Matt Taibbi

Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.

— Matt Taibbi

Organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

— Matt Taibbi

At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing.

— Matt Taibbi

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

— Matt Taibbi

Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together.

— Matt Taibbi

America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial.

— Matt Taibbi

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

— Matt Taibbi

'Prop trading' is just a fancy term for banks gambling in the market for their own profit.

— Matt Taibbi

The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt…

— Matt Taibbi

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.

— Matt Taibbi

In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years.

— Matt Taibbi

You might think otherwise, but it doesn't naturally follow that because a law has been passed by Congress and signed by the…

— Matt Taibbi

The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling…

— Matt Taibbi

“Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no felony cases. But when the stakes are in the hundreds of dollars, we kick in 26,000…

— Matt Taibbi

I actually never thought that Barack Obama was anything but a typical Democratic party politician, which to me meant that he was…

— Matt Taibbi

George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep…

— Matt Taibbi

At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward…

— Matt Taibbi

Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be…

— Matt Taibbi

If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed…

— Matt Taibbi

You know what an effective deterrent to crime is? Jail! And do you know what kind of criminal penalty actually makes people…

— Matt Taibbi

There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because…

— Matt Taibbi

“To sum it all up, the [Ayn] Rand belief system looks like this: 1. Facts are facts: things can be absolutely right…

— Matt Taibbi

“Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United…

— Matt Taibbi

What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs…

— Matt Taibbi

“But the ineffectiveness of “facts” didn’t stop there. The election of Trump was not just a political choice, a vote against minorities…

— Matt Taibbi

“It’s become a cliché by now, but since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one,…

— Matt Taibbi

In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like…

— Matt Taibbi

Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs…

— Matt Taibbi

“The great nonprosecutions of Wall Street in the years since 2008, I would learn, were just symbols of this dystopian sorting process…

— Matt Taibbi

“The argument is that Black History Month dwells too much on the downside of white America's relationship to its brothers of African…

— Matt Taibbi

“[Obamacare] was almost the perfect example of politics in the Bubble Era, where the time horizon for anyone with real power is…

— Matt Taibbi

“For a country founded on the idea that rights are inalienable and inherent from birth, we've developed a high tolerance for conditional…

— Matt Taibbi

“The sudden introduction of these magic mortgage bonds into the marketplace pushed most every major institutional investor in the world to suddenly…

— Matt Taibbi

“All of this goes back to Bill Clinton. It’s not a coincidence that radical welfare reform took place on the same watch…

— Matt Taibbi

“What this means is that the entire business model for something like Chase’s credit card business is not much more than a…

— Matt Taibbi

“Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business…

— Matt Taibbi

“In the elaborate con that is American electoral politics, the Republican voter has long been the easiest mark in the game, the…

— Matt Taibbi

“It was at that moment that Markisha decided to apply for CalWORKs. She’d rented a room in an apartment she shared with…

— Matt Taibbi

“Bill Clinton's political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free…

— Matt Taibbi

“This was never about welfare. You can have almost any opinion about welfare, you can be bitterly opposed to its very existence,…

— Matt Taibbi