Why Is a Slate Writer Shilling for Goldman Sachs? Taibbi Shreds the Latest Wall Street PR

By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant. Posted July 31, 2009.

So you can see why Goldman alums sometimes don’t do very impressively once they leave Goldman. They find themselves in positions where no one questions their premises and it’s hard to get good feedback and pushback. (This is why Paulson employed telephone banks of analysts to call Wall Street to solicit opinions.) Outside of the Goldman womb of debate and ideas, bankers and traders lack perspective. You might say that no Goldman is an island. -- Will Everyone Please Shut Up About Goldman Sachs? | The Big Money, Slate.

And the winner of this month’s Most Retarded Horseshit Written In Defense of Goldman Sachs award goes to… Heidi Moore at Big Money! Come on down, Heidi!

This stuff is just getting funnier and funnier. Now that both Michael Lewis and Joe Hagan at New York have piled on and hammered the “magical” Wall Street bank’s reputation, the tearful, wounded apologies on the bank’s behalf are trickling in with some more urgency, especially now that, as Moore puts it, the bank faces the specter of “disastrously populist” hearings in the Senate for (and Moore left out this part) selling crap mortgages while shorting them at the same time.

This latest effort by Moore over at the Slate-run “Big Money” column is absolutely hilarious. She manages to write a fairly lengthy three-page article defending Goldman without addressing a single one of the main criticisms recently leveled at the bank. The piece is a protracted exercise in goalpost-moving, as her premise is that what Goldman’s critics accuse it of is not using the power of the state to bail itself out and enrich itself at the expense of others, but of having “designed the kind of hive mind that controls anything it touches.” According to Moore, the defense against the charge that Goldman executives have “the kind of hive mind that can control everything that it touches” is the fact that they fared so badly in their attempts at “controlling” government and popular opinion. She actually writes the following:

If you believe that Goldman Sachs has designed the kind of devastating hive mind that can control any institution it touches, including the U.S. government, you also have to explain why Goldman Sachs alums have a history of not functioning terribly well outside of Goldman. Why, for instance, did Henry Paulson, by all accounts a brilliant man, flounder about in the politics of the Treasury so desperately that he was forced at one point to plead with Nancy Pelosi on bended knee? Why did the first TARP overseer, Neel Kashkari, get yelled at by Congress while performing the thankless job of managing the $700 billion kitty of the government? Why did Edward Liddy, former Goldman board member who served as the new CEO of AIG (AIG), quit in a huff over bonuses?

Moore here is arguing that because Hank Paulson actually had to beg the House majority leader for $700 billion in no-strings-attached money to bail out his buddies, and because Neel Kashkari got “yelled at” for unilaterally changing the TARP mission in defiance of congressional orders (and for refusing to provide congress with information about where TARP money went and how he chose whom to give it to), and because former Goldman banker Ed Liddy evoked popular anger for using public money to shell out bonuses to the very department of AIG that bet $450 billion without having a dime to cover it (”necessitating” the bailout), that all of this somehow is proof that Goldman does not “have the kind of hive mind that conrols everything.”

In Moore’s mind, (or, as a friend of mine would put it, “in what passes for Moore’s mind”) this is a defense of Goldman because, if Goldman was as powerful as we all say, Goldman would have just zapped its “hive mind” at Nancy Pelosi, congress, and the public, and none of those parties would have bothered to criticize the bank. Logically put! Let’s put this argument into the form of a syllogism:

All all-powerful hive-mind institutions can make themselves immune to criticism,

See more stories tagged with: pr, wall street, slate, goldman sachs, heidi moore, the big money

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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