If You're Angry and You Know it Clap Your Hands

I've read a few books on the current economic crisis and watched the documentary Inside Job, and while these works explained the complexities of the collapse and certainly assigned some blame, none of them channeled the powerless frustration and anger that I have towards both our government and big business . . . but Matt Taibbi addresses this in his book Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That is Breaking America, which began as a Rolling Stone article; he points fingers, calls people "morons" and "assholes" and far worse, and refers to Goldman Sachs as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" . . . he skewers Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson and Lawrence Summers and Obama and Reagan and Clinton and both Bush presidents and everyone else involved in making decisions about our economy . . . and the result is frightening and comprehensive condemnation of our economic system, portraying it as an unregulated, backroom dealing casino that rewards the super-wealthy at the expense of the taxpayers, and, sadly, there seems to be no simple solution . . . there's nothing we can do, no party we can vote for, because the result will be the same . . . and while we debate red and blue state issues-- while half the nation rails about "overweening government power" and the other half protests against "corporate excess"-- the real problem is that our system is a combination of both these problems, and the media is never going to extensively cover complicated and boring issues like the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act and the loosening of the Commodity Exchange Act and the actual ramifications of ObamaCare, and so instead we debate about abortion and health-care and tax cuts-- we argue about if gas prices have increased because of demand from China or because we need to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge-- while the real business of America is done between the mega-banks and the government and the usual suspects, behind a green curtain that shields them from the democratic process that is more show than substance.