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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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" 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

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

" I don't often get angered by the things press spokespeople say. Most of these people have difficult jobs and are often forced to be the public faces of policies they had nothing to do with creating. "

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

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

" We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I actually never thought that Barack Obama was anything but a typical Democratic party politician, which to me meant that he was probably in bed with Wall Street. "

Matt Taibbi

Party

Street

" You know what an effective deterrent to crime is? Jail! And do you know what kind of criminal penalty actually makes people think twice about committing crimes the next time? The kind that actually comes out of some individual's pocket, not fines that come out of the corporate kitty. "

" Over the years, many in the public have become numb to news of financial corruption, partly because too many of these stories involve banker-on-banker crime. "

" '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. "

" Everything in America is so uniform. In Russia, everywhere you go is completely insane. "

" It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. "

" Wall Street has turned the economy into a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class. "

" I was a bit of a troubled kid growing up, let's put it that way. I didn't take pleasure in hard work. "

" 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. "

" Within the cult of Wall Street that forged Mitt Romney, making money justifies any behavior, no matter how venal. "

" You know, I used to live in Russia where you had officers in the military opening up the warehouses at night and taking weapons out and putting them into a truck and selling them to foreign powers. That type of stuff doesn't happen in the United States. We still have a very functioning and relatively civil society. "

" It's increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line. "

" 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. "

" For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them - emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next. "

" 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. "

" You might think otherwise, but it doesn't naturally follow that because a law has been passed by Congress and signed by the president, said law actually has to be implemented. "

Matt Taibbi

You

Think

" An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world. "

" Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way. "

" In a pure capitalist system, an institution as moronic and corrupt as Bank of America would be swiftly punished by the market - the executives would get to loot their own firms once, then they'd be looking for jobs again. "

" The joy of being a consumer is that it doesn't require thought, responsibility, self-awareness or shame: All you have to do is obey the first urge that gurgles up from your stomach. And then obey the next. And the next. And the next. "

" 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. "

" I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new. "