Book review: Matt Taibbi explains why, in the new American ghetto, voting doesn't matter

In "Why Hong Kong's 'umbrella revolution' matters", Walt said The people of China would love to have the freedom of the ballot. Some are prepared to die for it. If you have it and don't use it, don't be surprised if one day you lose it.

Seemed like an irrefutable argument to me, until Agent 3 thrust into my hands a copy of Griftopia, by Matt Taibbi (Spiegel & Grau, 2010). In this eminently readable book, Mr. Taibbi dips his pen in vitriol and deconstructs the financial crisis of 2008-9 in language that even a non-economist like Walt can understand. He shows how the rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street was the work of the network of crooks, grifters and looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power.

However, Griftopia is more than an angry condemnation of the past. The author predicts that, with the grifters even more in control now than ever before, the whole maggot-gagging scenario is bound to be repeated again -- an argument that Walt finds thoroughly convincing in light of this weeks gut-wrenching ride on the Wall Street roller coaster.

I don't normally copy lengthy quotes from books I recommend, but I found the description and explanation of the new American ghetto -- the one Mr. Taibbi says we are powerless to change -- so compelling that I'm going to break my rule [You mean my rule! Ed.] Here are more than a few choice words from the introductory chapter.

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack of heroin. It concentrates the the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he's unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

In the ghetto, nobody gets real dreams. What they get are short-term rip-off versions of real dreams. You don't get real wealth, with a home, credit, a yard, money for your kids' college -- you get a fake symbol of wealth, a gold chain, a Fendi bag, a tricked-out car you bought with cash. Nobody gets to be really rich for long, but you do get to be pretend rich, for a few days, weeks, maybe even a few months. It makes you feel better to wear that gold, but when real criminals drive by on the overpass, they laugh.

It's the same in our new ghetto. We don't get real political movements and real change; what we get, instead, are crass show-business manipulations whose followers' aspirations are every bit as laughable and desperate as the wealth dreams of the street hustler with his gold rope. What we get, in other words, are moderates who don't question the corporate consensus dressed up as revolutionary leaders, like Barack Obama, and wonderfully captive opposition diversions like the Tea Party -- the latter a fake movement for real peasants....

The new America...is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose main job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.

This invisible hive of high-class thieves stays in business because when we're not completely distracted and exhausted by our work and entertainments, we prefer not to ponder the dilemma of why gasoline went over four dollars a gallon, why our pension funds just lost 20 percent of their value, or why when we do the right thing by saving money, we keep being punished by interest rates that hover near zero, while banks that have been the opposite of prudent get rewarded with free billions.

In reality political power is simply taken from most of us by a grubby kind of fiat, in little fractions of a percent here and there each and every day, through a thousand separate transactions that take place in fine print and in the margins of a vast social mechanism that most of us are simply not conscious of.

Wow! Scary. And depressing. All the same,Griftopia is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the labyrinthine inner workings of politics and finance in the Excited States of America. If you read it, at least you'll understand what's going on as the country discovers it can't awaken from Mr. Taibbi's nightmare.

Also recommended: On the same general theme -- why America is going to hell in a handbasket -- Walt recommends Mark Steyn's After America (Regnery Publishing, 2011). He and Matt Taibbi were writing at almost the same time, about the same subject. Although they approach the issue of America's decline and fall from opposing ends of the political spectrum, they reach the same depressing conclusion. Could they be wrong? Can Americans give their heads a shake, get rid of the grifters and restore the nation to its former greatness? Walt wouldn't be on it. Lifetime pct .947.