Quotes from Matt Taibbi

It boggles my mind that people think they're practicing real political advocacy by watching major corporate TV, be it Fox or MSNBC or CNN. Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV?

The deals the government and Wall Street worked out that weekend to save the likes of AIG, Goldman, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch were unprecedented in their reach and political consequence, transforming America into a permanent oligarchical bailout state. This was, essentially, a formal merger of Wall Street and the U.S. government.

Of course, Fiorina's claim that she had actually seen a video of someone trying to harvest the brain of a fetus with its legs kicking turned out to be false. Her

Greenspan's rise is instead a tale of a gerbilish mirror-gazer who flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and then, once he got to the top, feverishly jacked himself off to the attentions of Wall Street for twenty consecutive years—in the process laying the intellectual foundation for a generation of orgiastic greed and overconsumption and turning the Federal Reserve into a permanent bailout mechanism for the super-rich.

The one thing Mr. Sportscaster can't ever do is remind audiences it's just a game. He or she can't ever tell them it's okay not to care.

Though most of our problems are systemic, most of our public debates are referendums on personality. Not many people can be neutral on the subject of Trump, so we wave him at you all day long. Meanwhile, a vast universe of systemic issues is ignored. We've been steadily narrowing that field of view for decades, particularly in investigative reporting.

the two most taboo lines in all media in America are I don't know and I don't care.

Listening in anger to your favorite political program, you will act like a person who is shaking a fist at power, when in fact you've been neutralized as an independent threat, reduced to a prop in a show.

We know you know the news we show you is demeaning, disgusting, pointless, and not really intended to inform. But we assume you'll be too embarrassed to admit you spend hours every day poring over content specifically designed to reenforce your point of view. In fact, you'll consume twice as much, rather than admit you don't like to be challenged.

but the real shock this past year was finding out how frail has been our illusion of stability all along. We were a shallow country, held together by stale rituals and muscle memory. And now it is a shallow man who will take us wherever he pleases.

This was Chase's second sweetheart deal in less than a year. Six months before, in March 2008, Chase had "rescued" the imploding investment banking giant Bear Stearns, buying the venerable firm with the aid of $29 billion in guarantees extended by the New York branch of the Federal Reserve—whose chairman of the board of directors at the time was, get this, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

If you're a person of means, you get full service for all ten amendments, and even a few that aren't listed. But if you owe, if you rent, you get a slightly thinner, more tubercular version of the Fourth Amendment, the First Amendment, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and so on.

Some states have actually increased funding for fraud investigation because the programs are paid for by federal funds they would lose if they weren't spent—in other words, rather than lose funding because of reduced welfare rolls, states simply increase the amount of staff for welfare fraud investigation.

Curiously, for instance, the drop in violent crime is most pronounced in cities with high immigrant populations.

The central banking policies have been supported by what we think of as the entire range of allowable political thought in America, i.e. from Bush-era Republicans who signed off on the original bank bailouts through the Obama Democrats who followed.

The amazing closeness of American elections has never made sense. In a country in which 10 percent of the population owns 90 percent of the wealth, you'd expect the very rich to be a permanent electoral minority. That it doesn't work out that way is odd. But this is not the kind of observation pundits tend to make.

The paranoia about both national media and the opposing fans is now such a central part of the fan experience that for some modern fans, the dread of an opposing city reveling in their city's loss outweighs the potential satisfaction of winning.

Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; they do so out in the open, have entire departments committed to it, and have employees who've spent years literally doing nothing but commit, over and over again, the same legal crime that some welfare mothers go to jail for doing once. But they're not charged, because there's no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It's more like it's impressed by it.

More than any other politician in recent memory, Bernie Sanders is focused on reality. It's the rest of us who are lost.

The extent to which we hate and fear each other now -- that's not any one person's fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours.

A media that currently applauds itself for calling out the lies of Donald Trump (and they are lies) still uses shameful government-concocted euphemisms like "collateral damage." Our new "Democracy Dies in Darkness" churlishness has yet to reach the Pentagon, and probably never will.

informationally

Bill Clinton's political formula for seizing the presidency was simple. He made money tight in the ghettos and let it flow free on Wall Street.

After Clinton, just to get food stamps to buy potatoes and flour, you suddenly had to hand in a detailed financial history dating back years, submit to wholesale invasions of privacy, and give in to a range of humiliating conditions. Meanwhile banks in the 1990s were increasingly encouraged to lend and speculate without filling out any paperwork at all, and eventually borrowers were freed of the burden of even having to show proof of income when