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| Filched from MadMikesAmerica |
Taibbi has a new book out if you don't know. Its called "
Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.".I do plan to purchase his book, but thankfully Matt is publishing bits and pieces of it at
Alternet. I do snicker at the title of his book as I too refer to most politicians as Grifters and/or Carpetbaggers. The chapter subtitle currently on Alternet:
By rallying behind dingbats and morons like Palin and Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism its rallying cry.
I firmly believe that this fuckery started, in earnest, during the 08 election by the biggest and one of THE most ignorant wingtards of them all-Sarah Palin. Being a well-read, smart and/or college-educated person is bad according to the Nutter U folks like Palin, Bachmann and that idiot extraordinaire from TX,
Louie-voters shouldn't be able to elect senators- Gohmert. These assholes love to tout their belief in the Constitution, yet they really don't understand it and would remove basic rights that all Americans have enjoyed, some for over two hundred years. But I am rambling, so here is a small excerpt from Matt Taibbi's book where he discusses The Grifter Class and why the extreme right love them to death:
So long as this stuff is not widely understood by the public, the Grifter class is going to skate on almost anything it does -- because the tendency of most voters, in particular conservative voters, is to assume that Wall Street makes its money engaging in normal capitalist business and that any attempt to restrain that sector of the economy is thinly disguised socialism.
That’s why it’s so brilliant for the Tea Party to put forward as its leaders some of the most egregiously stupid morons on our great green earth. By rallying behind dingbats like Palin and Michele Bachmann -- the Minnesota congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted global warming wasn’t a threat because "carbon dioxide is natural" -- the Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism itself a rallying cry. The Tea Party is arguing against the very idea that it’s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics.
Bachmann is the perfect symbol of the Dumb and Dumber approach to high finance. She makes a great show of saying things that would get a kindergartner busted to the special ed bus -- shrieking, for instance, that AmeriCorps was a plot to force children into liberal "reeducation camps" (Bachmann’s own son, incidentally, was a teacher in an AmeriCorps program), or claiming that the U.S. economy was "100 percent private" before Barack Obama’s election (she would later say Obama in his first year and a half managed to seize control of "51 percent of the American economy").
Earlier in the article, Taibbi admits that understanding economics and the financial world is hard if you don't have a degree or expertise in that area. I will be the first to admit that I rely on various sources to explain different parts of the economic world to me. But that said...teabaggers don't even try to understand the economic system or issue, they just buy into whatever bullshit the R's spew from their pieholes. Sadly, two of the most vocal fuckwits, one just reelected, Palin and Bachmann, have no friggin clue about how
anything works. The final passage from the Alternet reprint of Taibbi's book excerpt:
Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate will power to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions -- just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are.(emphasis mine)
Life
in general isn't simple anymore. Raising children in this decade is a horror story that makes me glad my only spawn is 31 years old and on his own. Cooking dinner and hoping to hell you aren't poisoning your loved ones. Feeding your pets and then worrying that they just ate something that will kill them. The Corporatocracy is always finding ways to get us to give them our money, be it cheap goods from China or Vietnam, extending credit and then jacking the fuck out of the interest rates, crying wolf about their bad investments or, like the Chamber of Commerce, telling us that anything Obama or the liberals want is pure, unadulterated socialism that will bring the US to it's collective knees.
