Matt Taibbi quotes - page 3

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)
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. View quote
Matt Taibbi
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. View quote
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. View quote
Matt Taibbi
Capitalism is a system for determining objective value. View quote
Matt Taibbi
At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. View quote
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. View quote
Matt Taibbi
One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas. View quote
Matt Taibbi
The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe. View quote
Matt Taibbi
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. View quote
Matt Taibbi
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)
Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way. View quote
Matt Taibbi
Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Matt Taibbi
The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people. View quote
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. View quote
Matt Taibbi
The problem with the Tea Party is that it's been used in a way that scares people into supporting an agenda that's counter to their own interests. View quote
Matt Taibbi
The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers. View quote
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 don't 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. View quote
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. (Matt Taibbi)
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. View quote
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. View quote
Matt Taibbi
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. View quote
Matt Taibbi
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. View quote
Matt Taibbi