We're Famous!

Oh, but wait...

Not in a good way.

Rats.

From the "Rolling Stone" excepts of Matt Taibbi's "Griftopia":

"America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.

"Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market.
..."

"When you're trying to sell a highway that was once considered one of your nation's great engineering marvels — 532 miles of hard-built road that required tons of dynamite, wood, and steel and the labor of thousands to bore seven mighty tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains — when you're offering that up to petro-despots just so you can fight off a single-year budget shortfall, just so you can keep the lights on in the state house into the next fiscal year, you've entered a new stage in your societal development.

"You know how you used to have a job, and a house, and a car, and a wife and a family, and there was food in the fridge — and now you're six months into a drug habit and you're carrying toasters and TVs out the front door every morning just to raise the cash to make it through that day? That's where we are. While a lot of this book is about how American banks used bubble schemes to strip the last meat off the bones of America's postwar golden years, the cruelest joke is that American banks now don't even have the buying power needed to finish the job of stripping the country completely clean.
..."

"Around this time, state and municipal executives began putting their infrastructure assets up to lease — essentially for sale, since the proposed leases in some cases were seventy-five years or longer. And in virtually every case that I've been able to find, the local legislature was never informed who the true owners of these leases were. Probably the best example of this is the notorious Chicago parking meter deal, a deal that would have been a hideous betrayal even without the foreign ownership angle. It was a blitzkrieg rip-off that would provide the blueprint for increasingly broke-ass America to carry lots of these prized toasters to the proverbial pawnshop.
..."

Three observations.

First, as always, Matt delivers the goods wrapped in some fine, laser-sculpted writing.

Second, although the excerpt credits "The Chicago Reader", I sincerely hope that in the book Matt singles out the mighty Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke by name. Most of basics that undergirded what I read in the excerpt, Joravsky and Dumke had in print and in detail a year and a half ago.

Third, and on a more personal note, back at the beginning of 2010 when Matt started soliciting Chicago residents for input on this story --

"Any Chicago residents out there with some strong opinions on the parking meter issue? If so, I’d like to hear from you."

-- I know that several of my readers got back to him with the intel that, if he wanted a good field guide the weirdness of Chicago and our parking meter fiasco, he would do well to contact me. And as genuinely reluctant as I am to blogwhore my work in other people's living rooms, in this case I took his open invitation...as an open invitation, and as a request for assistance from a fellow writer regarding a subject I know pretty well.

I tried to contact Mr. Taibbi -- a writer I admire and was happy to help -- more than once, even sending along some light reading that may have included some of the following:

The First Rule of Clout Club.
Of Sin Eaters and Parking Meters.
Plate Sin with Gold.
The Clout Burglars.

Never heard a word back from him, even to say "No thanks".

Which, I gotta confess, was fairly disappointing.

Of course, if Matt wants to make dis lil' misunderstandin' evaporate quicker'n a Cubs rally, per local custom all he needs to do is drop a coupla Netanyahus in da' fundraiser hat and we'll call 'er square.

C'mon Taibbi,

how you gonna say "no" to dis face?