Famous Quotes & Sayings

Matt Taibbi Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Matt Taibbi.

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Famous Quotes By Matt Taibbi

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Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief. — Matt Taibbi

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One of the key psychological characteristics of the Tea Party is its oxymoronic love of authority figures coupled with a narcissistic celebration of its own "revolutionary" defiance. It's this psychic weakness that allows this segment of the population to be manipulated by the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. The advantage is that their willingness to take orders has allowed them to organize effectively (try getting one hundred progressives at a meeting focused on anything). The downside is, they see absolutely nothing weird in launching a revolution based upon the ravings of a guy who's basically a half-baked PR stooge shoveling propaganda coal for bloodsucking transnational behemoths like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. — Matt Taibbi

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There are times when American politics seems like little more than two groups in a fever to prevent each other from trespassing upon their respective soothing versions of unreality — Matt Taibbi

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Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people. — Matt Taibbi

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Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled America's ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power, and hoovering up enough of what's left of the cash on their blocks to drive around in an Escalade or a 633i for however long they have left. — Matt Taibbi

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For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we've developed a high tolerance for conditional rights and conditional citizenship. — Matt Taibbi

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I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new. — Matt Taibbi

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'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators' time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bill. — Matt Taibbi

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What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over and over again those campaign contributions through various favors and contracts and that sort of thing. — Matt Taibbi

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I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system. — Matt Taibbi

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Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight. — Matt Taibbi

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Justice by Attrition turns courthouses like this giant complex on Schermerhorn Street into huge fun houses of unreasonableness and mindless punishment, where you can peek into just about any room and find someone absolutely beside himself with disbelief over what is happening to him. — Matt Taibbi

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To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight - it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil - but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about. — Matt Taibbi

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The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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Trump has blown up even the backroom version of the issues-driven campaign. There are no secret donors that we know of. Trump himself appears to be the largest financial backer of the Trump campaign. A financial report disclosed that Trump lent his own campaign $1.8 million while raising just $100,000. There — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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In the old days, when you took out a mortgage, it was probably through a local bank or a credit union, and whoever gave you your loan held on to it for life. If you lost your job or got too sick to work and suddenly had trouble making your payments, you could call a human being and work things out. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. — Matt Taibbi

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Unquestionably, however, something else is at work, something that cuts deeper into the American psyche. We have a profound hatred of the weak and the poor, and a corresponding groveling terror before the rich and successful, and we're building a bureaucracy to match those feelings. — Matt Taibbi

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Lenders to trade their long-term income streams for short-term cash. Say — Matt Taibbi

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Things that are jailable crimes on one end of that spectrum become speeding tickets on the other. We find white people on the jail end and black people on the speeding ticket end, but for the most part ... well, for the most part, you know what I mean. That winking understanding we all share about who gets the book thrown at him and who doesn't, that's where American racism has gone: unspoken and hidden, but bureaucratized and automated, and therefore more powerful than ever. — Matt Taibbi

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Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process. — Matt Taibbi

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Americans spend an average of about $7,200 a year on health care, compared with the roughly $2,900 average for the other market economies that make up the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), and for that greatly increased outlay we get higher infant mortality, higher obesity rates, lower longevity, fewer doctors per 1,000 people (just 2.4 per 1,000 in the United States, compared with 3.1 in OECD states), and fewer acute care hospital beds (2.7 per 1,000, compared to 3.8 per 1,000 in the OECD countries). — Matt Taibbi

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George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic. — Matt Taibbi

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But even though nobody from the government ever says anything out loud about a lack of evidence being the real reason nobody from these companies goes to jail, we're all - including reporters who cover this stuff - still supposed to accept that as the real explanation. It's a particular feature of modern American government officials, particularly Democratic Party types, that they often expect the press and the public to give them credit for their unspoken excuses. They'll vote yea on the Iraq war and the Patriot Act and nay for a public option or an end to torture or a bill to break up the banks. Then they'll cozy up to you privately and whisper that of course they're with you in spirit on those issues, but politically it just wasn't possible to vote that way. And then they start giving you their reasons. — Matt Taibbi

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The attorney general of the United States had just admitted, in front of a room full of reporters, that he asks Wall Street for advice before he prosecutes Wall Street. — Matt Taibbi

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Two of the most long-awaited legislative wet dreams of the Washington Insiders Club - an energy bill and a much-delayed highway bill - breezed into law. One mildly nervous evening was all it took to pass through the House the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), for years now a primary strategic focus of the battle-in-Seattle activist scene. And accompanied by scarcely a whimper from the Democratic opposition, a second version of the notorious USA Patriot Act passed triumphantly through both houses of Congress, with most of the law being made permanent this time. — Matt Taibbi

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It obviously matters who gets to be president. And it's perfectly valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think is more qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has gotten so out of control, it's become bigger than the presidency itself. — Matt Taibbi

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Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife's edge. We're a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there's a dial tone, and your front yard isn't underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there's no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating. — Matt Taibbi

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Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity. — Matt Taibbi

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You can have somebody living next door to you and you can live in a completely different world from that person, which is definitely something we've never experienced before. So I think just because of the media landscape and the way we get our information now, we're more atomized and isolated from each other than ever before. — Matt Taibbi

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It turns out that it's a waste of absolute political power to simply throw undocumented aliens over the border. When you have a group of people who have no rights at all, the more inspired corporate solution is to extract as much value from them as possible. That can be money, that can be property, and if they don't have either of those things left, you take their time and labor. — Matt Taibbi

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In the modern Republican Party, making sense is a secondary consideration. Years of relentless propaganda combined with extreme frustration over the disastrous Bush years and two terms of a Kenyan Muslim terrorist president have cast the party's right wing into a swirling suckhole of paranoia and conspiratorial craziness. There is nothing you can do to go too far, a fact proved, if not exactly understood, by the madman, Trump. Huckabee — Matt Taibbi

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We paid for this instead of a generation of health insurance, or an alternative energy grid, or a brand-new system of roads and highways. With the $13-plus trillion we are estimated to ultimately spend on the bailouts, we could not only have bought and paid off every single sub-prime mortgage in the country (that would only have cost $1.4 trillion), we could have paid off every remaining mortgage of any kind in this country - and still have had enough money left over to buy a new house for every American who does not already have one. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. — Matt Taibbi

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We live in a country where people believe implicitly in their right to bore the living shit out of absolutely everybody within haranguing distance with tales of their miserable, lonely, and inevitably self-deluding searches for personal fulfillment in the emotional desert that is our crass commercial culture. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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I look around. You'd have to be out of your fucking mind to write, as Marcus did, that Black History Month is a ploy to lever more entitlement money out of Congress, but the ho-hum nonresponse of the white crowd reading this bit of transparent insanity is, to me, even weirder. — Matt Taibbi

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Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer. — Matt Taibbi

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A loose definition of the Tea Party might be fifteen million pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the small handful of banks and investment companies who advertise on Fox and CNBC. — Matt Taibbi

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You know what an effective deterrent to crime is? Jail! And do you know what kind of criminal penalty actually makes people think twice about committing crimes the next time? The kind that actually comes out of some individual's pocket, not fines that come out of the corporate kitty. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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I don't often get angered by the things press spokespeople say. Most of these people have difficult jobs and are often forced to be the public faces of policies they had nothing to do with creating. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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By February 2016, when Trump was already steaming toward the nomination, I began to realize the extent to which he'd conned all of us. He first used the media's financial desperation to secure free coverage, but when the attention became not just negative but condemnatory, he used that, too. He — Matt Taibbi

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Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000 doors a year, in just one county. — Matt Taibbi

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It's increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line. — Matt Taibbi

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I'll tell you one thing," Sorensen said. "If Hillary Clinton should ever become president, God forbid ... " The crowd hissed and booed. Sorensen raised his hands. "If, God forbid, something like that were ever to happen, one of the first things they'd try to do is tax the churches. You can count on that," he said. The crowd gasped at the audacity of the suggestion. I found it ironic that by singling out Hillary specifically, Sorensen had just done the one thing that made the church no longer deserve tax-free status. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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But the steep drop in violent crime presented police with a problem. If making arrests is the only way to advance in your career, but crime is dropping, what do you do? Furthermore, what to do if the only way to make a living wage is to rack up as much overtime as possible? — Matt Taibbi

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In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don't like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires. — Matt Taibbi

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If you look back in history, as the barbarians were invading the gates of Rome, people were consulting fortunetellers and worrying about the end of the world and all sorts of other apocalyptic notions. When the tsars were finally overthrown, they were all reading tarot cards even as the revolutionaries were banging at the gates. — Matt Taibbi

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The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people. — Matt Taibbi

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If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law. — Matt Taibbi

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In a pure capitalist system, an institution as moronic and corrupt as Bank of America would be swiftly punished by the market - the executives would get to loot their own firms once, then they'd be looking for jobs again. — Matt Taibbi

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The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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Get your liver ready: the second GOP debate is upon us S — Matt Taibbi

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'Nobody goes to jail.' This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth - and nobody went to jail. — Matt Taibbi

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So long as the investigation is still open, Gunnels explains, there is no way to request documents pertaining to the case through the Freedom of Information Act. "That investigation will probably stay open a long time," he says. — Matt Taibbi

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Voters who throw their emotional weight into elections they know deep down inside won't produce real change in their lives are also indulging in a kind of fantasy. That's why voters still dream of politicians whose primary goal is to effectively govern and maintain a thriving first world society with great international ambitions. What voters don't realize, or don't want to realize, is that that dream was abandoned long ago by this country's leaders, who know the more prosaic reality and are looking beyond the fantasy, into the future, at an America plummeted into third world status. — Matt Taibbi

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The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. — Matt Taibbi

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Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal. — Matt Taibbi

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Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. — Matt Taibbi

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What's happened now, in this new era of settlements and nonprosecutions, is that the state has formally surrendered to its own excuses. It has decided just to punt from the start and take the money, which doesn't become really wrong until it turns around the next day and decides to double down on the less-defended, flooring it all the way to trial against a welfare mom or some joker who sold a brick of dope in the projects. Repeat the same process a few million times, and that's how the jails in America get the population they have. Even if every single person they sent to jail were guilty, the system would still be an epic fail - it's the jurisprudential version of Pravda, where the facts in the paper might have all been true on any given day, but the lie was all in what was not said. — Matt Taibbi

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After eighteen long months covering this dreary business, the whole campaign appears in my mind's eye as one long, protracted scratch-fight over Internet-fueled nonsense. — Matt Taibbi

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In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he's unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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When I heard the book (Thomas Friedman's latest) was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. — Matt Taibbi

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In the meantime, though, the race for the Republican Party presidential nomination sure seems funny. The event known around the world as hashtagGOPClownCar is improbable, colossal, spectacular and shocking; epic, monumental, heinous and disgusting. It's like watching 17 platypuses try to mount the queen of England. You can't tear your eyes away from it. It — Matt Taibbi

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Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane. — Matt Taibbi

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Curiously, for instance, the drop in violent crime is most pronounced in cities with high immigrant populations. — Matt Taibbi

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Ironically, the very brokest people in America, Hispanic immigrants, are one of America's last great cash crops. — Matt Taibbi

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There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money. — Matt Taibbi

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In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life. — Matt Taibbi

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To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:
1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
3. Charity is immoral.
4. Pay for your own fucking schools. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits. — Matt Taibbi

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Capitalism is a system for determining objective value. — Matt Taibbi

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I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work. — Matt Taibbi

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It's hard to overstate how utterly mad it is for a Fed chairman in the age of the global economy to claim that a weak currency only affects tourists. It's a little bit like saying a forest fire only really sucks if you're a woodpecker. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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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. — Matt Taibbi

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The mainstream media act just like in the classic studies of herd animals; at the exact instant more than half of the herd makes a move to bolt, they all move. — Matt Taibbi

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But in more than a few cases, you can draw a straight line from a cop being laid off or a union worker having his or her pension slashed back to the week of 2008 when a handful of Lehman executives took a payoff to mark down their own inventory. — Matt Taibbi

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Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski should be herded into a rocket and shot into space for their brown-nosing of Trump A — Matt Taibbi

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It's so pathetically easy to set big groups of voters off angrily chasing their own tails in response to media-manufactured nonsense, — Matt Taibbi

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The epic struggle to pass health care reform was at once a shameless betrayal of the public trust of historic proportions and proof that a nation that perceives itself as being divided into red and blue should start paying attention to a third color that rules the day in Washington - a sort of puke-colored politics that puts together deals like this one and succeeds largely through its mastery of the capital city's bureaucracy. — Matt Taibbi