Quote

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

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Matt Taibbi
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: March 2
Author
Editorial Columnist
Journalist
Writer
Matthew C. Taibbi
Matthew Taibbi
Age
Opening
Pavement
Melon
Story
Basic
Financially
Scam
Easy
Window
Illiterate
Melons
Money
Internet
Banks
Tossing
Around
Took
Windows
Scams
Stories
Game
Grasp
Bids
Even
Pretty
Winner
Wrapping
Fiftieth
Like
Games
Phones
Ribbons
Watermelons

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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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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.
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Capitalism is a system for determining objective value.
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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.
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Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal.
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I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.
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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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Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.
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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.
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