giant sucking sound - bookforum.com / current issue

giant sucking sound - bookforum.com / current issue:

'via Blog this'"The Goldman chapter is the climax of Taibbi's new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America. You can see why that might be the case from the title alone: "Bubble machines" is also a reference to Goldman. But in fact the Goldman chapter is far from the strongest entry in this collection of seven self-contained essays, all loosely connected by the theme of rich and powerful people growing richer and more powerful at the expense of the rest of us.

The first, on the Tea Party, is the most politically astute, a keenly observed and whip-smart take on the familiar thesis that the Republican party's rank and file is being expertly manipulated by a small group of plutocrats. I'd forgotten, but Taibbi forcefully reminded me, that the very name of the Tea Party comes from a bonkers rant by CNBC contributor Rick Santelli on the floor of a Chicago futures exchange, where he was egged on by millionaires in loud jackets while addressing an audience of Wall Street idiots. (You actually need to be an idiot to listen to the cacophonous sloganizing that makes up substantially all the debate on CNBC.)

The second is the most tightly argued, a compelling excoriation of Alan Greenspan that ought to be required reading for anybody who still has respect for the man. With classic Taibbi hyperbole, the chapter is entitled "The Biggest Asshole in the Universe" (Greenspan's bad, but he has a lot of competition for that distinction)—but if anybody can make the case, Taibbi can. He certainly tries.

The third is Taibbi's strongest, an evisceration of pretty much the entire financial system that focuses on the little-known story of AIG's securities-lending operation and its stupid head, Win Neuger. Up until now, most examinations of the AIG debacle have concentrated on how the firm wrote credit-default swaps—but as Taibbi makes painfully clear, the way it lent out shares and invested the collateral in increasingly dangerous long-term securities is, if anything, even more scandalous.

After that, the book weakens a bit: The chapters on commodities and infrastructure privatization pack little wallop. But Taibbi perks up in his penultimate chapter, on health insurers. It's not exactly difficult to find insurance horror stories, of course, and Taibbi stretches a bit in his attempt to paint the Obama administration's health-carereform bill as a craven capitulation to Big Insurance. But he's absolutely right that the lack of federal regulation of health insurers is scandalous, and it's good for the book to move out of the realm of finance, even if only to take the few small steps to the insurance industry.

Taibbi's at his most rhetorically colorful here, talking about how a nation "divided into red and blue should start paying attention to a third color that rules the day in Washington"—i.e., the color of puke. He continues: "The defining characteristic of puke politics is that . . . the government should be purposefully ineffectual . . . in terms of the functions we usually ascribe to the state and really only competent in . . . giving away taxpayer money in return for campaign contributions.""