Speaking of writers who can be wonderful to read even when you don’t agree with their every utterance Matt Taibi has a new piece in Rolling Stone, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”
While I think a better question is “Why is the federal government in bed with Wall Street and why are they performing abnormal acts on millions of unconsenting adults?” it’s still a good read.
Taibi is right up there with Glenn Greenwald, Robert Scheer, Sam Smith, and Nat Hentoff among writers I admire for their integrity, reasoning power, humanity, or writing skill, even though conventional wisdom says they’re in some other region of the political spectrum than I. Another one I like (because he’s wickedly funny and a sharp observer) is Mark Morford — although he’s such a bigot about guns I avoid the blood-pressure spike caused by those columns.
Claire,
I agree with you about the political leanings of Tiabi and others but he has been genuinely on top of this issue from the beginning with thorough and concise reporting.
I also disagree with much of the political thinking of Hentoff but he is also a man of integrity and a stalwart on issues related to 1st and 4th amendments.
Consistency is hugely important in my view. I don’t expect to agree with everyone all the time but to engage in battle with those who will argue from a point of principal and hold to their position is to be respected for your position. Not much worse than dealing with those who would hold their finger to the wind of popular sentiment to base their position.
Sometimes I get the feeling that real life is closer to a Raymond Chandler detective novel (or maybe Damon Runyan) than it ought to be – the fix is in, and the big boys downtown have the graft all divided up between themselves, and anyone who gets in the way winds up dead, in prison, or too scared to talk.
Thanks for warning me about Morford… I won’t go there. I already spend far too much time trying to talk sense to hoplophobes. 🙂
Kevin – I think that’s kind of like “feeling” that there’s air.
I like Taibi and read his articles, but he’s either ignorant, dense, or simply unwilling to confront the plain truth.
He gets closest in the first few paragraphs, when he writes that
“raises a profound and difficult question about the very nature of our society,” but then he asks the wrong question.
It’s all rigged. No one goes to jail because everyone is doing what they are supposed to do. It’s not a breakdown of regulatory bureaucracy and rapidly revolving doors. Taibi has spent the past 3 years confronting the beast, but like the blind men confronted by an elephant, he’s so clueless he can’t tell its face from its rear.
The federal reserve is the key. The fed was designed and is run precisely to allow banks to steal from their customers. Forever. Without consequence. All the rest is window dressing and entertainment for the feeble minded.
The normal way is to steal slowly; about 98% per century seems to work pretty well. What happened in the early 21st century was a mistake made by thieves and fools, but a mistake nonetheless. They tried to take 90% of the 2% left over from plundering the rubes in the 20th century, and they tried to do it in a few years instead of many decades.
So it blew up. But no one in real power ever thought for a moment about trying to punish and change. The status quo works so very well, quietly funneling the life’s work of hundreds of millions of people into the enormous bank accounts of the elite. It’s just too good to allow any change.
So the fed doubled the monetary base, Congress spurted out the biggest spending spree in the history of the human race, and Wall Street went back to fleecing the rubes within weeks of the collapse.
And Taibi cannot or will not comprehend the nature of the system he has been writing about for so long. That is the most remarkable part of his story. How sad, for him and for the rest of us.
S has well said…
Just received my issue of Rolling Stone today with Matt Taibbi’s article on Wall Street – “How Wall Street’s Crooks Evaded Jail.” Personally, I thought it was excellent article that spoke truth to power. But I liked Taibbi’s earlier article better which exposed the hypocrisy of the tea party movement:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-on-the-tea-party-20100928
I hope this post doesn’t get deleted like all my other posts were from Backwoods Home Magazine’s main Facebook Page.
Remember that in the years leading up to the “financial crisis”, the alphabet soup of financial enforcement agencies weren’t just sitting on their hands. These are the same people who raided NorFed and crushed eGold during that time. They also brought down criminal mastermind Martha Stewart.
It always grates on me when “progressives” (or anyone else) argue that the most expensive government in history is insufficiently expensive and intrusive to solve their pet problem of the week.
This failure of “our” regulators will, as such failures usually are, be used to argue for more powers, larger budgets, and new redundant agencies. Not that it will fix anything if all the regulators are old school chums of the banksters.