Categories: The Current Situation

“The Big Takeover”

Pig in suit and top hat devouring Uncle Sam whole as he tries to devour its legPig in suit and top hat devouring Uncle Sam whole as he tries to devour its leg

The Big Takeover (here’s the regular version, and here’s the single-page “printer-friendly” version) is a Rolling Stone article that suggests that the global economic crisis isn’t about money, but power, and that Wall Street insiders are using the bailout as fuel for an all-out move to take over. Here’s an excerpt from the end of the article:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

"But wait a minute," you say to them. "No one ever asked you to stay up all night eight days a week trying to get filthy rich shorting what’s left of the American auto industry or selling $600 billion in toxic, irredeemable mortgages to ex-strippers on work release and Taco Bell clerks. Actually, come to think of it, why are we even giving taxpayer money to you people? Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?"

Joey deVilla

View Comments

  • The reason they're not throwing their asses in jail is you don't get to make up crimes post-facto and declare people guilty. The reason they're giving taxpayer money to those people is, IMHO, the people giving the money are idiots. The reason this money is being used for lavish bonuses (bonii? bone-u?) is they explicitly wrote this into the bill giving them the money.

  • David Janes: Very true. But up until that last line, "Why are we not throwing your ass in jail instead?" the article's on the right track.

  • This real estate bubble has been 10 years in the making. I am 48 pages into this book and I am sad that it took the bubble bursting for me to read it. Year after year of leaning on banks and encouraging banks to make loans to people who couldn't conceivably make the payments had to come to a bad end eventually.

    http://www.meltdownthebook.com/

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