BOOK REVIEW // Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America
by MATT TAIBBI
I discovered Matt Taibbi earlier this year during my routine wondering in the world of online-available books. Matt is quite an unusual specimen. He’s a journalist, author, critic, podcaster and all-round observer/interpreter of American politics. He minces no words, he expounds the argument with razor-sharp transitions, and does not hesitate to jab the reader with language which, in another era, would been immediately dismissed as debilitating propaganda. Matt is certainly to the left but he possesses the rare talent of making even staunch “anti-progressives” to pause and listen. This is a unique talent displayed by the rare very few in today’s arena of schizophrenic bloodbath of words.
Matt’s prose is a miracle of vocabulary choices, sharp expression technique, and the kind of “operational construction” that keeps the reader wide awake and following the thread with lively anticipation. I doubt anyone, save the absolutely narrow-minded, vocabulary straight-jacketed, and politically ossified, would drop reading his books and wonder back into the realm of usually pedestrian old and/or neo-conservative “wisdom.”
Matt’s Griftopia revolves around politics, economics, and society and what was once identified as the “American Dream,” i.e. the notion of America as the land of unlimited opportunity provided that one possessed the talent and persistence of pursuing his targets in life—and how this dream started to fray beginning in the late 1970s.
Griftopia [from ‘grift’ meaning to obtain (money or property) illicitly (as in a confidence game)], is a blow-by-blow analysis of how this “American Dream” fell victim to the hidden commodities bubble that culminated in the 2008 financial disaster engineered by the “grifter class” of financial looters i.e. the big investment banks, like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch, and their Washington politician friends.
The Grifters are a relentless, cold-blooded, take-no-prisoners lot. Their central target is how to promote a system by which private corporations acquire the (indirect) power to impose taxation on society, thus creating a literally unlimited source of cash (for themselves and their investors.) Taxation, however, has been since Day One the exclusive privilege of the Governors—and huge conflicts have exploded throughout history out of popular demands for the “fair” distribution of tax burdens. Apparently, the Grifters have little use of history, let alone its lessons.
It was Barak Obama, the reputed gold-hearted, and now multi-millionaire, “African American” friend and defender of the downtrodden and, particularly, of underprivileged minorities, who offered the Grifters the opportunity of a lifetime: the notorious Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, was a remarkable sneaky trick which let the Grifters impose their own fees and financial strictures—not very much different from what could have been federal taxes on health care—upon those in need, i.e. huge majorities of those poor-health unlucky that Nature itself guarantees to offer to the for-a-fee private corporate “carers” in perpetuity. As Matt put it:
Really Obamacare was designed as a straight money trade. The administration meant to deal away those billions in subsidies and the premiums from millions of involuntary customers in exchange for the relevant industries’ campaign contributions for a few election cycles going forward. It was almost the perfect example of politics in the Bubble Era, where the time horizon for anyone with any real power is always close to zero, long-term thinking is an alien concept, and even the most massive and ambitious undertakings are motivated entirely by short-term rewards. A radical reshaping of the entire economy, for two election cycles’ worth of campaign cash—that was what this bill meant. It sounds absurdly reductive to say so, but there’s no other explanation that makes any sense.
Taibbi, Matt. Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (Kindle Locations 2934-2939). Spiegel & Grau. Kindle Edition.
Matt’s core argument in Griftopia targets the very heart of American politics, i.e. the close “comradeship” between both Democrats and Republicans and Wall Street corporate finance—whose only “strategic target” is to maximize profits at the expense of society at large. This is an unholy alliance that keeps the American voter in darkness about the true problems facing the country and gradually diminishes the staying power of what we continue to call “American democracy.”
Griftopia is a difficult read if you are already pessimistic about America’s future. The book has been described as “cynical” and “sad” and Matt as one of Wall Street’s “most vocal populist critics.”
But, one way or another, this a masterfully constructed argument that should be part of the continuing education of anyone interested in where America is headed—and, thus, where the developed Western world is going—today.