Quotes from Matt Taibbi

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The one thing that I do is take really complicated systems and subjects and make them accessible to regular people.

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.

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.

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.

Once you give an NFL player permission to have thoughts, you invite all kinds of mischief.

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