If you want to understand what has happened to us, to our country, why

[JDPriestly]

we are where we are, you need to read Matt Taibbi's book, Griftopia.

And no, I don't get a commission.

I wish it could be required reading.

[Ghost Dog]

1. I found this extract here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131106798

...Like most Americans, I don't know a damn thing about high finance. The rumblings of financial doom have been sounding for months now — the first half of 2008 had already seen the death of Bear Stearns, one of America's top five investment banks, and a second, Lehman Brothers, had lost 73 percent of its value in the first six months of the year and was less than two weeks away from a bankruptcy that would trigger the worldwide crisis. Within the same two-week time frame, a third top-five investment bank, Merrill Lynch, would sink to the bottom alongside Lehman Brothers thanks to a hole blown in its side by years of reckless gambling debts; Merrill would be swallowed up in a shady state-aided backroom shotgun wedding to Bank of America that would never become anything like a major issue in this presidential race. The root cause of all these disasters was the unraveling of a massive Ponzi scheme centered around the American real estate market, a huge bubble of investment fraud that floated the American economy for the better part of a decade. This is a pretty big story, but at the moment I know nothing about it. Take it as a powerful indictment of American journalism that I'm far from alone in this among the campaign press corps charged with covering the 2008 election. None of us understands this stuff. We're all way too busy watching to make sure X candidate keeps his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, and Y candidate goes to church as often as he says he does, and so on.

Just looking at Palin up on the podium doesn't impress me. She looks like a chief flight attendant on a Piedmont flight from Winston-Salem to Cleveland, with only the bag of almonds and the polyester kerchief missing from the picture. With the Junior Anti-Sex League rimless glasses and a half updo with a Bumpit she comes across like she's wearing a cheap Halloween getup McCain's vice-presidential search party bought in a bag at Walgreens after midnight — four- piece costume, Pissed- Off White Suburban Female, $19.99 plus tax.

Just going by the crude sportswriter- think that can get any campaign journalist through a whole presidential race from start to finish if he feels like winging it, my initial conclusion here is that John McCain is desperate and he's taking one last heave at the end zone by serving up this overmatched electoral gimmick in a ploy for… what? Women? Extra- horny older married men? Frequent Piedmont fliers?

... :)

Thanks for the heads up. The point about writing about Wall Street for people outside Wall Street, unlike the usual financial journalism, is an important one for the sake of healthy democracy.

"What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers," Taibbi says, "and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them."

This wasn't the worst of it, of course. While Goldman Sachs was selling these bundles, "they turned around and placed massive bets against the mortgage market knowing that it was going to collapse."

"They took suckers like AIG, and they placed massive bets that this stuff was going to fail, and AIG stupidly took the bet and that’s what ended up blowing them up," Taibbi says.

In Taibbi narrative, Goldman Sachs often plays the villain's role. "They had an extraordinary amount of political influence that was over and above the other banks," he says. "No other bank has the same record as Goldman Sachs does in terms of taking former executives and placing them in high-ranking positions in the government."

Or, as Taibbi put it in one of his early columns, "The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

[cutlassmama]

2. yes, say hello to our corporate masters. We no longer have a free country. we are all slaves

[Ken Burch]

3. I'll read it.

Thanks.

[Scuba]

4. ...a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity

"The world's most powerful investment bank is , relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

That pretty much sums up my view.

[Skidmore]

5. We are what has happened to our nation.

WE quit being responsible citizens and became consumers. We got lazy and fat and quit questioning. We bought the "American dream" in the formulation of having it all and now a la Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Sure we have grifters and thieves but we also stopped being vigilant.