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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 -
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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'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 -
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
Matt Taibbi -
In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job.
Matt Taibbi -
Democracy doesn't require a whole lot of work of its citizens, but it requires some: It requires taking a good look outside once in a while, and considering the bad news and what it might mean, and making the occasional tough choice, and soberly taking stock of what your real interests are.
Matt Taibbi -
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 -
John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich.
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 -
America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.
Matt Taibbi -
I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new.
Matt Taibbi -
'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.
Matt Taibbi -
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 -
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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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 -
Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way.
Matt Taibbi -
Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.
Matt Taibbi -
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 -
The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.
Matt Taibbi -
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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Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove.
Matt Taibbi -
Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising.
Matt Taibbi -
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 -
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