Matt Taibbi Quotes

#1. It may not seem funny now, because it's happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.

Matt Taibbi

#2. Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime.

Matt Taibbi

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

#9. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#10. 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

#11. We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.

Matt Taibbi

#12. Curiously, for instance, the drop in violent crime is most pronounced in cities with high immigrant populations.

Matt Taibbi

#13. Chase's was a junkie's banking strategy, shooting speed in the morning and spending all day foraging for the cash to dope down at night, an endless quest to chase the debt dragon.

Matt Taibbi

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#17. Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame.

Matt Taibbi

#18. 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

#19. Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

Matt Taibbi

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#23. The Congressional Record will forever show that [Obamacare] was passed in a romper room of overgrown children seemingly barely old enough to keep from peeing on themselves.

Matt Taibbi

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. Banks like Goldman remain largely shielded from the impact of public opinion because while the public's only link to power is through the clumsy and highly imperfect avenue of elections, a bank of this size has a whole network of intimate connections with direct access to policy. In

Matt Taibbi

#27. I think America has the best assholes in the world. I defy the Belgians or the Japanese to produce something like a Donald Trump.

Matt Taibbi

#28. How Giuliani is not Trump's running mate no one will ever understand. Theirs is the most passionate love story since Beavis and Butthead.

Matt Taibbi

#29. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.

Matt Taibbi

#30. 'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

Matt Taibbi

#31. I get the cynicism thing all the time, although I don't really know where that comes from, because I think I'm actually the opposite of a cynic.

Matt Taibbi

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

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#33. More and more often, we all make silent calculations about who is entitled to what rights, and who is not.

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#34. The notion of "long-term greedy" vanished into thin air as the game became about getting your check before the melon hit the pavement.

Matt Taibbi

#35. 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

#36. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth.

Matt Taibbi

#37. One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas.

Matt Taibbi

#38. Say as little as possible, hope some of the undecideds like your teeth better than the other guy's - that's usually the way this business works.

Matt Taibbi

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. Even in his books, where he's allegedly trying to string multiple thoughts together, Trump wanders randomly from impulse to impulse, seemingly without rhyme or reason. He doesn't think anything through. (He's brilliantly cast this driving-blind trait as "not being politically correct.") It

Matt Taibbi

#42. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#43. 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

#44. The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next.

Matt Taibbi

#45. 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

#46. I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new.

Matt Taibbi

#47. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#48. Being in the building with Sarah Palin that night is a transformative and oddly unsettling experience. It's a little like having live cave-level access for the ripping-the-heart-out-with-the-bare-hands scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Matt Taibbi

#49. Jesus," I said into the phone. "I'm an establishment pseudo-hipster." "The funny thing about that," my so-called friend answered, "is that you are." "Fuck you," I said.

Matt Taibbi

#50. One loves one's country the way one loves a family member. And sometimes that family member does really embarrassing, shitty things. But you still love them.

Matt Taibbi

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski should be herded into a rocket and shot into space for their brown-nosing of Trump A

Matt Taibbi

#54. The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

Matt Taibbi

#55. Gross Domestic Product - the substitution, in effect, of ideas for physical value.

Matt Taibbi

#56. 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

#57. The man who once famously pronounced "I know words, I have the best words" scorched through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla ("China - money - bad!").

Matt Taibbi

#58. 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

#59. Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.

Matt Taibbi

#60. In reality, everybody in Congress is a stand-in for some kind of lobbyist. In many cases it's difficult to tell whether it's the companies that are lobbying the legislators or whether it's the other way around.

Matt Taibbi

#61. 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

#62. Our leaders know we're turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what's happened.

Matt Taibbi

#63. I mean, people who say that the Tea Party isn't a grassroots movement, I think, are incorrect. I think in some respects, it is a grassroots movement.

Matt Taibbi

#64. An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world.

Matt Taibbi

#65. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing.

Matt Taibbi

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside.

Matt Taibbi

#69. Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way.

Matt Taibbi

#70. Greenspan's eventual explanation for the growing gap between stock prices and actual productivity was that, fortuitously, the laws of nature had changed
humanity had reached a happy stage of history where bullshit could be used as rocket fuel.

Matt Taibbi

#71. 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.

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#72. Wall Street crime, in part, is a confidence game in which the criminal justice system itself is the mark.

Matt Taibbi

#73. 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

#74. It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.

Matt Taibbi

#75. 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.

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

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#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. As for the rest of them, God help us. Trump's continued success puts the onus on the field to try to out-crazy the frontrunner.

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#80. Since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world's wealth.

Matt Taibbi

#81. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

Matt Taibbi

#82. 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.

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#83. 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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#84. 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.

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#85. 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

#86. America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.

Matt Taibbi

#87. More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It's the rest of us who are lost.

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#88. 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.

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#89. We may be many things, we Americans, but we always get the job done.

Matt Taibbi

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. Intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When

Matt Taibbi

#93. America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show. And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call.

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#94. America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can't fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.

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#95. Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.

Matt Taibbi

#96. 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.

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#97. Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.

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#98. 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.

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#99. People are beginning to become disturbingly comfortable with a kind of official hypocrisy. Bizarrely, for instance, we've become numb to the idea that rights aren't absolute but are enjoyed on a kind of sliding scale.

Matt Taibbi

#100. 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