Sunday, January 31, 2010

That’s not a class story. It’s a crime story

Matt Taibbi chews David Brooks up and spits him out for the second week in a row.
Brooks here is trying to say that by criticizing, say, Goldman Sachs for mass thievery — criticizing a bank for selling billions of dollars worth of worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities mismarked as investment grade deals, for getting the taxpayer to pay them 100 cents on the dollar for their billions in crap investments with AIG, for forcing hundreds of millions of people to pay inflated gas and food prices when they manipulated the commodities market and helped push oil to a preposterous $149 a barrel, and for paying massive bonuses after receiving billions upon billions in public support even beyond the TARP — that in criticizing the bank for doing these things, people like me are primarily interested in being divisive and “organizing hatreds.”

1 comment:

deBeauxOs said...

When I read the op-ep Brooks wrote, it made me physically ill. The man's an apologist of the worst sort; his double standard is odious and I'm glad that Taibi called him on it.

I didn't see your blogpost about it, but yes, that's the money quote in Taibi's piece, isn't it? It gets to the heart of what's rotten in the US, and everywhere else - China, the Vatican, China, Afghanistan ...

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