See, now, we knew this was coming.
Matt Taibbi’s amazing Rolling Stone article about Goldman Sachs is reverberating far and wide - now Time is writing about it. And being a bit more “balanced,” by saying hey, it’s not just Goldman! Which may indeed be true, but doens’t minimize the behavior Taibbi wrote about in the first place.
Some of the other criticism, Taibbi writes today, is a little more blunt. Specifically, by highlighting the fact that Goldman Sachs has managed to help inflate, then profit from, so many bubbles in recent years makes Taibbi an anti-semite:
The evidence for these charges seems to be as follows. One, I used the word “tribe” somewhere near the end of the piece. Two, the term “blood-funnel” was used (one person also hinted that the use of a squid image was somehow anti-Semitic, but I was not entirely clear what was being referred to there). Three, I “singled out” Goldman and failed to level similar charges at “less Jewish firms” (yes, one letter-writer actually used that phrase) like Morgan-Stanley.
A few points in response to this preposterous argument. Firstly I’m going to make a blanket denial and just say that the question of religion was so far outside my thinking while writing this piece that I never even considered it.
I don’t necessarily believe this. At some point the fact that Goldman Sachs’ founders were Jewish - and that the firm was engaged in stereotypically “Jewish” financial shenanigans - had to occur to Taibbi at some point along the way. He’s too smart for it not to have.
But it’s one thing to think, as you’re writing a story, that someone might ultimately accuse you of anti-semitism; it’s another thing to actually be antisemetic, to let that filter into your actual writing. Taibbi didn’t. So whether the thought occurred to him at all beforehand is a moot point. The article wasn’t anti-Jewish. It was anti-Goldman Sachs. And it ain’t Taibbi concluding that Jewishness = Goldman Sachs; it’s his critics.
The first criticism is perhaps more legitimate, though Taibbi explains why it’s not really legitimate at all:
By any reasonable measure Goldman is and has been the baddest guy on the block for a long time. When it comes to government influence, no other Wall Street company even comes close. And while maybe one might have made an argument that other players were more damaging to society before the crisis of last year, there’s simply no question now, after the bailouts and especially after the AIG fiasco, that Goldman now reigns supreme in the area of insider advantage. To pick any other bank to tell the story of the rapidly growing influence of Wall Street on politics and the blurring of public and private roles would be a glaring journalistic oversight, and surely even Goldman’s biggest supporters would admit this.
Two, even if it is true that “everyone else was doing it”: so what? Who cares? To me this response is highly telling. We published a piece accusing Goldman Sachs of systematically ripping off pensioners and other retail investors by sticking them with rafts of toxic mortgages it knew were losers, of looting taxpayer reserves to cover its bad bets made with AIG, of manipulating gas prices to massive detrimental effect, of helping to explode an internet bubble that caused over $5 trillion in wealth to disappear, and numerous other crimes — and the response isn’t “You’re wrong,” or “We didn’t do that sh*t, not us,” but “Well, Morgan did the same stuff,” and “Why aren’t you writing about Morgan?”
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These are powerful people who know how to play the public relations game, have all the appropriate contacts, and have a playbook that they follow to discredit their critics. Whether it’s me now or the next guy who takes them on, they’re going to come back with some kind of charge, be it “Everyone was doing it,” or “We’re just smarter than the other guys, you can’t blame us for that,” or “The real culprits are the ineffective regulators,” something.
They’re going to say that and more, but whether it’s this time or the next time, the important thing is to pay attention to what they don’t say. And what they didn’t say about this piece is that it was wrong. They didn’t deny any of it. They said others were just as bad, they said I was a bad guy, they said it was a conspiracy theory. But they didn’t say it was mistaken, and that’s the only thing that matters.
