The best part of Matt Taibbi’s investigative polemic “Griftopia” comes at the very end. The final chapter is an updated version of his famous “vampire squid” article about Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone. In a short coda he goes through the public relations fallout and aftermath his article and similar ones produced. In all the pushback, from the financial industry cheerleaders at CNBC to Goldman’s in house press flacks, nobody challenges his facts, his quotes, his accounts of what actually fucking happened. Instead, what they find most objectionable is his classification of these deeds as wrong.
Taibbi trots out the likes of David Brooks and Megan McArdle, professional sycophants that use big enough words to maintain a shred of intellectual respect, who basically ask why he and Rolling Stone have to be such dicks about all this? What they are essentially doing is accusing him of being a class traitor, of stirring up the masses with unrealistic hopes about banks that don’t commit globe spanning fraud for a living. Brooks decries “political populists” with the kind of unmitigated disgust most people reserve for child molesters, a hack from CNBC actually uses the term “class-warfare”.
“Hey Matt”, this line of thinking goes, “So what if the financial industry melts down and costs the government trillions (with a “t”) every five or ten years? You’re still a rich, connected prick just like us, shut the fuck up and don’t rock the boat.” To be fair to them, the people making this argument have a perfectly valid, if monstrously inhumane, point. The suits in David Brooks’ closets cost more than most American families earn in a year; the prices of food and gasoline have never affected one of McArdle’s major life decisions; nobody on air at CNBC starts flying coach when the stock market crashes. For people like them financial meltdowns and recessions mean little more than a slight reshuffling of cocktail party guest lists. Taibbi’s main crime, in their eyes, is rudely spoiling their mood by pointing out that most people can’t weather downturns so comfortably.
Should any of the proud defenders of the rights of the wealthy ever manage to see past their cushy creature comforts and upper crust social strata, they would like what Taibbi is saying even less. He isn’t just defending the rights of the middle and lesser classes to exist, he’s saying that the very rich aren’t the engines of prosperity that their apologists assume. From crooked, sweetheart deals selling off municipal assets to commodities bubbles that ruin lives when gas goes over four dollars a gallon, the people who play with money for a living are systemically destroying real prosperity.
Amazingly, and this is the silent theme that runs through “Griftopia”, most of the people engaging in this self destructive looting don’t realize what they’re doing. While there are a few genuinely malicious actors, most of them just see dollar signs. Pension fund managers who never made it to the financial big leagues delude themselves into flashy but catastrophically disastrous decisions. Banks and servicers grow fat off of glorified transaction fees and never stop to think about the content of the transactions they’re brokering. From small time con artists all the way up to bank presidents who justify themselves by talking about business lending when it accounts for only a small percentage of their profits, none of them paused to consider that cash up front doesn’t justify all actions. Armed robbery, after all, has thick profit margins and pays off instantly, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
As his title suggests, robbery, theft and grifting are the only honest ways to describe what Taibbi has documented. It’s the long con of having Alan Greenspan and Ronald Reagan raise taxes on the working class so that Alan Greenspan and Bush the Younger could give the resulting money to millionaires and billionaires twenty years later. It’s insurance companies and a few useful idiots in government stealing from everyone by legalizing collusion that wouldn’t be legal in any other field.* It’s the rich and the connected robbing the poor and the ignorant by rigging markets and changing the rules.
Taibbi is often accused of being some kind of anti-capitalism crypto socialist. But what he’s really doing is exposing the anti-capitalist sins of the very wealthy. After all, capitalism is about competition, but the plutocratic villains in “Griftopia” don’t like competition. They like money, and if they have to fix the game to get it, they will.
*You had to get pretty deep into substantive coverage of the health care bill to even know it was happening, but I saw more than a few people say that ending the anti-trust exemption was far more important to effective reform than the ban on pre-existing conditions. Better than anything else I’ve read, Taibbi’s chapter on health reform makes clear both a) why the anti-trust exemption is so odious and important, and b) how it was destroyed through what can only be described as bribery.
