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.

"New morality" and approval of sinful sexual relationships becoming official US religion, says Cardinal

Everyone knows that church and state are strictly separate in the United States of Armerica. Unlike in the United [soon to be disunited? Ed.] Kingdom, there is no established church, no official state religion. Or is there?! Francis Cardinal George, the Archbishop of Chicago, says that American law has "taken upon itself the mantle of a religion and officially told its citizens what they must personally think or what 'values' they must personalize in order to deserve to be part of the country."

What is the nature of the new state religion to which all Americans must bend the knee? Writing in Catholic New World, the newspaper of the archdiocese, Cardinal George explains that America's ruling classes would have us believe that "there is no difference between men and women, although nature and our very bodies clearly evidence that men and women are not interchangeable at will in forming a family."

As evidence for this assertion, Cardinal George mentions an editorial comment in the Huffington Post on June 30th. Discussing the Hobby Lobby case (in which the US Supreme Court allowed religious objection to a part of Obamacare), the writer raised "concerns about the compatibility between being a Catholic and being a good citizen." This, the prelate says, is "the self righteous voice of some members of the American establishment today who regard themselves as 'progressive' and 'enlightened'." And woe betide anyone who, even for reasons of conscience, dares to swim against the tide.

"Those who do not conform to the official religion," he says, "place their citizenship in danger."

"Swimming against the tide," the Cardinal continues, "means limiting one’s access to positions of prestige and power in society. It means that those who choose to live by the Catholic Faith will not be welcomed as political candidates to national office, will not sit on editorial boards of major newspapers, will not be at home on most university faculties, will not have successful careers as actors and entertainers. Nor will their children, who will also be suspect.

"Since all public institutions, no matter who owns or operates them, will be agents of the government and conform their activities to the demands of the official religion, the practice of medicine and law will become more difficult for faithful Catholics. It already means in some States that those who run businesses must conform their activities to the official religion or be fined, as Christians and Jews are fined for their religion in countries governed by Sharia law."

Conform or else! If you don't like the morality of Obama's America, you're free to leave.

AN ALtogether horrible rights violation by New Mexico cops

Walt has just been shown the story of what Albuquerque NM attorney Shannon L. Kennedy calls "the most egregious case of law enforcement abuse" she ever saw in eighteen years of practice. She has filed a lawsuit against the police department of Deming NM, plus a district attorney and a number of doctors, on behalf of one David Eckert, a man with a reputation for concealing illegal substances in his, errr, nether orifice.

It was his reputation, according to the report ("NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN") on Albuquerque TV station KOB-TV, that landed Mr. Eckert in a "traffic stop nightmare" -- a considerable understatement as will be seen from the video and newspaper reports of what happened.

The lawsuit alleges that Deming police pulled Mr. Eckert over at a Walmart parking lot for failing to yield at a stop sign. When he stepped out of his vehicle, the cops thought he was "clenching his buttocks". Not thinking that perhaps Eckert had a bad case of the runs, they suspected him of hiding drugs in his anal cavity, so they got a warrant for an internal search.

Acting on the warrant, the police took Mr. Eckert -- buttocks still clenched, presumably -- to a nearby ER, where doctors refused to look into the matter (geddit?), calling it "unethical". Undeterred [Stop it. Ed.] the cops transported him to Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City.

The doctors there agreed to do the necessary. First, they x-rayed Mr. Eckert. No narcotics were found. Then they performed two rectal examinations, and still found nothing. But did they stop there? Noooo. The docs gave him an enema, and forced him to evacuate in front of them and the boys in blue. Still no result.

Not satisfied, the good doctors gave Mr. Eckert a second enema, then a third, followed by a second x-ray. Still, they found nothing. But the story doesn't end there! Determined to get to the bottom of things [I said stop it!. Ed.], the doctors sedated Mr. Eckert and performed a colonscopy, sticking a camera up his rectum, into his colon and large intestine. No drugs were found, and Mr. Eckert was released, some 12 hours after his arrest.

Said Attorney Kennedy, "You could never anticipate this happening in the USA." I hate to cast aspersions on those whose mission is "to serve and protect", but I find it very easy to anticipate. The police in the USA (and every other police state on earth) do what they like. They may not have the right, but they have the power.