What Would Durkheim Do?

This is Matt Taibbi's apt description of contemporary America. It is hard to argue with its accuracy unless you're living in a cave, or watching Fox "News" exclusively.

I think we need to make the scale of the problem more understandable:

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

As I said before, having power is all about not facing consequences. You make the right decisions, you profit. You make the wrong decision, you profit. Someone else has to suffer. That is what the capitalist class is so desperate to preserve.

We work, they enjoy. And at this moment of crisis, they say: "Work harder!" They can't be ask to enjoy any less.

The Republicans have been using the politics of fear to distract us from the upward transfer of wealth. That most of us are struggling to get by doesn't seem so important if we are all about to die. When that stopped working, they switched to their historical stand-by: the politics of resentment. Because this country was great before the women, people of color, and gays insisted on being treated as humans.

It is too much to expect that the GOP, always lapdogs for corporate power, would behave otherwise. But what about the rest of us? What is our excuse?

Taibbi hits it squarely again:

"we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream."

This crisis is about the avarice and poor judgment of particular people — Joseph Cassano, C.K. Lee, Phil Gramm, among others — but it is also a culmination of the development of modern capitalism. Any system based on the hegemony of the world's owners is going to end up here, eventually. That is what capitalism is for, to allow a tiny, tiny elite to live obscenely off the labor of the rest of us.

So, what do we do about it?

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Via C&L