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 More Quotes by Matt Taibbi More Quotes From Matt Taibbi At least Bank of America got its name right. The ultimate Too Big to Fail bank really is America, a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time. Matt Taibbi criminals names america 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. Matt Taibbi political successful watches George Bush and John Ashcroft were religious in a scary way, but the rational among us could always take heart that, deep down, the Bush administration was more cynical than messianic. Matt Taibbi cynical religious heart Obsessed with success and wealth and despising failure and poverty, our society is systematically dividing the population into winners and losers, using institutions like the courts to speed the process. Matt Taibbi population poverty our-society 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 wall meat class It may be that America has become too big and complicated for most people to deal with being part of. People are longing for a smaller, stupider reality. Matt Taibbi reality america people The House Rules Committee is perhaps the free world's outstanding bureaucratic abomination - a tiny, airless closet deep in the labyrinth of the Capitol where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish. Matt Taibbi labyrinth house people The failure to work out sensible budgets makes it impossible for government agencies to make long-term plans, and instead leaves them scrambling to spend money in the short term. Matt Taibbi agency government long Capitalism is a system for determining objective value. Matt Taibbi capitalism values objectives Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. Matt Taibbi cynical united-states political I think that if you're a thinking person you should always be trying to learn something new. Matt Taibbi something-new trying thinking If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law. Matt Taibbi ifs law 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. Matt Taibbi punishment white people 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 economic christian views It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. Matt Taibbi racist would-be tea 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 party class interesting 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. Matt Taibbi russia military night In the new American ghetto, the nightmare engine is bubble economics, a kind of high-tech casino scam that kills neighborhoods just like dope does, only the product is credit, not crack or heroin. It concentrates the money of the population in just a few hands with brutal efficiency, just like narco-business, and just as in narco-business the product itself, debt, steadily demoralizes the customer to the point where he’s unable to prevent himself from being continually dominated. Matt Taibbi dope ghetto hands The Congressional Record will forever show that [Obamacare] was passed in a romper room of overgrown children seemingly barely old enough to keep from peeing on themselves. Matt Taibbi obamacare forever children Washington politicians basically view the People as a capricious and dangerous enemy, a dumb mob whose only interesting quality happens to be their power to take away politicians' jobs... When the government sees its people as the enemy, sooner or later that feeling gets to be mutual. And that's when the real weirdness begins. Matt Taibbi government real jobs
