Words matter. These are the best Matt Taibbi Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.
Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism.
Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way.
If the law doesn’t apply equally to everybody, then you don’t really have a system of law.
What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in Washington.
Private equity firms aren’t necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.
The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world’s outstanding bureaucratic abomination – a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish.
The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis – and, of course, in capitalism we’re not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let’s mention it anyway – shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence.
The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.
Obviously, people who commit crimes should be punished. Even people who steal socks and ‘Snow White’ videos should probably do time if they have priors, especially serious priors. But the punishment has to fit the crime, and the standard has to be the same for everyone.
America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.
The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term.
There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can’t understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in ‘U.S.A. v. Carollo,’ that turned out not to be true.
You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again.
If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat.
I didn’t know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious – he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit.
You know, I used to live in Russia where you had officers in the military opening up the warehouses at night and taking weapons out and putting them into a truck and selling them to foreign powers. That type of stuff doesn’t happen in the United States. We still have a very functioning and relatively civil society.
The only reason investors haven’t run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed.
The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.
I try to be outraged by things that other people are just very accepting of, as though they’re normal and can’t be changed. A lot of what I write about is, ‘Hey, you know, this stuff is really awful, and it doesn’t need to be, and that’s why it’s so offensive.’ Things should be better.
America’s always had a real passion for lunatic movements. That’s one of the things we’re probably known for around the world, I would imagine.
At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time.
When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the other party wins.
This is America: Corporate stealing is practically the national pastime, and Goldman Sachs is far from the only company to get away with doing it.
The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.
Comparing your family budget to the sovereign debt of the United States is a little like comparing two kindergartners tossing a paper airplane to the Apollo 11 mission.
It’s really interesting that we’ve had this great Tea Party movement that is all about restoring free market capitalist values, but what they completely fail to understand is that what we’ve got now is a situation where there is a small class of gigantic financial companies that have put themselves above capitalism.
I’m a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.
One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.
You might think otherwise, but it doesn’t naturally follow that because a law has been passed by Congress and signed by the president, said law actually has to be implemented.
We may be many things, we Americans, but we always get the job done.
To Wall Street, a firm like BP isn’t just a profitable energy company with lots of assets like oil rigs and pipelines and gas stations – it’s also a corporation that routinely borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its business up and running.
What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them.
I actually never thought that Barack Obama was anything but a typical Democratic party politician, which to me meant that he was probably in bed with Wall Street.
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.
The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely.
The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits.
Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out.
It’s not a stretch to say the whole financial industry revolves around the compass point of the absolutely safe AAA rating. But the financial crisis happened because AAA ratings stopped being something that had to be earned and turned into something that could be paid for.
Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.
The problem with the Tea Party is that it’s been used in a way that scares people into supporting an agenda that’s counter to their own interests.
For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them – emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next.
2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction.
The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending – with the exception of the money spent on them.
