How big money is sending us down the gurgler

Rolling Stone magazine has run the best story I've seen on the WFC (that's World Financial Crisis, nothing to do with fried chicken). It clarifies the confusion between two points of view – one, that it's all a conspiracy or two, that politicians are sort of OK people who are doing their best on behalf of their constituents.

Writer Matt Taibbi begins:

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

It's eight pages well worth a read.