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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

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Matt Taibbi
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: March 2
Author
Editorial Columnist
Journalist
Writer
Matthew C. Taibbi
Matthew Taibbi
Crime
Teach
Read
Power
Used
States
Confederate
Reason
Literacy
Slave

More quotes by Matt Taibbi

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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
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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.
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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.
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There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true.
Matt Taibbi
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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.
Matt Taibbi
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'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.
Matt Taibbi
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I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.
Matt Taibbi
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Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane.
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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
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Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.
Matt Taibbi
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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.
Matt Taibbi
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Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.
Matt Taibbi
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Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.
Matt Taibbi
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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
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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
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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.
Matt Taibbi
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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
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Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins.
Matt Taibbi
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Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.
Matt Taibbi
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If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law.
Matt Taibbi