Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another

by Matt Taibbi

In Europe and the United States, she zeroed in on programs like Quantitative Easing that overworked the money-producing powers of the state and pumped giant sums of invented cash into the finance sector. She called this a “massive, unprecedented, coordinated effort to provide liquidity to [the] banking systems on a grand scale.” These policies are a kind of permanent welfare mechanism for the financial sector, and have had a dramatic impact around the world. They’ve accelerated an already serious financial inequality problem and addicted the banking sector to an unsustainable subsidy. There’s only one problem, at least in terms of editors. You can’t sell this story as any one party’s fault. “It is a purely bipartisan situation that things are as fucked up as they are,” laughs Prins. The central banking policies have been supported by what we think of as the entire range of allowable political thought in America, i.e. from Bush-era Republicans who signed off on the original bank bailouts through the Obama Democrats who followed. Prins’s recent book on the topic, Collusion, describes a classic systemic problem, one that ought to have deep interest to “both” camps. For liberals, it’s a story about an obscene subsidy of the very rich, while for conservatives, it’s a profound story about the corruption of capitalism. But TV bookers have struggled to figure out how to market Prins. She tells a story of a TV host who, in a troubled voice, quizzed her off air. “He was like, ‘I can...