why i'm suddenly a matt taibbi fan--and why you should be, too

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frankly, i'd never heard of the guy--i mean, i knew his father from dateline nbc, but i had no idea mike had a son, much less a son who was a well-known journalist [what can i say? i'm behind the curve on lots of shit, living deep in my reactionary cave as i do].

anyway, the other night i was forcing myself with gritted teeth to watch rachel maddow for the second time (you know, because i'd been told i should) when all of a sudden, with the introduction of her first guest, her show became interesting to me for the first time.

seems our boy matt had just written an article for rolling stone on the how and why of the aig collapse, and, shortly after sitting down in the guest chair, made one of the smartest, most concise and to-the-point assessments of the whole mess i'd ever heard.

what he said was this:

If these companies are too big to fail, then they're too big to exist. In a capitalist society, we can't have a situation where all you have to do to stay in business forever is to get so big that when you screw up, the government has no choice but to come in and bail you out.

i've watched the hearings, i've read the articles, i've seen all the posturing and finger-pointing from d.c. to wall street--and nowhere, from no one in any position of power, have i heard it put like that.

and, you know why? because almost no one in our government has even the slightest interest in really fixing things--they just want to paper it over, maintain the status quo and kick it down the road for the next guy.

well, needless to say, i headed off to find matt's article, and it's great--he lays it out better than anyone i've read so far, and in a way that even a non-financial genius can understand.

the money quote:

To fix [the] problem, the government should have slowly liquidated these monster, too-big-to-fail firms and broken them down to smaller, more manageable companies. Instead, federal regulators closed ranks and used an almost completely secret bailout process to double down on the same faulty, merger-happy thinking that got us here in the first place, creating a constellation of megafirms under government control that are even bigger, more unwieldy and more crammed to the gills with systemic risk.

and then he wraps it up and puts a bow on it:

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.

because that's the essence of the thing, folks--they want to keep it complicated and opaque; it's easier to rob, steal and fund campaigns with impunity that way.

every american should read this article--and then grab their tar and feathers.

but, of course, they won't.

* * * * *

since i'm feeling all warm, generous and giving--and just to belabor the point, because when i drink that's what i do--before i head off to bed i'm gonna leave you with one more quote:

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

not matt taibbi this time--that one was henry ford, just shy of 100 years ago.