ArtsJournal blogger Jan Herman found the cartoon, and joins others in accusing Taibbi of "rank anti-Semitism" for the, um, vivid language he's used to characterize Goldman Sachs. Those charges are ludicrous. There's nothing anti-Semitic in vigorously attacking Goldman for its use of revolving-door politics to secure profits in good years and back-door taxpayer bailouts in bad years. And we sincerely doubt that Taibbi went trolling through Nazi-era cartoons in search of the perfect image for his opening paragraph.

Still, there are unavoidable resonances here—the octopus is supposed to be Winston Churchill, but that's a star of David over his head and that appears to be blood dripping from his tentacles—that certainly don't help Taibbi's cause. So let's retire the phrase, shall we? That includes you, Goldman employees.

The problems facing Rolling Stone's online presence is that, well, they haven't had one. Since the late 90s, they've spread coverage of celebrities, politics, and music too thin. A destination full of Matt Taibbis, David Frickes, or celebrity gossips is one thing. Trying to do them all in the same publication is another, and it resulted in the literal and figurative sizing down of the publication.

Wenner needed to do something, so he fired an editor and brought in Steve Schwartz from Reader's Digest—yes, that Reader's Digest—as his, uh, let's see here...Chief Digital Officer. Great, well then. When Schwartz isn't commandeering the bridge of the Enterprise, he's gonna be piloting a different kind of ship. The kind that sinks before it can even set sail. Ahoy!

"I think there was the concept of, let's partner with a company that had experience in this space early on," said Schwartz, who plans to relaunch the site in January with new community and customization features. "A lot of companies spent a lot of money in trial and error mode." That said, he conceded, "It hasn't evolved nearly as much as we'd like it to."

Since Schwartz's hiring and their Unemployment for Christmas layoffs, they've made great strides, kinda capitalizing on Matt Taibbi's audience, and...that's it.

Eight months later, their Twitter's mostly an RSS feed of articles, interspersed with the occasional pieces of news. Even JetBlue's got a better Twitter. They don't have a Tumblr, their Facebook presence is mediocre, and their big high tech strategy involves one of the most reviled dinosaurs of the internet. What rhymes with BUFFERING?

Rollingstone.com will have a chance to update its music-listening technology; Wenner is determining if it will continue its partnership with Web music player Rhapsody, a joint venture with RealNetworks, after its relationship with RealNetworks ends.

Hm. Considering I can listen to whatever I want on Spotify or Pandora, amongst others, I would say that giving users the chance to interact with a widely available music player they hate isn't the most salient strategy. But this is what Wenner's spending his time "determining."

Forget the fact that Rolling Stone's losing breaking news traffic now (thanks, Brooklyn Vegan). Or that their Five Stars mean nothing anymore (thanks, Pitchfork). Or that their music analysis is being overrun (MBV), their political rockstar's still blogging for a political site that has their own writers working their own ad sales, and their movie critic is still Peter "Quotemaster" Travers.

Remember: Wenner has sites with pretty solid traffic(US Weekly), and as Maura Johnston noted, it still one of the biggest music destinations out there on brand recognition alone. But nobody cares about music enough to generate the kind of traffic the best music sites out there need to be competitive. That's not to say they couldn't become competitive, but it'd require the kind of intense online and editorial shakeup of direction and purpose they've never been able to make. And then flash back to Schwartz, who clearly doesn't understand Wenner's reluctance:

Schwartz admitted that Rollingstone.com is light on user engagement, which will be a big priority of the site relaunch. "The site that's out there right now-that whole notion of getting our audience involved in a dialogue is lost," he said.

It's pretty evident: Wenner's golden goose of ideals and ideology and influence on pop culture has to dignify—and even worse, compete with—the kinds of ragtag operations Rolling Stone once was back when Wenner first started it. Wenner's main man Hunter S. Thompson once wrote that "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." Looks like Rolling Stone was too mainstream and stodgy to get going, and for the most part, still are. As Huey Lewis once sang: it's hip to be square.

Maybe you were thinking like we were—That last night would a night for bottles popping all over town as Goldman's finest masters of the universe once again grabbed the city by the ballsack to celebrate yet another successful sodomizing of the American economy.

Nope. They're laying low, wisely we might add, something our pals at Cityfile learned when they contacted Goldman communications chief Lucas van Praag (Yep, that's really his name!) to find out where the party would be at, to which van Praag said the following:

Neither Lloyd Blankfein nor anyone else at Goldman Sachs has plans to celebrate our second quarter results.

Whoa! Well isn't that just a bucket of ice water poured down the ole britches?! Nevertheless, we have faith that the Goldmanites won't be able to contain their bonus-happy enthusiasm much longer and that they'll be back out on the town dropping what most people make in a month on bottles of fancy champagne before you know it. And when they do, we'd be very happy if you told us about it!

FInally, Matt Taibbi's much talked about Goldman article for Rolling Stone is finally up on the magazine's website. Go read it. Everyone should.

Lloyd Blankfein Plans to Make it a Bloackbuster Night [Cityfile]
The Great American Bubble Machine [Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone]
pic via

Reports the Guardian:

A lack of competition and a surge in revenues from trading foreign currency, bonds and fixed-income products has sent profits at Goldman Sachs soaring, according to insiders at the firm.

Staff in London were briefed last week on the banking and securities company's prospects and told they could look forward to bumper bonuses if, as predicted, it completed its most profitable year ever. Figures next month detailing the firm's second-quarter earnings are expected to show a further jump in profits. Warren Buffett, who bought $5bn of the company's shares in January, has already made a $1bn gain on his investment.

Further, the piece cites "experts" who say that Goldman's bonus-slinging ways is a big "F You!" to those trying to regulate a corrupt financial system. You don't say?!

Vince Cable, the (UK) Liberal Democrat treasury spokesman, said: "The investment banks more than any other institutions created the culture of excessive leverage, excessive risk and excessive bonuses that led to the downfall of the financial system. Now they are cashing in and the same bonus culture has returned. The result must be that we are being pushed to the edge of another crash."

This proves once and for all that Goldman Sachs is in fact running the United States government. Thank you Hank Paulson, Neel Kashkari et al for setting up the circumstances that have fully illuminated this fact. We're sort of pissed about this but, at the same time, feel liberated by you guys finally affirming who our true masters are. So yeah, thanks a lot a-holes.

The only bright spot in all of this is that Matt Taibbi is going to be so pissed about it, and we kind of like it when Taibbi is pissed off about something.

Goldman To Make Record Bonus Payout [Guardian]

Back in April Jeff Bercovici of the now defunct Portfolio speculated that Taibbi's absence from the Rolling Stone website was the direct result of publisher Jann Wenner's famously clueless web strategy.

You might wonder why Wenner, the magazine's owner and editor in chief, would allow a marquee writer to peddle his talents elsewhere rather than on Rollingstone.com. I wondered that myself — until I remembered hearing from a source that Tabbi had offered, during last summer's presidential campaign, to blog for the site, for free, only to be turned down by Wenner, who worried that it would detract from his work on the column.

As of this writing the last post on Rolling Stone's Taibbi Unbound blog is dated March 2nd of this year and implores readers to check out their National Affairs blog, where they can check out their "favorite Taibbi broadsides," but when readers follow the link there is nothing written by Taibbi on the National Affairs blog. Everything is written by Tim Dickinson, save for a single post written by Sean Woods.

I contacted Bercovici over the weekend to see if he'd picked up any additional information on the matter after his Portfolio post ran.

"Nope, didn't really find out anything beyond what I put in that item. Jann Wenner was too stupid and/or cheap to see the value of Matt Taibbi as a blogger, so he went to a place that will let him write whatever he wants and promote him. He's True/Slant's biggest traffic getter so far, by a comfortable margin, I think."

Yes, Taibbi is blogging up a storm over at True/Slant. He recently posted another vicious spanking of the pornstached Friedman, expressed bewilderment at the peasant mentality so pervasive in America today, and explained why Yankees' general manager Brian Cashman is an utter failure at what should be the world's easiest job.

So what gives here?

Yesterday I received a short message from Taibbi saying that his True/Slant material will soon be posting to Rolling Stone's website, and that much of Bercovici's Portfolio post was incorrect.

"I have a blog at True/Slant and the same material is going to be on the RS site very shortly, once my page there is redesigned. Portfolio got a number of things wrong in that story."

By all accounts Taibbi seems to be a good guy and we're willing to take him at his word. However, there certainly appears to be so much more to this story. If you work at Rolling Stone and have some insight you'd care to share anonymously, please, by all means, feel free to indulge us.

His original story was all about The Earth is Flat, and why Tom Friedman is a rich asshole who butchers the English language and is not particularly bright. So the new piece is on, you know, pretty much the same theme, except it's about 'stache's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Sample:

And who cares if it doesn’t quite make sense when Friedman says that Iraq is like a “vase we broke in order to get rid of the rancid water inside?”Who cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a fucking lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water? You’re missing the point, folks say, and the point is all in Friedman’s highly nuanced ideas about world politics and the economy—if you could just get past his well-meaning attempts to explain himself, you’d see that, and maybe you’d even learn something.

My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.

Ha, he sounds like us! Matt Taibbi is great and if you think you are too cool to like Matt Taibbi, you are incorrect. Suck it, 'stache. [NYPress]

New York magazine's daily online chats about the election are usually just mildly interesting, since the journalists involved tend to be overly polite to one another, because who knows who you're going to be sending a job application to someday? Even Gawker Media veterans and that Daily Kos maniac act all pleasant. But Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has never been one for such fraternal niceties, and when nymag.com threw him a sparring partner from National Review, the predictably caustic lefty went to work with his fangs, at one point typing, "tell me you're not ashamed." It was awesome and just really uncomfortable at the same time. Highlights:

It started out pleasantly enough:

M.T.: So how are you feeling about McCain's chances today?

B.Y.: I've just finished an article for National Review... about the headwinds McCain faces. I was going to look at three, and then I started to list them. I stopped at ten...

M.T.: Yeah, that's a damned shame, too. I feel really badly for the guy.

Feigning sympathy for the other side — very civil, Matt. Let's start to smack the guy around a little bit in the next question though, OK?

M.T.: ...There is absolute justice in his facing a "headwind" from the financial meltdown, from the unpopularity of the Iraq war, and so on. How is that a "headwind"? That's just self-created unpopularity...

B.Y.: Did I suggest that headwinds are unfair?

The vicious part of the debate then followed, consisting of Taibbi and the National Review guy, Byron York, trading partisan, grossly oversimplified accounts of the Wall Street meltdown.

Taibbi argued the Wall Street meltdown didn't arise because of homeowner mortgage defaults but "because of... myriad derivatives trades" like credit default swaps, financial instruments investment banks and others used to hedge risky mortgage holdings and keep potential mortgage losses off their books, and which speculators used to effectively short-sell certain bonds, thus amplifying the woes of banks.

In fact, buying the swaps was just one way financial firms threw caution to the wind risk.They also recklessly rated and bought dodgy mortgages, which are in fact defaulting to a disastrous extent, which is why many swaps were exercised and discovered to be worthless.

York, though more balanced, tries to pin some blame on "Democrats' desire to give mortgages to people, particularly minorities, who could not afford them," which is also a nasty distortion. In fact, the private sector was eager to issue and securitize subprime mortgages by lending to people of all income levels on terms they really couldn't afford — no money down, no documentation, teaser rates, etc. The returns were just to good. This is why many subprime loans were pushed on people who could qualify for regular loans.

Anyway, reality need not intrude on a nice ideological catfight! Emphasis added:

M.T.: You don't think the unregulated CDS market was a major factor in the current crisis?

B.Y.: ...I believe that many of the problems in the mortgage area can be attributed to the confluence of Democratic and Republican priorities: the Democrats' desire to give mortgages to people, particularly minorities, who could not afford them, and the Republicans' desire to achieve an "ownership society," in part by giving mortgages to people who could not afford them...

M.T.: Oh, come on. Tell me you're not ashamed to put this gigantic international financial Krakatoa at the feet of a bunch of poor black people who missed their mortgage payments... The effort of people like you to pin this whole thing on minorities, when in fact this whole thing has been caused by greedy traders dealing in unregulated markets, is despicable.

B.Y.: ... Fannie became more reckless in 2006 and 2007 than they had been in the scandal-ridden tenure of Franklin Raines (who departed in 2004)... [Decent point!]

M.T.: What a surprise that you mention Franklin Raines [really??]. Do you even know how a CDS works? Can you explain your conception of how these derivatives work? Because I get the feeling you don't understand.

B.Y.: ...When you refer to "Phil Gramm's Commodities Future Modernization Act," are you referring to S.3283, co-sponsored by Gramm, along with Senators Tom Harkin and Tim Johnson?

M.T.: In point of fact I'm talking about the 262-page amendment Gramm tacked on to that bill that deregulated the trade of credit default swaps.

Tick tick tick. Hilarious sitting here while you frantically search the Internet to learn about the cause of the financial crisis — in the middle of a live chat interview.

B.Y.: ...We've gone on for fifteen minutes longer than scheduled, and that's enough. Thanks.

M.T.: Thanks. Note, folks, that the esteemed representative of the New Republic has no idea what the hell a credit default swap is. But he sure knows what a minority homeowner looks like.

B.Y.: It's National Review.

OK then!

More like this, please, if only because it makes the comments section a lot more interesting.

"Jong has apparently never read anything else I've written," Taibbi writes. He then goes on to list some of his recent descriptions of male politicians. Rudy Giuliani has "the vestigial stoop of a once-chubby kid who grew up hiding tittie pictures from nuns"; Mike Huckabee "has the roundish, half-deflated physique of an ex-fatty"; former House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner is "An ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death."

Taibbi concludes: "I mean, wow. And I thought I was a hack."

(He also called Jong an "eight hundred year-old sex novelist." Heh.)

Then he [Abramoff] shows up a few weeks before sentencing with his cock wedged in the mouth of an adoring Vanity Fair reporter, claiming with a straight face that his problems came from trying to "save the world"...

Heh. David Margolick wrote the piece on Abramoff in the April issue of Vanity Fair. Wonder how the article tasted.

Rolling Stone
Vanity Fair

I was on the boat with Sean Penn this weekend. That's me in the background of the above photo.

[...]

Sincerely,
M. Taibbi
Reporter
Rollling Stone Magazine

It's nice to witness firsthand the inexorable spread of democracy.

Sean Penn's Katrina PR Stunt Springs a Leak [Blogcritics.org, scroll down to comment 39]

So now we really hope that's actually him. Because if not, it's a tough blow against democracy. And, though we know you're anti-pope, you're not anti-democracy, too, are you, Matt?

Earlier: Taibbi Moves to New Sinking Ship?

Thank God, then, for our readers, several of whom raised the truly important point: Is that recently resigned/ ousted New York Press columnist Matt Taibbi looking on as Penn furiously bails? Or, as an emailer puts it:

Is the job market for journalists so tough that this guy had to go become Spicoli's gondolier?

What do you think? Is it Taibbi?

Vote on it after the jump. And if you say it's him, then, dammit, it's him.

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

This email showed up first:

First and foremost, Russ loves his New York Press. It is his life, not so much because of the money, because there is no money in the Press, but because he feels passionately about good writing and ideas — left or right. His decision to sell the New York Press after 9-11 was not an easy decision. If anything he gave the business away and provided financing for the buyer, Avalon. All he wanted was the opportunity to continue writing for the New York Press and to be involved.

But then we heard from quit/ousted former Press editor Jeff Koyen, who, on the way out his South Korean door to go buy some fresh dogmeat — he called that a "half-joking" statement, and we're not sure which half — rattled off these facts, which he notes are approximate:

• As part of the agreement selling the Press to Avalon, Russ Smith earned $50,000 for 2003, plus benefits, in exchange for 48 1,800-word columns.
• The column could not be killed or even edited. (The latter prohibition Koyen & Co. ignored when necessary.)
• In 2004, Koyen managed to get Smith down to something like 1,200 words per column, reducing his payment to $35,000.
• Meantime, the publishers of the paper maintained a roughly $100,000 debt to unpaid writers and artists.

It's far too end-of-August for us to attempt to sort out such things — well, except that the Press has royally fucked over its freelancers; there's no disagreement on that — so we simply present them for your perusal. And if you haven't perused enough, you'll find the complete pro-Smith email, replete with compliments of Koyen and a nice dig at new editor Harry Siegel — after the jump.

Matt is a terrific writer — original, obnoxious and hilarious. But his characterization of Russ Smith is misleading.

First and foremost, Russ loves his New York Press. It is his life, not so much because of the money, because there is no money in the Press, but because he feels passionately about good writing and ideas - left or right. His decision to sell the New York Press after 9-11 was not an easy decision. If anything he gave the business away and provided financing for the buyer, Avalon. All he wanted was the opportunity to continue writing for the New York Press and to be involved.

What happened in the last few years since Avalon took over was a lesson in greed and just poor management. The debt incurred by NYP was not the result of Russ; it was the result of incompetent people who were just sloppy. Jeff Koyen did a heck of a job trying to put the pieces together in a period when writers and vendors were threatening to sue daily. He unfortunately was a scapegoat. Granted he was young, but he would have developed into one heck of an editor given more time.

To say that Russ was collecting paychecks while his writers were starving is bullshit. First and foremost, Russ doesn't need the Press. He has his own money from other sources. His salary was more a formality than of substance — it was a pittance like everyone else at the Press. Matt's statement that writers were not paid for a year is untrue. Writers were paid, but they were paid late. Many complaints by writers of non-payment were for old work, not the current work.

Matt is correct in saying that the Press did not invest enought in marketing. In fact, the Press missed a golden opportunity during a stretch when readership and interest skyrocketed. Instead of investing in the marketing side of the business, they started cutting costs when advertising sales didn't come in as planned for the week. It was the short-term, week-by-week thinking that turned the tide against the paper. We can only hope that New York Press retains its iconoclastic roots and not be turned into a boring piece of shit paper run by kids trying to impress his high school teacher.

Earlier:
Taibbi: Press Was Mugged
Jeff Koyen's Exit Interview

How'd Smith mug the paper? After the jump, kids.

I'll tell you what happened here. You should know that when the former owner, the conservative writer Russ Smith (aka Mugger), sold the paper, he negotiated an arrangement with the new management whereby he kept his column at an exorbitant fee price, and could not be fired. This was a condition of the sale. So Koyen and, later, Alex Zaitchik couldn't fire this guy, even though he a.) sucked, b.) was grossly insubordinate in print, constantly savaging the paper and its contributors, showing an utter lack of collegial loyalty, and c.) took a huge bite out of the contributor budget, even during times when the paper was hopelessly strapped for money.

If you look back, you'll find numerous examples of Smith blasting other Press contributors in his column (including and especially me, repeatedly saying that I was headed for the funny farm, a nut, and an immature lefty extremist); what readers didn't know is that in most of those cases, Smith was collecting his giant fee every week, while the rest of us who were the targets of his literary pseudo-wrath were going unpaid as the paper struggled. In other words, Smith was not only an editorial deadweight on the staff, but he had the nerve to rip the other contributors who were making sacrifices for the paper while he sat, fully paid, in his Manhattan townhouse, watching the Red Sox on NESN.

Hmm. Is this true? Who knows? But we really hope Smith fires back. That'll be fun.

An Exclusive Interview w/Matt Taibbi [The Toilet Paper Blog]