Blog: Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan & Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia

NinaIllingworth December 29, 2018November 5, 2022 2008 Financial Crisis, activism, Alan Greenspan, austerity, Ayn Rand, bailout, banker, blog, book review, Books, CA4, Can't You Read, capitalism, capitalism as religion, casino, corporate welfare, Deregulation, Essays, FEC, Federal Exchange Commission, Foreclosure Crisis, Fraud, free market fundamentalism, Griftopia, hot money, investment banking, laissez faire, Matt Taibbi, Meme, neofeudalism, neoliberalism, Nina Illingworth, Offsite Writing, Racism, speculators, the fraud economy, Theory

Editor’s note: as part of the massive site re-organization I’m doing in the new year, I’m transferring offsite writing and links to such over here to ninaillingworth.com; which includes this book review and commentary essay from the end of 2018. The plan is to make it easier for readers who’ve asked me how to read all of my articles “in one place” to actually do so; at least as long as they’re prepared to go back to when the essay was originally released, then follow a link.

Unfortunately the downside is that subscribers will get notifications for content they may have already read, or may not be all that interested in. Please accept my apologies in advance, between Facebook going after anarchist pages and Twitter giving me the bum’s rush, I’m out of options here.

Finally, I should note that this blog-ish book review post originally appeared on December 29th, 2018, over on my image blog at Can’t You Read.

That Time We Learned Fraud Makes the World Go Round

Whelp, this is a little awkward. In light of Matt Taibbi’s recent descent into reactionary boomer-ville and his bizarre quest to eradicate “cancel culture” I was more than a little tempted just to skip this post. The truth however is that to this day, Taibbi’s jaw-dropping “Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History“ remains, the single most important book yet written about the true underlying cause of the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown; the Americanized fraud economy. It would in my opinion then be a crying shame to ignore what this amazing book has to offer simply because later in life, the slings and arrows of outrageous media fortune caused its author to literally lose his freaking mind over some “looters” during the George Floyd protests and the clap-back he got for undercutting the modern American Civil Rights movement on Twitter.

To that end, in this post I’m going to include not only this essay, but links to another four quotation plus commentary posts I made about Taibbi’s Griftopia throughout the end of 2018. To check out “Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan & Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia” over on my image blog at Can’t You Read, click on the title header or the quotation block below. To check out my additional commentary posts about Griftopia, scroll down to the short list at the bottom of this post.

nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

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