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Matt Taibbi Quotes | Quotes said by Matt Taibbi

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #1

    [Obamacare] was almost the perfect example of politics in the Bubble Era, where the time horizon for anyone with real power is always close to zero, long-term thinking is an alien concept, and even the most massive and ambitious undertakings are motivated entirely by short-term rewards. A radical reshaping of the entire economy, for two election cycles’ worth of campaign cash – that was what this bill meant. It sounds absurdly reductive to say so, but there’s no other explanation that makes any sense.


  • Matt Taibbi Quote #2

    A loose definition of the Tea Party might be fifteen million pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the small handful of banks and investment companies who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #3

    After eighteen long months covering this dreary business, the whole campaign appears in my mind’s eye as one long, protracted scratch-fight over Internet-fueled nonsense.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #4

    America is no longer a country that cares about experts. In fact, it hates experts. If you can't fit a story into the culture-war storyline in ten seconds or less, it dies.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #5

    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.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #6

    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.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #7

    Gross Domestic Product—the substitution, in effect, of ideas for physical value.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #8

    In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #11

    intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #12

    lenders to trade their long-term income streams for short-term cash. Say

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    Politics is about a lot more than winning and losing. I think politics at its best is about compromise, shades of grey and about issues.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #15

    Say as little as possible, hope some of the undecideds like your teeth better than the other guy’s—that’s usually the way this business works.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #16

    The Congressional Record will forever show that [Obamacare] was passed in a romper room of overgrown children seemingly barely old enough to keep from peeing on themselves.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #17

    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 Quote #18

    The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #19

    The mainstream media act just like in the classic studies of herd animals; at the exact instant more than half of the herd makes a move to bolt, they all move.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

    The new America, instead, is fast becoming a vast ghetto in which all of us, conservatives and progressives, are being bled dry by a relatively tiny oligarchy of extremely clever financial criminals and their castrato henchmen in government, whose job is to be good actors on TV and put on a good show.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #22

    The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #23

    The threat posed by Bank of America isn't just financial - it's a full-blown assault on the American dream. Where's the incentive to play fair and do well, when what we see rewarded at the highest levels of society is failure, stupidity, incompetence and meanness? If this is what winning in our system looks like, who doesn't want to be a loser?

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    There really are two Americas, one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land, the world of small businesses and wage-earning employees, the government is something to be avoided, an overwhelming, all-powerful entity whose attentions usually presage some kind of financial setback, if not complete ruin. In the grifter world, however, government is a slavish lapdog that the financial companies that will be the major players in this book use as a tool for making money.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #26

    These leaders are like the drug lords who ruled America’s ghettos in the crack age, men (and some women) interested in just two things: staying in power, and hoovering up enough of what’s left of the cash on their blocks to drive around in an Escalade or a 633i for however long they have left.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #27

    This story is the ultimate example of American’s biggest political problem. We no longer have the attention span to deal with any twenty-first century crisis. We live in an economy that is immensely complex and we are completely at the mercy of the small group of people who understand it – who incidentally often happen to be the same people who built these wildly complex economic systems. We have to trust these people to do the right thing, but we can’t, because, well, they’re scum. Which is kind of a big problem, when you think about it.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #28

    To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight - it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil - but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #29

    To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this:
    1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right or absolutely wrong, as determined by reason.
    2. According to my reasoning, I am absolutely right.
    3. Charity is immoral.
    4. Pay for your own fucking schools.

  • Matt Taibbi Quote #30

    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.

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