Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids And The Long Con That Is Breaking America

Beneath America's outer appearance of sanity and democracy, there is a machine devoted to pure theft and political despotism. The mechanism is huge and bizarrely complex — layers of government and bureaucracy, impenetrably complicated financial instruments and procedures, a law-making process that frustrates even the closest observers — and has its own distinct personality.

This once invisible machine has become increasingly apparent as it enters its endgame: states selling off public assets to foreign wealth funds for a fraction of their worth, politicians giving away public land to private developers, the senseless perpetuation of a healthcare system stubbornly designed to enrich middlemen at the cost of actual lives, politically connected arms dealers selling useless bulletproof vests for soldiers facing real bullets in Afghanistan, and on and on.

But the griftopia reached its apotheosis in the financial crisis of recent years, when a quiet coup d'état was completed, as the government and business elites joined forces to save the richest people in the country at the expense of everyone else.

Here, Matt Taibbi tells the story of the people and institutions that have taken over America, centreing on Wall Street, and then moving out to Washington, D.C., the media, and the host of other plutocrats and crumb snatchers who are in on the scam. Taibbi breaks down the components of the story in a way that any reader can understand, finding the individual threads that bring his argument to life — from the inside story of how a software theft revealed Goldman Sachs' controversial (and possibly illegal) trading techniques, to the tale of a fund manager in Dubai trying to buy the Pennsylvania Turnpike, to the dramatic story of how Big Pharma hijacked the Obama administration's healthcare plans. Uniting this investigation is Taibbi's scalding, Menckenesque dark humour and passion for revealing the hidden structure of American power.