14 May 2020 Goldman Sachs Takes Taxpayer Cash While Flouting the Constitution
Courts have not looked favorably on public organizations trying to impose quotas based on race and gender. So why is it that the leadership of Goldman Sachs is trying to use its power as an investment bank to push such quotas onto publicly-traded companies? This is especially concerning as the ties between Goldman and the government become stronger.
Scott Shepard, coordinator of the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP), raised this issue at the Goldman Sachs shareholder meeting in April. And, in an interview with One America News (OAN), he presented a suggestion for stopping the company from abusing and offending the taxpaying public.
Highlighting that Goldman has decreed that it will not assist a company in “going public” – entering the stock market – if it lacked a female board member, Scott said that this was a “surely discriminatory” quota. But CEO David M. Solomon replied that he did not believe a gender requirement was a quota, claiming that greater diversity would “change the operation and success of the company for the better.”
Scott told OAN correspondent Stefan Kleinhenz that Solomon “just absolutely rejected what was obviously a quota being a quota.” As for what FEP considers fair, Scott continued:
We don’t have any objection to diversity. Our objection is to a company like Goldman – and particularly a company like Goldman that’s had so much involvement at the U.S. Treasury, so much involvement in setting formal government policy and has taken so much money from all of us – for them to require American companies to bow to their will, their self-imposed quota rule if they want to go public, we believe that’s a fairly aggressive violation of their position in our commerce stream.
And for Goldman to be doing it at this time, as the company is becoming increasingly influential in crafting government policy, Scott remarked:
Goldman really seems to be more interested in turning itself into a quasi-governmental organization than engaging with shareholders about questionable activity like this.
But this extreme closeness with the government may actually work to the favor of Goldman investors and the companies seeking to do business with Goldman in a more apolitical manner. With the strong ties and reliance on the government, Scott said, there should come obligations for the company to act with more respect for the Constitution:
With Goldman in particular, we can push politicians to add strings to the endless supply of bailout money and other incentives that go to organizations like Goldman.
I mean, for so long, they’ve been taking profits and keeping them. Privatized profits. But any time they run into losses, going to the government to seek bailouts. And so socializing their losses.
And we need to make it clear that if they’re gonna continue that model, they’d better stick to the straight and narrow on politics. Stay in the neutral middle and not become avatars of the woke left.