matt taibbi, american badass

[Strangelet]

this was on front page huffpost but in case you missed it, this has the potential to be big.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...machine/print#

This guy is one of the few american journalists not on the dole and with enough bitterness to say it like it is. I've been following his appearances, books, articles for a while and his basic views are...

1. If you're "too big to fail" you're too big to exist. Which is, like, duh! Companies getting bailed out by both Obama and Bush administrations because they are too big to fail, should instead be broken down. What system allows corporations to get so important that they reach a level where they are no longer responsible for their actions, but can just embezzle the entire system with impunity, only to get saved like a sweet-natured sibling with a drinking problem?

2. This is nothing less than a coup instigated by bankers. Which is insteresting because this is coming from Rolling Stone, not alex jones. His reasoning is that the bankers have managed to make the system so complicated that the system's failures are also complicated, which means the only people who have rigged the system are the people who can save the system. In other words, the modes and means of production have been re-engineered, patented, and copywritten by a select group of pinhead accountants and wallstreet sharks to the point where any public oversight is useless. People can't manage what they can't understand. Then there's no democratic process that can exists anymore in our economy.

3. Investors dogpiling on the commodities is still a bad idea, still creates artificial bubbles of value on things like gas, food, etc. The anti-monoply legislation passed in the 30's along with the glass-steigle act that prohibited things like citigroup and goldman sachs to exist in their current state were not dismantled by a conservative free market nob, nor a republican administration, but by larry summers, robert rubin, and the democrats under bill clinton. Which is why people should stop acting like democrats act more in their interests than the republicans.

Anyway, i'd go out and find stuff on him before basing things on my half-formed summaries. Here's a few quotes from the article.

Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibillion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman.

After the oil bubble collapsed last fall, there was no new bubble to keep things humming — this time, the money seems to be really gone, like worldwide-depression gone. So the financial safari has moved elsewhere, and the big game in the hunt has become the only remaining pool of dumb, unguarded capital left to feed upon: taxpayer money. Here, in the biggest bailout in history, is where Goldman Sachs really started to flex its muscle.