Must-read: Matt Taibbi on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.

From Matt Taibbi's article:
By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.


Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829#ixzz2549UrXsd

Wisdom from Matt Taibbi that won't be listened to/heeded by most people on the Left.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/obama-doesnt-want-a-progressive-deficit-deal-20110711

Two key passages from Taibbi's blog post:
 "The blindness of the DLC-era [the "centrist" Democratic Leadership Council] "Third Way" Democratic Party continues to be an astounding thing. For more than a decade now they have been clinging to the idea that the path to electoral success is social liberalism plus... laissez-faire economics – in other words, get Wall Street and corporate America to fund your campaigns, and get minorities, pro-choice and gay marriage activists (who will always frightened into loyalty by the Tea Party/Christian loonies on the other side) to march at your rallies and vote every November."
and
"I simply don't believe the Democrats would really be worse off with voters if they committed themselves to putting people back to work, policing Wall Street, throwing their weight behind a real public option in health care, making hedge fund managers pay the same tax rates as ordinary people, ending the pointless wars abroad, etc. That they won't do these things because they're afraid of public criticism, and "responding to pressure," is an increasingly transparent lie. This "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me into dat dere briar patch" deal isn't going to work for much longer. Just about everybody knows now that they want to go into that briar patch."

Frank Rich on Obama hearting Wall Street/Big Business.

http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/obama-economy/presidents-failure/

Certainly an article worth reading, though Rich loses his original thesis part of the way through to cheerlead for Obama's re-election by a voluminous recounting of the myriad sins of Mitt Romney, who's probably the most obvious used-car salesman of a Presidential candidate since John Edwards (who may have actually believed in a few of the populist notions he espoused).

Sympathy for Matt Taibbi as he receives media flogging.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/02/this_is_what_happens_if_you_te.html

The above is a blog entry in NEW YORK magazine intended as a snarky takedown of Matt Taibbi, best known for recent ROLLING STONE articles pulling back the curtains on how the U.S. government and Wall Street (particularly investment bank titans like Goldman Sachs) really do business.

This passage kind of got to me (I'll do some highlighting):
"He’s unique in that he doesn’t see anything that is good," a former editor tells Vanity Fair. "He just notices the flaws in people." But woe to those who point out his flaws, as writer James Verini, who met with Taibbi found while trying to write a piece about Exile, the English-language magazine Taibbi co-published in Moscow in the nineties.

Sounds a lot like what certain people say about me when I say that certain poetry emperors don't do a lot of good for the world of local poetry.

But I'm not Matt Taibbi--daring to highlight-in-yellow piggish, thuggish behavior by governments, corporate instruments and investment banks, and taking abuse from a corporate mainstream media who prefers for us all to shut up and consume, taking everything at no more than face value.

I'll go out on a limb and say that Taibbi, for his occasional flaws (a tendency to be too uncomfortable with blue-collar America, despite his Billy Bob Thornton's-kid-brother appearance), loves the USA and what it could and should be.

And it's too bad he's being whipped for that in the pages of NEW YORK and VANITY FAIR.

The myth of Rahm "f---ing r----ded" Emanuel as tough guy rather than profane lapdog.

http://www,fdlaction.firedoglake.com--for/ Jane Hamsher's take on Rahm Emanuel, the Special Olympics and his recent upbraiding for using the word "retarded."
http://www.taibbi.rssoundingboard.com/ for Matt Taibbi's opinion--with a few choice remarks aimed at those who choose to serve as word police.

By now, a lot of us common folks and media spoonfeeders (raise your hands, John Heilemann of NEW YORK magazine and Mike Madden of Salon.com) seem to have swallowed the grape-flavored myth of Clintonite Rahm Emanuel as the Obama Administration official who Gets Things Done with a "realistic" (read "despises liberals and liberalism") worldview.

Given the mixed-bag, incremental-at-best record of Obama: Year One, it's time for the Emanuel myth to be laid to rest.

It may be one thing for Emanuel to yell at people to "obey" administration dictates if they work in the White House or happen to be Senators/Congressmen. But to demand that liberal advocacy groups (i.e. MoveOn) fall into unquestioning lockstep is a bit much.

Rahm Emanuel is a go-along, get-along lapdog for the status quo of Wall Street (which wants to continue to do business the way they're accustomed to regardless of the Great Recession) and the (let's be PC here) plus-sized cats of both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Obviously, despite the opportunistic efforts of Sarah Palin (who merely objected to the word "retarded"), Emanuel won't be leaving the White House--probably because he's convinced too many people of his Importance to Obama.

But, to quote Gertrude Stein out of context, there truly isn't much there there where Rahm Emanuel is concerned.

And it's time for the mainstream media and the people who take it seriously to absorb that fact.

More great political commentary from Matt Taibbi

From the October 22nd entry ("Elizabeth Warren For President") on Matt Taibbi's blog http://taibbi.rssoundingboard.com, here's an excerpt (the boldface is provided by me):
I’m personally of the opinion that our main problem lay with the fact that the Democratic Party as currently constituted is more afraid of losing the financial support of Wall Street and the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry than it is of losing progressive voters. In fact, I think I’ve put that wrong, because it implies that the Democratic Party pushes the agenda of industry insiders out of fear. That is a misread of the situation, I think.

I think they prefer those people to their voters. I think they feel more comfortable with them. I heard a story recently from a Democratic Party operative who tells me that certain members of one of the president’s cabinet departments only got wind of how hard it is out there for ordinary people to pay their bills when they invited in a major corporation to give them a presentation about their financial outlook for the holiday season — and through that report found out that this company’s prospective customers were spending less because large numbers of them had been laid off, or had huge medical bills, or had maxed out their credit, and so on.

Letters from customers, survey answers and such, were read to the cabinet group. And they were shocked. This is how they find out about the economic reality of this country — accidentally, from a major campaign contributor! That’s how out of touch these people are.

Re the Goldman Sachs megaprofiting.

http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/07/14/trading-stock-underwriting-propel-goldman-to-record-profit/
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/07/15/goldman/index.html?source=newsletter
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2009/07/16/on-goldmans-giganto-profits/

Adding my voice to the no-to-AIG chorus.

One can't help but wish that the ghost of Moe Howard, leader of The Three Stooges, would appear on Earth to administer a few slaps and head-bops to Christopher Dodd and Edward Liddy. And extra slaps to the too-cautious Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as well.

Don't forget to read Matt Taibbi's long-but-explanatory article about the current financial mess--and AIG's key role in it--in the current issue of ROLLING STONE (the one with GOSSIP GIRLS Blake Lively and Leighton Meester on the cover).

Taibbi still has his Achilles heel of disdain for blue-collar America (sort of like Gene Kelly playing H.L. Mencken railing about "all-American idiots" in the 1960 film of INHERIT THE WIND), stereotyping over-their-head-in-mortgages-they-can't-pay-back homeowners as meth-addicted boobs.

Look past Taibbi's occasional spasms of condescension and you'll find a chilling tale of how Wall Street gambles with your money--and has no intention of changing its ways or giving up its opulence. And our current administration doesn't want to get too tough with the high-living titans and their destructive incompetence (and to be fair, a McCain administration likely wouldn't be any better)--because they "know things" about their complex money-castles-in-the-air that "ordinary" people don't.

Matt Taibbi on Tom Daschle--written long before Daschle's tax problems.

Something to read in the wake of Tom Daschle's resignation as President Obama's health-care czar and his withdrawal from Secretary of Health and Human Services nomination due to tax payment problems: http://www.rollingstone.com/blogs/taibbiunbound/2008/12/the-whore-factor.php#more

The mainstream media doesn't seem to want to dig as deep as Taibbi in terms of Daschle's past record as an advocate for the health insurance companies' keep-things-as-they-are policies.

Instead, there's some wailing today about how Obama's health-care "reform" is being imperiled by the Daschle resignation. Here's the Associated Press' Jennifer Loven: http://news.aol.com/main/obama-presidency/article/daschle-taxes/324156?icid=200100397x1218191867x1201179453