Yesterday, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein announced a generous $500 million dollars in funding for small businesses. Why? In contrition for the whole ruining-the economy-and-having-taxpayers-bailout-his-company-thing. Wowsers, $500 million for the hundreds of billions we spent to save your ass! That puts us about even, right guys? Right?

$500 million may look impressive from where most young people are standing. But $500 looks pretty good from where most young people are standing. In Goldman Sachs terms, $500 million is toilet paper.

 SEIU provides some good context for Blankfein’s kind hearted offer:

“$500m is one good day of trading for Goldman Sachs … it's less than 1% of what they got in taxpayer-funded assistance; or that it doesn't even compare to the $11.4 billion they paid themselves in the first half of 2009 alone.”

(If you include compensations and benefits through September, the loot adds up to $16.7 billion.)

The $500 million giftbasket is a part of Blankfein's attempt to patch things up with the American people, who are understandably pissed at his company. But if anyone is considering cutting Goldman some slack for this little PR stunt, just read this refresher from Matt Taibbi on their part in our current crisis (which is still going strong everywhere but Wall Street).

“The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed…”

This is the part of the scam where Goldman Sachs tries to remind us of all the good they’ve done for us with our own money. You’d think they’d try to be a little more convincing than $500 million.