Although that is not my language, I can sympathize with Taibbi:  His way of speaking might well be what is needed to express the outrage which one might naturally feel, if one has been born in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, which has in the course of a single generation... Here is a diagnosis on Taibbi’s book’s cover:

The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 isn’t past but prologue. (...) The grifter class—made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding—has been growing in power for a generation, transforming wealth upward through increasingly complex financial mechanisms and political maneuvers. The crisis was only one terrifying manifestation of how they’ve hijacked America’s political and economic life.

Taibbi’s down-to-earth language also comes in handy to explain what happened in a way that is free from often impenetrable economics jargon. Taibbi writes about the operation of Wall Street in terms of simple metaphors such as “bubble machine” and “casino.” The book presents an anatomy of a succession of bubbles. The 1990s Dot Com Bubble he describes, for example, as throwing pumpkins through the window (which corresponds to no-value-producing startup launches) and making bids (this is the casino part). As people make bids, the value of the stock goes up, and everyone appears to be making money (the bubble). When the pumpkin hits the pavement, as it surely will, those who own it at that point lose. But meanwhile, lots of people have won, including ‘the house’ (i.e. Wall Street), which of course always wins. 

We will not follow Taibbi through the more interesting, but also more complex 2008 bubble, in which Wall Street succeeded, through so-called ‘financial innovation,’ to transform what used to be the most solid value around such as pension funds and real-estate into a bubble.  What we want to do instead is take a systemic look at his theme, and use that point of view to bring the issues he is bringing up even more down to earth.

What is popularly known as Wall Street is systemically (i.e. as a function within the US economy) “the financial services industry;” its role is to allocate the money to the projects where it’s needed, through loans, investments and other means.  

You might be a young person just out of college; you want to work, there is work that needs to be done, but there is ‘not enough money’ to pay you. Or you might be a third generation living in a house, just being evicted because you ‘don’t have enough money’ to pay the mortgage. Or...

So where’s the money? You guessed—it is probably invested into ‘pumpkins.’

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There is another thing that Taibbi describes excellently—his own profession, journalism. 

At the beginning of his book, under the title “Grifters’ Archipelago – Or Why the Tea Party Doesn’t Matter,” Taibbi is describing a situation where two weeks before “the American economy will implode in the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression,” Taibbi as Rolling Stone’s political reporter is covering the US elections; but the reporters around him – and apparently also the politicians – don’t have a faintest clue about what goes on in the US economy. 

The attention of the media, and of the public, is in fact focused on completely different things:

Like most reporters, I’ve had to expend all the energy I have just keeping track of who compared whom to Bob Dole, whose minister got caught gripping about America on tape, who sent a picture of whom in African ceremonial garb to Matt Drudge... (...)

Like most Americans, I don’t know a damn thing about high finance. (...);. Within the same two-week time frame, a third top-five investment bank, Marrill Lynch, would sink to the bottom alongside Lehman Brothers thanks to a hole blown in its side by years of reckless gambling debts (...) The root cause of all these disasters was the unraveling of a huge bubble of investment fraud that floated  the American economy for the better part of a decade. This is a pretty big story, but for the moment I know nothing about it. Take it as a powerful indictment of American journalism that I’m far from alone in this among the campaign press corps charged with covering the 2008 election. None of us understands this stuff. We’re all way too busy watching to make sure X candidate keeps his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, and Y candidate goes to church as often as he says he does, and so on.

Of course you know this, but let me say it anyway – systemically, the  role of journalism is to show people what they need to know about the world, so that they can make right choices and decisions.

And now why the Tea Party doesn’t matter (or in other words, why the conventional divisions and polarities, such as political left and right, are an entirely irrelevant focus): While following them through the elections, Taibbi portrays the Tea Party members as just as little informed as everyone else: they see the American economy going down; they see the middle class disappearing; they see themselves and their friends working hard – and they draw the conclusion that it must be the lazy people on welfare that are causing those problems.