Best 126 quotes of Matt Taibbi on MyQuotes

Matt Taibbi

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    Matt Taibbi

    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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    Matt Taibbi

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

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    Matt Taibbi

    'American Sniper' is a movie whose politics are so ludicrous and idiotic that under normal circumstances it would be beneath criticism. The only thing that forces us to take it seriously is the extraordinary fact that an almost exactly similar worldview consumed the walnut-sized mind of the president who got us into the war in question.

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    Matt Taibbi

    America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

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

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    Matt Taibbi

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

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    Matt Taibbi

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

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    By incentivizing Wall Street players to sniff out inefficient or corrupt companies and bet against them, short-selling acts as a sort of policing system; legal short-sellers have been instrumental in helping expose firms like Enron and WorldCom.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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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    Matt Taibbi

    Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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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    Matt Taibbi

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

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    Criminal justice, as it pertains to the Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys of the world, is not adversarial combat, with cops and crooks duking it out in interrogation rooms and courthouses. Instead, it's a cocktail party between friends and colleagues who from month to month and year to year are constantly switching sides and trading hats.

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    Matt Taibbi

    Critics say the OWS protesters hate the rich. Come on! Success is the national religion, and almost everyone is a believer. Americans love winners. But that's just the problem. These guys on Wall Street are not winning - they're cheating. And as much as we love the self-made success story, we hate the cheater that much more.

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    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

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

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

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

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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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    Matt Taibbi

    In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they dont realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

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

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    Matt Taibbi

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

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    It's come around to that point of view at the end of a long evolutionary process, in which the rule of law has slowly been replaced by giant idiosyncratic bureaucracies that are designed to criminalize failure, poverty, and weakness on the one hand, and to immunize strength, wealth, and success on the other.

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    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.

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    Matt Taibbi

    It's really interesting that we've had this great Tea Party movement that is all about restoring free market capitalist values, but what they completely fail to understand is that what we've got now is a situation where there is a small class of gigantic financial companies that have put themselves above capitalism.

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    Matt Taibbi

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