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.
He maintains a good balance between scathing sarcasm and simplifying complex events. A lot of time is spent mapping out the relationships of the current players: Paulson, Geithner and the guys who were/are running banks. It's a small world and everyone wants to help out their old friends.
The entire piece by Matt Taibbi can be found here.
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