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Comment by Snark7 | Hacker News Reader

Actually Matt Taibbi is, apparently, one of the very few members of the press to have the intelligence, motivation, and opportunity to attack Goldman repeatedly. Everyone else is on a 24-hour news cycle, and as far as I can tell, Blankfein taking the $9 million bonus effectively defused the situation, especially after it was leaked that his bonus could be $100 million. Setting this up and getting the press to report the relatively low bonus was a brilliant PR coup, and it appears to have worked.

That being said, I don't have any issue with his efforts at muckraking - I believe in freedom of the press after all.

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That makes him a fanatic, but it doesn't say anything about his correctness.

The other thing is that, though I'm sure Goldman's decision was partially PR-motivated, it's what they should be doing anyway.

Pulling back on Loyd's bonus was a substance-less ploy. They received over tens of billion in bailouts, plus loans at 0% on MY dime, plus 100% in payouts on 5.9b on a bankrupt company. Because if this, they posted 13b in profits and paid out 16 billion in bonuses.

Do the math and they should be out of business. Instead our corporate socialist state (fascism) paid those bonuses with my taxes.

The public needs an outlet for it's anger. Hopefully some real reform takes place. If not, then let the dissatisfaction grow.

Reform by itself isn't want people need--the reform has to be good. All you have to do is look at any country dominated by stupid reformers to see the effects of stupid reform. Heck, just look at the history of socialism.

Or the history of reform.

I seem to recall a few years ago all of the smart "capitalists"* were telling us that we should put our SS money in the market. Around 2005-2006, if I recall correctly.

Good thing we didn't do it.

*"capitalists" in scare quotes to the extent that it may describe oligarchists rather than believers in true competition.

That's not "capitalists", that's the financial media.

Most of the people I know who are involved in finance consider the financial media to be pretty stupid.

Finally, the financial media tell you to do all kinds of orthogonal and contradictory things, only some of which was to put all your money in the market. In fact, most advise and would have advised the opposite.

So, I don't see the point of what you are saying.

The financial media and all "capitalists" who've been exposed to the downside of the risks they took. All that talk of individual responsibility and keep the government out of financial markets evaporated real fast, if I recall correctly.

Of course, now it's back again. It's as if 2008-2009 never even happened.

EDIT: My bad, you didn't get my initial reference. In 2005, a bunch of the "capitalists" were saying we should privatize social security and put it in the market. I was saying that would have been dumb. Regardless of how "capitalist" it may have been.

The true capitalistic thing to do would be to let the companies that took stupid risk go out of business. Instead they want socialism. It must be wonderful to profit from big risks and get bailed out when the risks don't pay out. I would take those "risks" too.

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