Kass: Ben Stein, Back Off Goldman Sachs

This blog post originally appeared on RealMoney Silver on Dec. 5 at 9:02 a.m. EST.

A quick disclaimer before I defend Goldman Sachs GS and criticize Ben Stein's New York Times article (and tell you about my own role in the brouhaha): My credentials in championing consumer advocacy and criticizing Wall Street run deep. I am not your average card-carrying Wall Streeter/defender of all that is capitalist.

Thirty-five years ago, I was a "Nader Raider" and co-authored Citibank: The Ralph Nader Report with Ralph Nader and the Center for the Study of Responsive Law. The book was a critical expose on the dealings of the bank and how it mistreated consumers and overindulged its corporate clients. I continue to support Nader's Citizen Works, an organization that exists to advance the progressive citizen movement by building coalitions that speak for the public interest.

Since working with Nader, I have been more critical of the Wall Street community than almost anyone extant. (Well, not more critical than Jim Grant!) Just go through the archives or read several of my interviews or editorials I have written about Wall Street in Barron's.

And unlike the majority of Wall Streeters, I have never voted Republican.

Finally, I am currently short nearly every brokerage stock.

That said, let's move on to why I believe Ben Stein's article this weekend in The New York Times was so unfair and off base.

Regular readers of this column are aware of my history with Stein.

Throughout 2007, I have written extensively on what I believe to be Ben Stein's unrealistic view of the U.S. economy, as represented in a series of New York Times articles he penned this year.

Here are a few of those articles: "Ben Stein Whistles Past Mortgage Mess," my first column on Stein's rose-colored economic views, in which he declared that the subprime mess was a media hoax in an attempt to "talk America into a panic."

In "No Quick and Easy Fix for This Market I discounted the idea that the subprime market was an isolated problem and how it would, over the course of time, move up the credit ladder.

Stein still chooses to ignore the mortgage mess and write "Happy Talk" in the New York Times.

On Sunday (and again last evening on "Kudlow & Company"), Ben Stein continued to demonstrate not only a Pollyanna view of the credit crisis (and its economic impact) in writing "The Long and Short of It at Goldman Sachs" in the New York Times but he also attacked Goldman Sachs, its economist (Dr. Jan Hatzius) and its former chairman (Henry Paulson Jr).