I must be getting soft-headed, or something. It just seems obvious to me that (a) Juan Cole’s Informed Comment is right about most of the issues it raises (for example, his treatment of Khamenei’s Speech Replying to Obama is vastly clearer than other stuff I’ve seen), and (b) Matt Taibbi’s The Big Takeover (“The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution”) nails what happened/is happening better than most of what I hear or read. viz:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren’t hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. 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.