Matt Taibbi’s GRIFTOPIA, a book from the best selling author is about the political and economic life of America being hijacked by politicians. It is an interesting read. Is America about to join the third world countries across the globe in their over-borrowing spree? Welcome America!
Here is part of the book:
“Here is the big difference between America and the third world: In America, our leaders put on a hell of a show for us voters, while in the third world, the bulk of the population gets squat. In the third world, most people know where they stand and don’t have illusions about it.”
“Maybe they get a parade every now and then, get to wave at shock troops carrying order of colors in an eyes-right salute. Or maybe, if they’re lucky, the leader will spring for a piece of mainstream entertainment – he’ll host a heavyweight title fight at the local Palace of Beheading. Something that puts the country on the map, cheers the national mood, distracts folks from their status as barefoot scrapers of the bottom of the international capitalist barrel.”
“But mostly your third-world schmuck gets the shaft. He gets to live in dusty unpaved dumps, eat expired food, scratch and claw at his way to an old enough age to reproduce, and then die unnecessarily of industrial accidents, malnutrition, or some long-forgotten disease of antiquity. Meanwhile, drawing upon the collective whole-life economic output of this worthy fellow and 47 million of his fellow citizens, the leader and about eighteen of his luckiest friends get to live in villas in Ibiza or the south of France, with enough money for a couple of impressive-looking ocean cruisers and a dozen sports cars.”
“We get more than that in America. We get a beautifully choreographed eighteen-month entertainment put on once every four years, a beast called presidential election that engrosses the population to the point of obsession. This on-going drama allows everyone to subsume their hopes and dreams for the future into one all-out, all-or-nothing battle for the White House, a big alabaster symbol of power we see on television a lot. Who wins and who loses this contest is a matter of utmost importance to a hell of a lot of people in this country.”
“But why it’s so important to them is one of the great unexplored mysteries of our time. It’s a mystery rooted in the central horrifying truth about our national politics.”
“Which is this: None of it really matters to us. The presidential election is a drama that we Americans have learned to wholly consume as entertainment, divorced completely from any expectations about concrete changes in our lives. For the vast majority of people who follow national elections in this country, the payoff they’re looking for when they campaign for this or that political figure is that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when the home team wins the big game. Or, more important, when a hated rival loses. Their stake in the electoral game isn’t a citizen’s interest, but a rooting interest.”
“Voters who throw their emotional weight into elections they know deep down inside won’t produce real change in their lives are also indulging in a kind of fantasy. That’s why voters still dream of politicians whose primary goal is to effectively govern and maintain a thriving first world society with great international ambitions. What voters don’t realize, or don’t want to realize, is that the dream was abandoned long ago by this country’s leaders, who know the more prosaic reality and are looking beyond the fantasy, into the future, at an America plummeted into third world status.”
“These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled America’s ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power, and hoovering up enough of what’s left of the cash on their blocks to drive around in an Escalade or a 633i for however long they have left. Our leaders know we’re turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what’s happened.”
“The engine for looting the old ghetto neighborhoods was the drug trade, which served two purposes with natural efficiency. Narco-business was the mechanism for concentrating all the money on the block into that Escalade-hungry dealer’s hands, while narco-chemistry was the mechanism for keeping the people on the block too weak and hopeless to do anything about it. The more dope you push into the neighborhood, the more weak, strung-out, and dominated the people who live there will be.”
“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 few hands with with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.”
“In the ghetto, nobody gets real dreams. What they get are short-term rip-off versions of real dreams. You don’t get real wealth, with a home, credit, a yard, money for your kids’ college – you get a fake symbol of wealth, a gold chain, a Fendi bag, a tricked-out car you bought with cash. Nobody gets to be really rich for long, but you do get to pretend rich, for a few days, weeks, maybe even few months. It makes you feel better to wear that gold, but when real criminals drive by on the overpass, they laugh.”
“It’s the same in our ghetto. we don’t get real political movements and real change; what we get, instead, are crass show business manipulations whose followers’ aspirations are every bit as laughable and desperate as the wealth dreams of the street hustler with his gold rope. What we get, in other words, are moderates who don’t question the corporate consensus dressed up as revolutionary leaders, like Barack Obama, and wonderfully captive opposition diversions like the Tea Party – the latter a fake movement for real peasant that was born that night in St. Paul, when Sarah Palin addressed we.”
Viewpoint Neutral 