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" Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief. "
Matt Taibbi
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" 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
Best
Politics
Winning
" Candidates don't want to be associated with poor people, people who have jobs or are ugly; they want to be associated with a certain middle class demographic, so as a result they leave those others out completely. "
Matt Taibbi
Class
Ugly
Result
" America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. "
Matt Taibbi
America
Two
Official
" 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. "
Matt Taibbi
Know
Jail
You
" In reality, everybody in Congress is a stand-in for some kind of lobbyist. In many cases it's difficult to tell whether it's the companies that are lobbying the legislators or whether it's the other way around. "
Matt Taibbi
Congress
Kind
Reality
" 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. "
Matt Taibbi
Survival
Line
Matter
" 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
" 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
" One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas. "
Matt Taibbi
American
Long
Journalism
" 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
" The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers. "
Matt Taibbi
Environmental
Workers
Problem
" Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget. "
Matt Taibbi
Used
Size
Meaning
" America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside. "
Matt Taibbi
Country
Ability
America
" 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
" Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead. "
Matt Taibbi
Successful
Many
Single
" In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life. "
Matt Taibbi
Life
Land
Rest
" Everybody I knew, practically, was a journalist when I was a kid - my father, all of his friends. I never wanted to be like those people. "
Matt Taibbi
Friends
People
Never
" Ratings agencies are the glue that ostensibly holds the entire financial industry together. "
Matt Taibbi
Financial
Glue
Together
" It obviously matters who gets to be president. And it's perfectly valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think is more qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has gotten so out of control, it's become bigger than the presidency itself. "
Matt Taibbi
Matters
Think
Become
" 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
" By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. "
Matt Taibbi
Future
Language
Political
" This idea that you can't be an honest man and a Washington politician is a myth, a crock made up by sellouts and careerist hacks who don't stand for anything and are impatient with people who do. It's possible to do this job with honor and dignity. "
Matt Taibbi
Man
People
Honor
" 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
Crisis
Compass
Say
" The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero. "
Matt Taibbi
Street
Crime
Individual
" I didn't know Michael Hastings very well, but one thing about him was always obvious - he was born to be in the news business, he loved it, he was made for it. He wrote about Iraq and Afghanistan as places he had always been destined to visit. "
Matt Taibbi
Loved
Born
News
" 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
" The print magazine and print journalism industry is obviously in a great deal of trouble, and one of the things that happened when this business started to give way to the Internet and to broadcast television is that a lot of organizations started cutting specifically investigative journalism and they also started cutting fact-checkers. "
Matt Taibbi
Internet
Journalism
Business
" In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will 'take our country back' from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. "
Matt Taibbi
Change
Victory
Tea
" 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
" 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