By Ben Cohen

I know this has been reverberating around the blogosphere (anything on the front page of the Huff Post tends to do so), but it's worth repeating. Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sach's sordid history of market manipulation, outright theft, and destruction of the U.S economy:

The first thing you need to know about

Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful

investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of

humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that

smells like money. Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former

Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and

pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What

you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the

drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an

extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic

capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed

passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed

always defeats disorganized democracy. They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again.

The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the

middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are

crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower

floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that

allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies

the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes

bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving,

they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us

all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling

themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys

keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt

over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to

do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious

bubble yet.

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There are other journalist saying the same thing, but Taibbi's talent for encapsulating and simplifying complex financial language is nothing short of brilliant. His rep as an ultra cool Rolling Stone journalist also helps spread his message to people who otherwise wouldn't have the stomach to understand what was happening to them.

For those of you looking to really get to the bottom of Taibbi's reporting, I suggest reading Noam Chomsky, a man who Taibbi has borrowed a lot of his ideas from. Chomsky has been saying the same thing abour our corrupt banking/government system for 30 years, and has yet to featured on the front page of any mainstream media outlet. For an indepth look into the topic, read here. The money quote: