If you're tired of the Goldman Sachs/Matt Taibbi-related string of posts on this blog ("Great 'Legs': Taibbi on Goldman Sachs"; "Goldman Sachs, Culprit", "Goldman Sachs' Nine-Plus Lives") . . . you'll want to skip this.
However, if you're not, here is Taibbi's reaction to the highly orchestrated, very sophisticated PR effort mounted to deflect the criticisms he made of Goldman Sachs in a now infamous Rolling Stone piece:
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 shit, not us," but "Well, Morgan did the same stuff," and "Why aren't you writing about Morgan?" . . . .
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.
--Matt Taibbi, On "The Everyone Was Doing It" Excuse
If my stance on this wasn't already clear: Taibbi's right, Goldman Sachs is (very, very) wrong.
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