Good Writing

Matt Taibbi, once again, this time on how the banks used complex products to rape Jefferson County, Alabama when they wanted to issue debt to upgrade their sewer system:

What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human sh%$ into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack. [a county employee laid off when the debt exploded]

………

And once the giant sh%$ machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that's right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the f%$# off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.

(%$# mine, emphasis original)

I believe that I have described him as this generation's Hunter S. Thompson, but I was wrong.

He is this generation's Upton Sinclair, though there is certainly a lot of Thompson in his prose.

It's a fairly long read, and the twists and turns of the deal, where Morgan Stanley paid a middleman to bribe people, and now will be getting off Scott free, and I really can't do justice with a summary, so just read the whole thing, and at the end, you will agree with him when he says, "This isn't capitalism. It's nomadic thievery."

I wish that I could write like him.