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" 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

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" The NFL, sadly, has a fatal environmental problem: It kills its workers. "

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

" The national debt is totally unlike a family budget for about a gazillion reasons, not the least of which being that families cannot raise money by fiat or deflate the size of their debt unilaterally and that family members die instead of existing infinitely. "

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

" What we have now is a situation where politicians get a whole bunch of money from mainly business interests. Then once they hold that office, they spend all their time in office paying back over and over again those campaign contributions through various favors and contracts and that sort of thing. "

" 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. "

" The moral angle to the foreclosure crisis - and, of course, in capitalism we're not supposed to be concerned with the moral stuff, but let's mention it anyway - shows a culture that is slowly giving in to a futuristic nightmare ideology of computerized greed and unchecked financial violence. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I mean, people who say that the Tea Party isn't a grassroots movement, I think, are incorrect. I think in some respects, it is a grassroots movement. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" America is a country that has been skating for ages on its unparalleled ability to look marvelous on the outside. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Like wars, forest fires and bad marriages, really stupid laws are much easier to begin than they are to end. "

Matt Taibbi

End

Laws