Matt Taibbi Quotes
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Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.
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This idea that you can't be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don't stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It's possible to do this job with honor and dignity.
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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.
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Candidates don't want to be associated with poor people, people who have jobs or are ugly; they want to be associated with a certain middle class demographic, so as a result they leave those others out completely.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Bush is our fault. He's our fault because too many of us found it easier to hate him than find a way to love each other. If we work on the second thing a little harder, we won't need to rely on the cynics in the DLC to come up with the right 'formula' the next time around. Because happiness and hope have a way of selling themselves.
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In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years.
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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.
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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.
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The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers.
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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.
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Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.
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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.
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Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.
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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.
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The threat posed by Bank of America isn't just financial - it's a full-blown assault on the American dream. Where's the incentive to play fair and do well, when what we see rewarded at the highest levels of society is failure, stupidity, incompetence and meanness? If this is what winning in our system looks like, who doesn't want to be a loser?
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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.
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Politics is about a lot more than winning and losing. I think politics at its best is about compromise, shades of grey and about issues.
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An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.
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The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.
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America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.
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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.