Why the Banks Are Winning
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.