It's over — we're officially, royally fucked.

Is how Matt Taibbi's long article in Rolling Stone begins, and it doesn't get any more optimistic from there on. If you were looking to be enraged by a detailed explanation of how this whole crisis is a result of a political structure that in the past 10-15 years has constructed a system to create wealth for massive companies and the financial class, this is it.

In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

Some populist rage is needed here, but boy has it been misguided so far. (via wayneandwax)