Busy day, and there is a lot of news to get through (will catch up over the weekend). One thing that jumps out at me above all else though is not even China news, it is Matt Taibbi’s latest column in Rolling Stone.

Taibbi, perhaps my current favorite journo, has been specializing in finance-related topics for the past few months, including some very well publicized pieces on Goldman Sachs. There has been a lot of pushback on Taibbi’s recent stuff from the finance press (and the banks themselves). Since I’m not an expert on these matters, it comes down to who do I think it more likely to be misleading the public? I’m a Lefty, so I’m going with Taibbi.

His latest is on some very dodgy practices by investment banks that bankrupted a county in the U.S. state of Alabama, practices that Taibbi says were replicated in other locales, like Greece.

Here’s a taste:

We live in a gangster state, and our days of laughing at other countries are over. It’s our turn to get laughed at. In Birmingham, lots of people have gone to jail for the crime: More than 20 local officials and businessmen have been convicted of corruption in federal court.

I bring up Taibbi’s non-China article to say something that I repeat periodically on this blog: on some issues, the U.S. has lost its ability to forcefully criticize other countries from a strong moral position.

As usual, I need to point out that I am NOT making a moral equivalency argument. I am NOT saying that the U.S. has the same level of local corruption that China does.

What I am saying is that this kind of thing doesn’t help, because when push comes to shove, and the U.S. government wishes to publicly criticize China (or another nation) on the issue of corruption, that country will inevitably bring this kind of incident to the fore and beat the U.S. over the head with it.

We’ve seen this countless times with respect to racism, treatment of indigenous people, income gap, poverty issues. The U.S. levels a charge, and China comes back with the cry of “hypocrisy.” I for one am tired of justifying U.S. criticism in the face of policies like the Iraq War, torture, aerial drone assassinations . . .

Needless to say, the kinds of things outlined by Taibbi should be better regulated and not merely ameliorated ex post facto (some local officials have gone to jail). This is a purely domestic reason. But additionally, all of the bad industry practices that helped lead to the Great Recession are certainly not helping the U.S. internationally.