Posts tagged with Griftopia
In bubble economics, actual human beings have only a few legitimate roles: they’re either customers of the financial services industry (borrowers, investors, or depositors) or else they’re wage earners whose taxes are used to provide both implicit and explicit investment insurance for the big casino-banks pushing the bubble scam. People aren’t really needed for anything else in the Griftopia, but since Americans require the illusion of self-government, we have elections.
Matt Taibbi, Griftopia
A loose definition of the Tea Party might be fifteen million pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the small handful of banks and investment companies who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
Matt Taibbi, Griftopia
I’m going to say something radical about the Tea Partiers. They’re not all crazy. They’re not even always wrong. What they are, and they don’t realize it, is an anachronism. They’re fighting a 1960s battle in a world run by twenty-first-century crooks. They’ve been encouraged to launch costly new offensives in already-lost cultural wars, and against a big-government hegemony of a kind that in reality hasn’t existed—or perhaps better to say, hasn’t really mattered—for decades. In the meantime an advanced new symbiosis of government and private bubble-economy interests goes undetected as it grows to exponential size and robs them blind.
Matt Taibbi, Griftopia
If you want to understand why America is such a paradise for high-class thieves, just look at the way a manufactured movement like the Tea Party corrals and neutralizes public anger that otherwise should be sending pitchforks in the direction of downtown Manhattan.
Matt Taibbi, Griftopia
If American politics made any sense at all, we wouldn’t have two giant political parties of roughly equal size perpetually fighting over the same 5–10 percent swatch of undecided voters, blues versus reds. Instead, the parties should be broken down into haves and have-nots—a couple of obnoxious bankers on the Upper East Side running for office against 280 million pissed-off credit card and mortgage customers. That’s the more accurate demographic divide in a country in which the top 1 percent has seen its share of the nation’s overall wealth jump from 34.6 percent before the crisis, in 2007, to over 37.1 percent in 2009. Moreover, the wealth of the average American plummeted during the crisis—the median American household net worth was $102,500 in 2007, and went down to $65,400 in 2009—while the top 1 percent saw its net worth hold relatively steady, dropping from $19.5 million to $16.5 million.
Matt Taibbi, Griftopia