Zoopolitik

Matt Taibbi’s latest invective for Rolling Stone is entitled “The Big Takeover,” but it might as well be called “Welcome to the American Plutocracy.”

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they’re not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d’état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — “our partners in the government,” as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The only place I disagree with Taibbi is when he insists the public should be more angry than it is. The plutocracy is nothing new. It has been a part of the American system since our founders initially extended voting rights only the landed gentry.

Which is why I feel a measure of shame over my disappointment in the Obama administration’s handling of Wall Street. Why should it surprise me that Timothy Geithner — an insider among financial insiders — was tapped for treasury secretary, or that, for all the rhetoric to the contrary, administration policies still favor the hyperwealthy? After more than fifty years living in the belly of the beast, one might think I couldn’t be fooled by words like “hope” and “change,” but there it is. Chairman Mao was right: Hope and change will only come from the barrel of a gun, and I’m too old, too complacent, and too lazy to advocate armed revolution, Lincoln to the contrary.

Besides, there are no Utopias. Though I might insist that, ideally, good government is the collective means of protecting society’s weakest individuals from being unduly exploited by its strongest, I find in practice it is nothing of the sort. In the case of AIG, for example, government has become the abettor of exploitation.

Sorry, Matt. This isn’t the “big takeover.” It’s simply business as usual.

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