Crazy pills

Another week, another writer trying to make sense of the financial crisis. At bat is one of my favorites: Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, with an offering titled "The Big Takeover," and subtitled "The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution ." There's a lot of high-quality vitriol as only Mr. Taibbi can deliver it, much of which I'm sure my more banking-sympathetic readers will find over the top. But he's got a great point toward the end, channeling a bit of the Shock Doctrine:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

Do with that what you will. I'm getting crazy-pilled out.