Should Companies That Receive Taxpayer Bailouts Be Allowed To Implement Constitutionally Questionable Policies?
 

CEO David Solomon Provides Contradictory Messages About Racial Discrimination During Annual Shareholder Meeting

Washington, D.C. – Goldman Sachs CEO David M. Solomon asserted today that requiring firms that the company takes public to include a minimum number of “diverse” candidates on their boards is not a quota, but rather a reason for celebration. Earlier in the meeting, however, Solomon recognized that discrimination on the basis of race and sex is fundamentally unjust and illegitimate, but failed to reconcile this contradiction.

During the company’s virtual annual shareholder meeting, Scott Shepard, Coordinator of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project, asked Solomon:

Goldman is refusing to take companies public unless they have at least one woman on their board of directors. While diversity can be good, the federal government and courts and American opinion have always rejected hard quotas. Given how much Goldman benefited from the 2008 bailout, and how much it and other investment houses have benefited from fiscal and monetary government programs since then, how can it justify establishing a quota requirement which is surely discriminatory and that would likely be ruled unconstitutional if undertaken by the government?

After the meeting, Shepard said:

For many years now, Goldman Sachs and its leaders have played a very large role in the federal government. Many have argued that this has gone on for too long, and that its role has been too large. These concerns have been exacerbated by the size of the bailouts and subsidies that average American taxpayers have paid to relatively well-off Goldman Sachs – which is to say, primarily to its leaders.

This critique has gone hand-in-hand with the criticism that the American banking system, especially at the top, has become one in which profits are privatized, to the extraordinary benefit of the leaders of that industry, while the losses are socialized, to the detriment of the federal fisc and the federal taxpayer.

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