I encourage people to read Matt’s full blog post. Below I have reproduced what I think to be the most insightful elements: or when Matt hits high dough. Particularly when he argues that the causes of the great financial crisis were in fact legally sanctioned fraud carried out under the watchful eye of a bought and paid for state. And that really is the truth that dare not speak its name.

After the start of the GFC I wrote:

Hedge fund managers were before congress justifying their pay packages and arguing against regulation while pointing the finger of blame at the ratings companies for the crisis; aka scam, aka market failure. So which is it? Everyone agrees that crisis surely fits the bill, but the characterization of the crisis as originating in a scam or a market failure of epic proportions is being ruled out of court.

Here is the dilemma: characterize the crisis as a scam and then people will have to go to jail. The problem is that if this be a scam it involves almost every single major player in the financial and political establishment in the US. In short, call it scam and a huge swath of the US ruling class would be on the hook.

However, if the crisis is characterized as a massive market failure (and massive is no mere hyperbole, perhaps understatement) then 30 years of patient theoretical innovation in the dismal science not to mention the ideological underwriting service it played for the institutional restructuring of the past thirty years will have to be re-thought.

Here is the core of Taibbi’s recent take on the GFC:

What’s so ironic about this is that Brooks, in arguing against class warfare, and trying to present himself as someone who is above making class distinctions, is making an argument based entirely on the notion that there is an lower class and an upper class and that the one should go easy on the other because the best hope for collective prosperity is the rich creating wealth for all. This is the same Randian bullshit that we’ve been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting — this idea that the way society works is that the productive ” rich” feed the needy “poor,” and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for “excesses” might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve.

That’s basically Brooks’s entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of “excesses” — but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

And the really funny thing about Brooks’s take on populists… I mean, I’m a member of the same Yuppie upper class that Brooks belongs to. I can’t speak for the other “populists” that Brooks might be referring to, but in my case for sure, my attitude toward the likes of Lloyd Blankfein and Hank Paulson has nothing to do with class anger.

I don’t hate these guys because they’re rich and went to fancy private schools. Hell, I’m rich and went to a fancy private school. I look at these people as my cultural peers and what angers me about them is that, with many coming from backgrounds similar to mine, these guys chose to go into a life of crime and did so in a way that is going to fuck things up for everyone, rich and poor, for a generation.

Their decision to rig the markets for their own benefit is going to cause other countries to completely lose confidence in the American economy, it will impact the dollar, and ultimately will make all of us involuntary debtors to whichever state we end up having to borrow from to bail these crimes out.

And from my perspective, what makes these guys more compelling as a journalistic subject than, say, the individual homeowner who took on too much debt is a thing that has nothing to do with class, not directly, anyway. It’s that their “excesses” exist in a nexus of political and economic connections that makes them very difficult to police.

We have at least some way of dealing with the average guy who doesn’t pay his debts — in fact our government has shown remarkable efficiency in passing laws like the bankruptcy bill that attack that particular problem, and of course certain banks always have the option of not lending that money (and I won’t even get into the many different ways that the banks themselves bear responsibility for all the easy credit that was handed out in recent years).

But the kinds of things that went on at Goldman and other investment banks, in many cases there are not even laws on the books to deal with these things. In some cases what we’re talking about is the highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government, which is both fascinating from a journalistic point of view and ought to be terrifying from the point of view of any citizen, rich or poor.