Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate willpower to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. (Griftopia, p. 14)
There will be a lot to say about health care for years to come, but the most important thing about it is that it proved the government’s utter helplessness to police whole sectors of society. Forget about fixing the health care industry; what President Obama proved to America is that his government couldn’t even win back the right to truly regulate this massive industry, even with a historic mandate at his back and after giving away everything he had to trade, conceding even the power to tax. (p. 205)
We have voters who don’t pay attention, a news media that either ignores key subjects or willfully misunderstands them, and a regulatory environment that bends easily to lobbying and campaign financing efforts. And we’ve got a superpower’s worth of accumulated wealth that is still there for the taking. You put all that together, and what you get is a thieves’ paradise - a Griftopia. (p.250)
These are some excerpts from Matt Taibbi’s mind-blowing critique of the American economic bubble machine, Griftopia. If you want to understand why the financial crisis hit so hard, start here.
For Griftopia is a narrative about individual and systemic criminal behaviour that goes unnoticed by the public and that the government isn’t able to police at all. We’re not talking about stealing a pack of gum from the supermarket here. We’re talking massive financial and economic crime and billions of dollars. Trillions, really. This criminal phenomenon isn’t specific to America, it’s happening everywhere all the time and is a sort of radioactive sick-making static floating in the atmosphere of society that makes our world ill even if we don’t know what it is that’s making us all throw up and lose our hair.
What really struck me about Griftopia was its latent argument that in the current balance of political power in the West it is the corporate organizations that are the real threat and enemy to the citizen. Though I disagree with Taibbi that ‘our world isn’t about ideology anymore’ - it is always about ideology as it is ideology which drives the behaviour of individuals and corporate organizations - the substantive point of this comment is to identify that the political and social framework in which ideology operates today has shifted and that it is now peculiarly ripe for exploitation by any so interested party. In this regard, I believe Taibbi is dead-on, in the sense that the world has changed and it is somewhat outmoded to see the government as the sole arbiter of social ill. The government cedes so much power to corporate organizations and thinks in such a short-term election cycle fashion that the majority of real, practical political power is now currently to be found in the hands of financial, economic and corporate criminals. As Taibbi documents, the health care battle in American largely proved this, and the health care fight is only one instance where corporate and industry interest bastardized and killed a good politics and policy in order to keep the few in money. The health care industry cracked the American government hard, really hard, and the goverment backed down whilst bleating its sheepish, plaintive rhetoric. Who really holds the power? Who really is the enemy of the people here?
We live in a Griftopia and it is long past time to wake up to that fact and start pushing for the regulation and financial and economic policing needed to end this completely unaccounted for and unaccountable culture of crime.
