it out to its obscenely wealthy (and occasionally pedophilic) employees in the form of bonuses really just hates Jews:

People inside Goldman tell me that some senior executives say they believe the onslaught of negative stories detailing Goldman's manifold ties to upper levels of government, charges that it somehow fraudulently profited from the subprime crisis, and now the press about the firm's record earnings is so out of proportion to reality that the coverage contains an element of anti-Semitism-subtly playing off the racist myth of a conspiracy of Jewish bankers controlling the world for their own benefit.

Blankfein might simply use the bonus money to buy back Goldman stock, Gasparino says, though that would risk an employee exodus. Mo' money, mo' problems.