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" 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
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" Mike Huckabee represents something that is either tremendously encouraging or deeply disturbing, depending on your point of view: a marriage of Christian fundamentalism with economic populism. "
Matt Taibbi
Point Of View
View
Christian
" 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
" What the mortgage bubble was all about was big banks like Goldman Sachs taking big bundles of subprime mortgages that were lent out largely to low-income, highly risky borrowers, and applying this kind of magic-pixie-dust math to these bundles of securities and slapping AAA ratings on them. "
Matt Taibbi
Big
Bubble
Kind
" 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
" The problem with the Tea Party is that it's been used in a way that scares people into supporting an agenda that's counter to their own interests. "
Matt Taibbi
People
Own
Party
" 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
" It's really interesting that we've had this great Tea Party movement that is all about restoring free market capitalist values, but what they completely fail to understand is that what we've got now is a situation where there is a small class of gigantic financial companies that have put themselves above capitalism. "
Matt Taibbi
Great
Financial
Small
" The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero. "
Matt Taibbi
Street
Crime
Individual
" 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
" 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. "
Matt Taibbi
Lost
Sick
You
" I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new. "
Matt Taibbi
You
Thinking
Think
" 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
" America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. "
Matt Taibbi
America
Two
Official
" 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. "
Matt Taibbi
Purpose
Meat
Economy
" In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don't like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires. "
Matt Taibbi
Potential
America
Class
" 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
" There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can't understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in 'U.S.A. v. Carollo,' that turned out not to be true. "
Matt Taibbi
Financial
Government
Corruption
" Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. "
Matt Taibbi
You
Hidden
Hands
" 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
" Contracting corruption has been around since the construction of the Appian Way. "
Matt Taibbi
Way
Construction
Been
" 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. "
Matt Taibbi
Things
Creating
Say
" 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. "
Matt Taibbi
Over
News
Corruption
" 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
" Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end. "
Matt Taibbi
Like
End
Laws
" 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
Me
Party
Street
" 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. "
Matt Taibbi
Joy
Responsibility
Shame
" 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
" 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
" An unregulated derivatives market essentially gives Wall Street a way to place hidden taxes on everything in the world. "
Matt Taibbi
Street
Place
Hidden