Full text of Matt Taibi’s recent Rolling Stone article on the bailout:

So that’s the first step in wall street’s power grab: making up things like credit-default swaps and collateralized-debt obligations, financial products so complex and inscrutable that ordinary American dumb people – to say nothing of federal regulators and even the CEOs of major corporations like AIG – are too intimidated to even try to understand them. That, combined with wise political investments, enabled the nation’s top bankers to effectively scrap any meaningful oversight of the financial industry. In 1997 and 1998, the years leading up to the passage of Phil Gramm’s fateful act that gutted Glass-Steagall, the banking, brokerage and insurance industries spent $350 million on political contributions and lobbying. Gramm alone – then the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee – collected $2.6 million in only five years. The law passed 90-8 in the Senate, with the support of 38 Democrats, including some names that might surprise you: Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, even John Edwards.

The act helped create the too-big-to-fail financial behemoths like Citigroup, AIG and Bank of America – and in turn helped those companies slowly crush their smaller competitors, leaving the major Wall Street firms with even more money and power to lobby for further deregulatory measures. “We’re moving to an oligopolistic situation,” Kenneth Guenther, a top executive with the Independent Community Bankers of America, lamented after the Gramm measure was passed.

The situation worsened in 2004, in an extraordinary move toward deregulation that never even got to a vote. At the time, the European Union was threatening to more strictly regulate the foreign operations of America’s big investment banks if the U.S. didn’t strengthen its own oversight. So the top five investment banks got together on April 28th of that year and – with the helpful assistance of then-Goldman Sachs chief and future Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson – made a pitch to George Bush’s SEC chief at the time, William Donaldson, himself a former investment banker. The banks generously volunteered to submit to new rules restricting them from engaging in excessively risky activity. In exchange, they asked to be released from any lending restrictions. The discussion about the new rules lasted just 55 minutes, and there was not a single representative of a major media outlet there to record the fateful decision.

CommonDreams: The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution

This is the most comprehensive, clear, and funniest article I’ve read on the bailout yet.

It’s curious that Taibi doesn’t even mention Fannie and Freddie in this article, however.