What Would Durkheim Do?

Those that made fortunes ruining the economy will make fortunes "fixing" it — that is, making it look good until the next crisis — and even the Democrats, supposedly the party of the non-elites, are eager to enable them.

Matt Taibbi has another great essay on the subject. I like his metaphor:

This isn't really commerce, but much more like organized crime: it was a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the economy that wouldn't have been possible without accomplices in the ratings agencies and regulators willing to turn a blind eye. Imagine a meat company that bred ten billion rats, fattened them on trash and sewage, ground their bodies into chuck, and then sold it all as grade-A ground beef to McDonald's and Burger King, right under the noses of the USDA: this is exactly the same thing, only with debt instead of food. We're eating it, they're counting the money.

Capitalism is a form of organized crime. It has always been such, and Taibbi's analysis of the culpability of Goldman Sachs and others leaves no doubt. We continue to let them rob us because we continue to believe that their crimes are in our best interest. Wake up!

He continues:

Any way you slice it, Goldman was responsible for putting tens of billions of toxic mortgages on the market, resulting in mass foreclosures, mass depletion of retirement funds, and a monstrously over-leveraged financial system that we will now all be bailing out for the next half-century or so. All of this so that Goldman could make a few billion bucks acting as the middleman in all of these deadly transactions.

They'll keep stealing from us as long as we let them. Let's stop pretending that Obama, or any Democrat, wants to stop them, let alone would be able to anyway.

Workers control society through our labor. If we stop cooperating with the thieves, we can build a different kind of state. We need a different kind of world — a world without the Goldman Sachs.