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296 of 303 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good News For People Who Love Bad News, November 7, 2010
This review is from: Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (Hardcover)
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Wow, what a wonderful piece of depressing work. Matt Taibbi writes like the manic offspring of Hunter S. Thompson and William F. Buckley, his prose has a wicked, glinting edge, he pulls no punches in his tirades, and he lays the blame for the current economy squarely at the door of unparalleled Wall Street greed and White House collusion.
The American economy has been hollowed into a huge funnel, and everything poured into it is sucked out the other end by the rapacious maw of Goldman Sachs. Why Goldman? Well, as Mr. Taibbi points out, they are the only ones left. Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail, Bear Stearns was swallowed, and AIG burned down for the insurance money. There are now fewer entities to siphon off the profits, and curiously enough, Goldman had former executives posted throughout both the Bush and Obama administrations, not to mention the Fed and the governorship of NJ!
The three major bubbles that recently struck the economy all emanated from Wall Street. The tech, commodity, and housing bubbles were engineered to squeeze every last dime out of America regardless of the future.
Wall Street has responded to Taibbi's Rolling Stone articles by disapproving of language that describes various CEOs as "mf"ers, and their websites as "BS.com" and other colorfully correct terminology; but Wall Street forgot to refute the facts, they haven't attempted to dispute what they did. A few CEOs have tried to blame the mortgage meltdown on subprime, complaining that lower income folks were socially engineered into housing--a swipe at both people and policy--but as Taibbi correctly points out, you can find maybe 1.4 trillion in subprime, but another 13 trillion is still missing.
There must be a few one star reviews up for 'Griftopia' by now, as Mr. Taibbi skewers everyone from the tea party to Ayn Rand and her evil disciple, Alan Greenspan (his chapter is entitled "The Biggest A--hole in the Universe.") But the author blames Washington rather than any one party, and admits that the tea party has some valid points, even if they don't know it themselves.
Matt Taibbi also has a great talent for explaining fiendish investment instruments like credit default swaps and tranches, none of which I fully understood, but now have a better grasp of. He uses analogies ranging from burgers to cars as he explains commodities, CDO squares, and other arcana that have reached directly into our pockets and pension plans and ended up as mega-yachts floating off the Hamptons. Finally, there's no remedy offered, no ten recommendations, Taibbi sticks to his investigative guns, epilogues out, and leaves your jaw hanging in disbelief at the extent of the scams that have sent America to the poor house.
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175 of 185 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Robbing what's left, November 4, 2010
This review is from: Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (Hardcover)
It was oddly comforting reading Taibbi's book the day after midterm elections. Reading 'Griftopia' convinced me that the Tea party, crazy people in Congress, the President who is doing his esoteric bipartisanship song and dance - nothing really matters. We have all been so profoundly screwed over, and for such a long time, that current political freak show will not make one iota of difference. Taibbi so neatly sums up life through the end of the USA as we know it (or the USA we believe we know) that I thought the outrage is beside the point.
The most devastating passage for me is the one where he explains what this country could have done with $13 trillion spent on bailouts: pay every mortgage in existence, and build house for every American who doesn't have one. He writes: "But we didn't do that, and we didn't spend money on anything else useful, either. Why? For a very good reason. Because we are no good anymore at building bridges and highways or coming up with brilliant innovations in energy or medicine... What are we good at? Robbing what's left." Devastating, and at the same time weirdly liberating. I would, after all, rather know the worst truth, than live in the fantasy USA we are being sold every day through our irresponsible media and callous politicians.
Taibbi's been compared to Michael Lewis, but I find this comparison plain lazy. Lewis writes about financial shenanigans with measured cynicism, and with a sort of appreciation for bankers who destroyed middle class of this country. Unlike him, Taibbi doesn't mince words, or tries to appear coolly above it all. He's, after all, as screwed up as is the rest of us.
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55 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Long Con, November 7, 2010
This review is from: Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (Hardcover)
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It is totally appropriate that Griftopia was released on election day. For, as Taibbi shows, elections really don't matter. Democrats and Republicans are all in on the Long Con that has emasculated our political system and made it (and all of us) beholden to Wall Street.
Taibbi cut his journalistic teeth, as it were, in the streets of 1990s Moscow, practicing gonzo journalism as a partner in the anything but PC expat paper "The Exile". So he knows from corruption and dollar politics. And in Griftopia he shows how greed and corruption have saturated the fabric of our political life so completely that we rarely recognize its extent or its chief spokesmen.
Like Alan Greenspan, whom the media painted as a parable-speaking sage, but whom Taibbi shows to be a charlatan bizarrely infatuated with Ayn Rand, and a guy who repeatedly got it wrong (throughout his entire career) about where the economy was headed. Yet Greenspan was perfectly clear about where he wanted the economy to go: decreasing banking/corporate/Wall Street regulation and taxes on the rich. He was, in fact, a chief architect of the hoovering of riches from the working to the monied classes, which Taibbi shows has been the underlying factor in every bubble created over the last 20 years.
The revelations are legion here. Of the insider deals in the 2008 Bailout, of the swindlers behind the housing bubble, of the ridiculously short-sighted trend of covering budget deficits by leasing key municipal assets to foreign sovereign wealth funds, and the trillion dollar sellout that was the Obama healthcare plan.
And Taibbi knows of what he speaks, having spent considerable time reporting directly on the the Tea Party, in Washington and on the campaign trail. As a Rolling Stone correspondent, he is certainly on the liberal end of the spectrum, yet he gores both right and left in Griftopia, and he does it in language that is fully appropriate for the subject matter, calling subjects "beetle-browed, balding types" ... "morons" ... "idiots" ... and plenty of other epithets which are not printable here.
Get this book. Read it. And, if after doing so you are not outraged, then you do not have a pulse.
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