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" Creating legislation is a tough process. But watering down legislation? Strangling it with lawsuits and comment letters and blue-ribbon committees? Not so tough, it turns out. "
Matt Taibbi
Letters
Down
Tough
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" The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero. "
Matt Taibbi
Street
Crime
Individual
" In the '50s and '60s, journalism wasn't a profession. It wasn't something you went to college for - it was really more of a trade. You had a lot of guys who came up working in newspapers at the copy desk, or delivery boys, and then they would somehow become reporters afterward and learn on the job. "
Matt Taibbi
Copy
Journalism
You
" What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides. "
Matt Taibbi
Hatred
Both Sides
Anger
" 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
Legal
Street
System
" In America, it takes about two weeks in the limelight for the whole country to think you've been around for years. "
Matt Taibbi
America
Two
You
" 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
Failure
Loser
Winning
" 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
Business
Street
Company
" 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. "
Matt Taibbi
Run
Government
Financial
" At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. "
Matt Taibbi
Than
Nothing
Party
" The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish. "
Matt Taibbi
Fish
Deep
People
" 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
Colleagues
World
Justice
" Capitalism is a system for determining objective value. "
Matt Taibbi
System
Objective
Capitalism
" Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal. "
Matt Taibbi
Making Money
Behavior
Street
" 'Nobody goes to jail.' This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth - and nobody went to jail. "
Matt Taibbi
World
Street
Jail
" It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. "
Matt Taibbi
Would
Say
Tea
" Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising. "
Matt Taibbi
Media
News
Products
" I'm a product of an East Coast liberal arts educational system. "
Matt Taibbi
Liberal
Product
Coast
" Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. "
Matt Taibbi
Financial
Glue
Together
" Since the end of the Cold War, America has been grasping left and right for an identity. "
Matt Taibbi
Identity
War
Right
" The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them. "
Matt Taibbi
Against
Government
Average
" 2008 was to the American economy what 9/11 was to national security. Yet while 9/11 prompted the U.S. government to tear up half the Constitution in the name of public safety, after 2008, authorities went in the other direction. "
Matt Taibbi
Government
Name
Constitution
" 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
Company
Away
America
" You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. "
Matt Taibbi
Game
Giving
Legal
" When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the other party wins. "
Matt Taibbi
Why
Want
Push
" If anything, the bailouts actually hindered lending, as banks became more like house pets that grow fat and lazy on two guaranteed meals a day than wild animals that have to go out into the jungle and hunt for opportunities in order to eat. "
Matt Taibbi
Grow
Animals
Day
" At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. "
Matt Taibbi
Time
Name
America
" 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
Reason
Slave
Used
" 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
Budget
Mission
Family
" John Boehner is the ultimate Beltway hack, a man whose unmatched and self-serving skill at political survival has made him, after two decades in Washington, the hairy blue mold on the American congressional sandwich. "
Matt Taibbi
Man
Political
American
" The party in power almost always unapologetically engages in deficit spending, while the other party argues passionately against the evils of debt and deficits. "
Matt Taibbi
Against
Always
Power