I hope Taibbi Isn't Right...

I just finished the Matt Taibbi article "The Big Takeover" in next month's Rolling Stone and it scares the crap out of me. I know I haven't read much on the subject but I sure as hell hope he isn't right about the rampant corruption on Wall Street and in Washington. Sadly, this insanity is being reported on daily now and it looks like many of our Treasury Department's decisions are bolstering rather than moderating the sickening leech of a mess our megabank conglomerates have created thanks to geniuses like Joseph Cassano, mastermind of the AIG gambling catastrophe. I'm nervous, as we all should be, that these guys have significantly more power than any of us realize. Here's a quote from Taibbi's article that is particularly telling:

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.

I'm in the process of checking Taibbi's sources and getting a better handle on how accurate his reporting is but if even a fraction of his article is on point we are in deep trouble as a nation. It's sickening to realize that our country is shifting in favor of supporting the massive oligarchical mega corporations over the bread and butter banks that keep us all secure and afloat. Read up on it and let me know feedback or insight that maybe I've overlooking. I'll let you know where my research takes me from here.

Liz