A lucid article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi makes better sense of the current financial crisis than any of the dailies (including the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times). It is becoming apparent that the timing of the meltdown might not have been entirely accidental.

Looked at in one light the TARP legislation was George W. Bush's final gift to the wealthy, sealing the fate of millions of householders with "toxic" mortgages but ensuring that the bankers and investment houses retained not only their wealth but also their huge political power. The key paragraph for me in Taibbi's article is the following.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

If people truly understood the irresponsible way in which this country's financial dealings have been used to manipulate the negation of common aspirations there would be a backlash worthy of the name "revolution". The Republican right isn't too worried about having temporarily lost power because the scandalous financial abuses revealed over the past six months represent (besides a disgusting portrayal of human greed) an effort to tie the hands of this country's political leaders.

My uncle Cyril was an independent candidate involved in politics at a petty level back in the UK. He would rail against the corrupt career politicians, lawyers and accountants he came up against, complaining that they were "all pissing in the same pot", and "only there to feather their own nests". It appears that the petty chicanery of the parish council is being repeated on a far grander scale, and there are few in congress with a sufficient combination of integrity and acumen to oppose the process. The rest just happily keep pissing, with nests as feathery as any ever seen.

All this is happening after a century in which the gap between the rich and the poor has widened hugely. Political power has always been in the hands of the wealthy, but the most recent turn of events makes it transparently obvious that it's time to fleece the poor yet again. Thus the average wage-earner maintains the Sisyphean mortgage repayments as long as possible, only to be robbed of any capital gain by the cynical ploys of the financial moguls in companies where the minimum wage is ten times the national median.

What's too often overlooked in the wailing and gnashing of teeth is that the "toxic" mortgages now so belittled by the very people who were happy to securitize them have yielded trillions of dollars in interest payments. It is those very interest payments that have funded the profits of the financiers. If you are rich, you will stay rich and hold on to all your assets. If you are poor, you lose your only significant asset an your rock gets rolled back to the bottom of the hill.

I am tired of hearing that these institutions are "too big to fail". They already have failed. Now we are all in thrall to them, and their leaders are more confident by the day that there will be no penalties for their willful recklessness. I am so angry it's a good job for Wall Street that I don't carry a gun. It's time we all got angry, and let everyone know it.