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Our leaders know we’re turning into a giant ghetto and they are taking every last hubcap they can get their hands on before the rest of us wake up and realize what’s happened.

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
Leader
Giant
Realizing
Giants
Happened
Turning
Lasts
Wake
Last
Leaders
Hands
Realize
Every
Taking
Rest
Ghetto

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Matt Taibbi
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Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity.
Matt Taibbi
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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.
Matt Taibbi
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The mistake our politicians so often make with these industry leaders is in thinking they are interested in, or respectful of, the power of government. All they want is to keep stealing. If you can offer them the government’s seal of approval on that, they’ll take it. But if you can’t, well, they’ll take that too.
Matt Taibbi
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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.
Matt Taibbi
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I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system.
Matt Taibbi
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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.
Matt Taibbi
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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.
Matt Taibbi
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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.
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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
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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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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
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It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists.
Matt Taibbi
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Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.
Matt Taibbi