I’m reading Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, by Matt Taibbi, and loving every page of it. The prose is over-the-top in the manner of Hunter S. Thompson, without the drugged persona. Every page has at least one quote-worthy line, but the one that made me yell “Wow!” came on page 209, where he describes Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” And now I see that line makes it into the first paragraph of Matt’s Wikipedia entry. And he has 23,771 followers (@mtaibbi) on Twitter.
So I’m behind the curve on this one. But we can all catch up. He blogs (and more) for Rolling Stone.
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How funny; I am reading it, too. It is unbelievably well written in its way, but it is also frightening. You know he is right, and I wonder how all this will end. As a friend of mine said over dinner tonight, “I’m old and don’t care, but why aren’t the younger people rioting in the streets? Don’t they know?”
Well, I’m probably old, but I do care, and books like “Griftopia” should get more attention.
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Matt needs an editor to slash away surplus adjectives, but that’s a quibble. What matters is that he makes sense of something that has clearly gone very wrong. If he’s even half right about why Alan Greenspan is “the biggest asshole in the universe,” that’s more than plenty cause for alarm.
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I agree with Doc…Taibbi, although not an economist, has managed to provide insight (in a laughable and depressing way) to something that has indeed gone very wrong! Clearly not impartial either!
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