By Ben Cohen

An epic piece of serious journalism by Matt Taibbi explaining how the banking system has essentially gambled with other people's money, lost it all, then forced the tax payer to erase their debts. It's a fuck over of gigantic proportions, so large, says Taibbi, America may never recover from it:

It's over — we're officially,

royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent

laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when

the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally

went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy

Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have

to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant

called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline

— a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel

of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy

itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables,

like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the

waning days of the British Empire.

Thank God for people like Taibbi - a dying breed of real journalists doing real reporting. He's only around because he's so funny, otherwise this type of investigative reporting simply wouldn't happen.