It ought to be a good thing when a financial firm and starts making money again. Green shoots! But it's really not, unless you work at said firm or maybe sleep with someone who works there — line up, ladies!

Goldman Sachs, the "giant vampire squid" that has systematically destroyed our economy again and again for the last 130 years, sucked just under $3.5 billion worth of blood from poor people in the second quarter of 2009. That's a 65 percent jump from last year.

Goldman has set aside $11.36 billion in bonuses so far this year for its 29,000 employees. The New York Times estimates that by the end of the year, bonuses will total $18 billion.

That money, which will be paid out at the end of the year, was made possible in part by $13 billion in taxpayer dollars funneled to Goldman through AIG, $10 billion in TARP funds (which Goldman has now repaid so that it can freely pay out billions in bonuses to its employees without pesky government oversight), and $28 billion in cheap debt issued by the FDIC.

So what sort of people are these Goldman folks who will be getting billions of dollars of your money right around the time you get kicked off unemployment this December? From the Times:

On Wall Street, where money is the ultimate measure, Goldman is both revered and reviled. Its bankers and traders are sometimes referred to as the Bandits of Broad Street. An executive at a rival bank characterized Goldman traders as "orcs," the warlike creatures of Middle Earth in Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings."

In Goldman's defense, everyone on Wall Street is orc-like. They're just not all quite as smug.

Of course, next quarter might not be so sweet, now that some Russian guy has stolen Goldman's supersecret money-making software. And we're absolutely confident that this claim that the company has been engaging in "massive unlawful activity" and the "biggest scam of the century" by gaining access to trading data before trades are recorded and using the information to make sure bets is just the rantings of a conspiracy-addled lunatic and no federal indictments are forthcoming. Move along, folks.