In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where heโs unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.
Matt TaibbiObviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.
Matt TaibbiThe national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.
Matt TaibbiThe joy of being a consumer is that it doesnt require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.
Matt TaibbiWhy is JP Morgan getting so much heat? Maybe because it is a massive international crime syndicate.
Matt TaibbiIn the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life.
Matt TaibbiThe new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.
Matt Taibbi