Matt Taibbi Quotes - Page 2

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• You can have somebody living next door to you and you can live in a completely different world from that person, which is definitely something we've never experienced before. So I think just because of the media landscape and the way we get our information now, we're more atomized and isolated from each other than ever before.

  Matt Taibbi

  Thinking, Doors, Media

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. July 11, 2008.

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• 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.

  Matt Taibbi

  Party, Class, Interesting

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

  Matt Taibbi

  Country, America, Age

  Matt Taibbi (2007). “Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire”, p.81, Black Cat

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• 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

  Country, Thinking, Class

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

  Matt Taibbi

  Eggs, Environment, Groupthink

  Matt Taibbi (2008). “The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire”, p.19, Spiegel & Grau

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• 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

  Crazy, Hands, Boxing

  "Michele Bachmann's Holy War". Article by Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com. June 22, 2011.

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• 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

  Country, Way, Doe

  Interview with Gregg LaGambina, www.avclub.com. July 11, 2008.

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• 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

  Party, Evil, Debt

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• 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

  Family, Debt, Size

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• 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

  Jobs, Boys, College

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

  Matt Taibbi

  Wall, Giving, World

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• 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

  Successful, Evil, Stories

  "Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital". www.rollingstone.com. August 29, 2012.

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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.

  Matt Taibbi

  Jobs, Class, People

  "The Bad Boy On the Bus: An Interview With Matt Taibbi". Interview with Janelle Nanos, www.motherjones.com. April 19, 2005.

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• 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

  Years, Land, Rest Of Your Life

  "Gangster Bankers: Too Big to Jail". Article by Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com. February 14, 2013.

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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.

  Matt Taibbi

  America, Stealing, Get Away

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• 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

  Ideas, Rights, Hypocrisy

  Matt Taibbi (2014). “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap”, p.11, Spiegel & Grau

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• 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.

  Matt Taibbi

  Cheating, Wall, Hate

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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.

  Matt Taibbi

  Cutting, Organization, Giving

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• The basic scam in the Internet age is pretty easy even for the financially illiterate to grasp. It was as if banks like Goldman were wrapping ribbons around watermelons, tossing them out fiftieth-story windows, and opening the phones for bids. In this game you were a winner only if you took your money out before the melon hit the pavement.

  Matt Taibbi

  Phones, Games, Age

  Matt Taibbi (2010). “Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America”, p.213, Spiegel & Grau

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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.

  Matt Taibbi

  Christian, Views, Economic

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• 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

  Punishment, White, People

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• 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

  Real, Mean, Choices

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• 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

  Blue, Creating, Letters

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• 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

  Safe, Financial, Compass

  "The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis" by Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com. June 19, 2013.

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• 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

  Years, Bankers, News

  "The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia". Article by Matt Taibbi, www.rollingstone.com. June 21, 2012.

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