Taibbi Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Just looking at Palin up on the podium doesn't impress me. She looks like a chief flight attendant on a Piedmont flight from Winston-Salem to Cleveland, with only the bag of almonds and the polyester kerchief missing from the picture. With

Matt Taibbi

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. Why is JP Morgan getting so much heat? Maybe because it is a massive international crime syndicate.

Matt Taibbi

#8. 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

#9. The presidential election is a drama that we Americans have learned to wholly consume as entertainment, divorced completely from any expectations about concrete changes in our own lives.

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. Sixty million people were announcing that they preferred one reality to another. Inherent in this decision was the revolutionary idea that you can choose your own set of facts. Blue-state

Matt Taibbi

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Having lived in a collapsed empire before - I lived in Russia right after the Soviet Union collapsed - you can see a lot of the classic signs of an empire that's on its way out.

Matt Taibbi

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#22. I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.

Matt Taibbi

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

#27. One of the top selections for its steady growth and defensive nature of its business. Economies may ebb and flow, but the number of incarcerated Americans is steadily growing according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Matt Taibbi

#28. 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

#29. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#30. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. Ultimately, what we're looking for is someone who's enough of a morally flexible gasbag to get over with the money people, and then also charming enough on some politically irrelevant level to attract voters. (

Matt Taibbi

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

#45. 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

#46. In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. It may be that America has become too big and complicated for most people to deal with being part of. People are longing for a smaller, stupider reality.

Matt Taibbi

#53. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. Lenders to trade their long-term income streams for short-term cash. Say

Matt Taibbi

#59. Duck Dynasty viewers think they're the experts on hunting, but actually they're the hunted ones, just another dumb demographic to be captured, laughed at and force-fed commercials for Geico and Home Depot by the Smart People in New York and L.A.

Matt Taibbi

#60. 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

#61. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

#63. Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.

Matt Taibbi

#64. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#65. 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.

Matt Taibbi

#66. 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

#67. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

#81. 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

#82. In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the biggest dope in the room. Everyone inside the Beltway knows this. The Republican voters themselves are the only ones who never saw it. Elections

Matt Taibbi

#83. 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

#84. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

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

Matt Taibbi

#88. 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

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

Matt Taibbi

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. Get your liver ready: the second GOP debate is upon us S

Matt Taibbi

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

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

Matt Taibbi