Goldman Sucks. You Swallow.

Here's the good news: Someone got a gripload of good financial news recently. The bad news is that it isn't you, unless you're either totally loaded or an employee or investment partner with Goldman Sachs.

That's right, the venerable banking behemoth's relationship with governments and business, especially of the family variety, has paid off so much that its $9.34 billion earnings in 2006 has broken the record for the highest single-year windfall in Wall Street history. Its fourth-quarter earnings alone were almost one hundred percent higher than the year before, and the whole cash grab, when averaged out per employee, tops off at an annual salary of $622,000. Now, doesn't that just make you feel like shit? Merry fucking Christmas, Goldman Sucks.

Of course, the NY Times report clickable above has you covered on that count, if this news is bringing you down. They take great pains to remind the hoi polloi that all that money will be injected back into the American economy, especially for the holidays. Good news, right? Yeah right:

"The bonuses at Goldman, the leading merger advisor in the industry, and elsewhere on Wall Street are expected to give the New York area’s economy a substantial boost, particularly in sales of high-end residential real estate, luxury cars and other pricey goods....Spouses and the high-end retailers that cater to them feel the effect of the bonus payment, said Faith H. Consolo, vice chair of Prudential Douglas Elliman, a commercial brokerage. 'The luxury market is very dramatically affected by bonuses,' Ms. Consolo said. 'We are talking furs, jewelry, apparel and beauty items like $250 jars of face cream. Anything that makes them look good or feel good.'"

In other words, if you're in the luxury market, this news just made your life a lot better. If you're anyone else, it didn't do anything for you but remind you how little the machinations of the global market have to do with your own bottom line, which is plunging by the minute in an economy full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

Take the Goldman Sachs bonus news, for example, and only on its face if you like: The rich just got richer, which means whatever they buy will help improve their own bottom line at the expense of a global majority that may never see a penny of it. A NYC-based investment powerhouse is about to unload millions into New York alone, which means that people who already own property there -- no small chunk of change -- are about to buy more, leaving others across the world, to say nothing of the Big Apple itself, out in the cold. And then there are the luxury items that power up our hyperreal consumer culture, whether they're Hummers, yachts or blood diamonds. Uh, I mean jewelry.

Throw in the fact that, according to a recent Baltimore Sun report, "the richest two percent of adults own more than half of the world's household wealth," and it seems clear that the average American, to say nothing of the average world citizen, has little to no influence in exchanges this size. Once you add the reality that the top one percent of Americans take 16 percent of the nation's income and hold 32 percent of its wealth, and the argument for middle-class and blue-collar America's solvency seems like the lunacy that it is.

And some will tell you that Goldman Sachs' windfall is good news for the American economy. Others, like the always readable doom prophet James Kunstler, will not only tell you that "the financial 'industry' decoupled from the US economy sometime in the past decade," but also that "Goldman Sachs was rumored to have driven the price of oil down for the election season by applying huge sums of money to twiddle the futures market." All of this while reminding us all that "the Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, was CEO of Goldman Sachs until the middle of last summer."

So who's zooming who? To answer that, you need to understand the hyperreal futures market, in which Rush Limbaugh-sized bags of cash change hands for things yet to come. As the wiki puts it, "the social utility of futures markets is considered to be mainly in the transfer of risk," and risk, well, we have a shitload of that today. Wars, famines, genocides, and other ugly sides of global transactions definitely have an upside to them, especially if you're into, as are most of Goldman Sachs clients, mergers and acqusitions. Naomi Klein calls it disaster capitalism. I call it one of the only valuable exports America has left since it let its manufacturing base go the way of the dodo.

Which is why I always find it hilarious that average Americans continue to venture forth into the world trumpeting their citizenship -- in wars, in biz, in dick contests, in whatever -- while the very economic foundations of citizenship's success over the last century deteriorate more and more each day. What's in a word, indeed. Try this one: Multinational. Where in that term do you see a loyalty to the United States, an unshakeable preference for the dollar, a firmly entrenched citizenship? Nowhere, that's where. Multinationals, like Goldman Sachs which hosts offices everywhere from Bangalore to Paris, have their money invested across the world, not solely in your hood, school, or church. And as such, they're interested in making sure their bottom line is more important than any one country's. Including ours.

Where's the beef, you ask? Chew on this: While corporate earnings are off the charts ever since the Bush administration got into office, destroyed the country's surplus and mired us in Iraq, the dollar is sucking wind. After the fed's recent decision to leave interest rates intact, it fell even farther, and is now worth about half a London pound. And according to Alan Greenspan, it's going to only get worse, mostly because Greenspan thinks that the decline will come because of "growing signs that OPEC nations are shifting their assets out of the US dollar towards the euro and yen." Meanwhile, analysts cite a reality-check in the housing boom that's possessed everyone here over the last few years. Guess who manages all that housing boom cash, as rendered in mortgage loans that similarly skirt reality? You guessed it: Banks like Goldman Sachs.

But no matter how you slice it, it is painfully obvious that the United States are going to wake up and realize that their economy is in serious trouble, and that America is at the mercy of a world market that is quickly tiring of its currency, its poor education scores, its dumbshit foreign policy and pretty much everything else -- including, yes, its tolerance. Sure, our currency keeps the machine running for now, but that's just because we're the big dog with the big guns. Iran and China should take care of that within the next century, if global warming and its own particular economic scenarios don't do it first. And then where will we be?

Screwed, that's where. So swallow hard, average American. That giant sucking sound you hear is your own future, trading lower every day and running out of air while you sleep. Better wake up now and lessen the pain somehow. Or suffer the fate best described by Roy Batty in Blade Runner: "Wake up. Time to die."