I don't normally recommend articles from Rolling Stone, but I just read (and re-read) a superb dissection of the roots of our current economic predicament in this month's issue by Matt Taibbi. If you can get past the lurid cover photo of the stars of "Gossip Girl," and the equally crude opening line of the article, you'll find a history of the meltdown that is as chilling as it is comprehensible and compelling...
While I don't entirely subscribe to his uber-conspiratorial conclusion (the author seems to channel his inner Oliver Stone in the final pages), I completely concur with his scathing indictment of crackhead capitalism (my unfortunate purple prose, not the author's...come to think of it, the kingpins on The Wire had more sense than the execs at AIG and Goldman-Sachs) and their lackeys in D.C.
Taibbi is clearly a man of The Left, but he is scrupulously fair in laying the blame at the feet of late 90s Clinton Dems as much as the likes of Phil Gramm.
I come away from two readings of this piece utterly convinced that our Days of Empire are done...Obamanon seems bent on recreating Iraq and Vietnam in Afghanistan...such expensive adventures are no longer fiscally feasible...There is NO money...If the President needs persuading he has only to read Taibbi's anatomy of the Wall Street rendition of Dante's Inferno...
