“The bonus system has gone beyond a means of rewarding talent and is now Wall Street’s primary business,” the newspaper editorial stated, adding: “Institutions take huge gambles because the short-term returns are a rationale for their rich payouts. But even when the consequences of their risky behavior come back to haunt them, they still pay huge bonuses.” 
 
 Well thought and well put, but for one thing: If you were looking for bonus excess despite miserable operations, the best recent example I can think of is Gannett, which owns USA Today. 
 
 The week before the editorial ran, Craig A. Dubow resigned as Gannett’s chief executive. His short six-year tenure was, by most accounts, a disaster. Gannett’s stock price declined to about $10 a share from a high of $75 the day after he took over; the number of employees at Gannett plummeted to 32,000 from about 52,000, resulting in a remarkable diminution in journalistic boots on the ground at the 82 newspapers the company owns. 
 
 Never a standout in journalism performance, the company strip-mined its newspapers in search of earnings, leaving many communities with far less original, serious reporting. 
 
 Given that legacy, it was about time Mr. Dubow was shown the door, right? Not in the current world we live in. Not only did Mr. Dubow retire under his own power because of health reasons, he got a mash note from Marjorie Magner, a member of Gannett’s board, who said without irony that “Craig championed our consumers and their ever-changing needs for news and information.” 
 
 But the board gave him far more than undeserved plaudits. Mr. Dubow walked out the door with just under $37.1 million in retirement, health and disability benefits. That comes on top of a combined $16 million in salary and bonuses in the last two years. 
 
 And in case you thought they were paying up just to get rid of a certain way of doing business — slicing and dicing their way to quarterly profits — Mr. Dubow was replaced by Gracia C. Martore, the company’s president and chief operating officer. She was Mr. Dubow’s steady accomplice in working the cost side of the business, without finding much in the way of new revenue. She has already pocketed millions in bonuses and will now be in line for even more. 
 
 Forget about occupying Wall Street; maybe it’s time to start occupying Main Street, a place Gannett has bled dry by offering less and less news while dumping and furloughing journalists in seemingly every quarter. 
 
 It’s tempting to write off Gannett’s enrichment amid the ruins as anomalous. 
 
 But Gannett is not the only big media enterprise where the consequences of bad decisions land on everyone except those who made them. The Tribune Company, a chain of newspapers and television stations run into the ground by Sam Zell after he bought it in 2007, is paying out tens of millions of dollars in bonuses as part of a deal in which it would exit bankruptcy. 
 
 Over 4,000 people in the company lost their jobs, and the journalistic missions of formerly robust newspapers it operates — including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun — have been curtailed. And even though Randy Michaels and some of his corporate fraternity brothers who operated the company into bankruptcy are gone, more than 600 managers who were there while the company cratered remain. 
 
 Not only do they have jobs while so many others were sent packing, but the remaining leadership will be eligible for a bonus pool from $26.4 million to $32.4 million under the current plan. 
 
 Through the magic of blunt force cost-cutting — about $800 million over the last three years, much of it in the form of layoffs — a lawyer for the senior creditors told the judge in charge of the bankruptcy case that the bankrupt enterprise would generate an estimated $517 million in cash flow for 2011. 
 
 Over the past three years, counting the payment scheduled for 2011, the bonuses could amount to $115 million, according to The Chicago Tribune. The drawn-out legal process hasn’t stopped lawyers and the current managers from picking the carcass clean. The Tribune story includes overleveraged purchases, feckless management and a culture of personal enrichment, all hallmarks of the Wall Street way that have left protesters enraged. 
 
 This is a not a finger-waving screed to suggest that some layoffs are more damaging than others just because they landed on people like me who type for a living. 
 
 (It’s worth noting that Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher and chairman of The New York Times Company, and Janet Robinson, the president and chief executive, were criticized by various unions for a 2009 compensation package that cost a combined $12 million. It’s also worth noting that Mr. Sulzberger chose to forgo additional compensation in other years.) ||||| The job of Wall Street is to raise capital and put it to good use. "God's work," as Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein once put it. For people who consider themselves financial geniuses, that mission shouldn't be too hard. 
 
 Apparently it is. The failure is most evident in the fortunes that Wall Street — defined broadly as New York's major banks, plus hedge funds and private equity houses — poured into high-risk mortgage products, triggering a financial crisis and ruinous recession. 
 
 Until recently, the popular response to Wall Street's excesses has been muted, except for conservative critics of the distasteful but ultimately profitable "bailouts" that averted a depression. Now, from the left, comes a ragtag assortment of college kids, labor unionists, conspiracy theorists and others who've taken to the streets in protests dubbed "Occupy Wall Street." 
 
 USA TODAY OPINION About Editorials/Debate Opinions expressed in USA TODAY's editorials are decided by its Editorial Board, a demographically and ideologically diverse group that is separate from USA TODAY's news staff. Most editorials are accompanied by an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature that allows readers to reach conclusions based on both sides of an argument rather than just the Editorial Board's point of view. 
 
 The protesters' rhetoric against capitalism and "corporate greed" is over the top, and they seem devoid of remedies. But at a gut level, they are on to something. Financial institutions that should be the enablers of economic growth have become, at least in part, destructive. Here are five legitimate reasons why people — left, right and center —should be angry at Wall Street: 
 
 •Economic distress. The Great Recession was a direct consequence of Wall Street's insatiable demand for mortgages to package into securities and sell. This demand spurred reckless lending, abetted by the government, and inflated a huge housing bubble, the bursting of which continues to inflict pain on millions of people more than three years later with no end in sight. 
 
 •Bonus excess. The bonus system has gone beyond a means of rewarding talent and is now Wall Street's primary business. Institutions take huge gambles because the short-term returns are a rationale for their rich payouts. But even when the consequences of their risky behavior come back to haunt them, they still pay huge bonuses. Last year, bonuses paid to New York City-based securities industry employees totaled $20.8 billion, up from $17.6 billion in 2008 — this at a time when unemployment nationally is above 9% and household incomes are stagnating. 
 
 •Brain drain. Because of this outsized compensation, banks and hedge funds lure some of the country's smartest people away from more productive endeavors, such as building companies. That's not easily fixed. People have every right to make their own choices. But the nation suffers if its best brains are busy manufacturing risk through schemes such as high-frequency computerized trading rather than creating jobs. 
 
 •Too big to fail. The largest institutions have grown so large that the failure of any one of them is a cataclysmic event. While last year's bank reform law creates a system for a rapid, supposedly bailout-free dissolution of failing institutions, it is highly questionable whether future leaders would let them go under. Bank CEOs know this, and it gives them confidence to pile on risk. 
 
 •The Washington racket. Through lobbyists and campaign contributions, the banking industry has long had its way in Washington. This was evident in the Clinton-era legislation that repealed a post-Depression safeguard and allowed banking behemoths to combine banking and brokerages under one roof. It was even more apparent during the Bush administration when Washington closed its eyes to reckless subprime lending. Now, after a brief period of contrition, the bank lobby is back in full force. Demands that megabanks maintain more conservative balance sheets, so bailouts won't be needed, are cast in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion as Big Government intrusion, not taxpayer protection. And hedge fund managers continue to enjoy an indefensible tax break that allows them to pay just 15% on earnings that sometimes exceed $1 billion a year. 
 
 Wall Street's misbehavior is hardly the only thing harming the economy, and its denizens make handy scapegoats for larger global forces. But Americans across the spectrum increasingly see Wall Street's shortcomings as a form of modern thievery. If things do not change soon, Wall Street will have a lot more to worry about than boisterous protesters.
– USA Today applauded Occupy Wall Street for attacking firms that give “huge bonuses” to execs who makes terrible decisions. The paper’s right—but it’s being hypocritical. Gannett, owner of USA Today, is a champion of “bonus excess despite miserable operations,” David Carr writes in the New York Times. Gannett's recently-resigned CEO Craig Dubow oversaw the loss of 20,000 employees, and "strip-mined its newspapers in search of earnings"—yet he departed, because of health problems, not performance issues, with some $37 million in benefits. And Gannett’s hardly alone among media firms “where the consequences of bad decisions land on everyone except those who made them,” Carr notes. Some 4,000 people lost jobs at the Tribune Company, which is now exiting bankruptcy in a deal that pays tens of millions in bonuses. With newspapers struggling, “the people in the industry who are content to slide people out of the back of the truck until it runs out of gas not only don’t deserve tens of millions in bonuses, they don’t deserve jobs,” Carr writes. “Forget about occupying Wall Street; maybe it’s time to start occupying Main Street.” Click through for Carr’s full column.